"Narrativist" 9-point alignment

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed! And I think it's a virtue of my scheme that it makes the classic drawing of A Paladin in Hell fit within the alignment system, rather than look like some sort of alignment error!

Hopefully this also makes clearer why I find the Planescape alignment set-up so irritating, because it embodies all the incoherences you diagnosed, and makes it hard if not impossible for me to articulate the scheme I find interesting.

Right, I'm getting it

I like the amusement value, but I don't think it's a paradox. The CG person asserts that social order and hierarchy are a burden on wellbeing beause of how they constrain self-realisation. (That is a paraphrase of Gygax.) The LE archevil likes social order and hierarchy because they let him/her impose his/her yoke of domination upon the world. (Again, a paraphrase of Gygax.) What do they disagree about? Not about whether or not social order and hierarchy are a source of misery! It's just that the CG person cares about that (because s/he is good), whereas the archdevil doesn't (because, being evil, s/he cares for nothing but self-interest).

Right, no paradox. They simply have a common view of law, at that level.

Absolutely agreed, but I think in a game taking this sort of focus alignment isn't really doing any work at all. Because the alignment system already comes with a prepackaged notion of the good guys (they're labelled "good") and the bad guys (they're labelled "evil"), a campaign focusing on good vs evil doesn't actually enliven or activate the alignment system at all. There is no debate about which of the elf or archdevil is morally correct, for instance - the archdevil is a monster who uses the most vile means to enslave his/her (and other) people.

What I was looking for in my OP was a way to identify an interesting moral question posed by the alignment system. And the one I identify is the question of law vs chaos as means to wellbeing.

Right, I understand it clearly now, thanks. The conflict really IS about good and evil, but its about how you define them through the lens of law/chaos in a sense.

Agreed, I think I would want some sort of way to particularise the social order vs self-realisation issue. I have some thought about how I might do that if I wanted to, based on my ideas about the way enclosure worked in England and how similar processes around agricultural production and urbanisation operate in other countries within the contemporary economy, but I think the board "no politics" rule means that I won't go any further than that in setting it out - but hopefully that gives you a sense of how I might do it.

Eh, I'm not a mod, but I think the 'no politics' rule is more about arguing ABOUT politics vs discussions of truly game-related things where some political idea might provide insight. It may still be possible to hit some nerves though as you might hit on personal experiences. Still, I'm mighty curious. I certainly know very little about the details of how 'enclosure' worked, or even perhaps what the term means exactly in a technical sense, given that I'm no sociologist/anthropologist/whatever.

So, if you get the urge to expound on it, I'm intrigued.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is a problem with engaging that question via play - if you are in a game in which alignment is a *power* (say, stock 3e) then there is no question. Forces of the Universe decide the question for you, and you can tell if they are lawful by casing, for example, Detect Law. If you are playing a game that, for some reason, has alignments but there is no power associated with it, then the question is likely moot.

I submit that the overthrow of previous social order cannot be a decisive measure for whether a person or people in a D&D universe are Lawful - context matters. For example, if it can be well-argued that the previous social order had betrayed its people or its own principles (betrayal being a pretty non-lawful thing to do), the truly Lawful thing to do may be to replace that old order with a new one.

And, then we get to bring in the alignment-of-person vs alignment-of-society question, but I have a different angle on it.

When I use alignment for people, I take it to be a long-term average of behavior. Single, non-magical acts rarely cause major alignment shifts.

You can consider the alignment of a society or group to be a similar, aggregate or average measure. If most of the people are LG, the society as a whole is LG. This doesn't preclude the occasional person who is different (or even very many differences, so long as the *average* works out), just as being LG precludes the occasional jerkish action from a person. Thus, Nazis in general can be LE, even if there are a couple of notable individuals in the ranks who are really more like CE.

The issue in play might be approached more in terms of swaying public opinion. Sure, in SOME sense if alignment is not a 'power' and is just a description of your own moral and ethical reasoning in terms of some generalizations, then the question is 'moot' in some cosmologically significant sense perhaps. However, suppose the PC is a champion of a 'new order' which has overthrown this 'Lawful Evil' regime. Can he justify, to the population, his actions? Can he convince the people he wants to submit to the legitimacy of the new rulers that they ARE legitimate?

Now, cosmological significance can be reinjected into this issue because the gods, even if they are just big powerful guys with their own personal morals that aren't powers, still have their own moral preferences, and by gosh if Atur, the lawful good god of kingship can't be convinced that your guy should be crowned, well HIS opinion has a LOT OF WEIGHT! Furthermore there could be a quite vociferous debate and struggles in and amongst the ranks of various power structures (Atur's priesthood for instance). Here you could bring home the struggle to the particular interests of the PCs and give them a stake in finding answers. Obviously in this scenario there isn't an ABSOLUTE right answer, we've already determined that. There certainly can be a right answer however in terms of social utility, in terms of justice, in terms of personal interest, social group interest, etc.

You could call it the "Fractured Kingdom" campaign. It might be a pretty good campaign arc as you could start out with the fallout of the change in regimes at a local level, then the impact of disagreements and infighting as different factions struggle for influence. Later external forces might get involved, and the 'epic' aspect of this game would involve lining up the higher powers behind the right candidate for new head honcho, gathering the 'symbols of power' required to validate that, and perhaps fun twists, like survivals of the old regime trying to recoup their overthrow, etc etc etc.

 

[Manbearcat]

True.

For some reason my mind is wandering to Runequest-style play. Put the family (or other small group) into some sort of conflict or challenge with the kobolds/goblins/ogres: probably not full-on raiding or warfare, which in D&D will probably default very quickly to humanoid-bashing, but semi-political conflict (say, a demand for tribute, or sacrifice) which then puts pressure on the cohesion of the family/village, opens up space for PC (and therefore player) choices that may foster or undermine that cohesion but, until actually resolved (via combat or social conflict), have an uncertain connection to wellbeing (both among the family/villagers, and among the evil humanoids).

The other issue in D&D is that the fragility of low-level PCs (outside of 4e) tends to make expedience an ever-present and rational option. To get around that issue you might have to start at (say) 3rd level, or alternatively use the first couple of levels to warm up and introduce some of the conflicts, rather than directly address them. (This sort of "story not-quite-now, but in a little while once we're all good and ready" is also something of a time-honoured FRPG tradition, although not therefore of necessity a good thing!)

Picking up on this a few weeks later...

I was just reading VB's site and came across this nice little encapsulation of the essence of Story NOW (!) play:

The entrenched mode among us old Forgies is to systematize the story - protagonist(s), conflict across moral lines, escalation, resolution - and furthermore, to systematically democratize it at the table. The result of this kind of design is that everyone at the table participates in creating a "satisfying story about n," right?

So in a D&D game where Law vs Chaos is the central them, you really need:

a) Law vs Chaos to be unambiguous statements that can be "empirically tested" through play:

"Why do we bring this person to justice?" Because tolerance of vice and criminal proclivities leads to the repudiation of honor and goodwill.

"Why do we not bring this person to justice?" Because the justicar is corrupt and enables exploitation of the meek by the powerful.


b) Protagonists who are committed to one side or the other and will advocate hard for their ethos.


c) System and a clear GMing protocol that pushes play towards democratically testing those Law vs Chaos conflicts, allowing players to have their say via PC resources and player action declarations intersecting with tight, neutral resolution mechanics.


At the end of play, we should have a satisfying story about the merits of freedom from external constraint and/or decency born of internal restraint (or the inverse or other combinations thereof).

 

[spinozajack]

I disagree.

It becomes difficult to give clear examples without breaking EN World's no-politics rule. I will go to the extreme end, to one that is likely to be at least uncontroversial - Nazis.

Amazingly lawful. Also evil. And, that evil is pretty solidly outwardly directed.

I accept the collective raspberries for Godwinning the thread.

Lawful evil is indeed the worst kind of evil, because all that's done in its name is inherently accepted due to its lawfulness, so many people simply look the other way. Heck, people look the other way even when their government blatantly breaks its own internal laws (NSA spying anyone? General warrants mean 4th Amendment = gone).

One could easily say many aspects of many governments have inherently "evil" laws. For example, voter disenfranchisement, targetting people of color and throwing them in jail by the buttloads for petty crimes, making people to to war and die horribly against their wishes to profit munitions companies who sell to both sides (definitely evil, and definitely illegal, yet done constantly). I can't think of anything more perfectly representing a LE society than one in which poor people have no choice but to go and die to make rich people richer for no other reason. Ok, maybe the Mayans ripping people's hearts out by the thousands then kicking their still alive bodies down hundreds of stairs along future victims, to make it rain again by appeasing some very evil-looking demon gods, and where the priests wear human skin during those sacrifices. Cortes was evil, for sure too, but was he more evil than those he was killing? I don't think so. If anything, that was just LE vs LE societies. If you boil it down, most societies are built on genocide and war, and then maintaining a social order which benefits the elites at the expense of everyone else, and those are pretty evil. So my thinking is, society is in itself pretty evil. It's 2015 and laws are are still being made to make it possible discriminate against those who don't conform to gender or sexuality norms. Those are pretty evil. Why sugar coat it? Laws, at best, are amoral. At worst, definitely evil. And sometimes good, yes. So they run the spectrum of good vs evil.

Gygax was on to something, albeit you can't reduce morality or personal behavior to a 9 point or 10-point list, let alone a society on the whole. Except for Nazis, as you wrote But Germany during Nazi era (and maybe even because of it) did create many wondrous and good things, that are still used today. Many of their scientists were hired by the US to win the space race. That I would say is evil, but maybe in realpolitik, evil is only what's necessary to achieve a goal.

Lawfulness can definitely be used to maintain a strict and inhuman social order, and often is. Laws don't really care about morality or justice per se. But they can cause great harm (the Draft, internment camps, disenfranchisement, discrimination), and great good (Voting Rights Act).

 

[pemerton]

in a D&D game where Law vs Chaos is the central them, you really need:

a) Law vs Chaos to be unambiguous statements that can be "empirically tested" through play:

<snip>

b) Protagonists who are committed to one side or the other and will advocate hard for their ethos.


c) System and a clear GMing protocol that pushes play towards democratically testing those Law vs Chaos conflicts, allowing players to have their say via PC resources and player action declarations intersecting with tight, neutral resolution mechanics.


At the end of play, we should have a satisfying story about the merits of freedom from external constraint and/or decency born of internal restraint (or the inverse or other combinations thereof).

I'm not sure about (a).

A few posts up I talked about the possibility of a campaign where part of what is at stake is the proper interpretation of the National Socialist government of Germany (or some imagined variant - eg Civil War in MHRP). In that sort of game, law and chaos aren't unambiguous at the start. While there is a clear sense of their contrast at the abstract level (for the lawfuls, they contrast social rules and order with self-indulgence and disregard; for the chaotics, they contrast self-realisation with social domination and hierarchy), what counts as an instance of one or the other in the actual (imagined) world is still up for grabs. Ie everyone knows that the Nazis (or SHIELD in the Civil War variant) are wrong, but they disagree, and are fighting over, whether the wrongness is of the lawful or the chaotic variety.

You would still have (b): protagonists who are committed advocates for either law or chaos, and hence are committed to presenting the unambiguously bad situation as the fault/result of the other side.

And (c) becomes interesting, because what is being pushed for is not an ingame outcome (ie it's not like the original sort of example I had in mind, where via play we discover whether adhering to social norms leads to wellbeing or suffering). Rather what is being pushed for is the vindication of a certain sort of interpretation of already-given events.

This might be achieved by rallying others to one's cause - eg if there is a NPC whose moral compass is unambiguously accepted as sound, getting thatperson to agree with you. For instance, in the MHRP game that NPC would be Captain America, os if you can get Captain America to agree with your side's interpretation of the wrong of what SHIELD is doing (eg the lawfuls get him to agree that it is really chaos and rampant individualism merely wearing a mask of legality) then that counts as a win for your side.

It could also be achieved by interacting with the evil organisation and getting it to change and ameliorate in a certain way - and if that change/amelioration takes the form of permitting self-realisation to emerge then the chaotic good side is winning, whereas if that change/amelioration takes the form of restoring genuine legality then the lawful good side is winning. (In MHRP, the first approach might take the form of persuading SHIELD to let superheroes escape to exile in Wakanda; the second approach might take the form of persuading a Congressional Committee to conduct an investigation into SHIELD's excesses in enforcing registration and holding them to account.)

Just some thoughts!

 

[pemerton]

have some thought about how I might do that if I wanted to, based on my ideas about the way enclosure worked in England and how similar processes around agricultural production and urbanisation operate in other countries within the contemporary economy

I certainly know very little about the details of how 'enclosure' worked, or even perhaps what the term means exactly in a technical sense, given that I'm no sociologist/anthropologist/whatever.

So, if you get the urge to expound on it, I'm intrigued.

In English history, enclosure means the privatisation of common lands, generally by Act of Parliament. The ostensible rationale is an increase in the economically productive use of the land (eg by turning it over to pasturage). The result is a mass migration of poor peasants and agricultural labourers, whose livelihood becomes impossible without access to the commons, to the newly-emerging cities. Where they become the industrial working class.

Urbanisation is largely complete in modern England, but similar processes are still going on in other parts of the world. (For a treatment of some of the issues from one particular political perspective, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums.)

In the context of the game I'm talking about, aspects of this history would be drawn on but others set aside or romanticised/idealised. The core contrast that the game would posit would be the free, self-realising peasant or woodsman against the socially organised and integrated city-dweller. For the lawful side, the aim would be to vindicate the social transformations as showing the merits of social organisation over the poverty and vulnerability of having to live as individuals; for the chaotics, they would be vindicating the self-realising individualism of the yeoman farmer against the impersonality and degradation of becoming a mere cog in the machine of urban life.

In the simple version, what would be at stake would be establishing, via game play, certain qualities of urban or rural life.

In the "interpretive" version (building on my reply above to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and our discussion of Nazism), there would also be conflict over the most defensible interpretation of the competing forms of life. (Eg there is certainly a school of thought that sees peasant life as highly socially regulated and cloying, and sees the anonymity and pluralism of mass urban life as a springboard for self-realisation via sub-cultures, avant garde artistic movements, etc. An Over the Edge-style or cyberpunk-ish urban game might raise issues a bit like this.)

A more traditional fantasy variant of what I have in mind might involve the king's forces (including knights, paladins etc) taking over the peasant lands so as to drive off the humanoids and keep the people safe (so instead of enclosure-style migration, we have rational government and production migrating into the countryside): is this a victory for law (establishing wellbeing by bringing people into the fold of social order), or a proof that the chaotics were right all along (as people's dignity, self-realisation etc is crushed by their absorption into a callous and ultimately demeaning system of social hierarchy)?

 

[pemerton]

There is a problem with engaging that question via play - if you are in a game in which alignment is a *power* (say, stock 3e) then there is no question. Forces of the Universe decide the question for you, and you can tell if they are lawful by casing, for example, Detect Law.

<snip>

When I use alignment for people, I take it to be a long-term average of behavior. Single, non-magical acts rarely cause major alignment shifts.

You can consider the alignment of a society or group to be a similar, aggregate or average measure. If most of the people are LG, the society as a whole is LG.

These are all examples of the sort of thing I'm trying to get away from in positing "narrativist" 9-point alignment.

Alignment as "forces of the universe" (eg 3E as you mention, and Planescape as well I think) make the set-up I'm envisaging impossible from the get-go. For instance, if both LG and CG are genuine "forces of the universe", then the metaphysical starting point for the game already tells us that, as far as achieving good is concerned, there is no clash between Law and Chaos: either can do the job. At most we have a type of aesthetic preference: dwarves like to achieve wellbeing living under law, and elves like to do it via self-realisation, but both are achieving wellbeing. Even if you ignore, or think you can resolve, the sorts of looming incoherences that [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] as pointing to upthread, plus others that I worry about (eg if demons really achieve a better life for themselves living in the Abyss rather than the Seven Heavens, then even the Abyss is contributing to wellbeing and hence is, to some extent, good), you have still drained away the moral conflict that I was trying to find within the traditional 9-point scheme.

Alignment as a descriptor (whether for persons or societies) creates the same problem. If both LG and CG people truly exist at the level of description - ie both sorts of people are genuine affirmers or creators of wellbeing, because both genuinely good - then where is the moral conflict between LG and CG? Again, this sort of starting point tells us that both law and chaos can contribute to wellbeing.

In the sort of set-up I was trying to outline in my OP, the LG and the CG person are both committed to wellbeing, but they have conflicting views about how social organisation and individualism are related to wellbeing, and the aim of play is to engage and perhaps resolve that conflict. So at the start of the game we have to have the campaign world in some sort of state which gives rise to the question, but doesn't answer it. In my two posts above, replying to AbdulAlhazred and [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], I've talked about three different (though perhaps overlapping) ways of doing that:

* Set up the campaign world so that social order (as expressed via urbanisation, and/or the king's paladins and knights) are absorbing, or encroaching on, the free peasants and woodmen (who express the ideal of individualism/self-realisation): in play, we would discover (via action resolution) whether order or freedom is more conducive to welfare;

* Set up the campaign world so that some unequivocally bad social state of affairs is in play (say, National Socialist goverment, or SHIELD's excesses in a MHRP: Civil War campaign), and via play we determine whether that bad state of affairs is an expression of law (and hence its existence vindicates CG) or an expression of individualism (and hence its existence vindicates LG);

* Mixing the first two approaches, a variant of the first in which we discover (via play) whether urbanisation is really a force for social order and regimentation, or rather for individual self-realisation: so law and chaos are conflicting over the true significance and consequences of urbanisation.​

The idea of "forces of the universe" has got no work to do here.

The issue in play might be approached more in terms of swaying public opinion. Sure, in SOME sense if alignment is not a 'power' and is just a description of your own moral and ethical reasoning in terms of some generalizations, then the question is 'moot' in some cosmologically significant sense perhaps.

<snip>

cosmological significance can be reinjected into this issue because the gods, even if they are just big powerful guys with their own personal morals that aren't powers, still have their own moral preferences, and by gosh if Atur, the lawful good god of kingship can't be convinced that your guy should be crowned, well HIS opinion has a LOT OF WEIGHT!

This is a bit like my example, replying to Manbearcat upthread, of getting Captain America to take your side.

More generally, in the "narrativist" 9-point alignment campaign cosmological significance is going to have to be established via play. If it were pre-given (presumably via GM-dictated backstory) then there would be no narrativism!

(In my OP I think I mentioned a campaign which you've probably seen me mention in other threads too, in which the players had their PCs side with an exiled god to oppose the dictates of Heaven because they had formed the view that the Heavens were sacrificing the immediate wellbeing of the mortal world to irrelevant concerns about ancient heavenly pacts. In this game, too, the cosmological significance of the PCs' choice was established through play: they learned that they'd made the right choice, and shown the gods to be on the wrong sides of the laws of karma, by "winning" the campaign - had it all gone wrong, or (more likely) been at best an equivocal win (and they only pulled out a complete win in the last session via a clever idea about how to use an artefact they'd borrowed from the exiled god), then the cosmological significance would have turned out a bit differently.)

 

[pemerton]

Lawfulness can definitely be used to maintain a strict and inhuman social order, and often is. Laws don't really care about morality or justice per se.

In the "narrativist 9-point alignment" campaign, this question has to be up for grabs. If we already know that social order is purely neutral as a means to wellbeing, then LG has already been proved wrong, and so the game can't get going.

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm not sure about (a).

A few posts up I talked about the possibility of a campaign where part of what is at stake is the proper interpretation of the National Socialist government of Germany (or some imagined variant - eg Civil War in MHRP). In that sort of game, law and chaos aren't unambiguous at the start. While there is a clear sense of their contrast at the abstract level (for the lawfuls, they contrast social rules and order with self-indulgence and disregard; for the chaotics, they contrast self-realisation with social domination and hierarchy), what counts as an instance of one or the other in the actual (imagined) world is still up for grabs. Ie everyone knows that the Nazis (or SHIELD in the Civil War variant) are wrong, but they disagree, and are fighting over, whether the wrongness is of the lawful or the chaotic variety.

Before I go into other thoughts, I want to make sure we're on the same page on this (not certain that we are). The lack of ambiguity I refer to is the kind one would expect to find in BW Beliefs, DW Alignment, MHRP Milestones, et al. Players shouldn't have any question, from a metagame perspective, what they are advocating for and what they are pushing play toward. Further, this transparent, unambiguous signalling (a) helps GMs properly navigate player intent during action declaration and (b) reward tokens/xp and, accordingly, (c) perpetuate story fallout in a coherent way once resolution of any given conflict has occurred.

The actual place in the world of these precepts (their veracity, their potency, their utility) is up for grabs as it would be the premise to be addressed/the point of play. If they were preemptively, unambiguously enshrined as cosmologically true, then players competitively advocating for their various positions would be utterly self-defeating and pointless (from a player perspective). We wouldn't get to find out what happens when Law and Chaos come into conflict! It has already happened and been settled for all time!

 

[pemerton]

The lack of ambiguity I refer to is the kind one would expect to find in BW Beliefs, DW Alignment, MHRP Milestones, et al. Players shouldn't have any question, from a metagame perspective, what they are advocating for and what they are pushing play toward.

<snip>

The actual place in the world of these precepts (their veracity, their potency, their utility) is up for grabs as it would be the premise to be addressed/the point of play.

I'm assuming that we know what each player (via his/her PC) is advocating for at the level of labels or basic principle: in general, the two sides are LG and CG.

The sort of ambiguity that I'm pointing to is what I would call interpretive ambiguity or, perhaps, instantiation ambiguity.

Is the big city - with its cars and roads and factories and seemingly automaton people starting and stopping at every traffic light; but also with its clubs and speak-easies and avant garde galleries and near-unlimited minor variations on feasible social roles - a place that exmplifies wellbeing via social order and hierarchy, or a place that exemplifies wellbeing via self-realisation? Or is it not a place of wellbeing at all, but a place that stifles wellbeing (and increasingly so as it absorbs the population of, and extends its geographic reach over, the rural hinterland)?

I think that could be something to be worked out via play; so, at the start of play, the big city would be a given, but its relationship to law and chaos would be up for grabs. In that sense, there would be ambiguity about whether the city is an instantiation of law or chaos, as well as ambiguity about whether it is a means to good or evil.