Celebrim
Legend
Forked from: What Alignment is Rorschach?
The various writers in D&D have done I think a pretty poor job of explaining what alignment is for. The best they done is what you've hit upon here, that it divides the world into 'teams' or 'sides'. It certainly can serve that purpose, and human history is filled with conflict and war, whose basis at the bottom whatever the justification was little more than just 'they live on the other side of the hill/forest/river'.
To me, fantasy is interesting because it is usually at some level about some difficult or moral or ethical issue which we try to deal with by representing 'good' and 'evil' in more concrete ways. All this arguing we do in alignment threads about what 'evil' means and what 'good' means, is to me very much part of the point of playing fantasy as opposed to sci-fi, horror, westerns, spec-ops, spy vs. spy, or whatever. The game is to me at some level, a narrative about good and evil. The more interesting the questions and answers are, the more compelling the game. We start out with "We are from the good tribe, and we are going to go to the evil tribe and kill them and take their stuff. What's the best way of going about that?" Eventually, hopefully we move on to some other interesting questions like maybe, "Are we really the good tribe? What makes us different than the bad guys? If we are the good guys, should we go kill things and take their stuff? And if we should, should we at least feel a little bit guilty about it, or would that be silly?"
Alignment serves several purposes. First, it is a really big huge flamboyent honking reminder that this is a fantasy game and interesting questions about good and evil ought to be coming up. Every starting player has to make choices about the ethical framework that they are going to play in. "Should I be a good guy, or maybe it would be more fun to play a bad guy this time?" "Should I play a character who lives for himself, or should I play a character defines himself by his service to some higher authority?" "When faced with ethical delimmas, what decision making process am I going to use to decide how to resolve them? Specifically, am I going to imagine how someone else might think in this situation, or am I going to 'be' the character and make those decisions in proxy?" And so forth. Choosing an alignment, however perfunctory the decision ('I always play neutral good'), starts the character in a process of seeing the game as being about this ethical conflict - good vs. evil, law vs. chaos, light vs. dark, life vs. death. It certainly doesn't gaurantee that the questions will be interesting or even much addressed at all, but its a start and thereafter a nagging reminder.
Even when we have alignment arguments like, 'What alignment is Rorschach', what it really demonstrates is not Rorschach's alignment, but the presence of alignment predisposes D&D players to looking at stories in terms of their ethical framework. Insufficient ethical framework, perhaps deficient ethical framework, to be sure, but even so perhaps a good deal more thoughtfully than most people would if no classification was there at all.
Afterall, with no classification system, almost everyone tends to go, 'Me = good', 'People not like me = bad' and leave it at that. See the aforementioned human history for examples.
Another thing that alignment does is give a little flag to help remind the player to maintain at least the pretence of pretending to be somebody who is real, who has independent motivations, who has feelings, and who might not always do what the player feels from his god-like perspective on the scene what is objectively 'in his best interests' at the moment. In other words, it helps to remind players to treat their characters as 'real people' and not as merely playing peices who serve the purpose of helping the player 'win'. This is probably a bias on my part based on the subset of players I've met, but those that didn't like alignment, however interesting and intellectual their reasons for not liking it, at the table they almost always played chaotic greedy characters who tried to morph from being 'the good guys' when rewards and favors where to be had, to being ruthless SOB's with no complusion against torture, murdering innocents, treachery, and anything else if it meant 'winning'.
See for example the narrative in KotDT, where the alignment issues of the characters tend to take a back seat to the personality disfunctions of the players.
Which brings me to question that prompted the fork, what is the relationship of personality to alignment.
For me, in most cases, the answer is 'very little'. Personality for me is 'who you are', and to a very large extent (though not to a complete extent) is in an adult unchangable. Through some combination of nuture and nature, by the time you get to be an adult, your personality is largely already defined and even to the extent that it isn't, its very very difficult to change your personality through conscious effort. You might mature and change over time even as an adult, but it will be a drift you have relatively little control over. I'll never be anything but wordy, opinionated, and bombastic for example.
Different personalities can leave you with a propensity for different sorts of behavior with moral value. I can be miserly or not, chaste or not, obsessive or not, lustful or not, short-tempered or not, patient or not, envious or not, gentle or not, arrogant or not, and so forth. But none of that tells me much about my alignment. A person might be born stingy or greedy, but that doesn't tell us everything about their behavior. That tells us something about there personality, but not whether they are a 'good person' (to reach for the easy cliche).
Alignment tells us what the person believes. It tells us what standard of behavior the person is striving for. Most importantly, it tells us how the character will behave in a pinch, when they are forced into that ethical delimma and they have to choose some important course of action.
Most of the time, we can't tell people of two different alignments apart. Extraordinary things have to happen to them before we know where they really stand. It's when they are put in a crunch, when they have to make a hard choice, that we really find out something about them that transcends superficial things like their personality.
Suppose someone is a miserly penny pinching skin-flint. But not every miserly penny pinching skin-flint is a Scrouge with a heart of stone and no more human feeling left in his body. The shop-keeper that weighs every bit of rice to the grain, who always drives a hard bargain, and who hordes his money up and never seems to spend it might be selfish and evil as we suspect, and certainly a lot of people will say that about him, but his true colors will shine through when he's in the press. He might be lawful good. He might be the town's secret benefactor - the one that gives all the anonymous goods when someone is in trouble. When pressed, when confronted with real need, it might be a hard matter for him, but because he believes he ought to do good, probably despite hiding behind bluster and anger so that no one will take advantage of him, he does. Maybe the day comes when the town burns down, and he gives all of his money away - not because that was easy for him to do, every fibre of his being may be crying out against it, but because he believes that that is what is right to do.
Similarly, until someone finds that pouch filled with money lying in the ditch when no one else is around, we don't really know anything about their alignment. We might know something about their personality, and we might say, "This person is always generous with his money so he won't steal it.", but we don't really know anything about why he's generous with his money. Perhaps in his heart he is generous because it's easy, because he enjoys receiving acclaim and having a good time. When he steals, its easy for him and he spends other peoples money with even more abandon than he spends his own. On the other hand, the same pouch might be found by the aforementioned good hearted spend-thrift, and then he has a real temptation. His emotions tell him to take the money, but his beliefs tell him that it belongs to someone else. All sorts of thoughts rationalizing not doing what he believes to be right will enter his head - people careless with their money don't deserve it, maybe I was meant to find this to use it for some good cause, no one will ever suspect me of stealing it because everyone knows I'm already rich, and so forth. Maybe he passes the test. Maybe he doesn't and it eats him up with guilt that he didn't live up to his own standards. Knowing the alignment tells us something about the person than knowing only the personality doesn't tell us.
I often think that probably a lot of us aren't entirely who we think we are. We entertain ourselves with ideas of being 'good people', but most of us probably aren't tested - seriously tested - very often. Certainly, very often in the news someone has committed a crime, and they interview friends and neighbors who say, "He just never seemed like the type." I think they are just judging people by their personality. A person's ethical inclinations are often much better hid, either behind bravado and affectation or by the simple matter of never talking about what they believe in any kind of serious manner.
I'm fairly certain that alignment is a deficient tool for talking about this. However, it seems to be a better tool than none at all, because most people's language is rather impoverished in this regard, and the few who have the linguistic tools use a complex language steeped in religion or philosophy which is rather inaccessible or else prone to provoking real life conflict. I wouldn't want to discuss this in real theological or real philosophical terms, and we probably certainly couldn't do it at EnWorld.
Mustrum_Ridcully said:
The various writers in D&D have done I think a pretty poor job of explaining what alignment is for. The best they done is what you've hit upon here, that it divides the world into 'teams' or 'sides'. It certainly can serve that purpose, and human history is filled with conflict and war, whose basis at the bottom whatever the justification was little more than just 'they live on the other side of the hill/forest/river'.
To me, fantasy is interesting because it is usually at some level about some difficult or moral or ethical issue which we try to deal with by representing 'good' and 'evil' in more concrete ways. All this arguing we do in alignment threads about what 'evil' means and what 'good' means, is to me very much part of the point of playing fantasy as opposed to sci-fi, horror, westerns, spec-ops, spy vs. spy, or whatever. The game is to me at some level, a narrative about good and evil. The more interesting the questions and answers are, the more compelling the game. We start out with "We are from the good tribe, and we are going to go to the evil tribe and kill them and take their stuff. What's the best way of going about that?" Eventually, hopefully we move on to some other interesting questions like maybe, "Are we really the good tribe? What makes us different than the bad guys? If we are the good guys, should we go kill things and take their stuff? And if we should, should we at least feel a little bit guilty about it, or would that be silly?"
Alignment serves several purposes. First, it is a really big huge flamboyent honking reminder that this is a fantasy game and interesting questions about good and evil ought to be coming up. Every starting player has to make choices about the ethical framework that they are going to play in. "Should I be a good guy, or maybe it would be more fun to play a bad guy this time?" "Should I play a character who lives for himself, or should I play a character defines himself by his service to some higher authority?" "When faced with ethical delimmas, what decision making process am I going to use to decide how to resolve them? Specifically, am I going to imagine how someone else might think in this situation, or am I going to 'be' the character and make those decisions in proxy?" And so forth. Choosing an alignment, however perfunctory the decision ('I always play neutral good'), starts the character in a process of seeing the game as being about this ethical conflict - good vs. evil, law vs. chaos, light vs. dark, life vs. death. It certainly doesn't gaurantee that the questions will be interesting or even much addressed at all, but its a start and thereafter a nagging reminder.
Even when we have alignment arguments like, 'What alignment is Rorschach', what it really demonstrates is not Rorschach's alignment, but the presence of alignment predisposes D&D players to looking at stories in terms of their ethical framework. Insufficient ethical framework, perhaps deficient ethical framework, to be sure, but even so perhaps a good deal more thoughtfully than most people would if no classification was there at all.
Afterall, with no classification system, almost everyone tends to go, 'Me = good', 'People not like me = bad' and leave it at that. See the aforementioned human history for examples.
Another thing that alignment does is give a little flag to help remind the player to maintain at least the pretence of pretending to be somebody who is real, who has independent motivations, who has feelings, and who might not always do what the player feels from his god-like perspective on the scene what is objectively 'in his best interests' at the moment. In other words, it helps to remind players to treat their characters as 'real people' and not as merely playing peices who serve the purpose of helping the player 'win'. This is probably a bias on my part based on the subset of players I've met, but those that didn't like alignment, however interesting and intellectual their reasons for not liking it, at the table they almost always played chaotic greedy characters who tried to morph from being 'the good guys' when rewards and favors where to be had, to being ruthless SOB's with no complusion against torture, murdering innocents, treachery, and anything else if it meant 'winning'.
See for example the narrative in KotDT, where the alignment issues of the characters tend to take a back seat to the personality disfunctions of the players.
Which brings me to question that prompted the fork, what is the relationship of personality to alignment.
For me, in most cases, the answer is 'very little'. Personality for me is 'who you are', and to a very large extent (though not to a complete extent) is in an adult unchangable. Through some combination of nuture and nature, by the time you get to be an adult, your personality is largely already defined and even to the extent that it isn't, its very very difficult to change your personality through conscious effort. You might mature and change over time even as an adult, but it will be a drift you have relatively little control over. I'll never be anything but wordy, opinionated, and bombastic for example.
Different personalities can leave you with a propensity for different sorts of behavior with moral value. I can be miserly or not, chaste or not, obsessive or not, lustful or not, short-tempered or not, patient or not, envious or not, gentle or not, arrogant or not, and so forth. But none of that tells me much about my alignment. A person might be born stingy or greedy, but that doesn't tell us everything about their behavior. That tells us something about there personality, but not whether they are a 'good person' (to reach for the easy cliche).
Alignment tells us what the person believes. It tells us what standard of behavior the person is striving for. Most importantly, it tells us how the character will behave in a pinch, when they are forced into that ethical delimma and they have to choose some important course of action.
Most of the time, we can't tell people of two different alignments apart. Extraordinary things have to happen to them before we know where they really stand. It's when they are put in a crunch, when they have to make a hard choice, that we really find out something about them that transcends superficial things like their personality.
Suppose someone is a miserly penny pinching skin-flint. But not every miserly penny pinching skin-flint is a Scrouge with a heart of stone and no more human feeling left in his body. The shop-keeper that weighs every bit of rice to the grain, who always drives a hard bargain, and who hordes his money up and never seems to spend it might be selfish and evil as we suspect, and certainly a lot of people will say that about him, but his true colors will shine through when he's in the press. He might be lawful good. He might be the town's secret benefactor - the one that gives all the anonymous goods when someone is in trouble. When pressed, when confronted with real need, it might be a hard matter for him, but because he believes he ought to do good, probably despite hiding behind bluster and anger so that no one will take advantage of him, he does. Maybe the day comes when the town burns down, and he gives all of his money away - not because that was easy for him to do, every fibre of his being may be crying out against it, but because he believes that that is what is right to do.
Similarly, until someone finds that pouch filled with money lying in the ditch when no one else is around, we don't really know anything about their alignment. We might know something about their personality, and we might say, "This person is always generous with his money so he won't steal it.", but we don't really know anything about why he's generous with his money. Perhaps in his heart he is generous because it's easy, because he enjoys receiving acclaim and having a good time. When he steals, its easy for him and he spends other peoples money with even more abandon than he spends his own. On the other hand, the same pouch might be found by the aforementioned good hearted spend-thrift, and then he has a real temptation. His emotions tell him to take the money, but his beliefs tell him that it belongs to someone else. All sorts of thoughts rationalizing not doing what he believes to be right will enter his head - people careless with their money don't deserve it, maybe I was meant to find this to use it for some good cause, no one will ever suspect me of stealing it because everyone knows I'm already rich, and so forth. Maybe he passes the test. Maybe he doesn't and it eats him up with guilt that he didn't live up to his own standards. Knowing the alignment tells us something about the person than knowing only the personality doesn't tell us.
I often think that probably a lot of us aren't entirely who we think we are. We entertain ourselves with ideas of being 'good people', but most of us probably aren't tested - seriously tested - very often. Certainly, very often in the news someone has committed a crime, and they interview friends and neighbors who say, "He just never seemed like the type." I think they are just judging people by their personality. A person's ethical inclinations are often much better hid, either behind bravado and affectation or by the simple matter of never talking about what they believe in any kind of serious manner.
I'm fairly certain that alignment is a deficient tool for talking about this. However, it seems to be a better tool than none at all, because most people's language is rather impoverished in this regard, and the few who have the linguistic tools use a complex language steeped in religion or philosophy which is rather inaccessible or else prone to provoking real life conflict. I wouldn't want to discuss this in real theological or real philosophical terms, and we probably certainly couldn't do it at EnWorld.
Last edited:
