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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samothdm" data-source="post: 2144773" data-attributes="member: 5473">Yep.  You'll note in my example that it happened twice, and after the second time, I pulled the player aside and told him that, next time, afterwards, I would note a change of the character's alignment to chaotic evil.  Three times would be enough for me to indicate a pattern.  Seems like a lot of my original notes and posts are getting lost or glossed over.  I get the impression that some people think that I ruled on shifting this guy's alignment after the first time this happened.  It happened twice, and I told him that after the third time (which never came, BTW), his alignment would change to evil.Yeah, that's the classical view of alignment in D&D but we don't adhere too closely to that definition.  Your examples of action movies and first-person shooters are accurate, but the influences of my campaign world do not include those particular references.  I gave my players a big list of campaign influences before the game started and so they knew this.  What I'd noticed in another game I played in was the Paladin and her detect evil ability.  Everytime we encountered someone, she'd declare "I'm going to detect evil".  If the npc/creature/thing/whatever radiated as evil, she would declare, "I'm going to kill it."  There was no interacting with these evil NPCs for the rest of us players.  The DM got a little frustrated, too, saying that just because someone had an evil alignment did not give her "permission" to kill it.  To avoid this problem in my campaign, I talked about this with my  players and explained that people committed actions which determined their alignment.  There alignment was going to probably slide a little bit along the ethical and the moral axes from time to time, based on their actions.  There would be cases of "good" aligned orcs and evil-aligned creatures that they normally would have considered good.  These things were meant to make them think beyond just the normal alignment structure of classic D&D.If I'd had access to it at the time, I would have used an article that ran in Dragon not that long ago that talked about replacements for detect evil such as detect sin and detect heresy.  I see what you're saying, but my game's a little different and my characters have paid the price before for dispensing vigilante justice.  The PCs in this case were not in an authoritative position to dispense legal justice.  Your guess is as good as mine.  The consequences of all this came up later.  Yes, you're right.  I probably shouldn't have derailed the thread this way.  I definitely don't think that and had made it quite clear before we started that I did not view the alignment that way.  There were two players who wanted to use that alignment despite my speechifying about how I would not simply turn away and let CN characters act any way they chose.  Yes, there are.  But, I think that being cruel is being cruel.  Either you act cruelly or you don't.  Cool - no problem.Yes, I agree, but I look at it more in terms of the character's actions.  Sometimes the individual character would act "more good than absolute neutral but still not quite Good" and sometimes the character would act "more evil than absolute Neutral but still not quite Evil".  In the case of my player, he was continuing a pattern of behavior each time that was becoming indicative of him having a preference for that certain type of behavior, which in this case I found to be "more evil than absolute Neutral".  That's a good way of looking at it.  I can appreciate those definitions.  To fit your definitions, though, the player in my game would have needed a pragmatic reason for his actions.  When pressed, he could not provide any.</blockquote>

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