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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6622823" data-attributes="member: 4937">I would suggest that this preference for having complete agency is an example of cultural values so deeply embedded that they aren't even normally questioned.  Of course having more agency is better, right?  I'm curious to see how differently an RPG might play, particularly in terms of the philosophical themes that the players wanted to embody or explore, if it was a group of say pious Mormons, Swiss nationalists, or Korean conservatives.  For example, I remember the culture shock of talking with one of the employees I was supervising - a Master's Student working as a research assistant in a biology lab - who told me how she wanted to go back to Korea so that her parents could pick her out a boy to marry and discussing hers reasons.  This is the sort of perspective on 'agency' that I think is very alien to the average American player.  For me, the difficulty would be consistently finding the sort of player who could take the alignment statement "Uphold the letter of the law over the spirit" seriously.   And the second question for me would be, "Is upholding the letter of the law over the spirit, really and truly an aspect of lawfulness or its mindset or it is just a stereotype applied unfairly to lawfulness by someone who isn't very sympathetic to it?"But I generally agree that to play a morally aligned character seriously, you have spend some thought thinking about what being that alignment means in concrete ways and not merely slap a label on the character.  Anything that the system or the GM can do to encourage that is probably a good thing.I don't however think you have to divorce alignment out of the system to get those thought provoking results.  The only real advantage of divorcing alignment out of the system is if the alignment of the players is so heavily Gamist Pragmatists that all their RP decisions regarding alignment are made based solely based on the mechanical advantage they perceive resulting from that, which I do admit a bad implementation of the system could help enforce (1 AD&D with it's 'loose a level if you stray', or Mass Effect with its 'only receive a mechanical benefit if you are completely 100% consistent with the game maker's perceptions/biases in your choices'). And, to be frank, I'm not really surprised by that.  I would be surprised if the player of the Elf moved his alignment toward the statement, "Uphold the letter of the law over the spirit", having learned the wisdom of that statement in play.  I'd be in fact surprised if anyone even seriously considered why upholding the letter of the law over the spirit was a good idea.</blockquote>

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