D&D General Do you use Alignment in your D&D games?

[Jacob Lewis]

Pick one: did I take your words out of context, or did I foolishly leave the context in?

I picked option 2. Remember?

If you're going to take something out of context by using boldface to make your point, you might want to ditch the actual context. Its a lame tactic anyway, but it looks even lamer when you do it wrong.

And now I have literally talked in a circle.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I picked option 2. Remember?

Then stop accusing me of taking you our of context.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

 

[Voadam]

I dislike general mechanics dictating how to play characters, so DMs policing PCs' alignments is something I find distasteful.

I am OK with occasional exceptions. I had decent fun being charmed by a Vrock bard in a 3.5 game and then roleplaying convincing our party paladin we needed to ally with the Vrock against a greater evil Devil in the dungeon.

I find most alignments are broad and open to different interpretations. I feel most can justify most any action or view so as a DM I feel fine not sweating whatever a player puts down on their character sheet. If a player views their character following their individual code as being chaotic or lawful it is fine by me. For my characters I think how I want to portray them then pick an alignment to put on the sheet that seems like it should work then hopefully not think about it again. I really do not try to use the alignment on the sheet as a guide to roleplay.

As a DM I generally use alignment in thinking about monsters and NPCs. Most monster descriptions could work with any alignment but different alignments are roleplay and characterization hooks I can use. Similarly the good evil axis is a good quick guide for characterization for whether the monster or NPC is generally hostile or not in some way as a default.

Take say Orcs. Their general monster description as bullying warriors is fairly consistent across editions but they were LE in AD&D and CE in 3e-5e. Lawful orcs suggest they are more follower soldier types who seek out evil armies because they like that type of lifestyle. So warrior minions of evil. Chaotic warriors might fight with or for an evil warlord and might join up in hordes, but they like fighting and raiding as opposed to the military structure of an army life. Different hooks for different characterizations of mostly the same basic Orc descriptions.

I really enjoyed 3e's descriptor alignments with a lot of mechanical impacts. It allowed a level of alignment as cosmic forces instead of as morality guide which had fun aspects for me. In 3e/Pathfinder I eventually came up with house rules where mortals were neutral/unaligned by default, being divinely powered (cleric, paladin, druid, etc.) could give you an alignment, outsiders would have their alignment tags but free up their personal actions, planetouched I gave alignment descriptors for the outsider connection but allowed complete freedom of roleplay good or evil or whatever, and I assigned some alignment tags to some monsters (Undead got the [Evil] descriptor, fey go the [Chaos] descriptor and constructs all got the [Lawful] descriptor). So using an [Evil] spell tapped into cosmic [EVIL] and would detect as evil even if you were using summoned demons to rescue orphans out of a burning building.

4e and 5e did away with most every mechanical impact of alignment so I don't sweat it much in my 5e game and mostly use monster alignment as a characterization hook.

 

[Maxperson]

So exactly what I said. You use alignment to control behavior.

That's literally the opposite of what he said. He's using the lack of alignment(no evil) to help eliminate bad behaviors, not as a control.

Edit: Nevermind. Thought you were repyling to Oofta and not someone who has me blocked. Please disregard.

 

[Maxperson]

How can it help if it doesn’t actually say anything concrete about the character?

As an aid to roleplay. It's not an aid that everyone needs or wants, and that's fine. It is a very useful aid, though, to a great many people, and it should remain in the game for them and for DMs like me who use it a great deal on the DM side of things.

 

[Lyxen]

Yes, and that's why alignment works for me as fuzzy guidelines that everyone has room to interpret for themselves but not as a top-down DM-controlled god or force imposing their own interpretations on the players.

There are two separate things there. Being fuzzy and leaving to the players is one thing, having concrete manifestation in the game (aligned planes, magic based on alignmemt) is something else.

For paladins, I prefer for their restrictions to be based more on their oath -- which may be related to alignment or it might not, but either way I would expect that to be a conversation between player and DM. Which again goes back to players having space to interpret the alignments for themselves and work out with the DM where the lines are on that interpretation.

I'm generally fine with that, note that 3e had paladins for every alignment and therefore it was already not a question of good and evil. But I agree that the 5e take on oaths is a really good direction.

My table is made up of a diverse group who aren't all from the same country or religious background. They like exploring issues of morality in the game. They don't like having heavily culturally Christian-leaning ideas of good and evil pushed on them, particularly if it's something that they, as players, don't have space to push back at.

And that's absolutely fine if it's your tables preferences. And I do agree that if the views on alignment are maybe not specifically christian, they are certainly extremely western.

I recently played with someone who played a traditional paladin -- roamed around questing to help people, prayed to his god every morning, proselytized to everyone who would listen. But we were playing in a setting that was hostile to adventurers because they have historically entered the area simply to loot it and destroyed the ecosystem on the way. The paladin constantly refused to understand this perspective and happily talked about taking loot and killing local fauna right in front of my character, the local guide who had reluctantly agreed to help the party despite said hostility towards adventurers.

Was the paladin acting according to his oath? Sure, he was doing what his god told him to do. Was the paladin objectively good? I actually find that debatable, and I would have had objections if the DM had chosen to validate his supposed goodness by presenting him with some magical item that is supposed to measure inherent goodness.

There are again two things here, the concept of the paladin, which I think was fine, and the interpretation by a player who was there for the fighting and the looting.

Right, and my taste is more about the specific acts and goals of the PCs aligning with such objects. But you do make a very good point about the Grail vs Mjolnir alignments. I suppose the objects themselves can be seen to have an alignment that makes them likely to choose someone who seems to be a match.

This is indeed a common fantasy trope, and it was in D&D since the early editions.

I really do appreciate your explanation about how it works in older editions because it is very interesting. The question was about whether we use alignment in our own games, though, so I answered based on my own experiences with it.

No worries, all tables are different, preferences are always OK, and to each his own.

 

[Bluebell]

There are two separate things there. Being fuzzy and leaving to the players is one thing, having concrete manifestation in the game (aligned planes, magic based on alignmemt) is something else.

I must not have communicated clearly, because that's what I was talking about from the start. I like the former use of alignment, but not the latter. It's not for me and doesn't suit the style of play that my table veers towards. But thanks for giving examples of how the latter might work, because it does sound more nuanced than it looked to me before.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I dislike general mechanics dictating how to play characters, so DMs policing PCs' alignments is something I find distasteful.

I am OK with occasional exceptions.

This is just fascinating to me. I didn't even cut anything out between those two sentences. And I hate to pick on this because I'm generally in agreement with everything said. But to say you find something distasteful, and then immediately follow it up by allowing yourself some exceptions?

 

[jmartkdr2]

So the idea is more of a threat than actually coming across it. Because most of us play with people we like, know, and possibly even respect. If there is an issue, I feel confident that we can have a constructive conversation about it. So we either trust our DM, or we find one that we do.

Stop me if I'm getting too far into semantics...

Are you suggesting that because you don't play that way anymore, it never happened?