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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6623199" data-attributes="member: 32740">My studious conclusion is that Gygax really had no idea what it was that he really had or what the game could or would be using it for. Heck, in the SR article referred to he pretty well admits as much.  In the 3 LBB's for OD&D alignment was just law/chaos/neutral, but it had absolutely nothing to say about WHAT IT WAS.  What was it for?  The rules sure didn't tell you.  The only way you could really figure it out is to have read Stormbringer/Elric - or were gaming with someone who had.  Even in 1E [IMO] he didn't yet have it completely sussed out what to use it FOR and especially HOW to use it to accomplish... whatever it was FOR.  He kind of talks about it like, "If you do so many actions of type X then you gain Y number of good/evil/chaos/law points and when you plot your current number on this graph that tells you what alignment the character is," but that's NOT how it really worked.  For one thing EVERYBODY, then and now, has differing ideas of what it means to be lawful, or chaotic, or neutral... and what that actually MEANS for your PC if you are alignment XY, and more importantly what it means for the PC if they ACTUALLY CHANGE alignment to YZ.I think what he was wanting it to do within the game really wasn't ever going to work well with his descriptions of tracking changes to it.  It may even have taken him a couple of editions to finally nail down the whole concept.  Or maybe he never would have touched it again.  Who knows?  As it was, he got ousted from the company and ever since there's been no real hope of seeing a genuinely useful vision of what it is, what to use it for, and HOW to use it.  That, then, is for all of us to actually determine for ourselves.I could give a detailed account of why tracking individual actions on a graph is a bad way to go about using alignment, but I'll just make the unsupported assertion for the moment.  Since you're assuming "a DM has a working definition of what the nine alignments mean to him or her in terms of types of activity," and the players are willing to defer to the DM's judgment, then the DM doesn't need a detailed system to track individual actions - he can and should simply exercise that judgement that the players allow for.  A few notes that a characters alignment IS changing (in which direction and WHY) is all that's necessary.  Actually marking a point on a graph is only going to tell the DM what the OP assumes the DM already knows - he/she has working definitions of alignment and related actions.  Doing too much of one or not enough of another tends to move you in the direction of some other alignment.  When and why it ACTUALLY changes is still a judgement call.  Trying to pinpoint it on a graph as it moves is actually counterproductive.That's where I come down anyway.</blockquote>

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