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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8760644" data-attributes="member: 18">I think this is a fundamentally bad and unfun idea solely because of the last sentence.The idea of say, keeping alignments secret and then having other players vote on what they THINK the PC's alignment is is absolutely solid and could be a whole lot of fun, especially if the vote was at the end of a campaign as [USER=49875]@Gimby[/USER]'s example shows.But where you go wrong is to do the vote pretty early (3-5 sessions? That's could be as little as like 6-10 hours, and in a party with like 4-5 party members, some PCs are barely even going to have had a chance to shine, let alone lay out their morals - especially if the campaign has been really adventure-centric or dungeon-centric, rather than featuring heavy RP), and so then want to try and force the player to stick to an alignment. You don't explain why that would ever be a legitimate goal, rather than alignment being informed by RP.Indeed you say "adjust their roleplaying to better fit their original choice". Whilst that may be occasionally true, that's a fundamentally flawed assumption of a fairly serious kind on your part. You're assuming that because other people interpreted their alignment to be something it wasn't, their RP was bad. That's obviously not necessarily true, and my feeling is it's outright less likely to be true than other factors. Other, frankly more likely reasons for the mismatch could be:1) The players voting either don't have a good grasp on the specific alignment being played (common with anything but NG and LN, in my experience, those seem to be the only two alignments almost everyone gets).2) The player has an interesting "take" on their alignment, which may be completely reasonable.3) The PC is de facto hiding their alignment in some way (as with the NE example from [USER=49875]@Gimby[/USER]).4) The PC simply hasn't been presented with choices that allow them to highlight their alignment. This is extremely likely after 3-5 sessions. And this is on the DM, nine times in ten. If you just keep presenting the party with situations where to be Evil would be stupid or suicidal (as many DMs do), then the guy playing LE is going to look like someone playing LN or even LG very easily.The alternate idea also seems flawed to me, because it put the cart ahead of the horse. You may start a campaign as a "Loyal Peacemaker", but will you finish the campaign that way? In my experience a lot of PCs undergo a fair amount of change and that can be vastly more compelling than "I decided on an archetype before the game started and then stuck with it ruthlessly!".</blockquote>

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