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dorchadas
The first is, of course, the alignment of the stereotypical paladin, while the second is what all PCs invariably end up being regardless of what's written on their character sheet.
This is much more general than specific to the campaign ideas I have. If you don't want to read my babbling, skip this one and wait for the next one.
Ah, alignment. Probably the second-most flamewar-ridden topic of discussion about D&D to ever exist (the most being, "[Your favorite edition] sucks!"). Fourth edition simplifies the structure from 9 down to 5 and makes it so they have very little (read: almost no) effect on the game, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about second, when there were 9. As a refresher, the alignments are:
Lawful Good: Characters of this alignment believe that an orderly, strong society with a well-organized government can work to make life better for the majority of the people. To ensure the quality of life, laws must be created and obeyed. When people respect laws and try to help one another, society as a whole prospers.
Lawful Neutral: Order and organization are of paramount importance to characters of this alignment. They believe in a strong, well-ordered government, whether that government is a tyranny or benevolent democracy. The benefits of organization and regimentation outweigh any moral questions raised by their actions.
Lawful Evil: These characters believe in using society themselves. Structure and organization elevate those who deserve to rule as well as provide a clearly defined hierarchy between master and servant. To this end, lawful evil characters support laws and societies that protect their own concerns.
Neutral Good: These characters believe that a balance of forces is important, but that the concerns of law and chaos do not moderate the need for good. Since the universe is vast and contains many creatures striving for different goals, a determined pursuit of good will not upset the balance; it may even maintain it. If fostering good means supporting organized society, then that is what must be done.
True Neutral: True neutral characters believe in the ultimate balance of forces, and they refuse to see actions as either good or evil. Since the majority of people in the world make judgments, true neutral characters are extremely rare. True neutrals do their best to avoid siding with the forces of either good or evil, law or chaos. It is their duty to see that all of these forces remain in balanced contention. True neutral characters sometimes find themselves forced into rather peculiar alliances. To a great extent, they are compelled to side with the underdog in any given situation, sometimes even changing sides as the previous loser becomes the winner. A true neutral druid might join the local barony to put down a tribe of evil gnolls, only to drop out and switch sides when the gnolls were brought to the brink of destruction. He would seek to prevent either side from becoming too powerful. Clearly, there are very few true neutral characters in the world.
Neutral Evil: Neutral evil characters are primarily concerned with themselves and their own advancement. They have no particular objection to working with others or, for that matter, going it on their own. Their only interest is in getting ahead. If there is a quick and easy way to gain a profit, whether it be legal, questionable, or obviously illegal, they take advantage of it.
Chaotic Good: Chaotic good characters are strong individualists marked by a streak of kindness and benevolence. They believe in all the virtues of goodness and right, but they have little use for laws and regulations. They have no use for people who "try to push folk around and tell them what to do." Their actions are guided by their own moral compass which, although good, may not always be in perfect agreement with the rest of society.
Chaotic Neutral: Chaotic neutral characters believe that there is no order to anything, including their own actions. With this as a guiding principle, they tend to follow whatever whim strikes them at the moment. Good and evil are irrelevant when making a decision. Chaotic neutral characters are extremely difficult to deal with. Such characters have been known to cheerfully and with no apparent purpose the roll of a single die. They are almost totally unreliable. In fact, the only reliable thing about them is that they cannot be relied upon! This alignment is perhaps the most difficult to play. Lunatics and madmen tend toward chaotic neutral behavior.
Chaotic Evil: These characters are the bane of all that is good and organized. Chaotic evil characters are motivated by the desire for personal gain and pleasure. They see
absolutely nothing wrong with taking whatever they want by whatever means possible. Laws and governments are the tools of weaklings unable to fend for themselves.
Whew, that was long. Quoted and adapted from the Player's Handbook. True and Chaotic Neutral quoted in full because of how ludicrous they are.
Now, one immediately obvious problem is that people are rarely have the moral response to everything--compare the many alignments of Batman. Another is that not all alignments have equal moral culpability. We have words for people who act True Neutral and Chaotic Neutral in real life, and those words are "mentally ill" (and now consider that druids have to be True Neutral...). Yet a third is that nearly all moral views in the real world are Obi-wan Truths--compare freedom fighter vs. terrorist, for example.
But, that said, these are the alignments. And in the game world, they actually exist as things that can be found out. The existence of spells like Detect Evil (and the reversed version Detect Good) imply that ones goodness or evilness is a measurable property that can be used to determine what kind of person you are. However, much like its magic, most gameworlds never actually follow through on this, and you'll never find cities where paladins or priests are stationed at the gates to scan the people going in and out with Detect Evil so that miscreants can be arrested before they commit any mischief, nor is it used in criminal trials or suspect profiling--since evil acts change one's alignment, establishing the alignment credentials of your city's people and then scanning criminal suspects to check for changed alignment would seem to be good sense, but no one ever does it.
One kind of meta-problem that doesn't spring from these alignments themselves but is still usually present in their implementation is the idea of some kind of cosmic "balance." This goes back to BECM D&D, which had three alignments--Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic--which goes back to Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories about the struggle of Law vs. Chaos. The thing is, when those alignments are further clarified down, it becomes nonsensical. The battle between Law and Chaos makes sense, after all. You can see similar fights over the idea of freedom vs. security, or Anarchism vs. Statism, where both the sides can be evil or good or neither.
When you attempt to add Good and Evil into this as things with actual metaphysical weight, it all breaks down. What does an excess of good even mean--too many small children with puppies, so we need to kill puppies for satan to restore the "balance"? From that, you can see the problem--attempting to restore the "balance" between good and evil if it's on the good side is an evil act, even if you're doing it for reasons of maintaining said balance. This means, as it turns out, that a lot of Forgotten Realms deities as written, including the head overgod (the god of the gods, basically) are actually evil.
One example--the Wall of the Faithless. As written, everyone the Realms must choose a specific deity to devote themselves to (which is nothing like how actual polytheism works, but Argumentum ad Fireballum[1]). Anyone who doesn't, or any atheists (though being an atheist in the Forgotten Fucking Realms of all places is basically a mental disorder) get put in the Wall, which torments them until their soul is dissolved in writhing agony. Despite that this is not a required feature of the cosmology (it was put in place by the second god of the dead, who was a complete douchebag), when the new gods of magic and of the dead try to remove it later on, Ao (the aforementioned overgod) tells them that they can't, because without the Wall in place, people wouldn't be afraid enough of the gods to actually worship them.
Now, it is a very old-school view of the gods (where they can do whatever they want and if you disagree, you probably get turned into some animal or something), but it doesn't fit in a world with objective morality. I think it's pretty clear that continuous torture for centuries is an evil act, which makes the Forgotten Realms a maltheistic universe and the death or overthrow of Ao a moral imperative for Lawful Good characters. Note that when the new (good) god of the dead tried to make it so that good people had a better afterlife than evil people, Ao smacked him down for that, too. So, yeah--Ao's stats say True Neutral, but as written he's Lawful Evil.
Alignments can be good or bad depending on the kind of game you want to play, too. If you like a world where you can kick down doors and slaughter the orcs inside and trust that you're doing the right thing, then all orcs should be chaotic evil (though this does lead to the "If a paladin kills an orc baby, is it a good or evil act?" debate). If you prefer more ambiguity, then racial alignments make no sense (well, they frequently make no sense anyway, but...) and neither do easy ways to determine alignment. Especially since Detect Evil is a first level spell, it can really put a cramp in any kind of mystery story or investigative game.
Oh, here's a hilarious part from the DMG: "Asking another character 'So, what's your alignment?' is a rude question. At best, any character who is boorish enough to bring up the issue is likely to receive a very icy stare (turning to shocked horror from more refined characters). Asking another character his alignment is futile, anyway--a lawful good character may feel compelled to tell the truth, but a chaotic evil character certainly won't. A chaotic evil character with any wit would reply 'lawful good.' " So not only are good and evil objective within the setting, so are the nine alignments above, which means every intelligent being falls neatly into one of 9 little boxes.
Moving on, we get to the part about Detect Evil. Now, it tries to address some of the problems I have with it. It says, "The ability to detect evil is really only useful to spot characters or creatures with evil intentions or those who are so thoroughly corrupted that they are evil to the core, not the evil aspect of an alignment. Just because a fighter is chaotic evil doesn't mean he can be detected as a source of evil while he is having a drink at the tavern. He may have no particularly evil intentions at that moment." When we...
...hang on, what's this? "This spell discovers emanations of evil (or of good in the case of the reverse spell) from any creature, object, or area. Character alignment is not revealed under most circumstances."
Looks like I was remembering it wrong! So, that helps a bit with the Detect Evil at the city gates thing--you could Detect Evil if someone was entering the city with evil intent, but not Murderous Bob the Horrendous who just wants a stiff drink. Detect Evil is still useful in solving crimes, but it's not magical radar like I remembered it. That's good! Most of my other problems still remain, though, because they're caused by evil as an objective thing rather than a judgement by others.
Oh, hey, the "effects of changing alignment" section (which talks about penalizing experience for people who change alignment--so much for moral ambiguity) mentions something that I had forgotten existed--the Helm of Opposite Alignment. You put it on and switched axis (Chaotic to Lawful, Good to Evil). There was some story about a Lawful Good vampire because they had put on a Helm of Opposite Alignment and didn't want it removed because they now had a conscience and were horrified by their previous deeds, which is actually kind of neat in terms of using the way the world is supposed to work.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of "All X are the same" races in fantasy, so I wouldn't mind having good orcs--after all, there are evil humans and elves. Well, maybe good hobgoblins, since they have a more regimented society. It gets especially silly with the dragons (now color-coded for your convenience!), but the metallic/chromatic split is so iconic D&D I can't really remove it. I suspect I'll just reduce the mechanical effects of alignment. In my opinion, alignments are a good idea on NPC sheets to give you a capsule description of how those NPCs behave (something Call of Cthulhu does with extraneous skills that'll never be rolled--a cultist might have "Cackle Insanely 68%," for example), but fall down hard when applied as actual things that have metaphysical weight. That's why I changed the Detect Evil spell.
How do you think alignments should work? Or should they? Are they even necessary anymore?
[1]: There's a quote from an e-mail by Ed Greenwood, the guy who originally came up with the Forgotten Realms, to the effect of, "one aspect of the Realms that's thus far been neglected is the extent to which Jonthun the baker next door worships Chauntea for a good harvest, Tymora for good luck in the baking, Talos for good weather so the grain crops won't be ruined, and so on, all in the same day." So it looks like it's just something that doesn't come out in the published products.
Next is another point of contention--classes.
This is much more general than specific to the campaign ideas I have. If you don't want to read my babbling, skip this one and wait for the next one.
Ah, alignment. Probably the second-most flamewar-ridden topic of discussion about D&D to ever exist (the most being, "[Your favorite edition] sucks!"). Fourth edition simplifies the structure from 9 down to 5 and makes it so they have very little (read: almost no) effect on the game, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about second, when there were 9. As a refresher, the alignments are:
Lawful Good: Characters of this alignment believe that an orderly, strong society with a well-organized government can work to make life better for the majority of the people. To ensure the quality of life, laws must be created and obeyed. When people respect laws and try to help one another, society as a whole prospers.
Lawful Neutral: Order and organization are of paramount importance to characters of this alignment. They believe in a strong, well-ordered government, whether that government is a tyranny or benevolent democracy. The benefits of organization and regimentation outweigh any moral questions raised by their actions.
Lawful Evil: These characters believe in using society themselves. Structure and organization elevate those who deserve to rule as well as provide a clearly defined hierarchy between master and servant. To this end, lawful evil characters support laws and societies that protect their own concerns.
Neutral Good: These characters believe that a balance of forces is important, but that the concerns of law and chaos do not moderate the need for good. Since the universe is vast and contains many creatures striving for different goals, a determined pursuit of good will not upset the balance; it may even maintain it. If fostering good means supporting organized society, then that is what must be done.
True Neutral: True neutral characters believe in the ultimate balance of forces, and they refuse to see actions as either good or evil. Since the majority of people in the world make judgments, true neutral characters are extremely rare. True neutrals do their best to avoid siding with the forces of either good or evil, law or chaos. It is their duty to see that all of these forces remain in balanced contention. True neutral characters sometimes find themselves forced into rather peculiar alliances. To a great extent, they are compelled to side with the underdog in any given situation, sometimes even changing sides as the previous loser becomes the winner. A true neutral druid might join the local barony to put down a tribe of evil gnolls, only to drop out and switch sides when the gnolls were brought to the brink of destruction. He would seek to prevent either side from becoming too powerful. Clearly, there are very few true neutral characters in the world.
Neutral Evil: Neutral evil characters are primarily concerned with themselves and their own advancement. They have no particular objection to working with others or, for that matter, going it on their own. Their only interest is in getting ahead. If there is a quick and easy way to gain a profit, whether it be legal, questionable, or obviously illegal, they take advantage of it.
Chaotic Good: Chaotic good characters are strong individualists marked by a streak of kindness and benevolence. They believe in all the virtues of goodness and right, but they have little use for laws and regulations. They have no use for people who "try to push folk around and tell them what to do." Their actions are guided by their own moral compass which, although good, may not always be in perfect agreement with the rest of society.
Chaotic Neutral: Chaotic neutral characters believe that there is no order to anything, including their own actions. With this as a guiding principle, they tend to follow whatever whim strikes them at the moment. Good and evil are irrelevant when making a decision. Chaotic neutral characters are extremely difficult to deal with. Such characters have been known to cheerfully and with no apparent purpose the roll of a single die. They are almost totally unreliable. In fact, the only reliable thing about them is that they cannot be relied upon! This alignment is perhaps the most difficult to play. Lunatics and madmen tend toward chaotic neutral behavior.
Chaotic Evil: These characters are the bane of all that is good and organized. Chaotic evil characters are motivated by the desire for personal gain and pleasure. They see
absolutely nothing wrong with taking whatever they want by whatever means possible. Laws and governments are the tools of weaklings unable to fend for themselves.
Whew, that was long. Quoted and adapted from the Player's Handbook. True and Chaotic Neutral quoted in full because of how ludicrous they are.
Now, one immediately obvious problem is that people are rarely have the moral response to everything--compare the many alignments of Batman. Another is that not all alignments have equal moral culpability. We have words for people who act True Neutral and Chaotic Neutral in real life, and those words are "mentally ill" (and now consider that druids have to be True Neutral...). Yet a third is that nearly all moral views in the real world are Obi-wan Truths--compare freedom fighter vs. terrorist, for example.
But, that said, these are the alignments. And in the game world, they actually exist as things that can be found out. The existence of spells like Detect Evil (and the reversed version Detect Good) imply that ones goodness or evilness is a measurable property that can be used to determine what kind of person you are. However, much like its magic, most gameworlds never actually follow through on this, and you'll never find cities where paladins or priests are stationed at the gates to scan the people going in and out with Detect Evil so that miscreants can be arrested before they commit any mischief, nor is it used in criminal trials or suspect profiling--since evil acts change one's alignment, establishing the alignment credentials of your city's people and then scanning criminal suspects to check for changed alignment would seem to be good sense, but no one ever does it.
One kind of meta-problem that doesn't spring from these alignments themselves but is still usually present in their implementation is the idea of some kind of cosmic "balance." This goes back to BECM D&D, which had three alignments--Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic--which goes back to Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories about the struggle of Law vs. Chaos. The thing is, when those alignments are further clarified down, it becomes nonsensical. The battle between Law and Chaos makes sense, after all. You can see similar fights over the idea of freedom vs. security, or Anarchism vs. Statism, where both the sides can be evil or good or neither.
When you attempt to add Good and Evil into this as things with actual metaphysical weight, it all breaks down. What does an excess of good even mean--too many small children with puppies, so we need to kill puppies for satan to restore the "balance"? From that, you can see the problem--attempting to restore the "balance" between good and evil if it's on the good side is an evil act, even if you're doing it for reasons of maintaining said balance. This means, as it turns out, that a lot of Forgotten Realms deities as written, including the head overgod (the god of the gods, basically) are actually evil.
One example--the Wall of the Faithless. As written, everyone the Realms must choose a specific deity to devote themselves to (which is nothing like how actual polytheism works, but Argumentum ad Fireballum[1]). Anyone who doesn't, or any atheists (though being an atheist in the Forgotten Fucking Realms of all places is basically a mental disorder) get put in the Wall, which torments them until their soul is dissolved in writhing agony. Despite that this is not a required feature of the cosmology (it was put in place by the second god of the dead, who was a complete douchebag), when the new gods of magic and of the dead try to remove it later on, Ao (the aforementioned overgod) tells them that they can't, because without the Wall in place, people wouldn't be afraid enough of the gods to actually worship them.
Now, it is a very old-school view of the gods (where they can do whatever they want and if you disagree, you probably get turned into some animal or something), but it doesn't fit in a world with objective morality. I think it's pretty clear that continuous torture for centuries is an evil act, which makes the Forgotten Realms a maltheistic universe and the death or overthrow of Ao a moral imperative for Lawful Good characters. Note that when the new (good) god of the dead tried to make it so that good people had a better afterlife than evil people, Ao smacked him down for that, too. So, yeah--Ao's stats say True Neutral, but as written he's Lawful Evil.
Alignments can be good or bad depending on the kind of game you want to play, too. If you like a world where you can kick down doors and slaughter the orcs inside and trust that you're doing the right thing, then all orcs should be chaotic evil (though this does lead to the "If a paladin kills an orc baby, is it a good or evil act?" debate). If you prefer more ambiguity, then racial alignments make no sense (well, they frequently make no sense anyway, but...) and neither do easy ways to determine alignment. Especially since Detect Evil is a first level spell, it can really put a cramp in any kind of mystery story or investigative game.
Oh, here's a hilarious part from the DMG: "Asking another character 'So, what's your alignment?' is a rude question. At best, any character who is boorish enough to bring up the issue is likely to receive a very icy stare (turning to shocked horror from more refined characters). Asking another character his alignment is futile, anyway--a lawful good character may feel compelled to tell the truth, but a chaotic evil character certainly won't. A chaotic evil character with any wit would reply 'lawful good.' " So not only are good and evil objective within the setting, so are the nine alignments above, which means every intelligent being falls neatly into one of 9 little boxes.
Moving on, we get to the part about Detect Evil. Now, it tries to address some of the problems I have with it. It says, "The ability to detect evil is really only useful to spot characters or creatures with evil intentions or those who are so thoroughly corrupted that they are evil to the core, not the evil aspect of an alignment. Just because a fighter is chaotic evil doesn't mean he can be detected as a source of evil while he is having a drink at the tavern. He may have no particularly evil intentions at that moment." When we...
...hang on, what's this? "This spell discovers emanations of evil (or of good in the case of the reverse spell) from any creature, object, or area. Character alignment is not revealed under most circumstances."
Looks like I was remembering it wrong! So, that helps a bit with the Detect Evil at the city gates thing--you could Detect Evil if someone was entering the city with evil intent, but not Murderous Bob the Horrendous who just wants a stiff drink. Detect Evil is still useful in solving crimes, but it's not magical radar like I remembered it. That's good! Most of my other problems still remain, though, because they're caused by evil as an objective thing rather than a judgement by others.
Oh, hey, the "effects of changing alignment" section (which talks about penalizing experience for people who change alignment--so much for moral ambiguity) mentions something that I had forgotten existed--the Helm of Opposite Alignment. You put it on and switched axis (Chaotic to Lawful, Good to Evil). There was some story about a Lawful Good vampire because they had put on a Helm of Opposite Alignment and didn't want it removed because they now had a conscience and were horrified by their previous deeds, which is actually kind of neat in terms of using the way the world is supposed to work.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of "All X are the same" races in fantasy, so I wouldn't mind having good orcs--after all, there are evil humans and elves. Well, maybe good hobgoblins, since they have a more regimented society. It gets especially silly with the dragons (now color-coded for your convenience!), but the metallic/chromatic split is so iconic D&D I can't really remove it. I suspect I'll just reduce the mechanical effects of alignment. In my opinion, alignments are a good idea on NPC sheets to give you a capsule description of how those NPCs behave (something Call of Cthulhu does with extraneous skills that'll never be rolled--a cultist might have "Cackle Insanely 68%," for example), but fall down hard when applied as actual things that have metaphysical weight. That's why I changed the Detect Evil spell.
How do you think alignments should work? Or should they? Are they even necessary anymore?
[1]: There's a quote from an e-mail by Ed Greenwood, the guy who originally came up with the Forgotten Realms, to the effect of, "one aspect of the Realms that's thus far been neglected is the extent to which Jonthun the baker next door worships Chauntea for a good harvest, Tymora for good luck in the baking, Talos for good weather so the grain crops won't be ruined, and so on, all in the same day." So it looks like it's just something that doesn't come out in the published products.
Next is another point of contention--classes.
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no subject
Date: 2011-Apr-30, Saturday 19:08 (UTC)As for the alignment system in general, I would say to stick to the Lawful-Chaotic axis. Law/Chaos is more in keeping with the sword-and-sorcery theme, and the idea of having characters/NPCs who are on "the same side" and yet are morally/ethically incompatible seems more interesting than being able to explain away such things as "Well, he's Lawful Good and she's Chaotic Good."
It's very much a dated quirk of D&D, but if you wanted to dispense with it's dated quirks, you wouldn't be planning a 2nd ed game.
no subject
Date: 2011-May-01, Sunday 04:16 (UTC)The big problem I have with Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic is--and I admit this is solely my problem--alignment tongues. In BECM D&D, each alignment had its own language as a sort of magical code they could use to talk to other beings of similar alignment. The really odd part is that if you change alignments, your alignment tongue changes too.
Basically, like the "what is your alignment?" question, it bothers me when alignments are actual things that exist in the game world, rather than moderately accurate ways of describing how characters behave.
no subject
Date: 2011-May-04, Wednesday 13:49 (UTC)