Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4950835" data-attributes="member: 4937">Maybe, maybe not.  It would be very difficult to prove this even if we had some concrete and complete definition of each alignment, because both the number of questions and the number of answers are infinite.  So it would be pretty much impossible to show that every answer was covered for every case.What I think is more important is that for any small set of questions and brief answers, the short hand alignment description actually contains more information because - even if it gives us few or no complete answers - it gives us some strong hints to the answers in a very large number of questions.  As of means of conveying information between DM's, for example, describing something's alignment is far more information rich than any equivalently long string.I'm a huge believer in seven sentence NPC's (The 7-Sentence NPC by C.M. Cline, Dragon #184).  For those that don't have the article, the seven sentenses give answers to the following questions about an NPC:1) What occupation?2) What is distinctive about the physical appearance?3) What are the notable attributes and skills.4) What are the values and motivation?5) How does she/he interact with others?6) What does she/he know?7) What distinctive habits?But even if we 'lavish' seven sentences on every NPC we still have a very small peice of information about the NPC's motives and very few clues about what sort of decision making process to use in all the cases we haven't described.  That's what alignment gives us that a list of questions and answers doesn't.  It's not that I don't think a list of questions and answers is in any fashion a bad idea, but deprived of any context it doesn't tell us some of the things we'd want to know.There is also a risk of it being infinitely recursive.  A question like, "How far would you be willing to sacrifice?", if it doesn't end up backing up to some sort of absolute standard ends up requireing an infinite number of digressions to answer fully because we don't have some real ranking of what is 'how far'?  It ends up telling us only something very specific.I think that 'The 7 Sentence NPC' is the best article ever written for Dragon magazine, but you can see this flaw even in the descriptions provided for the NPC's.  Baron 'Wardog' Muckdigger has a description that is memorable and creates a character, but which ultimately tells us nothing about what he'll do in a pinch.  The Baron could literally be from the description of any of the nine alignments, and knowing that would not change how you introduced the character necessarily but would probably change how you played the character if the character became a reoccuring intimate acquitance of the PC's. The same is even true of Lady Erin of Loft, whose description seems at first glance to peg her alignment to one portion of the wheel, but on reflection we find we don't really know enough to even know that.  In that case, suddenly we find that Lady Erin of Loft could be any number of things other than what we might think at first glance simply by playing around with her alignment descriptor.  But, I dare say that if you don't play around with her alignment descriptor, answering questions about her will almost certainly lead to a simple sterotype and not the potentially complex and compelling character she could be.Of course, it's probably equally true that if you only have an alignment description and never generate a personality that you'll end up with a bunch of sterotyped personalities based on the archetype presented by each alignment (meticulous prudish lawfuls, messy libertine chaotics for example), but just at this momment I don't feel the need to defend that giving NPC's a personality is useful.  What I'm trying to establish is that its not sufficient.And in my experience, very few DM's can precreate alot of seven sentence NPC's. I've spoke of NPC's, but with PC's the problems are similar and especially acute with novice roleplayers who first of all probably won't want to answer alot of questions and who second of all will probably give very uninformative answers.  An initial answer to, "What are your characters goals?", might be something like, "Get rich.", and an answer to how far you are willing to go is likely as not to be, "Not break the law.", or "Won't do anything immoral."  So, what are we really gaining there?</blockquote>

Verification