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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6633604" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.)</blockquote>

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