D&D General So how about alignment, eh?

[Andvari]

What's this about evil nipple rings?

 

[Neonchameleon]

What's this about evil nipple rings?

I think it's a reference to the Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Pain, a magic item in the 3.0 Book of Vile Darkness

 

[Staffan]

Edit: When I am trying to create an oppressive society as a game setting, I always start with it being a culture of moral certainty. This is not me being clever or original, virtually all dystopian fiction begins with a similar premise (e.g. 1984, A Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, etc.).

And that's my point exactly. The people in charge of those societies, or at least running the day-to-day business, believe they are doing good. Under moral relativism, that means they are. And that's not something I can accept.

 

[MNblockhead]

that's not what's being asked for here though is it? i don't think i've seen anything encouraging alignment switching penalties, what is being presented is the minimum requirement of 'either play as the alignment your sheet claims you are or accept the alignment change'

Well, to be fair, I did discuss that my current campaign has a variety of repercussions for changing alignment. At the most mundane level, there are faction/reputation rules. Then you have devotion/concordance to give mechanical weight to devotion to a particular deity. Then there is alignment. Cosmological factions if you will.

But the repercussions mainly affect story and flavor. There is no wrecking the character. PCs may have to ally with a different guild, patron, order, etc. The cleric / paladin can switch devotion to another god. There are areas and enemy auras that can affect PCs of certain alignments, positively or negatively. But these a fairly balanced in my current campaign. The closest thing that I can think of that could be construed as "wrecking" a PC is that certain magic items may no longer be attuned to and so if a PC were attuned to magic item that requires a specific alignment or harms those of certain alignments, they may no longer be able to use a magic item they have.

But I have not had a single player complain about it. There has been discussion about how certain actions may be seen as against certain alignments, but there have been no arguments at the table about it, certainly none that go anywhere close to anyone being upset.

I am not the type of DM that imposes certain styles of play. It is not my way or the highway. Before we start a new campaign, I usually give several suggestions as to the kinds of campaigns I would be interested in running. When all of us come to a consensus, I'll distribute a campaign guide that states any variant or homebrew rules, which is followed by discussion and suggestions by the players. During the campaign we, after discussion, we have dropped certain rules or added others. Again after discussion and reaching consensus. I feel fortunate in that we've always been able to easily reach a consensus.

In my first two campaigns in 5e, starting soon after the PHB was released, so for most of my time playing 5e, alignment was basically ignored. My first campaign was more about navigating the politics of 8 eight kingdoms and that was just tracked by plot and NPC motivations. My second campaign was Curse of Strahd, and the focus was more on sanity. Keeping sane and escaping Barovia. In my current campaign, alignment is very important and has mechanical weight. And it is just as fun as the campaigns where alignment was mostly, if not entirely, ignored.

I guess that is why I take a bit of offense when my use of alignment is characterized and my wanting to impose something on my poor players. We all agreed to this and we are enjoying it. If we stop enjoying it, we would discuss and change it.

 

[Scribe]

Edit: When I am trying to create an oppressive society as a game setting, I always start with it being a culture of moral certainty.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I never personally had any problem understanding how I as a player should handle my character's alignment, nor how as a DM I should use it to keep PC's on the up-and-up and guide the behavior and choices of monsters. What I had a problem with were EVERYONE ELSE'S whacked idea about what it all meant and how to use it to suck the fun out of the game for the players and use it as a means to DICTATE to them how to play their PC's.

I spent a lot of years reading pointless, endless debates on it. I actually READ what the books had to say from one edition to the next (which few actually do - and IF they do, they aren't often HELPED by doing so as alignment as presented by the rules has always been absolute crap, from OD&D onwards). I then wrote out MY views; MY conclusions on what alignment WAS FOR and how to use it. That helped to be able to find phrasing to explain my views to others (if they foolishly actually ask me to, "explain how YOU handle it.") However, there are just too many unshakably held opinions on alignment; some good, but more bad than good. Most are IRRELEVANT because the only opinion that actually matters is that of the DM you're gaming under. Anyone can crow theory from the mountaintops all they like, but the rubber hits the road where players actually have to run characters through a given DM's game.

Here's the fun test. Ask 100 people to define what alignment is FOR in the game. You'll be lucky to get 25 answers to substantively agree. Without near universal agreement and understanding on that simple question (What's alignment in the game FOR?) you're not going to get agreement on HOW it should do anything, much less WHY anyone thinks it should do something in any particular way. Even when there IS agreement, the majority of opinions on functionality still aren't going to match.

 

[Staffan]

Whereas I would probably call them CN. Yes, they break rules, but he also showed compassion at least on occasion. He was self-centered but not cruel or sadistic, he didn't go out of his way to harm others that we saw. Or at least that's what I'd make their alignment if I had a character that acted like them.

"You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with until you realize who's in ruttin' command!"

Or this:

Chaotic Evil doesn't necessarily mean you're a monster like the Joker. You might still have friends even, and you probably even help them out, but that's more because you like how being with those friends makes you feel, not because of any particular loyalty. If something else would make you feel better, you'll sell them out in a heartbeat.

 

[Neonchameleon]

And that's my point exactly. The people in charge of those societies, or at least running the day-to-day business, believe they are doing good. Under moral relativism, that means they are. And that's not something I can accept.

This is a strawman and I'm going to avoid politics so far as I can. But it's a complete misunderstanding of moral relativism as used by most people who think that moral relativism is a good thing. The point of moral relativism isn't that "everything you think is good is good", it's that "doing better is an act of good".

To use an example that is more relevant to D&D than it is to the real world politics I think that we can agree that slavery is bad and genocide is worse. Now imagine a raiding band of gnolls that are in the habit of raiding villages, eating some of the people they kill and slaughtering the ones they don't eat. Pretty clearly evil, right?

Now imagine there's a really smart gnoll who gets the idea "if we stop killing them all and instead just kidnap and enslave the ones we don't eat we can get them to dig our latrines and build our houses for us and we can also use them as a snack when we don't want to go raiding" then that gnoll is an advocate for slavery. Pretty clearly the gnoll is a bad guy by our standards both because they eat people and because they advocate for slavery.

The disagreement between moral relativism and moral absolutism is is that gnoll doing good by advocating for slavery? The moral relativist would say "Yes, they are actively trying to improve gnoll society by making it less genocidal and this is going to have a positive impact on the people not slaughtered and the people not eaten." They are doing better than the exceptionally low baseline that gnolls start at and to a moral relativist this is a good thing.

 

[Staffan]

The disagreement between moral relativism and moral absolutism is is that gnoll doing good by advocating for slavery? The moral relativist would say "Yes, they are actively trying to improve gnoll society by making it less genocidal and this is going to have a positive impact on the people not slaughtered and the people not eaten." They are doing better than the exceptionally low baseline that gnolls start at and to a moral relativist this is a good thing.

They might be doing better but they're still being evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

That said, you still have a point about the nomenclature. What would you suggest for the position that "characters have the alignment they believe they do", as opposed to "characters have the alignment determined by the sum of their actions"?

 

[Clint_L]

And that's my point exactly. The people in charge of those societies, or at least running the day-to-day business, believe they are doing good. Under moral relativism, that means they are. And that's not something I can accept.

But since you claim that good and evil are objective facts, doesn't that imply that they have simply picked the wrong virtues to call "good"?

After all, if good and evil are objective facts, we should be able to build a perfect society by only permitting good.