KM, another interesting reply. I'll try not to be too lengthy in my response.
Kamikaze Midget said:
The question isn't "Is what I'm doing evil," though. The question is "Am I evil?"
The alignment system is an agent of heroic adventure gameplay, so it wants people to choose sides in the cosmic war of ideas, and it tries to make sure those sides are clearly defined. But as a consequence of that, it allows for "evil heroes," and it allows for your goodness to be a cost of doing the right (or necessary) thing. Evil isn't any worse than Good, from a gameplay standpoint.
This is an interesting notion. It fits with my impression of Moorcockian Law and Chaos, but I've rarely seen it put forward in relation to Good and Evil.
Given that the PHB suggests that Evil is not a viable PC alignment (by implication, in the ch 6 alignment descriptions), do you think you're expounding orthodox D&D here, or an idealised version of D&D alignment?
For me, there is also the difficulty that I tend to find "Evil isn't worse than Good" self-contradictory - or at least highly problematic. But this in part purely terminological. I guess my feeling is that D&D simultaneously wants Evil to carry its ordinary language connotations, but also to bear a technical meaning in which it can be true that "Evil isn't worse than Good".
Because if the latter is really the case, then it doesn't follow that it's always right to oppose Evil - but this is a basic premise of most D&D play.
So again I want to know whether you think you're being orthodox here. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you.
Kamikaze Midget said:
With alignment, it should be fairly clear when an action is evil.
In my own experience this is notoriously vague - hence the alignment threads that proliferate. But I'll readily grant it to you for the sake of argument.
Kamikaze Midget said:
But it is far less clear when a given *character* shifts alignment. It is left up to the DM to determine, with the advice that alignment is a general description of the character, so it should be broadly applicable, and that exceptions are certainly allowed without an alignment shift. This is alignment's grey area, where the question is "How badly do I want to be Good?"
OK. But what is the reason for finding Good desirable, if "Evil is no worse than Good"? Is it just a matter of taste? But Paladins are not simply "morals snobs" - they're righteous! But this seems to entail that Evil is worse than Good - not just from Good's point of view, but absolutely.
Kamikaze Midget said:
A character who is able to choose the nature of what she's doing (Am I willing to do Evil to accomplish this?) has a direct and immediate clarity of action. Yes, I want to make this pact, no I do not want to make this pact. You know it's evil, but you also know the world rewards evil, too, and that by making this one choice, you won't be evil (though you are aware you may have started on a slippery slope and that the pact will come back to haunt you). It's just a little Evil. What's it going to hurt?
I get the impression here that the envisaged trade-off is between wealth (or prudence more generally) and morality.
Kamikaze Midget said:
This meshes better with a heroic game because the world is fairly black-and-white. The moral question should be between those options, rather than about what those options entail. Alignment allows the choice between those options to be a challenging one, because it doesn't penalize you for being anything. The shades of grey happen when characters debate about which one they should choose in a given situation.
<snip>
So, yes, Alignment does remove from the table the question of the nature of your action. But no, Alignment does not inhbit a moral grey area. It just shifts it into a heroic framework, rather than one resembling real-world questions of "What is Good?" This is entirely suitable to D&D, which is a heroic adventure game, after all.
<snip>
defining Evil and Good (and Law and Chaos) does not mean that the choice between them is at all clear. Toying with Evil for the purposes of Good is entirely acceptable, and your price is basically your Good alignment (which is a sort of "price of innoence;" you can never be pure, but you will make it so others can be).
I must admit I don't fully follow this. What is motivating the PC's moral choice? Presumably, the desire to be Good. But how can someone motivated by that desire ever do Evil? What is the cost of choosing Good actions? By definition, I would have thought it can't be an increase in Evil.
If your notion of doing Evil to achieve Good is to make sense, then we must have a deontological definition of Evil but a consequentialist definition of Good, mustn't we? - which I also find hard to make sense of.
If the PC is instead debating whether s/he should be Good or prudent (selfish), I don't see any shade of grey. Such a PC is already an amoralist, and so Evil by definition.
Of course, if it is not the PC who is debating, but the player - should I play an Evil character, or a Good-intentioned one who is weak of will and so succumbs to the lures of wealth - it's a different matter. To this extent alignment probably can fit with a type of narrativist play, but I don't know that D&D alignment gets played in that fashion very often. And what is really making that sort of play interesting is the players' notion of Goodness, not the game's (although, on the premise that the game has not collapsed, the ingame notion of Good presumably corresponds to the players' at least to a passable degree).
Kamikaze Midget said:
This is directly relevant to the gameplay, because it influences their immediate tactics. A character who questions the nature of what she's doing (Is this action Evil?) won't truly be affected outside of interesting character dialogue (doing evil is left a wide-open question).
True, but the player may well be affected, together with his or her fellow players. And this is what narrativist play aims at, isn't it?
Kamikaze Midget said:
Without alignment, D&D won't be as Heroic, which is great if all you want to do is kill goblins or if you have your own ideas about exploring the nature of heroism, but it sucks if you want to play D&D as D&D
<snip>
Because it's depiction of evil as self-destructive is something you feel should be left open for each DM?
But D&D has NEVER left that question open to DMs.
<snip>
D&D has chosen to be a heroic game where Good and Evil fight with each other. It's good that they're opening it up, but if D&D abandoned it all together, it would be going in quite a different direction than any edition has, more of a narrative toolkit and less of an 'implied setting.'
I agree that D&D has not left the question open in the past. (I'd add that I don't want it to be a matter for the GM, but for the playing group as a whole.) But 4e is going in a very different direction from past editions (except 3E, which I see in retrospect as a type of transitional state). And I guess I don't agree that heroic play depends upon metaphysical description within the gameworld. I think it depends much more upon the game actually evoking situations with resonate with the sense of heroism that the players of the game share.
Your ideas I've quoted above, about using alingment to frame a certain sort of PC choice, are interesting and suggestive, but as I've said I have trouble following all of them, and in any event I'm not sure they fit with typical D&D play.
Kamikaze Midget said:
And you'd think they'd be dedicated to that goal, and abandoning other things that tie you narratively to the rules (tieflings come from a lost empire! shaping a spell is taught by the Golden Wyverns!, etc.), not just alignment.
But a lot of those elements don't settle any thematic issue in advance. In fact (like the history of Glorantha in HeroQuest) they set up premises for play. So I see them as quite consistent with dedication to my goal. But in fact you're right, WoTC are not dedicated to my narrativist goal. They're dedicated to a gamist goal. But the way they're realising that goal is very consistent with the desiderata of my narrativist goal. (See Chris Sims' posts in the Healing thread, for example, and my own analysis of PoL in the "Metagame function of PoL thread".)
And now I get to expound my Unified Theory of 4e! In summary, every change from the previous editions (including making Demons and Devils more immediately recognisable to the players, and having that feed into the tactics the players need to use for their PCs to win) either:
*consolidates those aspects of 3E which empower the players over the GM (like character build and action resolution mechanics);
*further redistributes narrative control to the players, for example:
*the monster changes just described (because PCs can recognise the monster and take account of its known and distinctive tactics);
*rebalancing magic items and encounter build rules (to make players less vulnerable to accidentally unbalanced GMing);
*Second Wind and APs;
*per-encounter abilities (which mean that players are no longer hostage to the GM's decisions about the overall passage of time in the gameworld);
*the PoL assumption that PoLs are safehavens until the players choose to trigger adversity (see sidebar, p 20, W&M);
*transfers narrative control from the designers to the players and GM together (removal of mechanical metaphysics of alignment);
*undoes imbalances of narrative controls between players (PoL eliminates a lot of campaign backstory, putting different players on an even footing in that respect).
These changes all facilitate gamist play, by stopping the GM and the game designers getting in the way of the players' pursuit of system excellence. But they also facilitate narrativist play, by making adversity in the game, and its resolution, something much more shared between players and GM in a potentially co-operative fashion, than something almost entirely under the GM's control (as was the case in AD&D to a significant extent).
