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Sep 24, 2009 -- 2:42PM, Medhia_Nox wrote:

Awsome, it is extremely likely that were I to sit down at your gaming table that I would seriously enjoy the campaigns set forth. There is every reason for me to believe that I would enjoy the depth and attention given to it to bring it to life. I also believe you would enjoy my character design and not find it trite and one dimensional.

I hope so. I work to make my games as fun as possible, and I'm always open to fun new characters.

I'm not trying to say that alignment is the best invention for RPing. I am also largely being a Devil's Advocate against complexity and character design. I do believe that sometimes people get the concepts of melodrama and interesting characters confused, but that's another issue altogether.

Objective notions of good and evil are, to me, more or less the essence of melodrama. Take a look at how wikipedia defines melodrama,

"characterizations will accordingly be somewhat more one-dimensional: heroes will be unambiguously good and their entrance will be heralded by heroic-sounding trumpets and martial music; villains are unambiguously bad, and their entrance is greeted with dark-sounding, ominous chords.

Melodramas tend to be formulaic productions, with a clearly constructed world of connotations: A villain poses a threat, the hero escapes the threat and/or rescues the heroine. The term is sometimes used loosely to refer to plays, films or situations in which action or emotion is exaggerated and simplified for effect."

That, to me, sounds like a hard and fast alignment system. Villains are villains and heroes are heroes, we always know who is good and who is evil, and who we should be rooting for and why. The only possible emotional outcomes are classically happy (good guy wins) or melodramatically tragic (villain wins).

True drama, as opposed to melodrama, is to be found in shades of gray; in human beings acting not like embodiments of good or evil but like human beings, in partial victories and losses, in ambiguous conflict without a clear resolution. 

I DO feel that alignment has a place.

- As an introduction of "something more" to the game. That "something more" being a characters that are driven by goals, motivations, fears, etc.

See, this is where I feel alignment pushes characters *away* from a complex set of motivations, and towards simplistic, rigid moral codes. Yes, if you're sitting down at some LFR event which is likely to consists of nothing but a 4-encounter delve in which the players will just kill a bunch of monsters, alignment can be useful for pushing players to come up with a modicum of personality that they might otherwise have neglected.

But for a long-term, rp-heavy campaign? One in which entire sessions might consists of nothing but rp and skill challenges, and in which each character will undergo significant personal development? Alignment is, at best, an oversimplified, very minor piece of each character's personality--so much so that you could remove the oversimplified shorthand and lose nothing whatsoever.

- As an interesting philosophical basis. If alignment were dealt with better I think it is a brilliant spring board for 1) Discussion "What IS good?" 2) Self-awareness "What do I believe good is?"

If a simple, stupid childish RPG can drive people toward self-awareness and enlightenment (decidedly NOT the goal of everyone) then... well, it become the most important "game" ever invented.

But this debate is only meaningful if it takes place on the same terms as it takes place in life--i.e. without objective answers. That is, in life we don't have any access to objective answers. None of us do. We can choose to believe a given holy text or philosophy or political system, or just muddle along as best we can. We can approach things logically via philosophy, or simply take cues from our own emotions and gut sense of morality. We can argue with others and attempt to convince them, or draft laws to enforce certain behaviors. But we will never arrive at an objective, definite answer.

And, if you think about it, that lack of an objective answer is the fundamental basis for all major human conflict. Democrats have a different notion of "good" then Republicans, and therein lies the foundation of our political conflict. Israelis have certain ideas of good, and Palestinians have others. Capitalism and communism, and all the muddled systems in between. Hell, just look at pretty much any divorce in modern day america--the husband will have certain ideas of what is right, both for him and the relationship but also in general, and the wife will have others.

Using D&D to explore moral questions is awesome. But they have to be genuine questions. If the answers are right there, bound up in some god's degree, the planar structure of the universe, or an overbearing mechanic, then there are no questions.

Games like White Wolf can't do that because the system that they've developed is only a "Wants vs. Self-Control" (Which they call Virtues and Vices) Again, a good, perhaps great, system.. but "Virtues and Vices" stop short of "the big picture". It's not epic.. it's just.. common.

Epic is just the common writ large. The battle of troy was fundamentally about two dudes wanting to bone the same chick. WW1 was the result of a network of alliances forged for the basest and most common political reasons imaginable. People are people, always. Presidents and dictators and kings just as much as the rest of us. And the wars we fight are always for human reasons--even when we do our damndest to find some biblical or philosophical basis for declaring our cause "objectively good".

These are the only reasons that I believe alignment has a place. I am GLAD that it's mechanical aspects have been diminished. I'd look forward to them being removed altogether.. but even then, I still believe it belongs as part of D&D and NOT just because it's a "Sacred Cow". I couldn't give a damn about tradition.

Making it so people can ignore is a bonus. Some people don't like it, others don't understand it. But I will speak my mind about it being an option so long as forums are available to do so.

Well, on this we can agree--they've made it easy to completely ignore alignments, so it doesn't particularly bother me that a line on my character sheet has space for one, I simply don't fill it out.

Side note, I hope people who are against "realism" in RPGs can gain a little insight from this thread. We take the physical world and treat it the same way we treat the mental world of the characters. Trying to make things as consistent, logical, and parallel to the real world as possible.

Actually, I'm against granular simulationism in gaming as it applies to the physical world for the much the same reason I'm against a rigid alignment system--because a system that truly simulates morality would consist of an infinite number of possible alignments (one, at least, for every person who has ever lived), just a system that attempted to codify the skills associated with any possible human action would consist of an essentially infinite number of possible and distinct skills.

That doesn't mean I don't care about realism. I mean, I don't to the extent that I'm interested in playing a fantasy game full of wizards and dragons. But to the extent that I want people to act like people, or them to employ skills much like they'd take actions in the real world, realism is actually really important to me. I just find that its much, much easier to develop that sense of realism as a DM on a situation-by-situation basis than it is to employ a rigid system that tries (and, inevitably, fails) to codify realism, whether its in morality or skills.