"Naturalist" Alignment

[MoogleEmpMog]

St. Thomas Aquinas famously said (disclaimer: almost nobody knows or seriously reflects on this, it's NOT one of his famous ideas, and this isn't an exact quote) that if human nature were different, human morality would also be different. In the animal world, this certainly holds true: a wolf's nature, social order and, for lack of a better word, "ethics" are radically different from a sheep's, or an ant's.

Now, by popular request (disclaimer: one person asked to see it), an alternative to alignment for YOUR grim n' gritty fantasy or hard sci-fi campaign: naturalist alignment!

Interesting points all over, but this part struck me. Any chance I could get a look at this, either as another thread or email? I'm not happy with RAW alignment at all, but I would like something of a compass to work from; mostly for the aforementioned "face full of blasphemy".

fedaykin at kmfms dot com if email is better for you.

Essentially, the idea is that each creature has a particular nature that determines what is good (natural) or evil (unnatural) for it. These are actually quite primitive, but combine into complex forms due to their interaction.

Each also has a basic unit of society and social order. Wolves (and wolfmen!) have a pack. Humans are family-based and naturally feudal (so are orcs); dwarves place greater weight on the extended family than the nuclear, but are also naturally feudal. Giants are pair-bonders with a subrace-stratified caste system. Elves are unusual among intelligent races in that their basic societal unit is the individual, and they have no broad social order outside of opportunistic cooperation.

Some of the natural orders seem abhorrent to other races; elves loath dwarves' instinct to subsume individual goods to community goods, while dwarves think elves completely amoral and painfully lonely.

An elf who tries to live like a dwarf will inevitably become corrupt and degenerate; so too, a dwarf who tries to live like an elf. Thus lies the path of madness, the path of what each race calls evil. Even if it at first seems a road paved with good intentions...

Intelligent species like humans, elves and dwarves all have the opportunity to go against their natures by making (seemingly) rational choices. They may try to live like members of other races, or even to invent for themselves a whole new society... but they still walk the path to ruin, blasphemy and madness.

In D&D terms, this means that Good, Evil, Neutral, Lawful and Chaotic spells and abilities are replaced by Natural and Unnatural spells and abilities (Smite Unnature, for instance, will smite an egalatarian orc, a Cthulu-worshipping anything, or a feudal elf with equal efficacy, according to the base system) and spells and abilities with a racial qualifier (Smite Orc, Smite Elf, Smite Dwarf, etc.).

 

[alsih2o]

My only problem here is that while they cast spells as opposites (like the smite unnature listed above) they do not take effect from any already existing classes.

I mean, a paladin cannot "Detect Natural", or any of the other "X alignment" spells, effects, or powers. So they automatically fall out of the range of almost everyone.

If they could be better integrated, I would be all for it.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Note that I said "spells AND abilities." A paladin indeed "detects the unnatural," and his smite works against aberrations rather than outsiders.

A blackguard, by contrast, is a mortal warrior who has fully given himself over to the unnatural and rejects all vestiges of his racial path; in return, entropic powers have granted him the ability to "smite natural."

Natural:
1. Humanoids living in rough accordance with their racial morality and social order
2. Giants doing same
3. Monstrous Humanoids doing same
4. Animals
5. Some Vermin
6. Dragons
7. Some Magical Beasts

Unnatural
1. Aberrations
2. Undead
3. Evil Outsiders (if extant)
4. Some Magical Beasts
5. Some Vermin
6. MHs, Giants or Humanoids living against their natural order

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

The difficulties with this idea fall in the interactions between species with various "natures."

For instance, humans, orcs, and elves, can all interbreed and produce viable offspring. The argument then that they have an essentially different nature will run into some difficulties: what is the nature of a half-orc? Is a human with a little bit of orc blood (a quarter orc) different in nature than a normal human? How about a human with a little bit of elf blood (1/8 or 1/16 elf)?

Second, it provides difficulties WRT the interactions of various races. There is an intellectual difficulty of meaning similar to the difficulties posed to nominalist divine command theories of morality by the Euthyphro dilemma. One of those problems in common philosophy is this: if the only reason that actions are good is because God or the gods command them, then how can it be meaningful to say that God or the gods are good? If that means that God or the gods act in accordance with his/their commands for himself/themselves (as distinct from his/their commands to humans), doesn't it render the prase meaningless? There are answers to this argument that have been explored in the thousands of years that Plato wrote Euthyphro and the dilemma isn't a logical dilemma WRT other intelligent races (since their will does not define good for them), but it is still difficult to maintain a useful notion of good while, at the same time, saying that it is "good" (ie: in accordance with their nature) for orcs to rape, murder, betray, lie, steal, and pillage, for elves to be irresponsible, for dwarves to be responsible, and for humans to be--well, fill in the blank. (Though it should be pointed out that, in an essentialist scheme, there is no particular reason that nature should be the same for an entire species; many past philosophers and even a number of current ones have maintained that men and women have essentially different natures. I imagine this demonstrates that the difficulty in defining what is "natural" for a human is not any bit easier than the difficulty of defining an abstract, Kantian, Christian, or Stoic Good).

Furthermore, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that the natural and unnatural descriptors would be the relevant ones for defining opposition in a D&D world. A paladin that is even close to the one typically imagined--and indeed, any champion of humanity would want to smite the natural orcs rather than the unnatural ones. An orc that goes against its essential nature and acts according to what would be good for a human might be slain by a paladin or champion of humanity, but it's the orc who acts according to his nature and who rapes, and pillages who is the bigger threat. In order to get a convincing "who smites whom" list, I think you would need to base smiting on principles opposed by the nature of the smiter rather than the nature of the smitee. So a human paladin would smite those, whatever their race, who depart from the essential good of humanity rather than those who depart from their own essential goods.

On the whole, this idea strikes me, more as a way of explaining some of the alignment tendencies of different creatures--for instance, if orcs do have an essential nature that means that they are, in a sense, supposed to rape, murder, betray, and pillage, etc, it makes sense for them to be usually chaotic evil. (In fact, some of Frodo's statements in LotR (book, not movie) could be interpreted as indicating that this was the explanation for the evil of orcs in the books: they were created according to the nature of their creator and thus were, in a sense, naturally evil).

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Well, where crossbreeds are concerned, I would disallow them for a world that uses this system. Or, make them inherently tainted and unnatural; "good" half-elves would, in essence, be as unusual as "good" vampires in a normal campaign.

Paladins probably shouldn't be able to smite mortals at all. They're basically guardians of reality, rather like Eberron druids in that respect.

Orc nature IMC isn't Tolkienesque, anyway; orcs are almost pure carnivores and natural nomads, so they tend to fight settled races often, but they're not the race of psychos D&D often portrays them as, nor are they naturally inclined to cruelty. Their enmity with other races (especially dwarves) comes from resource clashes more than anything else.

As for the nature of, say, humans: male and female humans do have differing instincts, and that most definitely applies here. That's quite common in mammals, from small or simple to large or complex, and it carries over into people. The lioness and the lion, in obeying their natures, behave differently. The alpha male and alpha female in a wolf pack do not share the same duties. Male elephants have a different social structure from females. What I DON'T see any evidence of is wide variance in the instincts of one gender or the other, or in the natural societies humans form when left to their own devices.

Of course, the GM is free to apply any sort of nature he thinks is appropriate to his fantasy humans, or even to remove humans entirely.