Mechanical Alignment: How Well Does it Work?

[Glade Riven]

I always have consiquences for player behavior - but sometime players insist on fighting the town watch, getting kicked out of town, thrown in jail, or just outright get themselves killed. If you're going to play a violent sociopath, bad things will happen. Some player's still insist on it, though.

 

[pemerton]

I think that exploder wizard has the best idea. If you want a heroic game then only reward heroic actions.

<snip>

They will be stumbling over themselves to help everyone cross the street and hold doors for every little old lady in town.

I think this raises the question "Where are the real rewards"?

For example - if the rewards that really motivate your players are level-ups via XPs, and you decide to give them XPs only for heroic actions, then if your players are expedient they will have their PCs perform only heroic actions - but will you have achieved a heroic feel for your game? Or a continued feeling of expedience?

This is why I suggested upthread that you might want to look at trying to create scenarios where heroism is its own reward. (Of course XP might be earned too, but they might equally be earned if the players have their PCs act merely expediently. I think this is orthogonal to the issue the OP described.)

 

[Thunderfoot]

I can honestly say that when characters are played by players who strive to play a character based on a set of ideals and a back story and not themselves, I have never seen what you describe.

The problem usually comes when the players thing they are "entitled" to do what they want, when they want, outside of the laws of the land, because they are the "heroes".

If the goal of a heroic party becomes personal revenge, public drunkenness, carousing and exploitation of the locals, they are no longer the "good guys". They have strayed from their goals (and usually alignments) enough to warrant penalties. The problem is, how did it get this far without you stepping in earlier? DMs need to administer the smackdown on occasion to remind players that actions have consequences. No player party should be able to run roughshod over the law of a town, a county and definitely not a kingdom.

You don't have to be draconian to be stern, either. XP penalties are usually a good indication to a player that something is amiss. Town authorities not allowing characters to enter based on their "reputation" is another good way to send up the flag prior to bringing down the hammer. Give the players a chance to recognize they have strayed and turn themselves around before the armies of goodness take them out.

Clerics, monks, and paladins should never get to this point. Representatives of their order should have stepped in long ago with warnings of "rumored poor behavior" and possible "punishment from the highest levels of the order." Even if you don't have anything specific planned the threat of organized retribution for spurious acts will usually have the priests and pallys culling the other classes in line and if not - the beatings shall now begin.

Without specific details of their deeds that have let them stray from lawful to chaotic there isn't any specific advice I can give. Though you should probably talk to the group and find out how they think they are doing and if the believe. More than likely its a case of they just didn't realize that they were in the wrong and that they are not entitled to get away with anything - if so - boot to the head. If they didn't realize that stealing the money from that town and burning down the orphanage because they were drunk and bored or that 150 1st level town folks had to be worth at least some XP... well, religious assassinations and player death are just part of the daily grind.

 

[pemerton]

If the goal of a heroic party becomes personal revenge, public drunkenness, carousing and exploitation of the locals, they are no longer the "good guys". They have strayed from their goals (and usually alignments) enough to warrant penalties. The problem is, how did it get this far without you stepping in earlier? DMs need to administer the smackdown on occasion to remind players that actions have consequences. No player party should be able to run roughshod over the law of a town, a county and definitely not a kingdom.

You don't have to be draconian to be stern, either. XP penalties are usually a good indication to a player that something is amiss.

<snip>

More than likely its a case of they just didn't realize that they were in the wrong and that they are not entitled to get away with anything - if so - boot to the head. If they didn't realize that stealing the money from that town and burning down the orphanage because they were drunk and bored or that 150 1st level town folks had to be worth at least some XP... well, religious assassinations and player death are just part of the daily grind.

Are there many examples of this sort of adversarial GMing actually having the desired effect? I know that if a GM tried this sort of thing on me I'd generally be out of there.

I'm not sure it's the GM's job to tell me how my player should behave - the GM is just one out of several relevant voices here - but I certainly don't want that being done via the game mechanics. Just tell me to my face that you want the game to take a different direction. Or, better yet, give me interesting stuff to do that is the sort of stuff you care about.

To the OP: for some more discussion of similar issues, see this other current thread.

 

[Macbeth]

Jack, it sounds like you want a game about *how* the characters are Good, not about Good characters.

Alignment is great for games about Good characters. It's kind of a shorthand: it says "hey, my guy's good, let's get to beating on some orcs, cause they're evil." It doesn't really handle the whys and wherefores.

Games about how characters are Good don't really benefit from saying they're good to begin with. For a game to be about how the characters are Good, they have to have the option of not being Good. Of backsliding and all that. In which case we're in a more nuanced kind of world view. Things aren't black and white anymore.

When being Good or Evil is a mechanical thing, it takes it out of the focus of the game. When being Good or Evil is a void, someplace where players have to make their own calls, Good and Evil can be explored and discussed more, it matters more.


For a mechanical, reward oriented alignment (if that fits the game you're thinking of) I'm a fan of treating them a bit like Keys in Shadow of Yesterday. Come up with clear, action-oriented things that make that character/class good, and have the player take XP for doing those things.

For example, in Dungeon World, a Good Cleric gets XP for putting the dead to rest or bringing someone back from the brink of death. A Neutral Fighter gets XP for defeating a worth opponent. An Evil Wizard gets XP for binding or controlling others.

The important aspects of doing alignment like this: the player's actions trigger XP, with implicit GM approval. The reason for gaining XP is clear, but applies to a number of situations. The reason for gaining XP is also customized to that class and alignment.