The Final Preview - Alignment (Is this really the first thread?)

[Blackeagle]

1. Strict alignment--everyone has an alignment. Preferred for beginning groups learning the game.

Given all the trouble with definitions, and some players substituting alignment for personality, I would never advise beginning players to use a strict alignment system.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Cascadian - that's one hell of a first post, and I agree completely

 

[Tony Vargas]

While it's obvious that 4e Good = AD&D Chaotic Good, and 4e Evil = LE, I'll still miss the Moorcockian Law/Chaos axis.

 

[Andor]

Ultimately, the important thing is removing all of the actual rules related to it, since it means people can write down "autobot", "sith" or "anarcho-capitalist" as their alignment, and as either GM or fellow player, I don't have to care.

That would be the d20 Modern allegiance system. Which was vastly more elegant and useful than this kludge. It's just a shame that the designers of 4e couldn't use it due to copyright issues. ... Wait, what?

 

[Veon Brighteyes]

BUT there's a big difference between a the ideals of a revolutionary and those of a philanthropist. Compare Che Guaevara and Norman Borlag. There's also a big difference between Neutral and Unaligned. Unaligned people just don't care, Neutrality takes work and commitment. Besides, a big part of the fluff for Mordenkainen was that he seeks a karmic balance between the four polarities, making him Unaligned seems like a big kick in the face to his character. The same goes for Druids who seek to balance themselves with the force of nature. The same also goes for LN - you can't really call Judge Dredd 'unaligned'.

WHOA! Stop the car right there! I've been a lurker for some time, but seeing this going unanswered made it almost a duty to post.

Yes, there is a BIG difference between a bloodthirsty terrorist and a philantropist. For God sakes, have you ever researched the life of "El Cancho" (the Pig, posthumously known as "Che" Guevara) beyond advertising and T-shirts? This man has laid waste to everywhere he has been and commited inumerous atrocities in Congo and Bolivia (including torture, cold blooded murder of his own followers and genocides), and people just worship him thanks to the mistification done with his name. He never defended freedom, he fought in favour of dictatorships and tyrannies. I as a latin american feel very disapointed at this horrible man being one of the most known icons of our people.

Anyways, I didn't mean to get political, but I felt it was necessary. As for the alignment, do you see how it's complicated? Would you consider Milton Friedman chaotic or lawful? He was a libertarian... but he also believed in the importance of strong institutions. Now, using historical examples, were the american revolutionaries lawful or chaotic? You could argue that they were chaotic for their love for freedom. But they also created an structured society with a constitution and laws to which all would abide. Almost all revolutionaries don't fight AGAINST order, they fight to create a NEW order, and that has been the rule throughout human history.

And that's why the chaotic - lawful axis has always been very confusing, people hardly ever agree on what is chaotic and lawful, and out of misleading simplification they tend to see lawful as "law abiding", when it actually is belief in structure, order and organization. Chaotic, on the other hand, is individualist, impulsive and more akin to change, but not disorganized or lunatic.

But, let me ask you, is there really big of a difference between chaotic neutral and simply neutral as there is between neutral good and neutral? And chaotic good and neutral good have always been much more alike than neutral good and lawful good.

 

[pemerton]

For me, alignment is mostly a descriptor and I've always minimized the mechanical effects of alignment. Fourth edition makes the mechanical effects smaller than ever before, if not non-existent. That's good. But for a system that's mostly a stereotypical shorthand for describing the ethics of each character, it is no better and arguably worse because it's less specific.

Alignment in 4e is not a descriptor of a character's personal morality or ethics. It records a character's relationship to certain moral and religious conflicts that are central to the play of the game.

I really don't like the entire "choosing teams" language being used throughout the excerpt. It seems like one of the worst kinds of analogies to use for something that is pretty much a descriptor for a character's innate personality more than anything else.

But in 4e alignment is not a descriptor for a character's innate personality. You might disagree with that implementation of alignment, but given that implementation, the team-choosing language is quite apt.

Ah, the great philosophical argument. When faced with a choice, is the decision not to choose a choice?

In other words, is choosing to be unaligned the same as not choosing an alignment?

The player chooses that his or her PC will be unaligned. The player has made a metagame choice. The PC has made no choice. The PC may never have been confronted by a choice (eg no cleric, angel or demon ever made an alignment proposition to the PC).

There's also a big difference between Neutral and Unaligned. Unaligned people just don't care, Neutrality takes work and commitment. Besides, a big part of the fluff for Mordenkainen was that he seeks a karmic balance between the four polarities, making him Unaligned seems like a big kick in the face to his character.

"Unaligned" incorporates Mordenkainen-style neutrality, and indeed the extract says that this is the typical view of unaligned gods.

If we take as a premise the 4e notion that there are only 4 teams - G, LG, E and CE - then it is a pretty basic deduction to work out that someone who is not a member of any team is unaligned, regardless of whether that status reflects indifference, or committed neutrality.

the old alignment system gave DnD a philosophical depth that every other game lacked.

My own view is that it demonstrated numerous philosophical confusions, including (but not limited to) confusions between descriptive and normative concepts.

I disagree. RuneQuest is far superior in terms of giving PCs cultural belief systems. The only rpg I've read that had some genuine philosophical ideas (in the academic sense) is Mage. Planescape is a joke, taking purely theoretical positions, such as solipsism and laughably thinking they could be used as a system for living.

I don't know Mage but otherwise QFT. Planescape Factions, in particular, have not really impressed me in my reading of them.

 

[Mercule]

"Chaotic" does not mean "free".
"Lawful" does not mean "despotic".

Agreed -- by the dictionary or real world. 4e has a couple of significant things working against it, though.

1) Momentum. Law and Chaos have been opposites in D&D for longer than Good and Evil have. They can try to change the meanings, but it is only slightly more likely to work than if they started using the word "elf" for what has always been gnomes -- short, woodsy fey with a knack for magic.

2) Pattern recognition. Humans have a tendency to see patterns. Pushed too far, this is the "needless symmetry" that chaffed 4e designers. Regardless, it's very real. We have five alignments, one is "other", two are textbook opposites, and two are phrases that include the names of the opposites and an uncommon adjective that appears to modify those opposites. What are the odds that the human brain is going to track them as special cases and opposites?

The names, alone, that WotC chose to employ for CE and LG are just plain dumb. In all honesty, I have a hard time believing that you could get five people in a room brainstorming this and no one red flagged it as a problem.

The definitions from the PHB don't actually improve anything, either.

Good is "freedom and kindness" while LG is "civilization and order". So, "freedom and kindness" are a baseline "good" and valuing "civilization and order" is a special case? Does that mean that Good is more good than LG? The opposite? Separate but equal? That last one seems to be the case and is an issue because it begs the question, "If both are equally 'good', why does one warrant a modifier and the other doesn't?" When the "non-standard", orderly good includes a preference for working within the system for a positive change, about the only thing that's left for unmodified good is open rebellion and revolt.

I can get the differences between Evil and CE. One still wants to live here when they get done remodeling and the other wants to bulldoze the whole thing. I can even get behind having only one term include the adjective. It's the whole good end of the scale that hurts my head.

 

[Hussar]

The problem that I had with the old Lawful and Chaotic descriptors is that you can apply them to the same action. A CE demon can be scheming, capable of in depth planning. So, if that's CE, then what is LE? Oh, wait, LE is scheming and capable of in depth planning. Or, put it another way. The only reason devils obey those above them is because those above them are stronger. They don't obey out of any loyalty to the system itself. How is that lawful? Isn't that definitively Chaotic?

So, if there's no functional difference between the two, then one should go away.

The difference between LG and Good is fairly easy to see really. LG societies would be closer to say, feudal societies where you have lots of rules that allow the society to function. Good societies would be tribal societies, where you can advance through your own personal skills. Meritocracy societies would not be particularly LG, since it's personal ability that is important, not social standing.

Note, in the above example, I'm talking about a benevolent society. Reverse it though and you get Evil and CE societies. Evil societies would generally follow the rules, not out of fear of direct punishment necessarily, but out of inertia and a recognition that anarchy serves no one. CE societies would be ruled by the strongest and only extend as far as the strongest could control.

 

[TwinBahamut]

But in 4e alignment is not a descriptor for a character's innate personality. You might disagree with that implementation of alignment, but given that implementation, the team-choosing language is quite apt.

I think that is an odd thing to say. Of course the 4E alignment is a descriptor for innate personality. At the very least, it is a huge move in the direction away from the old 3E alignments which were something akin to "teams", and a movement toward it being "personality".

You say that 4E alignment is not based on personality, but everything about it other than the "team" analogy is pretty much just that: a set of five personalities. Alignment has always been a rough descriptor that tries to summarize how a character behaves and what they think. The old system was too flawed because it tried too much to equate "a description of a character" with "great cosmological forces". Because it gets rid of the symmetry, the 4E system mostly gets rid of the "great cosmological forces" angle, and thus it becomes a more accurate description of personality.

Regardless, if you don't interpret alignment as some personality attribute innate to characters, then I don't see how it is relevant at all. Unless a "good" character is actually a good person, then you might as well declare their alignment as "self-proclaimed good", and the whole thing is meaningless.

Lastly, anyone who thinks "alignment=personality" just needs to read some OOTS, and compare Roy, Durkon, Miko, and Hinjo. All lawful good. All very different people.

This was posted a while back, but I may as well respond to it now.

Honestly, the OOTS depictions of "alignment" are a joke. They are more symptomatic of the flaws of the old 3E approach and the limitations of the "team, not personality" approach than anything else. Miko is not a lawful good character, she is a deliberate depiction of a lawful good character played wrong, so that lawful good is nothing more than excuse to commit atrocities.

Besides, your argument seems to be based on the idea that I am claiming alignment is a complete description of personality. Since that is not true at all, that argument is invalid. If you want, just add different words like "kind" or "aggressive" on top of the moral personality descriptors, and you can describe different types of lawful good easily. If you feel like making a system out of it, there are always the old personality "humours" based on the four classical elements... Then we can have Melancholic Lawful-Good Dwarven Clerics, Choleric Lawful-Good Human Fighters, and Sanguine Good Human Bards.

 

[SDOgre]

Let me just say...

Finally. I feel like I can finally exhale and embrace the alignment system.

Someone at wizard's looked up the definition of good and evil.

Why do I feel vindicated? Ahhhh.