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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6634148" data-attributes="member: 42582">Can I tackle this in two stages?In the context of the OP, I was assuming that the main descriptors are LG and CG.For the reasons I gave in the OP, I think TN works better for NPCs than PCs in the set-up I sketched. A player who wants to play a PC who is LN, CN or some sort of evil is in a different situation. I've just posted a reply to you flagging this as a likely derail. But a bit more thought suggests perhaps it needn't be, if the player is happy for his/her PC to be a type of thematic foil for the main action. Relating this back to what we were discussing upthread, if I play a LE PC then I might be setting myself up to be a thematic foil for the player of the CG elf or ranger, who can point to me as a sign of the error the LGs are making.(Some way upthread - post 23 - I talked about playing non-good PCs in this set up. On reflection I'm not sure it was all coherent, but I think the idea that a player might see his/her PC shifting from (say) LG to LN or even LE could be interesting - and in line with or elf/arch-devil discussion, the moment of redemption for that LE PC would be when s/he realised the truth of CG. Which I now realise is another departure from some aspects of trad alignment, which would see the move from LE to LG as easier than from LE to CG - whereas in my set-up once you've become LE you've completely discredited LG, along the lines we discussed above.)Law and chaos are themselves rather ambiguous, both in general and in the D&D context, so when they are used as descriptors there is still a fair degree of flexibility (eg will the player of the LG PC emphasise social hierarchy, or rigid norms?). That's the sort of thing that I would hope could be worked out in play.Now the second stage - what are quality descriptors in general? I'm not sure I have a very good answer. I can say generic stuff, like they should give the PC, and hence the player, a definite orientation in relation to the fiction, but that's not very helpful!Perhaps because my approach to play is really pretty mainstream (compared to, say, The Forge - I think the fact that ENworld sometimes makes me look radical says as much about ENworld as about me!), for me actual play has always been more important than descriptors.In my current 4e game, to get things started I gave every player four instructions for PC building:(1) Everything in the books is legal; (2) We're following the core cosmology and mythic history; (3) Your PC needs to have at least one loyalty specified; (4) Your PC needs a reason to be ready to fight goblins.The rationale for (4) was that I wanted to use the module Night's Dark Terror, which has a goblin assault on a homestead as its near-to-opening set-piece. Between this and (4), my hope was that I would get enough to give me hooks for developing the campaign.What I got were responses that, in various ways, mixed (2), (3) and (4). So, for instance, I got a paladin of the Raven Queen (loyalty) who was ready to fight goblins simply because his mistress had teleported him from his home town to the place where the other PCs were gathered, and so she must have sent him there for a reason. I got an elven ranger who was also a Raven Queen cultist (loyalty) and whose hatred of goblins was the result of conflict between elves and goblins. I got a half-elven feypact warlock whose loyalty was to Corellon (his patron) and who was ready to fight goblins because they had raided the elven village where his mother lived. I got a human mage who was a former devotee of the Raven Queen and was a refugee from a town that had been sacked by humanoids - these were his loyalties, and also gave him a reason to be ready to fight goblins. And I got a dwarf fighter whose loyalty was to his dwarfhold, which he had nevertheless fled from for reasons that made him ready to fight goblins. According to the customs of the hold (as written by the player as part of his PC backstory), a dwarf could not graduate to adulthood until s/he killed a goblin in battle; but despite many years of military service this particular dwarf had never confronted a goblin in battle (always doing kitchen duty, or carrying a message, or otherwise finding himself not on the front lines). Hence all his age-mates had long graduated to adulthood while he was stuck, and increasingly a laughing stock. Hence he had left the hold to go and find a goblin to kill on his own!These descriptors vary in their detail, and are mostly more about backstory than directly about value commitments. But they did give me enough hooks to hang interesting conflicts on, and the responses to these from the player in the actual course of play gave further directions to keep the game going (eg Orcus and Vecna cultists; refugees from goblin attacks; NPCs (dwarven and non-dwarven) teasing the dwarf PC over various aspects of his personal history and dwarven history more generally; etc).That's a bit rambling, and I'm not sure it really answers your question, but I'll stop at this point!</blockquote>

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