Keeping track of player's alignment

[the Jester]

That's something that the individual campaign will need to address.

I can't really address the issue fully without risking violating board rules in about three different ways, but I think I can reference it by noting that in the second Narnia book Prince Caspian, the good dwarf drew a sharp distinction between eating a "bear" and eating a "talking bear" and that it would have never occurred to either the Dwarf or the children to eat a Calormen or a Telmarine. Whether or not you accept his distinction, this is an issue that has to be addressed within a games morality system. Is there a distinction, and if so what is the basis of the distinction and why. Obviously, this is an issue for which there are lots and lots of different takes in real world morality systems. There are equally many takes you can give to a fantasy world, and arguably they would be a good deal more complicated given the number of different sophont races and species in a typical fantasy world.

This is a great point.

Perhaps the whole difference between so-called good and evil races could, in some milieus, boil down to whether you eat sentient creatures.

 

[Obryn]

I've alway felt alignments are a crutch and don't fit real people's actions.

At best, IMO. And when it's not used as a crutch, it's used like a bludgeon like the OP may have been intending.

-O

 

[Celebrim]

This is a great point.

Perhaps the whole difference between so-called good and evil races could, in some milieus, boil down to whether you eat sentient creatures.

In some milieus. It doesn't work in mine because my Grimm Fairy Tales inspirations makes sentience is so widespread. As a working description of the morality in my world, you might get something like, "Good aligned free peoples don't eat other free peoples. Animals respect the food chain as a natural right, and expect you to do so in return. Ei, Tiger spirit won't get upset about you eating him out of necessity, if you don't get upset with him eating you in his turn. Everything else is basically a monster and eats everything it can digest." Pretty much everything else is effectively polluted to a greater or lesser extent, and so most Free Peoples don't eat it for that reason - ei most people don't eat dragons because they are spiritually tainted, conversely dragons prefer to eat people because they are not. I've never really worked out a complete theory of who can legitimately eat who though, and although eating say Hippogrif or Forest Drake is something I know some of the more decadent cultures of my world might do, I've never figured out whether its actually evil. Certainly the free peoples have no problem using monsters as resources if they kill them, but there is a certain 'you are what you eat' thing going as a real law of the world. Blood in particular has transformative properties. Even with a lot of thought, a lot of details that have never come up in play aren't really worked out in my game - like even are there any 'good dragons' (gold, silver, etc.)

 

[Sunseeker]

At best, IMO. And when it's not used as a crutch, it's used like a bludgeon like the OP may have been intending.

-O

This is one reason I've always disliked the 2 dimensional alignment system.

 

[Libramarian]

To actually answer your question, I use a graph paper grid 18x18 squares, which divides into 9 sections 6x6, and free draw the PCs' path across the grid. I treat diagonal movement the same as linear movement, so it takes the same number of moves to get to the corners as the edges.