What happens when you get rid of alignment?

[Shayuri]

On the nature of evil

The horror stories of paladins smiting evil kings and the general antipathy for Detect Evil and so on makes me feel compelled to note one or two things.

I'll say up front that I have no particular attachment to alignments one way or the other, save for creatures from the Outer Planes which in many ways *embody* the alignments. And I think everyone's more or less in agreement so far with that, so I shan't belabor it.

However, I think alignments can (and should) be used in a game without it becoming a bloodbath. People seem to equate "evil" alignments with "being involved in plots to end the world." Nothing could be farther from the truth.

A schoolyard bully is evil, yes? He extorts money from the weak, hurting them and dominating them. Does the paladin slay this ten year old menace? Or what about the guardsman who does his job, and reasonably well, but also likes getting plastered and goes home to beat his wife up every night? One can have an evil alignment, yet NOT be a threat to the civilized world.

One thing I was pleased to see in 3rd Ed was a far looser interpretation of alignments in the PHB, as well as clearer descriptions of what "evil" and "good" are. From those descriptions, we can see that any campaign world will be FULL of petty evils...much like the real world. A paladin may be gifted to see the stains on a man's soul, yes...but that doesn't give him the right to indiscriminately slaughter. The same for a cleric with that spell. Detect Evil can tell you "this person has committed sins, and repeatedly enough that his very spirit is smudged with them." It can't tell you what those sins are, nor what their magnitude is. Those are *very* important mitigators.

Many of the complaints I've seen towards alignments and detection of such are, to my eyes, less complaints about the concepts, and more complaints about how those concepts are implemented.

Remember always that a paladin stands at the crux of two equally powerful pulls. Goodness and Law. For a paladin to strike down a KING without provocation, simply because he smelled a whiff of guilt on the man is a blatant violation of that second obligation. Not to mention the guard and the others that perished by his hand.

A paladin that behaves that way is no better than the miscreants he opposes...and his Fall will leave him oh-so-vulnerable to the many, many enemies he will have earned...

 

[DreamChaser]

as has come up many times before on these boards, there is a difference between behaving in an immoral or evil way and being an evil person.

I would not call a schoolyard bully evil by any stretch of the imagination. I would call him or her young, ignorant, and misguided. An adult bully, perhaps evil. Mostly likely more along the lines of D&D's neutral alignments.

Perhaps in the moment of bullying, a bully of any age would show up on a detect evil, but while sitting in class? Probably not.

For my game definitions, a person must consistantly choose to behave in a way that is self-involved, harmful, destructive, cruel, etc. in order to be evil.

The most clear cut cases are those who revel in such behavior. The one's who wake up one morning and decide to be evil and follow it through.

More difficult is the person who does these things beliving that they are good. Would Torquemada (head of the Spanish Inquisition) be evil? What about Hitler? I would say yes, because despite the fact that they believed that they were doing good, they were intentionally behaving in cruel, self-invovled, harmful ways.

JMHO of course.
DC

 

[Kamard]

And if you want to get right technical, we need to look at what is "Good" and what is "Evil".

"Good" to a goblin is going out, robbing a farm and killing its family, and taking everything back to Goblintown for a big meal and celebration.

 

[Happy Monkey]

I have never had any problem with alignments because I consider each alignment to be very broad, each covering many philosophies. Some may be an alignment by default whilst others conciously choose to believe.

There are cutoffs, which I warn once but really, my players don't approach them.

As for moronic paladins hacking heads off They are not going through due process, have meagre evidence and should not have made it past level 1 as a member a great class.

Getting rid of alignments... Just get rid of spells, spell lists, spell descriptors based on alignments, a few domains, some magic items, relevant abilities. Flesh out codes for restricted classes like Bard and Druid to keep their feel. Paladins should be compensated for a lost feature.

Personally I have to urge everyone to keep such an easy moral shorthand. If it is causing problems, chances are that that it is being applied too vigorously or that players (inc the dm) have not agreed on what each means.

 

[Someone]

Alignment still exists, but there are two types of alignment: Tenuous and fundamental. Most creatures, including most characters, will be tenuous: Their alignment is not a tangible thing, and has no in-game effect aside from serving as a prerequisite (for classes, mainly). This means that you can't detect evil on a lowly rogue... He's just not that evil.


Thoughts on all this?

I´ve done the same IMC and works very well. "Alingment" weapn enchantments and some spells lose value, but things are going fine.

 

[Anubis]

What's the problem with alignments? They're a good thing. On top of that, they're incredibly flexible. The alignments aren't set in stone, and are just guidelines. It says so in the PH. The reason for alignments is so players don't divert all over the plaqce on a whim, and so the character doesn't act out depending on the player's mood. If you removed alignment, the players could be heroes one day, villains the next, and then not care the day after that, which is totally unrealistic and utterly ridiculous! Alignment gives you a range of actions and behaviors that forces you to be consistent. (If you want to be inconsistent by nature, just pick Chaotic Neutral as your alignment.)

As for the system itself, the Law/Chaos axis is the ambiguous one that is hard to define, because it's based on culture. The Good/Evil axis, however, is based on fact, and is therefore quite easy to define. Killing someone who has done nothing wrong is evil. Rape is evil without exception. Stealing from someone for the sake of greed alone is evil. Genocide is evil. Racism is evil. Worshipping Tharizdun is evil. Very easy to define good and evil, see? Good/Evil has nothing to do with opinion, and therefore is a set axis which is easy to identify with one way or the other.

As for Paladins detecting evil and killing everything that registers as evil, well, I'd say the DMs in these cases needs to actually read the damn books, because they're not paying attention. The books state clearly that detecting evil does not give the paladin a license to kill. The paladin actually has to witness or have heard something done wrong by the person, either through witnesses or physical evidence. The person being evil just isn't enough. Detect evil is more for the sake of choosing employers and trying to decide whether you can trust someone or not, it's not to give hte paladin a moral obligation.

Anyway, read the rules and read the books before passing judgment. Making uneducated statements like those in this topic only leads to confusion.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Right, it's the difference between evil and Evil. The interpretation I use:

A CE Rogue is not inherently Evil (with a capital E); he's still a human doing the sort of things humans do. The key is he's REDEEMABLE. There's nothing inherent to his nature that drives him to one extreme; it's a choice, and it's one he can choose to reverse given motive and opportunity.
So, you can't use Detect Evil to find him, and Protection from Evil doesn't stop him. A sunblade doesn't do extra damage to him.
(Note that some abilities depend on evil, not Evil; for example, if a Robe of the Archmagi (white) is picked up by a evil spellcaster, they still take negative levels, since it depends on evil alignment explicitly IIRC)

Now, to keep things more interesting, I added an extra round to the Detect Evil type of spells that allows detection of evil alignments in addition to the inherent Evil. It also detects inherently evil actions (murder, rape, etc.) no matter what alignment the person who did them was.

A Devil, on the other hand, is inherently Evil. Same goes for most (but not all) Undead, and certain races (Illithid?). Sure, you can have a Devil with a non-evil alignment, just like you can have a celestial fall from grace, but their very natures always attempt to drive them back to the extreme they were born to. Everything they do is tainted by evil, even though they might have good intentions.

Using a spell to attack someone is evil, but not Evil. Using a spell with the (Evil) modifier, though, is always Evil no matter what you use it for.

 

[Gez]

You may adapt d20 Modern's allegiance system.

Basically, any character has between 0 (none) and three allegiance, listed in decreasing order of importance.

An allegiance can be to a moral or ethical code (the D&D alignments), but also a religion, a nation, an organization, a person, an ideal, etc. In D&D that could also include race and subrace.

For example, with this system, a paladin's allegiance could be Good, Heironeous, Law; while a dwarven defender's allegiance could be Dwarven Race, Law, Good. But then you may have a loremaster whose allegiance is simply Spreading Knowledge, and a rogue with no allegiance.

Most devils would have an allegiance of Evil, Law; but the "kinder" (if such a term could be used for fiends) may have Law, Evil instead. And so on.

Alignment detection would work like before: if someone has a moral or ethical allegiance, he has that alignment. Otherwise, he's considered neutral.

 

[SylverFlame]

Just a sec...

I was looking at Anubis' post above and noticed something wrong.

As for the system itself, the Law/Chaos axis is the ambiguous one that is hard to define, because it's based on culture. The Good/Evil axis, however, is based on fact, and is therefore quite easy to define.

There is a key problem here. Anubis goes on to explain what is good and evil. However, we look on this as a cultural motif as well. For instance, let us take a hypothetical person from the land of OverThere.

In OverThere, murder is not a crime, in fact, it's endorsed by the government. With a huge population they can't support, the only way to control it (without going against other cultural beliefs) is to condone murder. In OverThere, slicing the throat of your local begger isn't a problem. Who are we to say this is evil?

I'm not condoning murder here, just stating a point of view. The idea that good/evil is universal is flawed. If it was universal then everyone would have been against slavery in the USA, unless you state that the US was an evil country lording over a population who was deprived the right to protect itself. Even after slavery was abolished the black people who were "freed" were still targets of angry and violent acts. To this day this sort of thing occurs. This was a widely accepted practice so "a few bad apples" can't be blamed.

This shows that alignment fails to present any realism in its portrayal. Personally, I prefer leting players do their own thing or giving them huge amounts of lee-way (see my above post). That's my two-bits.

 

[Shalewind]

The idea that good/evil is universal is flawed.

I think what he was attempting to imply is that in D&D they are universal. The DM sets the boundaries, "What is evil and what is good in this universe". And then that is that. Typical D&D isn't realistic in this fashion, it is heroic fantasy. Alignment is made as a tool so that every monster and encounter isn't a moral delimae.

Some DMs can tinker with it as they see fit. It is up to the DM to define what is evil. If this one kingdom endorses murder and the rest of the universe doesn't, then it's evil. If an afterlife is much better and more important than being a mortal, well then, murder might not be so bad.