Subjective alignment

[Doug McCrae]

An idea I had for alignment, I haven't worked it out in any detail.

A minority of the inhabitants of the game universe believe in the concept of alignment. A player character that does so would have their alignment noted on their character sheet. This alignment is subjective in the sense that it exists only in their own mind, and as a societal belief. There's no cosmic tally of good, evil, lawful or chaotic acts. Magic exists which can read surface thoughts and even memories and such magic could feasibly reveal the character's opinion of their own alignment.

Most aligned characters will probably be lawful good, and will be likely to stay that way no matter what actions they undertake, as sentient beings tend to regard their own actions in a positive light, no matter how they are perceived by others.

I'm not sure what the result of know alignment cast by an aligned character on a non-aligned character would be. It might be null. Alternatively, it could give a result in accordance with the cultural beliefs and prejudices of the caster. Orcs might be always chaotic evil, for example.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think your best answer for "know alignment" would be to tell the caster the target's alignment based on the caster's perception of alignment.

But really I think this is going to A: needlessly complicate everything and B: lead to arguments.

 

[Celebrim]

In this case, why even track alignment? What would it actually mean? What purpose would it have? Is alignment only to mean 'self-esteem'? Those with high self-esteem think of themselves as 'good' and those with low as 'evil? Won't this mean that alignment will exhibit Dunning-Krugar effects where the arrogant will believe themselves Good (believing themselves better than the average), while the humble will believe themselves Evil (having fallen short of their own high standards)? You'll end up with a system where those who are worst are ranked best, and those who are best are ranked worst. People with low wisdom will tend to believe in their own perfection, while those with high wisdom will self-reflectively note all their shortcomings and limitations.

Worse, the whole system would seem to become recursive, and fall down the rabbit hole. Do people know this is true of alignment? If you know your alignment is subjective, would you think that alignment is something you meaningfully have? If you don't think alignment is something you meaningfully have, wouldn't you tend - even if you think positively of your own actions - that they are neutral/unaligned, since alignment lacks in reality? But if you do think that alignment has meaning, wouldn't at least you know whether or not you took your cue as to what alignment meant from something outside yourself ("Law") or from your own judgment ("Chaos")? Wouldn't you at least know whether you conformed to societal consensus as to what was right or wrong, or whether you rejected that? And if you did, wouldn't alignment tend to cease to be subjective?

If you truly know that alignment has no meaning, could you really justify whether anything was right or wrong? Or if you do believe that there is right or wrong, why would you rely on alignment to know anything. knowing as you did that it had no relation to right and wrong. And what would you say that this right and wrong would be?

So if I understand you correctly, Know Alignment is now judging whether or not someone agrees with your own views? Yet you seem to waver on that and suggest that, no, on the other hand, perhaps Know Alignment only confirms your own biases - meaning it is a divination spell that leaves you with less information than you started out with.

 

[Aenghus]

I think your idea removes almost everything that's practical about the D&D alignment system, making it even more useless than many people say it is already.

I don't think alignment is useless, but making it useful requires some arbitrary objectivity, which is close to the opposite of your approach. My own campaign uses alignment, but as DM I judge it in a dictatorial way, as I want a black and white world with clear good and evil, where barring obfuscation the good are identifiably good and the evil are clearly evil , want to narrow those classified as neutral to much less than 90% of everyone and don't really care about the Law and Chaos axis much, and fully admit to my players that it's going to be simplistic and lack the nuance and complexity of real world people.

Some of the practical uses of alignment include team jerseys - alignments providing clear allies, neutrals and enemies, simplistic roleplaying pointers, potential advance warning of alignment clash within a party and the sort of plots hooks the majority of the party are likely to find compelling.

One of the things I find interesting about D&D worlds using alignment systems is that one interpretation is that individuals can be rewarded for holding to a particular alignment, but agents of that alignment, by relevant gods, or by the direct or indirect action of the alignment force itself made manifest in the gameworld.

 

[Antaus]

To be honest I really don't rule bash players about alignment when I GM. Personally I see it as more of a character action guideline. I will still follow game mechanics if an evil character casts CoP Good or something like that. However in terms of actual role play I might suggest an alignment shift if the player is not living up to the alignment they chose. However I also take situation and circumstance into account for RPing. Being NE or LG doesn't mean a person 'can't' act outside their alignment, they just need a good reason to do so.

Also about hard and fast alignments it depends on the version being played, because 3E does say that good and evil very much exist and are fairly well laid out in how they work. But again I mostly use that for game mechanics, and as a guideline for role play.

 

[Blue]

Princeton University's SGU gaming club has been running a convention (and camapigns) for 41 years using their own (evolving) rules. Even when they moved to being based off the d20 OGL, their Detect Evil spells were by religious beliefs instead of "absolute" good and evil. So the god of justice would detect oathbreakers and unrepentant criminals while the goddess of nature would detect entirely differently. Doing something like that might be useful for you. At that point, items and spells that only work for/against specific alignments would instead only work for those furthering or against the tenants of the religion.

Of course, that's assuming religion as the arbiter of morality, which you may not want in your game.

I had a character I played from 1st to epic level cleric in the Forgotten Realms (back is AD&D 2nd) that was convinced that while he espoused the tenants of his religion, the fact hat every god's detect evil/good and know alignment spells all returned the same answer that there was a greater morality. He had attributed it to AO, the unknowable "over-god" in the FR universe, but part of that was that as a cleric he was used to framing the returns from divine spellcasting into the context of the gods, not postulating that it might be an absolute morality not coming from a deity.