D&D General Why do people like Alignment?

[Sword of Spirit]

There is nothing wrong with an obsessively meticulous and organized CN for example, or a slovenly scatterbrained LN.

Interesting take. I've tended to merge some personality elements into alignment, specifically the L/C axis.

For instance, I have a friend who exhibits typically Chaotic things. He dispositionally very much considers the needs of the individual in a group rather than the whole. For instance, he naturally considers the right thing to do when GMing is make the whole group wait to while we do something for a new player (like make a character), even when it clearly means when don't get to play. (Whereas I see a group as an entity in and if itself to be respected, and would have the new player play a premade or just observe that session so as not to impose and disappoint everyone else.) For both of us, the C or L attitudes are something we might be able to explain, but in 3e terms, more something we recognize than consciously chose.

He is also spontaneous, individualistic, and probably some other things that sound like stuff the books would classify as chaotic (he has ADHD, but I'm trying to leave those elements out).

OTOH, he is really committed to LG ideals. He is trustworthy, honorable, and has an incongruent nurture-based commitment to assuming tradition is right. And he wants to consider himself LG. I agree that he is G, but in my own mind I look at all those elements and say to myself he is NG. If he lacked the desire and commitment towards those L things, we which aren't noticeable at first glance, I'd think of him as CG, and indeed did for years of our friendship before we had a discussion about it and I started thinking of how he likes to align himself with L.

For me, I have some strong natural lawful-like personality inclinations, as well as some strong natural personality inclinations, but I believe both need to be balanced, and so I'd firmly put my L/C axis on N, both by choice of alignment and personality inclination.

(Now on the G/E axis, I separate it almost entirely from personality, and consider it based on chosen actions and their motivations.)

I'd be interested in hearing your take on how to totally separate personality from alignment on the L/C axis.

 

[Lanefan]

If a good person is aligned with evil because they are forced to do so, they are still a good person. Deeds do not define a person's alignment to me, but in most cases deeds are driven by a person's alignment if the person has a choice.

To the bolded: in the run of play in the game they do, as often they're all we-as-observers have to go by.

You can write whatever you want in the 'alignment' space on your character sheet but it's what the character actually does in play that defines its actual alignment - which may or may not agree in the slightest with what you wrote on the character sheet - as seen by the world i.e. the DM.

For the same reason, as DM I'm fine with players changing their characters' intended alignments during a character's first session or two of play before any real patterns have been established, as sometimes an idea that looked good in theory just doesn't work out in practice.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd be interested in hearing your take on how to totally separate personality from alignment on the L/C axis.

Alignment is as I said about core values, ethos, fundamental beliefs.

You separate it in two or three ways, first by noting that all people have flaws and predilections which directly or indirectly impact their core values. These are habits that they are often not proud of, consider weaknesses, or which are socially looked on as weaknesses by observers with similar core values. So again, from my example of the shopkeeper who never gives store credit, weighs every grain carefully and charges every cent, and who generally meets the appearance of a miserly and stingy individual, the impression because of social standards of behavior might be to assume that this person is selfish and greedy and has core value of acquisition for personal gain. But that might not be the case. The individual might have this personality because at a young age they learned the meaning of need and want, and from their perspective they are being a good steward of money, being thrifty, and be fair. And we learn the difference when we see what they do with their stored treasure when real need and want comes along. Maybe they don't want it known that they are charitable because they fear to be taken advantage of. Maybe they are the person who when there is a real serious need in town, the priest comes to privately because they know that all that penny pinching means the shopkeeper has the resources to do good when it counts.

The second thing to note is that many times a personality quirk isn't actually relevant to the core value. Spontaneity isn't really the core value of Chaos. Chaos has no problem with spontaneity. It doesn't necessarily mind if you act on impulse. But the core value of Chaos is individuality. It doesn't have a problem with acting on impulse if that is being true to yourself. But it also doesn't have a problem with meticulous planning if that is being true to yourself. What it has a problem with is other people telling you who you should be. The real core conflict between chaos and law isn't planning because complexity is a nicely chaotic trait too. The core conflict is over whether the laws of the universe are (or should be) written separately on each particle and are therefore potentially unique to the particle, or whether the laws of the universe are (or should be) external to the particles and thus properly govern all of them. At the level of sentience, this conflict is over who gets to decide what is right or wrong (or properly speaking how one ought to act). Is each individual solely responsible for deciding its own actions or should everyone be collectively governed by some external standard. An Individualist would say something like, "Follow the dictates of your own conscious." or "Follow your heart". A collectivist would say, "You must be mad? Don't you know just how flawed your own judgment is? Don't you know how capricious your heart is? Never trust yourself but submit yourself to something wiser and higher than yourself." As long as the core values of the person are grounded in that, a lot of things about personality turn out to be secondary.

And the third thing to note is that people have varying WIS scores. Wisdom pertains to self-awareness, self-control, and perceptiveness. Thus, the higher the WIS of the character the more fully and correctly they embody their core beliefs because they correctly judge the outcomes of their own actions, have the willpower to live up to the standards they believe in, and are aware of their own flaws and biases and potential folly. If we were to imagine some soft of concrete mechanism for determining alignment and a set of game mechanics for tracking "Goodness points" or "Chaos points" then one mechanism I would suggest is that any drift away from your current alignment only really happens when you PASS a wisdom check. Call of Cthulhu has a single axis alignment system ("Human/Sane from a human perspective" vs "Alien/Insane from a human perspective") and it actually implements something like this. You go more insane if you understood fully the meaning of what you say. The more you can understand what just happened, the more insane you get. Of course, in a sense, CoC has even more objective morality than D&D. Humans are objectively insane in the sense that they have a set of beliefs incompatible with reality; the universe is objectively insane and only be ignoring it can you stay human.

The point being that if you have a low WIS character then you that character can have a lot of leeway in the contrast between what they have as core values and how they are often behaving. They are a small 'h' hypocrite in that they are trying their best and feel guilty and remorseful when they fail, but they just don't have the understanding or courage to fully live out their convictions.

 

[cranberry]

I don't mind alignment, but I never saw the point in penalizing someone for going a bit outside the "boundaries" (unless they do a complete 180, then that's an issue)

 

[AlViking]

To the bolded: in the run of play in the game they do, as often they're all we-as-observers have to go by.

You can write whatever you want in the 'alignment' space on your character sheet but it's what the character actually does in play that defines its actual alignment - which may or may not agree in the slightest with what you wrote on the character sheet - as seen by the world i.e. the DM.

For the same reason, as DM I'm fine with players changing their characters' intended alignments during a character's first session or two of play before any real patterns have been established, as sometimes an idea that looked good in theory just doesn't work out in practice.

For the vast, vast, majority of NPCs the deeds will match the alignment because that's what I use it for. Every once in a great while though I'll throw in the youngest son of an evil baron that sees little option but to do what they're told until and unless they are given an opportunity to rebel and survive or at least make enough of a difference to make their sacrifice worthwhile.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Roleplaying aid. Well, it should be. Mostly it's ignored even when used.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Modern versions of D&D and it's "D&D-alike cousins" seem to veer further and further away from the alignment system- I can admit, I don't really miss it, as I've never had a positive experience with it as a mechanic. Even in older versions of D&D, while the cracks in the system were never officially addressed, you'd often see NPC's with "tendencies" towards an alignment other than their own, showing that people are often more complex than can be placed on the C/L+E/G axes. Yet on the player side, mechanics were very firm that thou shalt not act outside of one's alignment, like a commandment from on high, from xp penalties to the loss of class abilities!

Alignment as a restrictive rule that one must obey (as originally conceived) is borked. It was the GM's job to police your behavior, penalize you for playing out of character, and, honestly, the whole system was more than a little evocative of some racist genetic determinism nonsense. Alignment hasn't been that way for 25 years, though, and as it sits in 5e, I think alignment is fine and basically a positive addition to the game.

The first time one sees a session fall apart due to a debate over fake fantasy ethics (which alignment was never supposed to be, as I understand it- it's more of an allegiance to cosmic forces beyond mortal ken), you'd think people would instantly shuck the system out the door- especially when game designers weighed in, tried to tie alignment to some kind of morality system, and made some quite dubious statements about what a given alignment can/cannot do (the 3.x era had some of the worst examples of this).

IDK, I've always been pretty OK with how 3e defined alignment. I may not be remembering some things, though...

I am OK with characters debating fantasy ethics and allegiance to cosmic forces, if that's where the players want to go.

Then 3.x and it's imitators thought it would be a wonderful idea to make magic effects that cared about alignment, which seemed more designed to punish the players than enforce any cosmic agenda- many foes were annoyingly neutral, making "anti-evil" powers unreliable, and the first time you get dinged by an unholy word for having the utter gall to write "good" on your character sheet, well, I stopped writing alignment on my sheet at all, unless the DM insisted, at which point I'd simply write "Neutral" and let my actions in-game speak for themselves.

This wasn't really my XP. Evil enemies could be smote with evil-smiting things. Some evil enemies could return the smitings. The players that liked to be Han Solo types could kind of sit it out.

But despite all of this, I keep seeing people wax nostalgic for alignment, wanting it back in the game, even to the point of once again binding character abilities to following some esoteric code of conduct that no two people seem able to agree upon!

So I'm asking people to explain their point of view as to why they see alignment as a good thing. It's a + thread, so I expect people to disagree, but let's not fight about it- everyone is entitled to their own point of view!

The big benefit of alignment is that it is a roleplaying mechanic. It helps players -- especially new ones -- answer improv RP questions like "What does my character do?" or "How does my character react to this?" or "What does my character stand for?"

It also helps differentiate antagonists, to some degree -- what do demons want vs. what do devils want vs. what do necromancers want or whatever.

This is part of why I think it's smart to not tie combat mechanics or class mechanics to alignment. Which, for the most part, is a rule 5e follows.

I'm also a big fan of alignment as part of D&D's Multiverse. I'm a big Planescape fan, and part of the fun of that setting is playing with the concept and expectations of alignment. In a setting where monsters are characters, saying something is Lawful Evil doesn't really tell me if I should kill it or make friends with it, and PS loves to play in that space, where angels can be villains and demons can be allies, where alignment is only one aspect of a creature's personality, and usually not the most important one. The multiverse being defined according to the nine-point alignment scale gives that a real juxtaposition, between "always lawful good being on a literal reality built of lawful good" and "well, this one is a rebel because it thought too hard about what it means to be lawful good and came to a different conclusion."

I can get on board with the idea that it's simplistic (that's kind of the point - it's VERY newbie-friendly) and that it's lousy to try and ENFORCE someone to act according to an alignment, and that it's not great to tie classes and mechanics too tightly to alignment. But I think it's worth holding onto for the two reasons above. It's a powerful RP mechanic, and it helps provide interesting play hooks for D&D's multiverse.

Of special note here is 4e's alignment system, which was very unique, and probably wasn't the most successful of experiments. But it was a decent system -- just not maybe a system that was good for D&D.