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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:02AM
#51
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- Forum Guide
- Hero Craftsman Gold Medalist
- Master Dungeon Master
Date Joined:
Jun 23, 2005
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I believe, the goal was to have a diverse group of good-aligned PCs with some neutral and groups of evil-aligned NPCs.
I don't see how that could be the goal, since the alignment mechanics never dictated that some alignments were better at certain tasks than others.
If Lawful characters were given benefits to leadership, and Chaotic characters were given benefits to... I don't know, going rogue, you might have a point. But that never happened and it was never the intention of any developer to distinguish alignments in that fashion.
Again, I want a system where character actions and personality affect the game in predictable ways.
It does. They are called "consequences", just like in the real world. If you want those consequences to be enforced mechanically instead of naturally, then you are arguing for a campaign setting involving supra-deific forces.
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:08AM
#52
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Saying that the ideals that they hold are Evil is precisely doing just that.
About 10 years ago, a local pastor who visited the game shop I used to go to tried to DM a game. He decided that rather than use a pre-made campaign setting, he would craft his own setting that was built like a new testament-esque world ripe with shunts of logic here and there (Jesus existed while the Islamic faith was already around... the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Empire existed simultaneously... it was all wonked up for the purpose of making it "fantastical"). He was obviously using it as a subtle conversion tool, but me and a bunch of other guys decided to jump in and play. Everything was going fine, until one of the players said that he wanted his character to be Islamic, after which the pastor objected with:
"If your character is Islamic, then he has to be Evil."
Which was immediately followed by a haughty argument, and most of the group leaving.*
I know that this is an extreme example of the problems that are inherent with alignment, but these problems exist, and alignment has no way to deal with them. Once again, I bring up the classic argument for unbalanced classes: "no one in my playgroup (ab)uses classes that are unbalanced" does not mean that everyone is like your playgroup.
*: [SUB]The epic tale of this story doesn't end there, as I and a few other guys decided to stay on until we had an opportune time to show the pastor the error of his ways. Unfortunately, the very immature deeds we did in this campaign are far to offensive to post in these forums, and as such I will not be risking a ban to tell you all the hilarity. But I have to say, if Pastor Gomez still likes D&D, he either won't be injecting real religion, or he won't be DMing... and I'm proud of that.[/SUB]
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:09AM
#53
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Date Joined:
Sep 24, 2008
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A ran a mini campaign once with that as the premise for the game world - the tension between Law and Chaos was greater than that between Good and Evil.
So the party had a Paladin (I forget of who, Heironeus probably) and a lawful evil Blackguard of Hextor teamed up going after some followers of Eruthnul, who were naturally all chaotic evil.
It was a fun campaign.
That does sound like a fun campaign. 
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:10AM
#54
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Date Joined:
Feb 20, 2007
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The problem is, what are you possibly going to change my alignment to? All of my characters are solidly in 3+ alignments, because I create actual personalities. Are you going to keep changing my alignment round robin? What's the point?
I can just see it now.
You're all sitting at the game table and the DM whips out a couple of darts, a dart board, and a cooking timer. He throws a dart and it lands towards the edge at the 10 o'clock position. He then throws the second dart and it lands in between the edge and the bull's eye at the 7:30 position.
"Max, your character's alignment is now mildly LE for the next fifty minutes." *Sets the timer.* "Then we'll check again."
My position:
As long as there are no mechanical aspects of alignment, I can live with it still being there (because I can ignore it entirely). This means that the Platinum Warlord and the Channel Divinity feats (at least for a Paladin) are still a problem for me. Why must the Platinum Warlord (or more accurately, the list of class features named "Platinum Warlord") be constrained to G or LG? Why must Paladins be the same alignment as their deity when Clerics can get away with being U and still worshipping whoever they want (more to the point, why must the deities be constrained by alignment)?
I've finally figured out how to put in a sig. Yes, I'm including this here for no other reason than to express how happy I am that I could finally do this. For goodness' sake, change these forums back (or just change, I don't care).
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:12AM
#55
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I don't thnk alignment can work well, mechanically, in a way that is not naturally conductive to roleplaying the values of that alignment. In this edition, alignment has minimal or no mechanical value, so it's pretty much a nonissue here. Previous editions, however, presented alignment not as incentives, but as limits to what how you could portray your characters. The instances in which alignment provided mechanical benefits were rare in the extreme. On the other hand, being punished for straying out was common.
I think that any kind of mechanical re-introduction of alignment should be based on providing roleplaying incentives. Rather than punishing characters for acting out of alignment, reward them for actively promoting the values of their alignment.
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:14AM
#56
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- Forum Guide
- Hero Craftsman Gold Medalist
- Master Dungeon Master
Date Joined:
Jun 23, 2005
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From the way I see it, there are two main advantages to checking against LN instead of against Wee Jas's tenets.
1) It provides a simplier structure for initial checking and comparision.
With simplicity comes inaccuracy.
Law is described as those who "tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties." Wee Jas has some traditions (but so does almost every deity), and judges wizards, but has no compunctions about honesty or authority.
Of let's look at the description of Lawful Neutral: "A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs her. Order and organization are paramount to her. She may believe in personal order and live by a code or standard, or she may believe in order for all and favor a strong, organized government."
Does sound like Wee Jas? Not particularly. Sure, Wee Jas is organized, but that's about it.
In contrast, let's look at Chaotic Neutral:
A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn’t strive to protect others’ freedom. He avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions. A chaotic neutral character does not intentionally disrupt organizations as part of a campaign of anarchy. To do so, he would have to be motivated either by good (and a desire to liberate others) or evil (and a desire to make those different from himself suffer). A chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it.
Man, this seems about as descriptive of Wee Jas as Lawful neutral! Wee Jas and her followers are individualistic and they value their freedom to conduct arcane research, avoiding authority and resenting restrictictions on that research, which is why many of them are hermits.
In short, I don't think alignment is useful as a god proxy, even shorthand.
It is easier to remember the 4 to 6 concepts of law/neutral/chaos and good/neutral/evil or the 9 alignments than it is to remember the tenets of all the gods.
I wish you'd keep saying this because it's an absurd argument. Any given DM doesn't have to memorize the tenets of every god. He only has to know the tenets of the gods followed by the divine-classed members of the party. Usually, that should be no more than one or two. In contrast, a party may have up to six different alignments within it. If the goal is to reduce workload, then alignment fails in that endeavor.
If I have a particular idea of my cleric's personality, I can assign an alignment, then see what gods would be applicable.
But clerics should not pick gods based on who they'd like to date, but based on what domains the god governs in which the cleric is interested.
It also provides a framework which gives a basis of expectations.
As set forth above, it creates laughably unrealistic expectations. Wee Jas' expectations are not well-approximanted by looking at LN
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:20AM
#57
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- Forum Guide
- Hero Craftsman Gold Medalist
- Master Dungeon Master
Date Joined:
Jun 23, 2005
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Edit: Response to your edit, well what if you are DMing a large group.
Few campaign have multiple divine classes of multiple deities.
Or play with multiple groups.
You still only have to keep in mind the gods for the game you're playing at the time you're playing.
Or have characters that die and are replaced?
Then you drop the god of the dead cleric and look up the god of the new one. It's not inconvenient.
Or you want to have a campaign with many gods fighting for power?
Alignment isn't helpful here, since they'd be fighting over their individual interests, unless in your campaign, the gods are mere puppets of alignment. I.e., you're playing in a campaign specifically built around alignment.
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:21AM
#58
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Interesting. I missed out on all that, so it has never been an issue for me.
The objective conflict is still part and parcel to the alignment system, or its largely worthless. The whole point behind alignment is to represent the high fantasy manifestation of two opposing bodiless forces fighting over the universe... in this case, four forces fighting two battles. Take that away, and alignment becomes largely moot, and little more than single- or double-word descriptors for personality, better served by a larger, better defining structure of single- or double-words, or potentially even something involving more than two words.
I didn't get that assassination was meant to be evil in D&D. I begin to see that there were some vastly different perceptions on how things were to be run in earlier editions. Some people seem to take alignment too literally. See, I saw the assassin class as an evil class, not because they performed assassinations, but because they did so for money and cared not who the target was in general. So, they would kill innocents and guilty alike without a care.
If someone came to me and said they had an idea for a character--> he is an assassin, but for the church, and he uses his talents to take out only evil creatures, but he is Neutral Good because he obviously doesn't follow the church's creed; I would be more than happy to let him play that character.
What do you consider acceptable atrocities in the name of good? Without getting into extreme "save the world" situations.
Remember, a character from any class does not have his aims necessarily defined by his class. If you take up the rogue class, it does not necessarily mean you are a pickpocket, nor does it necessarily mean you are only doing it for money. An assassin is a number of things, only a few of which necessarily do it for money (especially considering that the original namesake for the assassin didn't do it for money). Hence the problem: the class actually defined the personality by tying an alignment to it.
That said, the concept behind "greater good" is that so long as the good of the end-result significantly outweighs the evil committed to achieve it, it's a good act. So in a modern example, if blowing up a single busload of people helps you infiltrate and destroy an organization of busload-of-people-killing terrorists who kill busloads of people all the time, it was worth it. Conversely in a more appropriate example for D&D, sacrificing one innocent to Tharizdun is worth it if you can completely annihilate the target cult, since you will stop the hundreds of sacrifices they make a year. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" taken to its logical conclusion.
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:40AM
#59
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Except that you'd have to ignore the fact that alignment does still define personality.
Of course, there's still the fact that tenets do not affect alignment, or vice versa. But since those tenets are specifically tied to the actions of people befitting a specific alignment, we're still left with a quandry you haven't really answered. If you can be of any alignment and still worship a god, how do you do so without altering that gods intentions and beliefs in a way that befits your alignment? Moreover, how does an Unaligned cleric worship a Good or Evil god without bringing their precepts into Unaligned territory?
I stole this from another thread, but don't worry I won't name, names.
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4 years ago ::
Feb 25, 2009 - 11:46AM
#60
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Date Joined:
Dec 11, 2007
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Well what do you know, Wee Jas is lawful stupid from her 1st ED write up, and then goes through 4 different deity writeups ending at 3rd ED with little conection to her old persona. Wonderful. Okay lets skip to something easier, and consistant.
We have a deity of magical research and secrets who doesn't care how knowledge is obtained or even if it is passed out, so long as progress is made. Said deity is Evil, due to her willingness to commit any atrocity in the name of research. However since she only cares about results she should have no alignment restrictions on clerics. In fact she would specifically want good clerics to research Exalted spells.
Okay, lets examine your goddess. Wouldn't she have a problem with mages who did not go to "any means" to obtain knowledge? Would she see it as weakness or not commitment?
And even if she's okay with followers and "normal worshippers" not going to the same extreme as she would, would she really want clerics, who teach her tenets, to limit themselves?
Additionally, why would a good aligned person be advocating a god who regularly commits atrocities? We're not just talking about a wizard who worships, but someone who devoted their life to this god.
Saying that the ideals that they hold are Evil is precisely doing just that.
You are not your character.
Additionally, this character, even if you decide they have a personality exactly the same as you, lives in a completely different world. We're not even talking about a different world in the sense of politics and philosophy, we're talking about a world in where there are monsters, magic, heroes, gods, etc.
Also, most people probably do a pretty poor analysis of themselves IF they wanted to recreate themself as their character.
So unless you are saying that your character's actions completely reflect what you, personally, would do, then how can you relate having your character judged as evil to having you be judged as evil.
If they put claim that those morals are somehow right and pure or that mine are corrupt and Evil I do consider it a mark against the work. Fortunatly most entertainment presents things in more open and reasonable manner, or with the deck so stacked the moral is killed.
So I guess you don't like dystopian or utopian stories, along with much of science-fiction.
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