Alignment - because we ...ing can't let it pass

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 12:53 pm

Those are two different actions hogarth.

I'm not saying that a person can only be good or evil. I'm saying that if we have a continuum with good on one end, and evil on the other, then we only have 3 categories the action can fall into.

Good, Evil, and Ok. Ok is enjoying a bubble bath, it really doesn't have any moral implications. For this continuum to make any sense, you cant have an action that is both good and evil at the same time. You can have a person who is conflicting, because frankly that's human. The actions can't both be the best thing ever and the worst thing ever at the same time. Generally it seems to actually play out that way.

The Law-Chaos continuum has a serious problem that not only can no one seem to figure out if an action is lawful or chaotic, but they damn things aren't even mutually exclusive. You can literally have an action that by most definitions given for Law and Chaos is both at the same time.

Before we can even get started talking about Law and Chaos as alignments we need definitions for the two that are mutually exclusive, or are at least mutually exclusive in most circumstances.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 1:28 pm

The problem is that there totally are actions IRL that are both stereotypically good and stereotypically evil at the same time. They aren't even that hard to think of, really.

The alignment system is all about drawing divisions that don't really exist, but which people think that they understand. And then using those divisions to justify holy wars and dicketry.

So I think we should just let go of the 2-axes model, and go back to the discussion about the various philosophies of the great wheel and how each one says that 'good' is something different.

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 2:08 pm

If I had to have another scale, I guess I would have Order and Chaos as:

Order: wants the world to conform to categories and stereotypes. Angels of Order go around killing LGBT folks because they aren't heteronormative. They prefer to do this the same way that they killed the first one, by beheading with a sword, even though other ways are more effective.

Chaos: wants the world to be free of categories and stereotypes. Angels of Chaos go around trying to tempt folks to engage in crazy sexual shenanigans. They prefer to do this many different ways, even though some ways are more effective.

It would be easier to achieve the goals of Order if they were willing to be more flexible, just like it would be easier to achieve the goals of Good if they were willing to eat babies.
Humans are neutral on this axis, because they want some things to be ordered and some things to be chaotic.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 2:11 pm

Planescape: Torment and AEG Evil suggested that Law and Chaos are methods of achieving Good, Evil and Neutral goals, not ends in and of themselves.

Lawful Evil is the typical "we're just cogs in an infernal machine" faceless bureaucracy - it's The System, founded in stone and able to function by itself. Lawful Evil high-ups reap the benefits the System provides as part of its design.
Neutral Evil is basically Scientology, i.e. a parasitic system feeding off another one. Neutral Evil individuals reported their friends, neighbours, superiors and immediate family to the KGB (Lawful Neutral) because if the latter weren't guilty of state treason, they were guilty of something.
Chaotic Evil rides in, takes your stuff, puts your cat in the microwave and rides out.

In comparison, Lawful Good is The Kingdom (tvtropes link omitted as part of Efficiency-Increasing Initiative VII), Neutral Good is a charity or a knighthood order, and Chaotic Good saves the cat and rides off into the sunset.
Neutrals do Neutral stuff, like collecting stamps or getting enlightened, same routine there.

Note that Chaos isn't less efficient because this is D&D world where individuals matter and you can seriously take over it with like four guys (for maybe a week).

MartinHarper wrote: Humans are neutral on this axis, because they want some things to be ordered and some things to be chaotic.

That sort of sucks IMO, because if we can't have Alignment for generic PCs (who presumably start out mortal), we don't need Alignment at all.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 2:18 pm

Question: if Law and Chaos are about methods rather than goals, how can you justify using them as alignments?

It says nothing about what team you're on.

PoliteNewb · Post by **PoliteNewb** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 6:13 pm

Boolean wrote:Question: if Law and Chaos are about methods rather than goals, how can you justify using them as alignments?

It says nothing about what team you're on.

#1 Why doesn't it?
#2 Who gives a fuck?

I've pretty much given up on the idea of Law vs. Chaos as teams, where the lawful guys team up against the chaotic guys and vice versa.

Law and Chaos shouldn't be teams, they should be descriptors. Every bank robber is not on the same side as every other bank robber, but they're both fucking bank robbers, and if you have a magic Magnum +4 vs. Bank Robbers, the gun doesn't care whether you were robbing that bank to feed hungry orphans or buy yourself a lamborghini.

I don't feel alignment in general is hopeless (despite some of the holes folks have poked in my theories...I can admit to doing some serious rethinking here), but the idea of alignment as teams where Team Evil is one big happy family is simply not feasible. Hell, the idea of Team Good being a big happy family isn't really feasible.

If people agree on goals and disagree on methods, does that make them any more a cohesive whole than if they agree on methods and disagree on goals? IMO, the whole point of having LG as differentiated from CG is that they both want some of the same things (happy people, good times) but each thinks the other is not going to accomplish it with their methods...in fact, each thinks the other is probably working AGAINST their goals by using those methods.

I guess lets start with: what is the purpose of alignment in the first place?

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 7:52 pm

Law and Chaos only work as goals for beings made purely of those alignments, the absolutes of that sphere. It's just not going to work for rational beings of any stripe.

It is perfectly within the nature of a pure being of Chaos to Giant Frog, because it's very existence is Giant Frog, and anything that isn't Giant Frog does not work within it's worldview. Just like a being of Law will create and believe in a natural law for every system and a stereotype for every being. Everything must fit in the little box for a pure Lawful creature.

This does not work for an animal, because animals don't give a fuck about anything but survival. This also doesn't work for (insert fantasy race)kind as well because pure Law and pure Chaos don't make any fucking sense, just like pure Evil and pure Good are unattainable to the average Orc/Elf/Human/Whatever.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:03 pm

PoliteNewb wrote: Law and Chaos shouldn't be teams, they should be descriptors.

Yeah honestly, I hate the whole idea of alignment "teams".

Evil doesn't necessarily work together and even good people can have different ideas about the best way to help the world.

The idea that two robots would automatically ally because they're both robots and therefore lawful is just a bad idea and should be dropped. Lawful isn't an agenda, nor is chaotic.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jul 13, 2009 8:11 pm

Any alignment system that is based on 'rights' is completely laughable.

Rights are not some axioms of things that increase goodness in the universe. Rights are based on survival. The thing is, since human stress decreases survival in many ways (from reduced productivity, violence, rebellion, etc.) most of our rights are based on increasing happiness. But that's not the case.

For example, having children to the limit of your ability to support them is a good thing for nearly all people to the point where it's recognized as a basic 'right'. However, if we lived in a Mad Max-style world with limited resources, the right of limitless reproduction would good away--even if we could support a baby explosion, the decline in quality of life for everyone else would be so dire that it would be a good thing to forbid people from having reproductive sex whenever they felt like.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 7:14 am

Ultimate Lawful:

-Crissa

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 7:23 am

Since this has been brought back up, I've been thinking about how to write a spiel on Good.

I'm still stuck on the Tome of Fiends recommendations. To reiterate:

A) For practical purposes, 'Good and Evil' boil them to 'Us and Them'

B) People can be quite ordinary and still be good--just getting through the day, sometimes doing something decent.

C) You're not Good unless you're constantly working at it, and you can stop being Good really easily (like Paladins who Fall because they let their comrades loot enemy corpses. I've heard about that happening in some games).

Does anyone have another perspective on this?

Also, still thinking of a sidebar on "Honor =/= Virtue".

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 12:52 pm

Honor is a system of warfare, as presented in Races of War. If you're honorable, other people raid your dungeons with adventuring parties and take your stuff away in their Santa sacks. If you're not honorable, they band together to destroy you once and for all. (See Dungeonomicon).
Virtue is Goodness, that is making the world a nicer place to live in.

Also, there's so much wrong with your example on paladins that I don't understand it at all.

First, associating with Evil characters is Unaligned. (I'm saying Unaligned instead of Neutral because some people classify certain actions as adding to Neutral, i.e. detracting from both Good and Evil.) It's a part of the paladin's arbitrary code (which is Unaligned regarding Good and Evil, perhaps Lawful) and they do indeed fall when they break it. (And they also fall when they commit an Evil act, which leads people to confuse the two.)

Second, the code forbids associating with Evil characters, not with characters who commit Evil deeds. Good people can commit Evil deeds, it's just that they do more Good on the aggregate and do not eat their neighbors' kids.

Third, looting corpses is not Evil. If you're just defeated the Big Bad, it's your obligation to Detect Magic on his pants and take them if they shine blue. By abandoning valuable resources you just won behind, you're reducing the total available to the Forces of Good (which includes you). That's how the D&D world works. Poverty is not Good, nonviolence is not Good, Book of Exalted Deeds is not good. What do you do with an artifact sword to do the most Good? Bury it with the previous owner or loot it, sell and donate the money to the orphanage? Wrong. You stab the evil king with it, cancel the mass executions, provide for orphans from the treasury, bind a celestial to be in charge of the whole mess and go stab Mephistopheles next.

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 1:27 pm

Starmaker wrote:First, associating with Evil characters is Unaligned.

From a consequentialist perspective:
a) if you associate with 'evil' people then you are more likely to do evil, and may assist them in doing evil.
b) if you associate with 'evil' people then they are less likely to do evil, and may assist you in doing good.

If a>b then associating with evil is evil, if b<a then associating with evil is good, and if a=b then associating with evil is unaligned.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 1:37 pm

Well, the distinction between 'honor' and virtue would be that honor is, as in Races of War, a social concept. Being dishonorable means people won't hang around you, but these days a lot of people talk about 'honor' as if it's inherently a good thing, rather than a morally neutral one.

But being honorable is not the same as being virtuous; what with the weird cultures DnD has, being virtuous may in fact be dishonorable.

And the looting corpses causing a Paladin to stop being a Paladin is something I've seen around. There's a slight validity that it's wrong to kill people and take their stuff, but it's an example of how stringently some players and DMs take 'Good', and their justification is that it's stealing and all that crap.

I could come up with about three different ways to justify taking enemy loot--putting it to the service of good, selling it off and donating money to charity, putting the artifact away where it will never be used again--that'd probably fly.

Editing this last paragraph to a thought I just had:

Some people are really harsh on being Good--if you're not working every second for Good, then you're not Good. If you do anything wrong, you're Not Good.

Oh, and as a side note: If you're dishonorable enough, you get burned at the stake or lynched or something.

Edit-Edit:

Case in point:

Last year someone tried to change the section on Honor in Races of War. This is what they added.

To some the concept of honorable combat is pretty fishy when looked upon, this is only because they are unable to grasp the concept of what honor truly means. The concept of "Your goal is to painfully kill another sapient being with a deadly weapon, and the other guy is attempting to do the same to you. Why then, would any rational person take time to consider the "honor" of whatever horribly painful and potentially lethal act they were intent upon inflicting on another?" or to the ideals of "Living life with integrety, courage, and virtue. A warrior who refuses to strike a prone enemy. The Sorcerer that vows to never use necromantic spells. A Rogue who steals everything with out shedding any blood. An assassin who evades every guard and only kills the main target. Or the Paladin who refuses to engage in battle against a defenseless being." Honor being a social or personal code of higher ethnical or morality, even against the odds.

To the person who added those long sickly bits, honor IS virtue or decency. Which isn't true. Honor and virtue sometimes coincide, but they're not the same thing.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 3:26 pm

On the good/evil angle I picked up something from the Dragon back in the 2E days that has stuck with me. The article was basically defining alignment by priorities. Simply put, and reduced back to the one dimensional good/evil argument; good places the third person above the first person; evil places the first person above the third person. This is a simple and straight forward definition but it has an important implication; it leaves a lot of things in “limbo.” Often one needs to look at the secondary implications of an action, implications that don’t normally directly come into alignment questions in the first place.

Let’s take the looting a corpse case. Assuming that he isn’t expected to re resurrected any moment now, at the simplest level, it is not evil. He (or she) certainly isn’t going to need it anytime soon. (To quote from an online game where I used to work; “being dead, that can’t be done.”) Nor is it per se a priori something that benefits the self (no really he is taking all that gold to give to the orphans). Now assuming that it wasn’t the evil, and that stuff should go to the widow and orphan but instead goes to you, then there is at the secondary level a note of “evil” attached.

I’ve been thinking about alignment recently, I just saw a small town production of “Into the Woods” (with a very good up and coming lady who used to be in our church choir singing the role of the witch) and there alignment, choices and consequences, and “wish twisting” all come into play in an almost Gygaxian manner. Since evil is the act of choosing the self over the others, even the most neutral person can have occasional myoptic moral decisions where their own needs either blind them of the other or obscure them from the other. In those cases the act is not per see evil. If, however, the person chooses to blind themselves from the other then the act is evil, although not as evil as when the person is fully aware of the harm to the other.

Morzas · Post by **Morzas** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 10:09 pm

I think that the Law - Chaos axis was used to determine your character's allegiance in the war between the gods of Chaos and the gods of Law, as that axis was ripped off from Moorcock's Multiverse. Most people are probably neutral in that matter. Nowadays it means something completely different (and stupid) because a lot of today's D&D players have no knowledge of the stuff that the guys that made D&D integrated into their game. I myself knew nothing about it until I started reading through some Eternal Champion stories a few years ago.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Thu Jul 30, 2009 7:27 pm

That was part of the inspiration, but, it didn't mean much in terms of D&D. It was just another team, 'red hats and green hats' to go along with the white and black hats. Or sometimes just to have white and black hats be called something else.

Though in terms of Moorcock, most of his characters ultimately found that getting involved at all was something of a pooch-screw, as the Gods of Law were more or less the same kind of douchebags that the Gods of Chaos were, they just didn't look as nasty at first glance. The later Corum books, iirc, really start dealing with this, as he finds out just how screwed he is. Ultimately, no matter who wins, normal 'human' type races get fucked, because they can't exist in a state of 'pure Law' or 'pure Chaos'

The problem with Law/Chaos is it usually just doesn't make sense from a modern viewpoint, partly because it gets mixed up and confused with legal law and justice vs entropy and madness. And that makes just as much sense as putting Love and cuteness in opposition to gasoline and pot.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Thu Jul 30, 2009 10:49 pm

I'm totally going to be dishonorable by stealing your slaves and healing them when you're not looking.

-Crissa

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 2:12 am

Going off of Morzas's thought chain and going by what I do at home, I usually use something else other than the general axis presented.

When I run I rule that the actual forces of good and evil are cosmic powers. Most people are just neutral. The only people that "read" as good or evil are those who deal directly with or use those cosmic powers. As in the case with "law" and "chaos" that is eliminated in place of Faithfulness. To be "read" as lawful you have to be aligned with the forces that identify themselves as law and order (the forces of Mechanus). to be aligned with chaos you must be aligned with the powers of chaos and anarchy. For Paladins, they are faithful to their god/church (whichever way you want to run it). Knight's and Samurai are faithful to their lord. Though Samurai may follow the code of bushido if you prefer.

Otherwise people are just neutral. Anything with an intelligence score be it demon or celestial born can be good/evil characters but will still read as there birth would dictate. This means that Tieflings always read as Evil and Aasimar will read as good. Such things as background of course can be overcome with the right application of the atonement spell (or any other spell you deem appropriate)

This sound like a reasonable idea?

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 1:14 pm

What I was toying with is to replace alignment system with "virtues". Basically, create a list of character traits player such as "valiant" or "courageous" or "humble", and a player would pick a certain number of them during character creation. During play, he could call upon his virtue a certain number of times per session/adventure/whatever to get an appropriate bonus.

So, for example, you have a character who selects "valiant" as one of his virtues, which would give him a bonus to his combat rolls. So not only would such a valiant character have an easier time fighting, the player would also be encouraged to enter combat, that is, to actually roleplay a valiant character.

Further step would be to divide those traits into loose good/neutral/evil groups, and have character who have predominantly good traits show up as "good" in the game for stuff such as detect good or protection from good or whatever else there is.

And finally, the last step would be to determine setting-appropriate bonuses, that is, to explain why, for example "humble", "headstrong" and "arrogant" characters all have bonuses to defend against compulsion and mind control, or why "pious" characters have bonuses to resist power of deamons/devils/whatever evil powers are there.

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 4:25 pm

Kobajagrande wrote:So, for example, you have a character who selects "valiant" as one of his virtues, which would give him a bonus to his combat rolls.

So a character who selects "chaste" gets a bonus when not having sex?

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Fri Jul 31, 2009 5:03 pm

MartinHarper wrote: So a character who selects "chaste" gets a bonus when not having sex?

A bonus to what though? I mean, like a humble character, he would have a chance to get a bonus a certain number of times per game, for some specific thing, like fort saves vs magical effects, as long as he remains chaste. Why? Because chaste people in your setting are blessed by the powers of chastesness and their bodies resist magical effects better.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Tue Aug 04, 2009 4:56 pm

Why do personality traits (or goals, depending on how you look at them, since chastity is pretty much a hope of not giving in to ones own desires) need to hand out numerical bonuses?

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 8:43 am

Because by assigning mechanical effects to personality traits, you make those personality traits actually matter, which encourages players to roleplay them, and actually awards them for roleplaying, unlike other Magic Tea Party roleplaying stuff.

And in addition, by using personality traits, you can greatly influence what type of characters would be played, hence, the type of story/the way game will be played etc.

If you think about it, what is better to do if making a hypothetical game where virtuous heroes fight against evil:

a) "Pick up personality traits, which virtues you character has, which will help him triumph against challenges"

or

b) "Please play virtuous heroes"

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Wed Aug 05, 2009 8:52 am

Personality is too fluid and immaterial to label but for the most general sense.

Game-wise, negligible. It's one of the 'soft' aspects of gaming that is difficult to impossible to put with numbers and checks.