Quote from: mcbobbo;688704It's an RPG.  It doesn't have to be realistic, only functional.  So, to that expectation you in fact can.

QuoteObviously everyone who plays an RPG is a person.  But this doesn't mean they will act that way.  Many players would do things with a character that they would never, ever do in real life.  Like, say, murdering transients.  So this point is immediately pretty weak.

QuoteLet me just direct you to the WEG d6 rules for the Force.

QuoteWrong!  Alignment is something the player chooses at character creation, and is something they can typically change.  Paladins aside, the only players who caution a beating are those who get psychotic, in alignment terms.

QuoteIt's a source for roleplaying opportunities.  The lack of people rising to them is hardly an indictment of the concept.

QuoteThere's also the issue of clerics, druids, paladins, and the like being expected to follow alignments as a function of class balance.  If you take away the behavioral restrictions, then you may also want to consider letting wizards wear armor, too.  Or at least let your druids wear metal.

Quote from: Ravenswing;688690Alignment is THE single stupidest, illogical and anti-roleplaying concept with which the wargamers who invented this hobby stuck us.

Even in the cookie-cutter campaigns where everyone plays - or claims to play -  just as the module authors design ... ten times more people than actually play to any consensus concept try to argue, sometimes fantastically so, why their actions and roleplay really are in tune with their pet alignment. (And that almost always involves trying to justify a Good alignment. Why is that? How many times do you hear the Chaotic Evil fellow argue angrily that those weren't really *good* acts he was doing, and you shouldn't penalize him for it?)  It's caused more in-game arguments than all other mechanics combined.

You can't come up with an all-encompassing code that defines every least little aspect of human behavior and morality under an umbrella of Good and Not Good ... even if you sort through the circumstances under which it is Good and Not Good to kill puppies, can you also arrive on a universal consensus concerning criminals?  Outlanders?  Slaves?  Orcs?  Anyone who gets in your face?  How about just maiming them?  Okay, the Powers That Be say the purity of your race and the safety of your country depends on eliminating those rapist subhuman greedy orcs, and that is for the greater good.  Most fantasy campaigns would sign off on that, I expect.  Delete the word 'orcs' from that sentence, substitute 'Jews.'  How do you feel about that now?

You won't find many people who will agree as to how free spirited you have to be to be officially Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic.  How many laws do you have to break to stop being lawful?  Fifty percent?  Twenty-five percent?  Five percent?  Just one, ever?  How about you, do you agree with that percentage?  And are we talking about biggies, like you're no longer Lawful if you commit treason or murder, or will jaywalking or mouthing off to your parents suffice to make you Chaotic, and how many streets do you have to cross outside the walk to make you as Chaotic as a regicide?  (Or failing to do your lawful duty and eliminate those Jews previously cited.)  And whose laws?  The local lord?  The local church's?  Oregon and seven other states say it's lawful to grow marijuana for medical purposes, and the United States government's position is that they will throw you in prison for trying.

•  In similar fashion, does law = black-letter legal code or does law = acknowledged social custom, and what happens when social custom and your legal code conflict?

I have never heard an adequate explanation of why it is necessary to stick RPGs with this system, nor why it can't be deleted from the vast majority of them.  But I've heard a lot of INadequate explanations ...

* Let's start with the "moral compass" rationale, that it's necessary to give beginning players a notion of what's acceptable or not.  But those players don't come to the table without knowledge of right vs. wrong. They're products of our 21st century culture, and regardless of their personal beliefs, they can't be unaware of the codes professed by our societies and our religions. The most case-hardened gangbanger, no matter how much he might scoff, knows that our society regards stealing, murder, lying and violence as wrong and decrees punishments for them. Now individual DMs might run their campaigns differently from the norm - the NastyBad NPC race there is de facto Evil, so it's "Lawful Good" to exterminate them on sight - but you're not going to learn that from a two-letter tag anyway; you need to learn that from play, just like anyone else.  I'm seriously bewildered at the premise that in order to roleplay distinguishing "good" from "evil," you need a gamewriter to define it for you ... which, as to that, they almost never actually do.

* Alignment defines "good guy" and "bad guy?" Oh please. If the players are too stupid to figure that out without a glowing two-letter symbol hovering over the foreheads of the NPCs, they're hopeless.  People make snap decisions on ally vs enemy on many more reasons than abstract and unidentifiable notions such as "good" or "bad." Be the wrong skin color or have the wrong accent, a lot of people'll perceive you as an enemy. Wear a Yankees or a Lakers shirt around my neck of the woods, a lot of people'll perceive you as an enemy. Walk around the wrong neighborhood wearing clothes well outside the neighborhood's social station, a lot of people'll perceive you as an enemy. Be athletic, well-spoken and/or good looking, a lot of people will want to perceive you as a friend.

* Define the PCs' roleplay? Players manage to roleplay perfectly well in unaligned game systems.  D&D players surely aren't so much more inadequate at roleplaying than (say) GURPS or Traveller players, are they?

* "Allegiance to a cause?" Allegiance to what, precisely, since most games aren't based around Alignment Wars, most PCs don't define their gameplay around (say) Defending Neutrality To The Last, and most gamers can't agree on what exactly the alignments MEAN?

* It's necessary for "Detect Good/Evil" spells?  Let's leave aside the self-justification argument.  The obvious solution is to change or drop any such spell.  Many systems and campaigns have "Detect Ethos" or "Detect Enemy" spells, where someone opposed to your religion, or with hostile intent towards you, is red-flagged.  

* There's an objective standard ordained by the Gods?  Um ... riiiight.  Like almost all fantasy worlds, yours isn't monotheistic.  According to your myths, your gods can't agree on who's supposed to be sleeping with whom or on what kind of clothing priests should wear, and they're all marching in lockstep over infinitely complex issues of morality?  Exactly who put THAT one over on Paradise, and why are the other gods standing for it?

Beyond that, the only practical use of alignment is as a stick to beat people for "violating" it. Why?  People do what they do, act how they act, and take - or duck - whatever consequences arise. If I decide that while my character plans to be nice to my friends and to non-offensive strangers, petty rules really don't concern me, what makes my decisions and gameplay more valid or less so just because a DM hangs a "CG" tag on me?

No. Alignment doesn't help roleplay; someone who wanted to play a nasty solipsist rogue would do so without the numbers, and someone who wants to play a hack-n-slash munchkin will pay the letters lip service at best. For everyone I've heard say how wonderful alignment is I've heard fifty bitter screeds from people feeling they've been screwed because of differences over the definitions.  The best way to game is ditch the entire concept. Even D&D works quite well without it, and doing so pulls a perpetual and poisonous bone of contention from many campaigns. Judge people on their actions and beliefs -- or, alternatively, don't bother to "judge" them at all! -- not on how closely they adhere to an arbitrary two-letter label upon which few ever agree.


{*} - This was written several years ago, as you can tell.  Funny, that ... our laws have changed.  So ... do you flip your stance on drug use, all you Lawful Good types, because the government has?

Quote from: Bill;688777What idiot gm puts a cg tag on a character controlled by a player? I assume you mean puts a tag and thern tells the player how to play. Duh...bad gm

Quote from: Ravenswing;688828The ones who say "You have to pick an alignment" and won't take No for an answer, I expect.  Which, I imagine, are quite a lot of them.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;688835Picking an alignment is not the same as being told how to play. I have always used alignment in D&D and never told anyone "you can't do that" because of alignment.

I will warn someone if an action is directly opposed to their alignment but they are still free to DO it.

Quote from: fuseboy;688601My favorite interpretation is alignment as affiliation, rather than an ethical stance.  It says who you are striving for and with, rather than a classification of your actions.

Quote from: Bill;688846Real example of a player that did not really grasp 'Good' -- Paladin (LG variety, first edition dnd...the ones that radiate protection from evil 10' radius all the time.)

This Paladin, when another character questioned the worthiness of the paladins personal quest, put his sword to the fellows neck and said "Swear to join my quest or die"  Epic fail ...

Quote from: Ravenswing;689243Judging from the threads I've seen over the years, there'd be just as many folks who'd claim that your stance was screwed up, and that the player understood just fine.  What do you mean I've fallen? he'd say.  I'm a paladin, so obviously my quest is Good.  If you refuse to buy into it, you're going against Good.  So that means you're Evil, and that means you have to die.

Yes, yes, I'm sure that most people here would sneer at that POV as stupid and illogical ... however much the Deus Volt! types, throughout world history, have operated pretty much on that value system.

Quote from: talysman;688506If the precondition to alignment is that there has to be a Great Planar Wheel with planes aligned with (enforcing?) the essentials of each alignment, then I'm against it. It's certainly not the way *I* conceive of alignment.

For me, alignment is just a couple broad factions and behaviors. They are a broad guideline for the GM, but not strict philosophical codes or role-playing restrictions. Choosing an alignment means it's easier to find allies with creatures of that alignment, you have access to certain artifacts and are banned from using others, and if you are a cleric and not Chaotic, you can turn undead. That's it. That's what's in original D&D, and that's what I support.

The other stuff? That's for you other guys.

Quote from: Premier;688510Against.

I hate alignment exactly because it sets restrictions on what a character can or cannot do. If you don't want your character to rape children in the game, then you just don't say "my character rapes that child". It's that simple, you don't need to have an actual line on your sheet telling you you can't do it.

The D&D alignment system had the potential to become an interesting element along the original, Moorcockian Law-Chaos axis, and bits of this potential shine through in, for example, the BECMI series, where it's implied that a Chaotic human warrior out of the city could request shelter in the lair of a Chaotic dragon or somesuch. But this potential was never realised, never actually built into the game as an integral part. Instead, the 5- and 9-pronged system came along and fucked up the interesting elements of the Moorcockian system, turning it into an ugly hybrid which is equally incapable of modelling actual morality or the interplay of objective cosmological forces.

QuoteAnd the Planar Wheel is boring for this very reason. Instead of "anything and everything could be out there", it's "out there all the guys are the same alignment and may have a thin mythological veneer".

Quote from: Bill;689272I think very few people would take that stance actually.

Quote from: Ravenswing;689679I reiterate that the "Failure To Agree That The People We Tell You Are Enemies Of The Faith Are Evil And Must Be Destroyed Means That You Are Evil Yourself" POV is very common in Earth's history, and has broad currency today.

You might not like that POV, might not agree with that POV, but you can't claim it's rare.