Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6126105" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thank you.Out of curiosity, then, what is the point of alignment in this system?I think I'm generally more optimistic about new players and new groups being able to work out what they want to do with the game, without needing GM force to get them there.An interesting approach which I think has some merit is the Burning Wheel "trait vote" approach - at the end of X sessions (where X has been agreed in advance based on an overall sense of campaign pacing), the whole table votes to add traits to or remove traits from each PC. Any player can lobby in respect of his/her PC, or another's PC. This way a PC can gain or lose the Faithful trait, gain or lose the Evil or Generous or Hopelessly Confused trait, etc, but not unilaterally. Interpretation of PC personalities and morality is given to the custody of the group as a whole.That's an interesting analysis. It has something like the same structure I suggested above for a paladin confronted with a greater good that requires violating the Code (which, as I said, is different from a geas).Suppose that the "greater good" in question is justice. So then the paladin has to choose between honour/truthfulness (by adhering to the code) or justice (by breaking the code in pursuit of that "greater good").On your Anscombite reading of Satan, the choice is between doing good (by complying with God's plan for all things), or the "greater good" of free agency (by defying God and pursuing evil).If that came up in an RPG situation - say, the player realises that all his/her PC's "choices" are really moves in a fore-ordained plan, and in pursuit of genuine agency the player decides to turn against that plan, whatever the cost - how should it be handled? I'm not sure that a paladin can make that choice and remain a paladin - because "free agency" is not one of the virtues of paladinhood, and so within the strictures of paladinhood that PC made an impermissible choice - but I don't think a big GM stick would be helpful either. (Whereas I have played under GMs who take the view that once a PC drifts into territory that the GM labels as evil, that PC must be abandoned to become an NPC.)</blockquote>

Verification