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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Daniel" data-source="post: 5483129" data-attributes="member: 694">The alignment system in most versions of the D&D game has generally been a descriptive quality, not a prescriptive one.  Even in the earlier editions of the game---where alignments were more like cosmic factions (as in, "Which team do you play for? I'm with the Chaotic Neutrals!") than private moral outlooks, and the DM was encouraged to penalize the experience of players who "didn't play their alignment right"---the alignments themselves were still ultimately a flexible description which could change in response to a new pattern of character behavior.  The upshot of this: even with a draconian DM enforcing experience penalties or other punishments (like denying spells to a cleric or ruling a paladin fallen), there is still nothing a DM can ever do, via the alignment system or any other mechanic in the game, to dissuade a character who really wants to play (or violate) a particular alignment from doing so.As it should be, of course, because the players' freedom to direct the actions of their characters is sacrosanct, within reasonable limits.  (By "reasonable limits," I mean anything that squicks out the DM and the other players, the archetypical example being in-game rape.  I know of no DM or group of players who would countenance, or suffer to continue gaming with, a player who instigated such a thing.  But that's beside the point of this discussion.)  The rules of D&D are basically "neutral" with respect to alignments.  By that, I mean that there is nothing in the rules themselves to encourage or discourage particular alignments.  Most of the time, for every spell or item or special class feature that keys to a particular alignment, its opposite is also present in the game.  The rulebooks can and do point out that evil characters don't work well in adventuring parties, but that's toothless flavor-text.  As far as the rules themselves are concerned, Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil are equivalent.This is not a problem for core D&D, of course, because it allows for a certain flexibility with respect to creating campaigns.  Above all, it allows for the "swords & sorcery" assumptions that underlie early D&D: an <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackAndGrayMorality" target="_blank">amoral world</a> where gold, glory, and power define rightness, and where the choices facing characters often boil down to "bad" and "worse".  But let's say that the DM is aiming for a different sort of campaign.  Heroic high fantasy, where the characters are good guys who know compassion and altruism.  What might have been called an "exalted" campaign in the halcyon days of 3rd Edition.  Further, let's assume that the players are on board.  They've bought in, they've anted up, they want to play heroes.  What is the best way to keep the campaign focused on heroism and goodness?In my experience, such campaigns might perhaps start out fine, but as they age, they atrophy.  A month or two in, and the players are all essentially running Chaotic Neutrals, doing whatever in the world they can get away with, regardless of whatever alignments they started with.  This seems to be endemic to RPGs in general, and D&D in particular.  If the players cease to care about the fantasy world that they're helping to create (that is, they dismiss its verisimilitude and stop suspending their disbelief, and they start meta-gaming instead of role-playing), they treat the campaign as a consequence-free environment, knowing full well that consequences for their imaginary characters are not real consequences that matter.  Further, self-serving actions often reward the player (with treasure or experience or just plain getting one's way), creating a kind of positive reinforcement that tempts characters away from being good guys.  Heroism is hard; selfishness reaps rewards that all too often make the players feel like they're "winning" the game.My question posed to the community is thus: assuming that the DM and the players desire a heroic campaign, which is better for role-playing, D&D's toothless and utterly non-mechanical alignment system? or some kind of mechanic that serves a similar purpose?  In particular, I refer to Dark Side points from Star Wars d20 and corruption from the CODA system Lord of the Rings RPG.  (Basically, characters rack up points for committing evil deeds.  If the number of points ever exceeds a characters Wisdom in Star Wars or Charisma in LotR, the character is irredeemably corrupted and becomes an NPC.)  If Star Wars and LotR share anything in common, it would be that these are heroic high fantasies, populated by good and heroic protagonists and set in universes with a fairly absolute morality.  If the group desires a game that feels like this particular genre, are the aforementioned mechanics a better way to emulate it?More importantly, does the threat of getting "NPC'd" after a certain fixed number, known to the player, of "evil points" are accumulated sufficiently incentivize players to play good characters?</blockquote>

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