The 3×3 grid for D&D’s alignment system is one that I find useful enough for my day to day living but I understand how other folks might find it lacking. Fair enough. There are other systems out there that do a good job for the game universes they’ve built… let’s look at some of those and see what we can do with them.
Before they were starring in a movie with Vanilla Ice, they were a comic book. Between those two things, they were a tabletop RPG. Their alignment system was fairly restrictive. There was good, selfish, and evil but they also gave a list of “alwayses” and “nevers” for each one.
Like, Principled will never attack an unarmed foe. Avoid lies… but Scupluous would never attack an unarmed foe but, hey, you can lie to selfish or evil characters, right? Unprincipled is a good guy who has no use for the law and so will try to bring the bad guy to justice and try to avoid killing but, hey, sometimes that means taking dirty money along the way. Sometimes that means lying and cheating the bad guys. The Anarchist character is more out for him or herself without really having the stomach to be truly evil. Miscreant is your run of the mill bad guy, lies, cheats, kills, whatevs. The Aberrant is more like Doctor Doom… will NEVER break his or her word but might lie to someone unworthy of notice, will not kill for pleasure but some people *NEED* killing, right? And Diabolic characters are Miscreants turned up to 11.
This is a comic book. We’re telling a story. You have things you will always do, things you’ll try to avoid, and things you’ll never do. And so do the guys you’re up against. The archetype is the important thing here… and you can change an archetype, but why would you want to?
My problem with this is that I can’t use it in normal conversations or when watching the news. It’s not particularly useful outside of Ninja Turtling.
Vampire (and Werewolf and Mage) all had a Nature/Demeanor/Humanity thing going on. Nature was a particular archetype (like “Thrill Seeker!” or “Survivor” or “Competitor” or “Rogue” or “Fanatic” and so on) that the character really, truly was deep down. Demeanor was a particular archetype (same list) that the character showed to the world. Nature and Demeanor could be complimentary if you wanted to be straightforward (Survivor/Survivor was probably the easiest Gangrel to play) or you could have contradictory ones if you wanted to be more conflicted and/or crazy (Malkavians were good choices for stuff like Survivor/Martyr).
Humanity was the sliding scale of how much the character could get away with without losing humanity… most humans, for example, have a humanity of 7. 10s aren’t even allowed to think bad thoughts. The Dalai Lama (or the Pope or whatever) has a 9. Dirty Harry has a 5. Dahmer has a 2. If you’re a vampire and you hit 1, you automatically become a frenzied NPC who does nothing but sleep and eat and needs to be put down.
So a Loner/Perfectionist that has a Humanity of 8 could easily be an artist who wants to create the perfect piece for the betterment of the world… while a Loner/Perfectionist with a Humanity of 4 could be a Serial Killer Killer. Hundreds of combinations were possible… but, at the end of the day, everybody played Glenn Danzig.
(Not particularly useful in arguing around the poker table.)
This one is elegant in its simplicity: There are seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues in addition to a “morality” stat (your morality stat is similar enough to humanity). Each player has a favorite vice and a favorite virtue and gains willpower by indulging in them. It’s real easy to gain willpower back by having a Wrath/Justice combo… but you may quickly find yourself losing morality (and gaining derangements/mental instability thereby).
This one is one that you can work into casual conversation. This politician is Hope/Pride, that one is Faith/Sloth. Morality slides around accordingly. As such, I think that this one is my favorite non-D&D one.
Which ones work for you? Which ones did I miss that I shouldn’t have?
When it comes to Dungeons and Dragons I was always of the school that a PC who insists on being ‘evil’ is a different stripe of evil from the black knight 0r the illithid temptress.
Lawful good is compelled to help that old lady across the street.
Lawful evil will demand the old lady give him two copper bits to be safely led across the street.
Of course if someone decides they want to be Evil (note caps) it’s up to the party to say they’re perfectly fine travelling with a psychotic who wears a necklace of baby orc heads or defiles the holy water in a very personal fashion while the paladin visits his temple. When the party decides enough is enough I will not shed any tears for the dead Evil player.
This is the Monday essay.
For me the annoying thing about alignments is that the concept of good and evil are just too nebulous for me. Sure there are some acts that are pretty clearly good and evil, but most of the actual moral decisions people make are too ambiguous to fall into these overly simplistic categories.
If I were going to try to reconstruct alignment for D&D I’d piggyback off their pantheon. In a world where there are obviously gods, I would expect people to align their moralities by the gods. So what I’d do is have a system where every character had a listed deity (this already happens) and then a measure of intensity for how closely they follow that god’s precepts (something like Fanatical – Devout – Practising – Lapsed) and Clerics / Paladins would have to be at least Devout. For those who don’t follow the gods much there’d be Unaligned, the equivalent of True Neutral.
Now this doesn’t have much real-world application. But then I don’t actually want people running around rating people on a 2-dimensional 3 point scale. Maybe that’s just evidence I’m True Neutral but I find the concept silly.
We should always open with the question: “What kind of story are you telling?”
If you’re just dice-grinding and doing the whole “I hope I can upgrade my +1 leather armor and get some +2 leather armor!”, thing, then alignment matters only insofar as it impacts the group members and their ability to share after they find treasure.
On the waaay other end of the spectrum, you’ve got games like the Old World of Darkness Wraith: The Oblivion where there are not alignments much at all… just goals.
Somewhere in the middle, you have stuff like “Indiana Jones kinda Nazis” (fun to fight against) and “Maus kinda Nazis” (not very much fun to fight against).
If you’re playing comic book characters, it’s best to have a four-color morality system.
I like the New World of Darkness the best on those you listed, but I think the best “alignment system” I have seen is the Fate system’s aspects (as mentioned in an earlier post). By making these aspects, you have basically created an alignment for the character and you have fate points to break it when you feel like you should. Nobody ALWAYS does X or NEVER does Y, there will be times when you break those rules and this systems gives you that option. Now to just add it into D&D….
Yeah, the Dresden Files system is pretty good… I’d say that it’s like the TMNT system only instead of there being 7ish alignments, you have to build your own… one alignment per, if you will.
It’s just the introduction of, say, Knights of the Cross and/or Nicodemus that pretty much shake that reality up and say “yeah, there is good and evil too”.
True, but you can still make a true good or true evil being with the system. Just imagine a character that has these:
He who attacks first, attacks last
The end justifies the mean (left s off on purpose)
Fools deserve what happens to them
And so on, this would not be a nice character.
Nerds… I’m just gonna throw this in here for ya cos I luvs you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54VJWHL2K3I
Yep, very funny video. But what if your game does not use d6’s!?!
Nobody rolls “a” d6. They roll d20s, or d100s, or *tons* of d6s.
Actually in Savage Worlds you could end up rolling a single d6 fro some tests.
Well yes, but d6 is the only thing the works with G-6.
sometimes, you just gotta sacrifice the truth for a rhyme.
The TMNT system (which came from the Palladium RPG system, which I thoroughly enjoy btw) is very archtypical, but I found it a lot easier for new players to grok than D&D’s system. Principled: Superman. Scrupulous: Indiana Jones. Oddly enough many of my characters wound up being Aberrant.
GURPS’s lack of an alignment system except vis-a-vis taking Disadvantages with role-playing consequences like Bullying or Sadist was intriguing. Also, I thought, more realistic because most people aren’t “Evil” the way you would think a Demon is “Evil”.
Heck, Norman Bates loved his mother, didn’t he? Well, sort of anyway.
Looking forward to the Evil essay.
Part of the problem is that too many players don’t Play A Role; instead, they just play themselves, only with a big axe and a fur bikini.
The other problem is that D&D was still showing its wargame roots; in wargames you’ll have units with traits like “stealthy” or “accurate”, and those traits determine what special things affect the unit and what abilities it has. So it’s not out of the question for a game system to see “Good” and “Evil” as just more traits, and those determine what spells you can cast on that unit and what equipment it can use.
Well, in defense of author-insertion fanfic, there ain’t nothing wrong with that.
If you can get five people together who are all willing to work collaboratively on their fanfics together and tell a story, then that is, quite frankly, FREAKIN’ AWESOME.
To be honest, I don’t know how folks would be able to play something that wasn’t them (on some level).
Actors seem to manage. On the other hand, they get paid.
We don’t make actors anymore. Just movie stars and variants.
Agreed, I have found most players just play themselves.
Back when I was still trying to write the perfect RPG game, the concept I was working with was that everything emerged based on the story and the player’s actions. So there were no alignments, there were no classes, there were only choices and consequences. (This has been attempted in video game RPG’s since then, without a lot of success – in my experience, anyways.) Never really got it right, but I was always aiming to create as much realism as possible.