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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5427215" data-attributes="member: 42582">I wasn't referring to the sincerity of the PC. I was referring to the sincerity of the player. If your player of a paladin is sincere about playing a holy warrior, you don't need alignment - the player will deliver her own interesting interpretation of holiness, without needing the GM to help her play her PC. Conversely, if she is not really interested in playing a holy warrior, but for some reason is nevertheless rolling up a paladin PC, using alignment isn't going to make the latent conflict in that situation go away. Indeed, my whole contention is that it is likely to aggravate it.That's not my experience at all. I have had intra-party fighting, killing and looting in my games, but not associated with the sort of moral collapse (or transition) that I described.In my experience it's very possible to play out, over the course of many sessions, very complex and nuanced moral transformations in PC personalities - from good to bad, from bad to good, or a bit of both - without party collapse either ingame or among the players at the game table.Again, my experience GMing this is quite different.One of the more memorable PCs I've had in my games was a high level mage (a Rolemaster sorcerer, who in D&D terms would probably be a wizard with a focus on transmutation, energy drains and domination). Over a year or more of play that PC fell, from being a respected lawyer in an independent city leasing a beautiful and well-appointed townhouse, to a drug addict (addicted to magic-enhancing herbs that also tended to leave him in a stupor) who couldn't afford to renew his lease until he joined with a force invading the city in return for their discharging his debts and appointing him a magistrate. He eventually redeemed himself to an extent, at least at the personal level (in terms of his own self-respect) by establishing a successful relationship with an elven shapechanger - who was herself then killed by a monster that another PC had summoned, and that went rogue in the middle of a difficult combat. This was somewhat ironic because it was only through the party leadership of that other PC that the sorcerer had had the opportunity (i) to betray his city for profit, (ii) to meet the elf (the meeting happened on a mission led by that other PC) and (iii) to cleanse himself of his addiction (the leader PC didn't find a drug-addicted flunky very useful). Unsurprisingly, the relationship between those two PCs was a major focus of the game, both in the events I've described and in the events that followed (the player of the sorcerer toyed with having his PC lapse back into despair, but then decided he would dedicate himself to the party's endeavours in order to make enough money to bring the elf back to life).So in my experience playing out a moral collapse has nothing in particular to do with monologues, hamming it up or disrupting party play.</blockquote>

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