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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9740081" data-attributes="member: 4937">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 saw.  The more you can understand about 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.</blockquote>

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