Alignment is like Communism: It sounds like a good idea, and in principle it could work, but in the real world it just falls flat.
In every RPG I’ve ever run or played that has an alignment system, I’ve found the following to be true:
- Alignment is a shortcut past real character development.
- There’s always at least one “do whatever you want” alignment.
- Evil = you can kill it without feeling bad.
- Even if the game says it’s just a guideline, someone takes it as a rule.
- As a GM, alignments color my expectations about PC actions, often to my detriment.
In games where character development doesn’t matter (an old school hack-and-slash dungeon crawl, for example), neither does alignment. In games where character development does matter, alignment discourages it by painting everyone with broad brushes.
Does alignment ever work the way it was intended to work?
Count me in as an alignment hater. Aligences seem like they work better, because they inform part of the character’s core beliefs. What’s important to the character? What would make them do ‘interesting’ things. Where is the moral conflict? Where can I find inter-party conflict? Intra-party conflict?
Alignment(in DND) always seemed like shoehoringing a story element into a hack and slash. White wolf always had humanity and paths, but those never seemed right for my characters motivations, besides which they worked well only for the horror genre.
I think a lot of this kind of stuff comes down to game design. A combat system and phsyical resolution system is built and then the designers go, oh yeah? What about the other times you’re not in combat. People are looking at other ways of gaming now though and we’re getting a lot of good small press innovative designs.
On the other hand I find that a lot of these games try to avoid the old way of things and swing way far in the other direction. They work really great in a few detailed ways but aren’t broad enough to keep my attention for more than a session or two.
Still, moral conflict is something hard to deal with even in real life, how easily can it boil down to a game mechanic?
Maybe I’m missing something, but how is alignment supposed to work?
Einan
Alignments as a useful tool pretty much peaked with the Chaos/Neutral/Law system in Chainmail and the original 3 D&D books. As I read the text alignment didn’t do much to define your PCs behavior, it indicated which side you were aligned with. Nothing more, nothing less. In a war of dwarves against orcs, which side will your character take? If you said dwarves, that put you in the camp of Law. If you say orcs, congratulations! You now fight for Chaos. If you don’t know or need more information to answer, then you’re clearly Neutral.
The later attachment of a code of behavior and expansion of the system to 9 alignments never helped any game I have ever participated in, up to and including the two 3.5 games I am currently involved in. I’m much more fond of the honor system in 1st edition Oriental Adventures, the virtues and passions of Pendragon, or even the allegiance rules of d20 Modern.
arguing in defense of alignment, i see the system as simply another quick and dirty handle on one aspect of a character, similar to and no more necessarily limiting than “human” or “level 10 fighter”. it is not meant to be a comprehensive description of ethics and behaviour, any more than “human” describes your culture or “fighter” the fine details of your occupation. but when a party bashes in a dungeon door to kill a monster and loot stuff, you don’t really need all that detail — broad strokes of capability and what team jersey each side is wearing is sufficient. outside such context, there’s plenty of room for variety and character development within the gross handles, if you really want it.
the only problem is where people fail to see gray areas, and play their character strictly according to the textbook. “LE, done.” but that’s a similar problem to people who play a fighter as “sword, shield, done,” and has similar solutions if you feel that its an important issue.
As a DM, I WANT to throw alignment out the window, but I can’t. My players aren’t ready for it.
When we switched to Arcana Evolved for awhile, they floundered when it came to making moral decisions. I swear from time to time I could see them glancing down at the top right-hand corner of their character sheets, searching for that alignment indicator.
Granted, my players do pretty well with it; they can see the gray in-between the alignments, but they NEED a broad stroke to give them direction.
What I’ve done with my game is eliminate any game functionality related to the alignment system, so Detect Alignment/Evil spells either don’t function, or operate on other indicators.
Alignment works well if you want to have divisions amongst characters. As you can see, for the typical D&D “Us vs. them” mentality, alignment leads to “us vs. us” play, and usually in a terribly bad way, since it has not social conflict rules, time is wasted as the PCs argue stances that neither will give on, until someone either walks away and splits the party, or pulls out weapons and forcibly stops the other.
For comparison, many people play Tunnels & Trolls which lacks an alignment system, and their parties don’t turn on each other.
I largely agree with drow: alignment is a guide for players. But it’s also an important rules element – how do you deal with DR/good if there’s no alignment tag to attach to a weapon or a monster/character? I’ve always thought the alignment rules were intended more for labelling NPCs and monsters than the PCs. PCs determine their alignment by their play, perhaps guided by a “chosen” alignment (especially if there’s an alignment restriction for their Class). Everyone else is assigned an alignment for rules purposes and as a guide to the DM for interactions/behaviour, etc.
On one hand I done without alignment for a long time when I switched to Fantasy Hero and later GURPS. When I GMed D20 after 3.0 was released I didn’t bother with alignment.
But it wasn’t a matter of just jettisoning alignment. The key was that my campaign had a well-developed backstory with the different religion and groups moral codes spelled out. Without that I can see my player confused over what actions are moral or not.
For a game where people just get together to play alignment can be a handy shortcut to the complexities of real-world morality. Orcs in my game are “evil” but they are evil (because of their culture, choices, and history. But for a new DM or a DM without much time the simple annotation that Orcs are LE or CE is all they need to run their game.
Later if they want more complex role-playing then they can developed their background and jettison alignment.
It tends to get to me when people talk about hating alignment. You don’t break the law and look out for your fellow man because you are chaotic good – YOU PICK chaotic good BECAUSE you have a disreguard for the law and help your fellow man.
Novice players use aligment as their handrail for character interaction. More expirienced players pick an alignment that most closly matches what they intend to play. (Most closly, not perfectly. There are more than 9 types of people in the world, but you could categorize everyone by them in a pinch)
I’m pretty firmly in the “D&D’s alignment rules are crap” camp. One factor is as Chris mentions, no well rounded conflict resolution system (D&D does have a conflict resolution system, the problem is the output is rather binary “he’s dead” or “I’m dead”).
For D&D’s “core story” of “kill things and take their treasure” alignment is not necessary. All that is necessary is enough back story to give the PCs permission to kill the things you want them to kill, and some options if you want to have some things that they might not want to kill.
If you want players to make real moral decisions for their characters, then an alignment system is the wrong way to go about it. Far better is to look at Dogs in the Vinyard, or Sorceror. Their mechanics support the player’s choice, whichever it is. And a well rounded conflict resolution system means that if the player succeeds in convincing an NPC to do X, Y, and Z without violence, then it’s settled, the NPC will do X, Y, and Z, at least for now.
Now I do see a place for pseudo-alignments. Chaos in RuneQuest works well. It by and large produces a class of creatures that the PCs have license to kill. But it doesn’t force most of them to kill. And some bleeding hearts specifically won’t kill (though my feeling is that Chalana Arroy is hopeless as a PC cult because the only time they would ever accompany a typical PC party is if they were doing a hero quest – although I suppose to some weird extent, one could argue that those heroquests set precedent for less heroic undertakings).
Allegiances are good (I’m trying to make city state A succeed, I don’t care about city state B, and I want city state C to fail, meanwhile, the other player also wants C to fail, but he wants A to be taken down a notch, while still succeeding, and B to gain prominence). Now we have a recipe for some fun play because the players have strong motivation to cooperate, but they also have some areas where they don’t see eye to eye.
Frank
I think I’m going to stay Neutral on this 🙂
My group of 11-15 year-olds even sees that alignment isn’t helping; it looks like we’re going to house-rule it away. The only concern that’s been expressed is that the paladin class disappears, but that can be dealt with by adding an alternate class should it prove necessary. (There are no paladins in the group now, so that’s not pressing.)
Alignment is maligned a lot. It’s an abstract concept trying to apply itself as a rules component. Very few other abstracts as rules get debated as much as the alignment system. Armor Class, Hit Points, standard damage from a weapon, turn-based combat, weapon speed, numerical ability scores – the list goes on, so why do we spend most of our time picking on alignment?
My thoughts on alignment are probably jaded because of my real world opinions. I don’t believe in relativistic morality. I don’t believe in grey areas. Good is good, and bad is bad. I don’t care if you’re looting a store for cigarettes, or looting a store for milk, you’re still doing something wrong. The only time I see room for “grey” is with the punishment. Punishments should fit the crimes, but I don’t believe that there are moral grey areas.
The major problem most people seem to have with alignment is they feel it’s a shoehorn and not representative of the relativistic moral society that a large portion of humans think exists. I don’t claim to be better than anyone else, but I firmly believe in concepts such as universal right and universal wrong, so the alignment systems work for me.
Next, alignments are only straitjackets in the sense that people don’t seem to understand that the alignment is an overall averaged out thing. No person who is lawful good will be lawful or good all the time. Take the person who never breaks a law, except for speeding. That person is still lawful. And if he treats his neighbors with respect and helps out when he can, he’s good too.
As a final point, keep in mind that lawful and chaotic do not mean people “obey laws” or “thwart all laws”. A lawful person wouldn’t obey a law they feel is wrong. I’d be hardpressed to call MLK chaotic simply because he stood up to unjust laws. On the same token, I’d be hardpressed to call a Tibetan monk chaotic simply because they don’t recognize Chinese rule. On the flip side, I wouldn’t call the people who riot in the streets in Iran lawful simply because they follow the laws of their country. The riots are clear exhibitions of chaotic behaviour.
Finally (for real this time), trying to apply the alignment system in real life (I know I just did it) is a fallacious proposition, just as it would be to assign yourself and Armor Class or Hit Points. If you want your gaming to be totally real, you’re in the wrong line of business. If you want everything to work according to the actual world, strap on some armor, pick up a longsword and go try to kill someone similarly attired. You’ll quickly realize that abstract concepts and rules for a game don’t translate well to life. As such, I object to the fundamental argument that alignments don’t make sense in the real world – neither do armor class, fireball, arrows doing less damage than a sword, or skill checks in the 50s.
I don’t see what the big stink is. Alignment is just shorthand for broadly defined groups of ethical and moral beliefs. The only time it really matters, with very few exceptions, is when “ethical magic” comes into play: when answering questions like:
* Who can my paladin smite?
* What code does my paladin have to adhere to?
* What happens if I cast Protection from Evil?
* Can I damage that demon with this magic sword?
…and so on. The rest of the time, it doesn’t even come into play.
So, I say, keep alignment in D&D. Do your best to accurately assign alignments to your characters, but don’t lose sleep over it. It only really matters if you’re a paladin (or other ethically-restricted class) or interacting with certain magical effects or creatures, anyway.
-Will
Alignment can work (“can”, not “will”–and you might have an alternate way that works better for you even when it can work), when the players answer two questions for their game:
1. How does a character become aligned? Not, how did they pick, but what led them to get this tag attached that a detect good spell can evaluate?
2. Who in that world cares about the alignment?
As a mechanic, those are the only two things that really matter about alignment. All the social/ethical stuff is really just a language we can use to discuss those two questions, and relate it to the game. And obviously, if one is playing a very “gray” game, then the answers are: 1. They don’t, and 2. No one. So in that case, you wouldn’t even bother to record alignment. 😀
Likewise, with Frank’s city state example. A faction or allegience system is simply another social model. You’d only bring in something analogous to an alignment system if, for example, the Gods marked you as for or against certain cities, and provided ways for their priests to check it.
Let’s say that I have city states A, B, and C. Mr. Mage creates a sword that he intends to be wielded by a champion of City A. He might want the sword to only work for those that swear an oath to defend A. The oath may or may not be magically binding. Can the sword be fooled? How does it check? You can model that with or without alignments, though the underlying reality will be somewhat different depending on how you do it. However, if the sword can check in some magical way, then that is a form of alignment, and makes just as much sense as a sword checking for Lawful Good. (Rather, it makes as much sense if we assume that mechanical checks for “Oath to Protect City A” and “Lawful Good” each occur only in game worlds where such things matter.)
Rather than ditching alignments (for D&D), I’d think it would make more sense to provide a way to customize them. The ability to customize them would necessarily do the work to provide “drop them all” as an option. It’s not the alignments that are the problem, but their somewhat embedded nature. You’ll note that Monte Cook didn’t have that much trouble getting rid of them for AE, but that was because he was doing all new classes and spells.
I see alignment as much more sensible if you use it as a description of an action rather than a character, with a character’s alignment descriptor based upon what most of their ethically-controversial actions classify under.
Lawful Good Paladin would probably rob his church to feed his own wife and kids if they were starving to death, but I don’t consider that breaking alignment.
One thing – as to the things with alignment based DR and stuff like that – I actually played with adding some alignment descriptors into my Arcana Evolved campaign. The alignments didn’t describe actions, just how things related to certain sets of extraplanar creatures. It actually worked out ok, though imperfect.
But as soon as you assign alignments to PCs, and restrict some character abilities to certain alignments, and assign certain actions to certain alignments, then you have a recipe for player vs. player conflict. And a game system that presents as the only way to resolve that conflict is elimination of a character. So you CAN’T have a thief and a paladin in the same party if the players insist on following the alignment rules. And you invariably will get a dick player who comes along and uses his chaotic evil alignment as a justification to ruin the fun for everyone else (“I’m just role playing, what are you guy’s shallow hack ‘n slash players or something?”).
I’ve been there. And since I’ve stopped playing games with alignment, I’ve almost never seen such activity. Sure, in one campaign, when a player brought in a new necromancer character (where plenty of the PCs followed some of the other more or less “evil” gods), the necromancer was sumarily executed. I’ve seen thieves (who stole from PCs) threatened with dismemberment if they didn’t shape up. But I’ve never seen anyone argue “I’m just role playing.” (Well ok, the necromancer guy and the thief guy did sort of – but they both acknowledged that the social contract of the group didn’t allow the type of play they were angling for, and never even reached dick status). That isn’t to say that every PC agrees with the others all the time. But the tension is kept to a low enough level that it doesn’t demand resolution when the only conflict resolution is a fight to the death.
Will – your idea would work great – except for the damned folks who think alignment should run by the rules, and demand that actions fit alignment, and then proceed to use their alignment to justify dickery.
Mercutio – it’s not worth getting into realtive vs. absolute morality, and black vs. grey, but you describe an awful lot of grey there… The real world isn’t black and white. It really isn’t. That isn’t to say that there isn’t an absolute system of right and wrong, it’s just that when you start looking at actions in relation to other actions, grey areas start to slip in. If there is absolute right and wrong, black and white, with no grey areas, killing (for whatever reason) is either white or black. I think we can all agree that killing is not absolutely white. So unless you’re prepared to argues that it’s absolutely black, you’re going to have to admit to grey.
Frank
Fred:
“My group of 11-15 year-olds even sees that alignment isn’t helping; it looks like we’re going to house-rule it away. The only concern that’s been expressed is that the paladin class disappears, but that can be dealt with by adding an alternate class should it prove necessary. (There are no paladins in the group now, so that’s not pressing.)”
I house rule it away while keeping opponents by instead using something of a smite opponent ability. Rather than broad strokes of good vs. evil, it works on the principle that if damage is dealt to an the paladin or an ally or the ‘opponent’ is preventing the paladin from pursuing their cause, (using allegiances is key here) then the paladin can smite them. Rather than being a damaging strike empowered with good/evil energy, it becomes instead a strike empowered due to belief itself, because it is empowered with the user’s belief in their cause. It therefore becomes possible that a good angel could get smited by a paladin while the paladin may be unable to smite a demon.
The same applies to rest of the alignment-based spells/abilities in the game, save DR, which can be turned into DR/magic or DR/–. (IMC, I’m keeping DR/good and DR/evil for outsiders and clerics/paladins, but it’s always based on their ‘planar origin’ rather than their actual beliefs, so it’s more like DR/plane than DR/alignment)
Frank – Maybe we just play with different types of players. I don’t have the issues of player conflicts within game. The paladin and the thief can play in a group just fine. A paladin isn’t going to begrudge the guy who bypasses traps and opens chests. Sure, if he catches the thief picking pockets of innocents he’d stop it, but that’s a different story.
Also, your example of killing being wrong – I believe it is black, period.
Way outside the scope of things though, because as I said – alignments are a rule to pull an abstract viewpoint into a codified system for a game. Just like Armor Class means nothing in the real world, alignments mean nothing in the real world. But you have to have some way to quantify the world in order to make a ruling in a game. If you want to do away with alignments, then you need to do as Monte Cook did – a whole rewrite of a new system that doesn’t have any base for good or evil – no spell descriptors, no creature types, no planes devoted to good and evil, etc. High fantasy does not have that kind of lack. Sword and Sorcery fantasy of the Conan variety has no worries about alignments, but Tolkien most definitely puts the world into categories of good and evil. D&D is founded upon the Tolkien vision of fantasy literature, not the Hyborian Age – as such, alignments are integral to the system.
I’m not saying you can’t play in a system without alignments, but that arguing against them in D&D is like arguing against feats, skills, AC, etc. Just go play in a different system, or make your own.
Mercutio, Monte Cook didn’t get rid of good/evil in his game exceedingly High Fantasy game. It fits in very well, and there are characters/creatures practically dripping with it. All he did was remove the mechanical ability to tell whether or not people are good or evil (or chaotic or lawful).
Real world or game, the existence of absolute good/evil and the ability to determine absolute good/evil are two very separate things. One might attempt to exclude certain ones (for various reasons), but you can’t ditch the logical concepts. I find that most alignment discussions are so contentious because many people fail to recognize that distinction.
(Einan) Maybe I’m missing something, but how is alignment supposed to work?
I’m not sure if you meant this in the technical sense, which (in the case of D&D) was covered by Bento’s comment #5, or in the sense that I asked the question: What is alignment actually supposed to do?
I left that one open-ended because I think there are several ways to answer it, and a variety of opinions on what alignment is designed to do.
Personally, I think it was mainly intended to help develop a character, and secondarily intended to explain the world in Tolkienesque terms (evil races, etc.). It fails miserably at the first one, and I don’t find the second one all that interesting.
(Chris) Alignment works well if you want to have divisions amongst characters.
So true. I hadn’t thought of that at all.
(Mercutio) Next, alignments are only straitjackets in the sense that people don’t seem to understand that the alignment is an overall averaged out thing. No person who is lawful good will be lawful or good all the time.
The problem is that the rules don’t support this, except in the most general sense. Every other mechanical element in the game is what it is — characters don’t have feats most of the time, or get to use their OCC abilities (Palladium) some of the time, hit points are always hit points, etc.
But not, as you said, alignment.
With D&D, the fact that alignment — a fuzzy target intended to help with characterization — gets used in a very concrete way in the DR rules, in spells, etc. only makes things worse. It leads to the assumption that alignment is equally concrete in all aspects.
Crazy Jerome – your point of separating real world from game is a good one. Except that as soon as people want to correlate between actions, morals, and alignment, our only hope is to make parallels with the real world. And then all the real world mess gets dragged in.
Mercutio – As to going to a different game if you don’t like alignment, that’s certainly a valid suggestion, though it’s possible to play D&D without alignments. I’m glad you have found gamers who can play alignments without all the crap. My experience (and everything I read on the web) suggests this is very rare. My experience also suggests that it essentially doesn’t happen without alignments.
So I support Martin’s premise above. Alignment looks like a good idea, but it doesn’t work in practice, at least not well enough to be encoded into the most popular RPG.
Martin – I think alignment was originally for the more Tolkiensque purpose. Remember, D&D started off as a glorified wargame. Of course as one of the few rules that could be used to address characterization, it quickly became primarily a characterization rule. And the rules text started to talk about the GM watching the player’s actions, and penalizing the player for playing out of alignment, and even forcing alignment changes. I don’t know what transpired during 2e, but by 3e, it’s returned somewhat to the Tolkienesque meaning, unfortunately, there is a huge player history of the characterization way, and the text still talks to some extent about the characterization stuff (though the punishment stuff is no longer there).
Frank
Will’s comment about alignment-keyed magic in D&D is worth noting. In D&D, it’s hard to get rid of alignment because of the magic tie ins. I’d chuck it, but I don’t want to go to all the bother to rejigger all the magic that’s dependent on the system.
I prefer Wheel of Time, another game that jetisoned alignment. Players are expected to make their own moral decisions, and live with the results.
Removing alignment from D&D isn’t too bad if you keep the alignment descriptors. That way, extra planar creatures are still affected. Paladins perhaps are still affected (though their smite might not be quite as good – of course you could add alignment descriptors to a few things like undead). DR and vs. evil swords still have a place.
But it certainly is easier to go with a game that has ditched the aligments for you already. Until you want to try and use a D&D module…
Frank
Martin sees alignment as painting a character in broad strokes, discouraging development. I see alignment as a rough sketch begging to be fleshed out, refined, and perhaps overhauled as the game is played.
Although Martin didn’t say so in as many words, it’s pretty clear he’s talking about D&D. What other mainstream game suffers the faults he attributes to it? Most games simply have no alignment system. Of those that do, most have limited it to an advisory role (see White Wolf’s Storyteller system’s Nature/Demeanor). In an advisory role it’s pretty harmless and should be taken as seriously as you take the backstory the player wrote for the character. It’s a useful summary.
D&D is a special case because alignment exists both as an advisory guideline for the character and as an in game element. This confuses the situation. It is, however, a core part of D&D’s mindset. It’s not about giving you unlimited freedom to slaughter goblins without moral consideration, but it is about creating a high fantasy world with relatively sharp distinctions between Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. It’s about a world where someone can have a soul so black that even trying to pick up the Blade of Righteousness will burn them. D&D’s alignment system does a servicable, if not great, job.
(If it really bothers you, it’s pretty easy to strip out. There really aren’t that many rules that are directly impacted by alignment. Scrub it from PCs. As a GM, use NPC and monster alignments simply as a shorthand for general tendencies. For those spells and effects that specifically impact particular alignments, limit them to effecting creatures who are innately alignment with those alignments (demons=chaos and evil, devils=law and evil). For extra measure consider the negative material plane to the evil and positive to be good. Now the spell or weapon of Evil-Thwacking only does bonus damage to devils, demons, and undead, but that’s still pretty useful. Resolve the occasional special case as nencessary. For example: Paladins are locked to a lawful good alignment. Instead lock them to a code of conduct that would please their diety (indeed, I hold my PC paladins to that anyway).)
As for Martin’s specific complaints, I think he overgeneralized in some cases.
• Alignment is a shortcut past real character development: This would appear to depend on one’s group. In most of the games I’ve played alignment is a starting point, a sketch of morality from which the character builds.
• There’s always at least one “do whatever you want†alignment: I’m not sure what Martin’s point is. Yes. And that alignment represents someone with no moral connection to society as a whole: a psychopath. You can pretty much read “Chaotic-Evil” in D&D as “psychopath.” That’s within the spectrum of people you’d want to portray (if only as an NPC; psychopath PCs are usually more trouble than they’re worth).
• Evil = you can kill it without feeling bad: Definately not my experience. I’ve regularly gamed with groups who captured an evil being, had no real option to have that being imprisoned, and couldn’t bring themselves to kill them. My experience has generally been that the PCs are only willing to kill without remorse to stop concrete evil acts. You raid a goblin lair not because “goblins are evil aligned”, but because “the goblins regularly raid the village, killing innocents each time.” It has nothing to do with alignment and everything to do with the genre expectations of heroic fantasy.
• Even if the game says it’s just a guideline, someone takes it as a rule: Blaming a rule because a rules-lawyer (be it player of GM) violates it is unfair.
• As a GM, alignments color my expectations about PC actions, often to my detriment: How more or less so than the character’s backstory?
I’m not saying alignment is a perfect tool, but it isn’t a complete failure. It certainly hasn’t proved a hindrance to any game I’ve played since grade school. The obviously stupid parts in D&D’s alignment system (XP penalties for changing alignment) have been gone for a while now.
“Crazy Jerome – your point of separating real world from game is a good one. Except that as soon as people want to correlate between actions, morals, and alignment, our only hope is to make parallels with the real world. And then all the real world mess gets dragged in.”
That isn’t my point. My point is that there are two logically separate things:
1. Existence (or not) of absolutes (moral, ethical, however you want to put it).
2. The ability to determine when and how those absolutes apply.
Conceptually, the real world and game world(s) are alike in this respect, not different.
D&D says that some absolutes exist, and there are reliable ways to detect them. AE says that absolutes may or may not exist, but there are no reliable ways to detect them. (Individual groups are free to decide how they want it to work in AE, but Monte has said more than once that the lack of #2 doesn’t forclose the possibility of #1.) In the real world, we’d say that #2 is impossible, while #1 is a source of much contention–especially given the difficulty with #2.
You might say that you can escape alignments or not, as it suits you. You can’t escape the question of alignments. 😀
(Alan De Smet) Although Martin didn’t say so in as many words, it’s pretty clear he’s talking about D&D.
Nope, not just D&D. 😉
My experience with RPGs with alignments includes:
– D&D, naturally
– Palladium games
– Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (the first one)
And for me, what I said holds true for all three games.
Alignment could be the tip of a character development iceberg, and in some groups (like yours, Alan) that’s probably exactly what it is. But I’d rather have a different tip of that iceberg included in the rules — one that doesn’t suffer from alignment’s problems.
Alignment feels like an add-on, and a kludgy one at that.
There’s always at least one “do whatever you want†alignment: I’m not sure what Martin’s point is. Yes. And that alignment represents someone with no moral connection to society as a whole: a psychopath.
I had in mind D&D’s Chaotic Neutral, WFRP’s Neutral and Palladium’s whatever-they-call-it (I don’t have any Palladium stuff anymore), the alignments that are so unbounded and flexible that they make the whole system pointless.
As a GM, alignments color my expectations about PC actions, often to my detriment: How more or less so than the character’s backstory?
Because when alignment is on the table, and especially when deeper character development isn’t, I fall into the same trap as many players. I’m planning for an adventure, and I think to myself, “Of course Ralph will want to rescue the villagers. His alignment is X.”
With a character background that has some meaningful hooks, useful flags and other sticky bits in it, that mistake is a lot harder for me to make. It doesn’t even have to be a novel, a short one will do.
Good character development and alignment aren’t mutually exclusive, but my experience has been that the presence of alignment either a) makes good development less likely to happen, or b) is completely superfluous when good character development is also present.
I went on for far too long. I agree that for most games (probably the vast majority) an alignment system doesn’t add anything and probably hurts the game.
Forunately, it looks like they’re dying out. I’m don’t know enough about WFRP to speak to it, but Palladium is just a very old game with lots of historical baggage. Given its niche status, I don’t thing it’s terribily relevant to the dicussion; people playing Palladium know what they’re getting into. D&D is more relevant because of it’s overwhelming popularity.
For D&D some of the ideas they want to bring forth (items and beings of pure Good/Evil/Law/Chaos and their impact on PCs) call for some sort of system. D&D’s alignment system has many flaws, but it supports these ideas at least servicably well. A better system is probably possible, but in the absence of that better system I find that the negative aspects of D&D’s alignment system are not significant in real play.
Ultimately, I think you’re railing against an idea that’s already on its way out. D&D is the last noteworthy holdout, and that alignment system is needed (barring an unlikely overhaul to replace it). Sure, you’ll get the occasional new D&D knockoff that includes alignment, but you see lots of questionable ideas rehashed by new game authors. For modern successful games alignment is pretty much dead.
I don’t know if I agree that alignment is on its way out. I think a lot of experienced RPGers are moving away from it, but that doesn’t really tell us about the majority of gamers. A slightly asymmetrical counterexample could be to look at computer games, where alignment (in my estimation) seems to be doing quite well.
My two cents:
I think it’s bad, if for no other reason than no two people can agree on it. I mean, Regdar’s, over at the Wizards.com boards, speciifally disallows alignment threads. There was a petition on the “What’s a DM to Do?” board to stop them altogether. It’s crazy!
T
As I said, Alignment tends to trip up the party mentality more than help it, and D&D is firmly a party vs. opposition game. For comparison, consider Paranoia’s secret societies + work sectors as types of alignments, and that they’re all designed to set the player’s against each other, which they do rather well.
Systemically as a magic thing, or as a DR issue, I have no problem with alignment. As a guideline to character behavior, and often depicted as an inflexible one at that, you end up sabotaging the baseline party concept.
In fact, I mentioned to a friend that you’d have less problems if the divisions were based on something more abstract- like elements, which do not necessarily indicate instant hostility or unwavering opposed beliefs- Fire & Water may be “against” each other, but it doesn’t mean the PCs need be.
I quit using alignment for PC´s long ago, but it helps the DM running NPC´s and monsters, that are not especially detailed.
I’m also unsure that alignment is on it’s way out. I don’t think it’ll really be headed the way of the dodo until it stops being a part of D&D.
Even then, until a new generation or two of gamers take root, it’s part of the culture for a lot of folks.
I really don’t understand what the issue is. There’s an entire list of categories that Fred the fighter (spanning the multiverse of editions) falls into:
Humanoid
Human
Medium sized
Fighter
Warrior (they dropped this one in 3rd edition. remember when the fighter, paladin, ranger, and barbarian were part of the warrior group, the thief bard and assassin were part of the rogue group, etc…?)
Prime
There’s also a list of things that Fred’s NOT:
subtyped
cursed, poisoned, whatever…
All of these are tags that show how Fred interacts with various other entities within his world.
He’s humanoid, so he can be effected by charm person, hold person, and any other effect that effects humanoids.
He’s human, so he’s effected by that ring of human control, and that sleep spell, but he can’t use the Axe of dwarven kings
He’s medium sized, so he takes up a 5’x5′ square and has a 5′ reach. He can use medium or smaller weapons in one hand, large weapons in two hands, and time was, he would take a different amount of damage from different weapons.
He’s a fighter, so he can get weapon specialization and use the rod of lordly might as a weapon (or whatever that thing is)
He’s a warrior, so he can use all martial weapons and once upon a time got greater strength and con bonuses. and gets a certain BAB.
He’s Prime, so we know how spells like banish effect him.
He’s not subtyped. That means things that have special effect on undead or fire or oozes, etc.. DON’T have a special effect on Fred.
He’s not currently under effect of curses or poisons or whatever. He COULD be, but he isn’t.
Mechanically, all Fred is is a few numbers and then a shitload of tags. Those tags help make everything easier because when someone or something interacts with Fred, we know what happens.
So what’s the big deal? Why are we bitching, because in addition to the hundreds of other tags that Fred carries around, he also carries arround:
Lawful
Good
So that if Fred get hit with a chaotic energy mace, we know how it effects him, or if Fred kisses the book of holy might, we know if he gets buffed or severe burns.
You might say “Well, THOSE tags, tell Fred how to play his character in ADDITION to telling us how he interacts with the world around him!”
We guess what Kreskin? So does every other one of em! If you don’t believe me, pay close attention to your players sometime and see how they play their mages and their halflings. See any similarities? Mages don’t generally hit people with two-handed swords? The halflings are annoying klemptomanical pains in the ass? Well damn! Quick! Let’s form an anti-class protest and an anti-race sit-in! Those class and race tags are telling players how to play their characters! We can’t have that!
Sure. Sure. Not all mages play the same. Not all halflings play the same, but neither do all lawfuls of all evils.
It’s easy to blame inter-party conflict on alignment too isn’t it? Take a closer look and you might see that there are players who play Evil characters in the middle of groups of good characters and there isn’t problem one. Why is that? Maybe because inter-party conflict has NOTHING to do with alignment. What it DOES have to do with is players wanting to cause trouble and finding an excuse to do it.
Anyway, work’s out, I’m off! Have fun everyone!
I play a little D&D, and in it I have two rules related to this in character generation: Characters must be either Lawful or Good, and may not be Chaotic or Evil; there is a short list of compatible deities that PCs may worship, though all PCs with faith-based powers must worship the same deity.
And to say that GURPS doesn’t have alignment isn’t entirely accurate. Again, in my game I require a 10 point Code of Honor. Basically, a “Good” alignment.
As far as PCs stealing from each other: That doesn’t have anything to do with alignment. I’ve been using a kind of standard rule for decades. Want experience points? Don’t hurt, rob, attack, impede, or otherwise interfer in the fun of the other PCs. I hate PKs in computer games. I hate characters who steal party treasure in table top games. “But my character would…” Hey, if you’re really such a great role player, think of a really good in-character reason why you would never rob someone who you depend on for your life every day. I prefer to play with the “Use my magic sword for this battle, it’ll do us better in your hand than in mine” sort of player.
Except for John Arcadian’s quick mention, there’s yet little discussion of the alternate moral tracking systems that pop up in games.
I find the Humanity/Path/Wisdom/Angst system in current and previous incarnations of the World of Darkness heavy and restrictive in a way that D&D alignment can’t hope to be. While there is a certain realistic feel to a moral system that uses a scale, it’s far too wound up into the rest of the system to be a good fit.
In Vampire, for instance, Humanity (Morality) is a scale that measures not only where you fall on a line that seems to measure a range from something like Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil, it also affects your ability to make rational decisions, affects how you can sleep, puts a cap on how social you can be, etc. In other words, WoD Morality isn’t only a straightjacket, it’s deliberately designed to be one.
The virtue of alignment is its simplicity and adaptability. Alignment works because its up to the game master and players to collectively decide what it means to be good or chaotic. Except in a couple corner cases like DR 5/Good and Silver, alignment doesn’t do a lot to force particular behaviors from players. There’s a very wide range between the lawful good paladin who would hunt a vampire across the continent and die before being dishonest and the lawful good baker who tells customers up front that his bread is a day old and gives a silver piece a week to his neighbor for the care of a sick child.
This, in my view, is superior to a system that threatens you with insanity and power loss for shoplifting (see World of Darkness).
I think Alignment has helped with character development. It’s a base point to begin building things like a character’s “worldview” and moral code.
I can build 40 lawful neutral characters and they aren’t completely identical. They may still adhere to the essence of lawful neutrality, but from there they can establish the code that the follow, and why it is they think it’s important to adhere to it. Other characters who are chaotic believe in flexibility, case-by-case study. They may have ways of dealing with blurry situations or those situations may cause them to punt.
The nice thing about alignment is it lets me build characters that are more unlike me than if I didn’t have it.
I also should add that it’s just one of many basepoints I begin personality development with.
My only complaint is the tie-ins with “Protection against Evil” etc. These are legacy applications of folk tales about being able to protect yourself from all manner of foul beast with garlic or magic or whatever. It’s a bit antiquated
It’s hard for modern folk to believe in such nonsense, but it’s a fantasy game.
Alignment is tied to a given setting rather than being an indispensable part of a gaming system.
A GM seeking arbitrary restrictions on character behavior can abuse these rules in obvious ways, but in-game, how is it rationalized? Are the gods sitting in judgment of the PCs? Do their pacts with dark powers have actual consequences? These strike me as good things to do with alignments, challenges that players can overcome with smart roleplaying.
It’s not as simple as “alignments suck.” Alignments are simply not appropriate to every campaign or gaming group. D&D alignments assume the default setting of Greyhawk, or similar settings that players of the system might not use.
John – good point, except the problem with D&D alignment is that it ISN’T tied to a setting. Now RuneQuest/Glortantha on the other hand, it has various “alignments” and allegiances, which are all tied to explicit setting. Chaos isn’t just some arbitrary bad thing. It’s a specific force, trying to accomplish specific things in the world.
My other recent thought on this is that ANY personality rules, rules that try and describe how PCs act and think are a problem (even a few of the geases in RuneQuest are a problem in this aspect). I have seen just as bad abuses of psychological disadvantages in Hero system as alighment in D&D. The problem is that as soon as you assign fixed rules to this, they either cramp flexibility (when most real world people are flexible – going back to are things black and white, and is killing black – if killing truly is absolute black, then all of modern society falls apart – because I see no way to establish a stable society without killing at least a few people), or they provide the “I was just playing my character by the rules ” (the rules told the player he HAD to destroy the fun of the rest of the players – bull pucky!) excuses.
Time and time again, I have seen players abuse personality rules. In theory, social contract should solve the problem, but in practice it doesn’t. Some dick comes along and bends the social contract and personality rules all to hell, and runs roughshod over the game. Take those personality rules away, and my experience has been pretty universal in seeing the problem never show up. Oh, and toss in the “dwarves and elves hate each other” from the early D&D days into the same personality rules bucket.
Now at a certain level, where the personality rules aren’t central to the game, or are well grounded in a general system of allegiances and alliances that are campaign appropriate (for example, it’s ok in RuneQuest for elves and dwarves to hate each other – I don’t allow PC dwarves, they’re just too weird, and several people hate trolls, which is ok, trolls can be cool, but they can serve quite well as raw enemies, and no one likes undead and chaos).
Frank
Well, Frank, I still have to disagree. Alignment in the xD&D rules assumes the existence of deities/powers who are in charge of things.
It’s possible for a campaign to echo the old D&D cartoon, of course, and to have Dungeon Master as a character in the place of the gods. If that campaign uses alignments, it will be that “Dungeon Master” who judges the characters’ actions.
Aside from that ridiculous (IMO) example, a campaign world may not have gods at all, or the powers of that world might be so remote as to render quaint the provisions of the alignment rules. The surgical removal of those rules by the game master is a rather obvious choice in such a case.
A game master who wants to keep his deities mysterious even when they show up in person might choose to ignore alignment dicta, if only to keep players from trying to rules-lawyer such powerful NPCs.
The old alignment languages were perhaps the most ludicrous (again, IMO) manifestation of alignment as a tangible thing. I can imagine settings in which characters live, eat and breathe the divine presence, and can agree that such sily rules might have a place in such a game (Planescape variants come to mind).
Alignment doesn’t strike me as a bad idea, but it is tied to a specific class of settings. Fortunately, it is easily ignored or replaced, depending upon the campaign world.