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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4704832" data-attributes="member: 4937">That sounds like it would be an appropriate topic for graduate thesis in sociology.'The Classification of Group Conventions Regarding Topologies Subject to Reification in Social Gaming'I for one would be interested in knowing if there was a topology that predicted how a particular gamer responded to a game topology, and how many buckets that players could be dropped in, and whether there was any correlation with other topologies or self-identifications.  Most alignment arguments seem to revolve around the assumption that the mental maps of the two participants either match or should match.  In alot of cases, to be honest, this is because players don't read the manual and instead bring preexisting definitions into play and subsitute them for the formal definitions.  In some cases, this is because as you say, the sorting is by abstract concepts.  In sadly far too many cases, its because one player has a copy of a different manual than another player, and each game manual defines the terms differently.Admitting that there are many difficulties, it seems to me that you could go with one particular definition and then from that, have a far more useful predictive tool than any real world classification system could be, because the alignment of a game character is knowable and real in a way quite unlike any real classification system and because (quite unlike the real world) the number of actors is quite small.  Rather than trying to guess the category from the behavior, we can guess the behavior from the category.  The purpose of alignment would seem to be to communicate in a general fashion how to predict the character's likely behavior.  To that extent, it seems likely that it is intended for communicating general behavioral guidelines between DM's as much as between the DM and the player.  One DM says to another, "Here is the outline of an adventure.  I don't know what situations will come up in your games, but I intend Mr. X to behave in a manner consistant with your interpretation of 'Chaotic Evil' and Lady Y to behave in a manner consistant with your interpretation of 'Lawful Good'."  This, along with a brief personality outline, forms the basis both of the first DM's decision making process, and of the second DM's decision making process.  Neither will be perfectly comparable to the other, but I think there would be not an insignificant amount of information transfer given the size of a message like 'Chaotic Evil' (about 4 bits worth in computer terms).  Gygax says, "Here is a monster.  It's decision making process is normally of the Chaotic Good type."  We don't have a perfect transferal of information, but we don't need a perfect transfer.  Within my campaign, I'm always using a very similar decision making process for Chaotic Good NPC's, so there will be internal consistancy even if there isn't perfect consistancy with the original author's model.  I'm not sure perfect agreement with another DM is necessary.  Isn't general agreement enough?  What would you do to devise better message passing?</blockquote>

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