Monster Alignment

[Dire Bare]

Scribbles man, I'm pretty sure we've already had this exact same thread already . . . why start a new one?!?!

 

[Dire Bare]

I don't mind that metallic dragons can be evil.

However, I do mind that the ax doesn't swing both ways. A gold dragon can be evil but a red dragon, if one takes the MM at face value, can't be good. An eladrin can be chaotic evil, but an orc can't be lawful good.

It's a double-standard really, and it bothers me. I'm all for moral grays. But when all it means is that the good guys aren't necessarily good while the bad guys are still evil, it becomes more of a back and dark gray setting than black, white, and gray one.

From a gameplay perspective, I understand it to a degree, as good parties are less likely to fight good monsters. Then again, I also dislike the "you should only play if you're a good or inclined-to-good guy" vibe the PHB takes as well.

It's discrimination, that's what!!! The man is always keeping the chromatics down!

 

[doctorhook]

I don't mind that metallic dragons can be evil.

However, I do mind that the ax doesn't swing both ways. A gold dragon can be evil but a red dragon, if one takes the MM at face value, can't be good. An eladrin can be chaotic evil, but an orc can't be lawful good.

It's a double-standard really, and it bothers me. I'm all for moral grays. But when all it means is that the good guys aren't necessarily good while the bad guys are still evil, it becomes more of a back and dark gray setting than black, white, and gray one.

From a gameplay perspective, I understand it to a degree, as good parties are less likely to fight good monsters. Then again, I also dislike the "you should only play if you're a good or inclined-to-good guy" vibe the PHB takes as well.

This is precisely one of the things that makes Eberron so cool: All assumptions about alignment are out the window in that setting. Orcs are as likely to be Lawful Good Paladins as they are to be Chaotic Evil Barbarians; Gold Dragons are as likely to tyrannize and cruelly torture villagers as they are to be champions of honor and law. Hell, even the Lawful Good Goddess of Honor and Sacrifice (Dol Arrah, of the Sovereign Host) is sometimes depicted as a Red Dragon.

 

[wingsandsword]

What would keeping the creature the LG alignment offer to the game? What makes the creature's alignment being LG so important? Why is changing it from LG to unaligned so problematic for you?

Well, Gold Dragons have been depicted as paragons of virtue until now. They have been wise, forgiving, compassionate, and very honorable. While not every single dragon lives all the way up to the standard, they were the good (or at least Lawful, which in 4e is conflated with Good) guys in the draconic world.

Making them "unaligned" seems to be just another 4e-ism to make it so that parties can slaughter them guilt-free that they didn't have to kill anything good-aligned and an extension of the 4e-ism that anything in the monster manual is simply there for PCs to slaughter and there really aren't good-aligned monsters in 4e.

One of the most iconic of D&D deities is Bahamut, the patron deity of metallic dragons, who is Lawful Good and has an escort/honor guard of Gold Dragons. Is this to be just another bit of venerable lore chucked aside in 4e as being too daunting to new players or "not fun"?

 

[doctorhook]

Well, Gold Dragons have been depicted as paragons of virtue until now. They have been wise, forgiving, compassionate, and very honorable. While not every single dragon lives all the way up to the standard, they were the good (or at least Lawful, which in 4e is conflated with Good) guys in the draconic world.

Making them "unaligned" seems to be just another 4e-ism to make it so that parties can slaughter them guilt-free that they didn't have to kill anything good-aligned and an extension of the 4e-ism that anything in the monster manual is simply there for PCs to slaughter and there really aren't good-aligned monsters in 4e.

One of the most iconic of D&D deities is Bahamut, the patron deity of metallic dragons, who is Lawful Good and has an escort/honor guard of Gold Dragons. Is this to be just another bit of venerable lore chucked aside in 4e as being too daunting to new players or "not fun"?

Gold Dragons were always among the coolest of monsters. Lots of players have always wanted to fight them. 4E simply allows for that, by playing up the proud and draconic aspect of Gold Dragons, rather than the good and noble part. Gold Dragons in 4E can and do still play the role of "powerful draconic champions of good and law", but now they can more easily play the role of villains as well. (Again, a lot of folks have always wanted to try their hands against one of D&D's most powerful monsters.)

 

[Nivenus]

It's discrimination, that's what!!! The man is always keeping the chromatics down!

Let me rephrase that since my choice of words was poor. What I mean is that I like mixing morality up with creatures to be sure... but it's less interesting to me if it's lopsided. If it's just black and gray than it's not really any different than black and white... except that one side is worse. That doesn't really interest me as much.

Furthermore, there is a disconcerting element. While dragons are a poor case as it arguable that the evil dragons look as cool (or cooler) than the good ones, the orcs and eladrin examination is apt. As portrayed in D&D eladrin are beautiful. Orcs are ugly. Guess which one is more often evil? Same goes for goblins and gnomes. Or hags and dryads.

This was fine and all when things were black and white. But once you start introducing moral grays - but only with the nice creatures - it starts to bother me. Maybe that doesn't make much sense. But it's one of my few real complaints about 4e, which I otherwise greatly enjoy.

Interestingly, they went the opposite direction with tieflings in 4e - making them much more "unaligned" (as opposed to leaning towards evil) while making their appearance more outwardly bestial than it was in previous editions. Which I find nice for a change.

This is precisely one of the things that makes Eberron so cool: All assumptions about alignment are out the window in that setting. Orcs are as likely to be Lawful Good Paladins as they are to be Chaotic Evil Barbarians; Gold Dragons are as likely to tyrannize and cruelly torture villagers as they are to be champions of honor and law. Hell, even the Lawful Good Goddess of Honor and Sacrifice (Dol Arrah, of the Sovereign Host) is sometimes depicted as a Red Dragon.

Yeah, there's alot of things that sound cool about Eberron to me - including this. I've been toying with trying out the setting for awhile but I'm pretty busy running an FR campaign at the moment. However, if the opportunity arises I'll probably try it out to see what it's like.

And I might just buy the EPG anyway, just to raid the crunch.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Why is that?

What would keeping the creature the LG alignment offer to the game? What makes the creature's alignment being LG so important? Why is changing it from LG to unaligned so problematic for you?

110% Archetype.

D&D, for me, more than most things, is a game about fantasy archetypes. The strong warrior, the stout dwarf, the brilliant wizard, whatever. D&D tends to hodge-podge and throw in a few of its own, but rarely is a fantasy archetype ever expressly written out.

The "good dragon" is a fantasy archetype. The dragon of light and purity, aloof and defending the innocent. This is a fantasy archetype, contrasting with the evil dragon of smoke and fire, it is a dragon of sunlight and maybe even 13-year-old "I want a dragon buddy!" ideas. It's Falco from The Neverending Story. It's, heck, half of dragons in fantasy these days, because people want to be buddies with heroic dragons. D&D may have even had a hand in creating this archetype!

"Oh, but you can't really fight and kill it!" is a horrible reason to violate archetype. For me, this isn't a game about fighting and killing things. I don't care if I can't fight and kill very many LG gold dragons. They don't exist for me to fight and kill, generally speaking. They exist to help my group tell our story, to make our world more interesting and engaging, to add a variety of challenges and allies to the mix...a dozen good reasons for a dragon of pure goodness to be present in the rules.

The fact that they should exist and should be dragons of pure good is also more fuel for my "Mosnter Manuals should not just be stat blocks" point, too.

In short, I want gold dragons to be LG because it makes my D&D games play better.

Yet another stat block to reduce to 0 hp doesn't really do that.

And, yes, I know it's "easy to change for your campaign," but that's not really the point, now is it?

Coutls irk me, too, but they're far enough removed from their source material that it's an annoyance only. This annoys me a bit more than the inability to make an effective "Intelligent/Dexterous" rogue (though it's on the same continuum), largely because that's a mechanical gap, while this is just a bad decision for the direction of Monster Manuals in 4e. The former might be patched, the latter is going to irk me probably every time an MM comes out, when they decide to make Joan of Arc, Mother Theresa, and the Baby Jesus unaligned just so you can fight them.

Insane human nobles irk me for entirely different reasons.

I'm not that attached to pointless legacy -- I'm not a fan for pointless change, but I don't begrudge experimental toe-testing either. What irks me is that there's a great fantasy archetype out there that millions of people are familiar with that they just turned into a house rule. Way to go, jerkbags.

 

[Drkfathr1]

I wonder if a lot of the alignment issues many of us have with 4E would have been solved if the choice of alignments had instead become: Lawful, Good, Unaligned, Chaotic, and Evil.

If they were going to toss out the importance of alignment in this edition (instead of throwing it out entirely) they should have made it even more general than they did.

Unaligned has become too much of a catch-all.

 

[Harlekin]

What I find interesting when reading the MM2 is that the actual descriptions of Dragon behavior have not changed; gold dragons are still noble and silver dragons (and couatl) still crusade for good. The designers apparently did not change the creatures, they changed the goalposts. They put the bar higher for a creature to be considered good.

In older editions, a creature was often assigned a good alignment if ist description said kill evil no matter what and woe you if you get in its way. One could just as easily argue that such a creature is fighting for good, but because of its choice of methods is actually not so good itself. Most races that were potential allies were considered good just for that reason.

One example for me would be the Dragonlance Metallic Dragons in the original series. Watching civilizations burn and thousands die and doing nothing about it because you are concerned for the safety of few of your kin is selfish and could be considered unaligned.

 

[knifie_sp00nie]

I think a better question might be why a single word like alignments makes some people so frothy. It seems like the people that rail against the mechanics of 4e are also the people who keep talking about this golden age of gaming where imagination was king. This attitude then turns around and cries that you can never change the alignment of a monster because the text in a book was printed differently that it was in the past. The rules of the monster manual are immutable. Where's your imagination now?

Then the debate turns to history and "core assumptions". Won't someone please think of the children?! The poor new players won't play DnD the same way I've been playing for 30 years. In that 30 years the sophistication of storytelling has improved greatly. Even young people can handle some light moral ambiguity. They don't care about what came before and are going to play the game how they want to play it.

The 4e world, if you could call it that, is not the same thing from 30 years ago. I used to hate DnD because it was so black-and-white. It still is to a certain extent, but it's a lot better and worlds like Eberron showed you can do DnD without being a good vs evil slugfest.

But that still dances around the core problem. We're talking about a game of infinite imagination where one camp believes that anything in print about the game is immutable and that unapproved deviations somehow destroy some concept of a shared experience.