Metagame role of PoL compared to alignment

[FourthBear]

Points of Light does not explain why PCs do not work for their organizations. It does the opposite.

While I can see a PoL campaign where characters would not wish to band together due to xenophobia, I don't think it would need to be so. After all, adversity is frequently used in fiction to bring normally opposing forces together. While a cleric might *wish* to remain with a likeminded church and a rogue with a thieves' guild, in a PoL setting large organizations for them to join up with may not exist. Further, in many books, the reason for disparate types to be brought together is because those involved know that tackling problems involves different skill sets. Given that in D&D, the optimal group usually results from a team of differing specialists, I would think the experienced would realize this.

And, of course, true adventurers may not be at all common in the isolated community. If all the town has is a rag-tag group of heroes, that's who is going to be asked to help out. The heroes could sit around all day griping about wishing they had a more convenient selections of initial companions, but reality may reply with "tough cookies, this is all you get."

 

[The Little Raven]

Points of Light does not explain why PCs do not work for their organizations.

Neither did previous editions, because the players and DMs did that for themselves.

 

[mach1.9pants]

Neither did previous editions, because the players and DMs did that for themselves.

Q, as is a forumites want, FT
ps w00t

 

[pemerton]

Not the case anymore. W&M states that their are 'no forced race relations' and 'no inherent racial emnity between PC races' (p.14).

I know. That's part of my point.

With POL, folks from different settlements ("points") will have every reason to distrust each other. Each settlement is a unique clan and a unique "alignment".

This is not the case in canonical PoL, as set out in W&M, which discusses the role of the different points of light as safehavens for all members of PC races. (Thus the importance of the removal of inherent enmity between races.)

The need to protect all these safehavens is what (on my analysis) gives the PCs a motivation to adventure together despite their diverse origins.

Nobody would want to work with individuals from other communities. They would not trust outsiders.

In the canonical descriptoin of PoL this is not the case.

In a PoL setting, everybody would want to be part of big strong organizations that could protect them. They would not want to be part of small adventuring groups that could easily get killed moving from one community to the next.

Part of the conceit of PoL, as set out in W&M, are that there are no such organisations. Thus, protection depends upon small bands of adventurers doing heroic things. Thus, we can explain the motivation of the PCs to band together, despite their diverse origins, without needing to appeal to alignment considerations.

I really like the 4E idea of everybody has their own morals and you only have game effects if you commit yourself (paladin or cultist), body and soul, to an ideal. And even then you can't be detected based on it.

So do I. What I like about PoL is that it explains how this diversity is not an obstacle to a small group of adventurers banding together to invade dungeons.

I do agree that the alignments, split roughly as "good" vs "evil", do allow "good" players to band up and fight "evil". From that point of view, alignment never really worked, anyways, as the "Law" vs "chaos" distinction never seemed to matter as much as the "Good" vs "evil".

But what you describe is alignment working in the metagame sense I am talking about. The fact that (as you observe) most players ignored Law vs Chaos is part of what made it work.

Pemerton: I guess you just run your campaigns different from me, I never use alignment as anything but a bit of background info when I run vanilla; and have homebrewed it out of my last 2 campaigns.

Actually I haven't said anything about how I run my campaigns. My account of the role of alignment is based mainly on what is said about it in some of the earlier D&D texts, such as the 1st ed PHB and DMG, early White Dwarf articles by Lewis Pulsipher, and the extensive discussions in articles and forum letters in the first 100 or so numbers of Dragon.

In my own games I don't use alignment and try to set up real social relations that will bind a party together (recongnising the metagame imperative for this). But I haven't tried the PoL way, and as a result my games tend not be classic D&D games but more political/social games. What I think is very clever about the PoL design is that it uses the ingame social situation to drive a classic D&D game. This has never been done before in a published D&D text that I'm aware of - it was almost always alignment-driven (ie the GM in guise of Elminster or whomever says "As Good PCs you surely have no choice but to go and smite these Evil entities").

For me, what kept the party together was just social/emotional ties and common objectives... Alignment was just a way to (poorly) define general character behaviour...

The traditional difficulty that alignment resolves is the following: why does this group of close friends spend its time engaged in acts of murder and robbery? And how did they become friends in the first place, given their disparate racial and social backgrounds? Alignment, by positing the boon companions as Good and their victims as Evil, provided a short-hand answer to both questions.

Obviously the game has outgrown that explanation, and this creates pressure to downplay or disregard alignment. But other fantasy RPGs that have done this (RQ, RM in some versions, Pendragon, Chivalry and Sorcery, Ars Magica< HeroQuest, The Dying Earth) also do not support classic D&D dungeon-raiding play. As already stated, PoL is the first attempt I know of in published D&D material to reconcile the abolition of alignment with traditional D&D play, by instituting an alternative (and in my view much more clever) metagame device. (It may be that I should be crediting Eberron with this achievement rather than PoL, but I don't know it well enough, and all the reviews I've read of the first few Eberron modules suggest that they were pulpy railroads rather than classic dungeons.)

 

[pemerton]

Neither did previous editions, because the players and DMs did that for themselves.

Mourn, as a pro-4e person I thought you might be more sympathetic to my argument!

Its true that players and GMs can do things for themselves, but (as you were discussing with Reynard - in the Game vs Gameplay thread, I think) there are advantages in having a game which explains how it is meant to be played rather than hides this.

Classic D&D play is a group of adventurers killing and looting (like Conan, mostly unlike Arthurian or Tolkienesque heroes). But it is also a group of heroes, not mercenaries (like Arthurian or Tokienesque heroes, unlike Conan). How to reconcile these? Alignment is one way. PoL is another, and in my view superior, way.

In my experience, in past versions of D&D the more that players and GMs tried to do this work on their own the more the game became a social/political game and less a classic D&D game (I hope I'm not generalising too much from my own experience here). This is also true, it seems to me, of other fantasy RPGs (C&S, Ars Magica, RQ, RM as developed through Loremaster and Shadow World, The Dying Earth, Pendragon, HeroQuest).

Worlds and Monsters makes it clear that D&D is not being designed as a social/political game, though they don't care if some of their players play it like that. As I see it PoL is the solution to avoiding such a game, while also avoiding alignment, while also reconciling (rather than just handwaving in the general direction of) the two basic features of classic D&D play.

 

[The Little Raven]

Mourn, as a pro-4e person I thought you might be more sympathetic to my argument!

I'm not unsympathetic to your argument, I was just pointing out that no previous edition of D&D did it, because players and DMs did it for themselves. I'm not against PoL trying to give you stronger reasons to play it their way, simply pointing out the lack of precedent up until now.

As for my opinion, I'm totally down with the stronger focus PoL is pushing to make PCs of all races friendly to eachother, to the extent that they're eliminating "traditional" rivalries like elves and dwarves. With the default setting, as presented so far, I see no reason why traveling to a new town would provoke hostility from that town, so long as you are part of the group of "good" races.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Not the case anymore. W&M states that their are 'no forced race relations' and 'no inherent racial emnity between PC races' (p.14).

I imagine the relationship between the various PC races would be a lot like the relationship between the various countries in Western Europe - they all still remember and complain about who invaded who 300 years ago, but those grudges don't play a primary part in everyday life anymore. (P.S.: Elves = the French.)

 

[The Little Raven]

P.S.: Elves = the French.)

One of the most dominant military powers in it's sphere until late into it's history, when multiple wars that devastate the region finally tire the native people of it? I can buy that.

 

[mach1.9pants]

In my own games I don't use alignment and try to set up real social relations that will bind a party together (recongnising the metagame imperative for this). But I haven't tried the PoL way, and as a result my games tend not be classic D&D games but more political/social games. What I think is very clever about the PoL design is that it uses the ingame social situation to drive a classic D&D game. This has never been done before in a published D&D text that I'm aware of - it was almost always alignment-driven (ie the GM in guise of Elminster or whomever says "As Good PCs you surely have no choice but to go and smite these Evil entities").

I think I got your point mixed, so sorry. I didn't like this part of your OP:

In the absence of these alignment motivations, it might be very difficult to explain why elves and dwarves were adventuring together (luckily, shared Good alignment overcomes an otherwise deep-set racial antipathy)

I totally disagree with the need for mechanical alignment to explain anything the PCs do. Even without PoL, you don't need alignment to explain it.
But..I see what you are saying here..

To sum up: PoL makes alignment redundant by offering a well-conceived way of integrating adventuring parties and motivating them to adventure drawing purely on the social realities of the gameworld - there is no need to impose the dead and heavy hand of metaphysics upon the gameworld in order to make the game play properly.
PoL does other good stuff to, like facilitate world creation and adventure design, especially for new GMs. But I think the above is probably its more important contribution to D&D as a game.

'Adversity makes the strangest of allies' type thing. I would say 'PoL offers one, well-conceived, way of integrating adventuring parties and motivating them to adventure drawing purely on the social realities of the gameworld'
Does that grok? (I love that word, )
M1.9P

 

[Erik Mona]

For me, as a DM, alignment is a two-character part of the stat block that tells me more about how to roleplay a creature than any number or special attack.

I fear I will miss it dearly.