The more I thought about it, the less happy I became with the outcome of this thread. The definitions I proposed are workable, but they don’t really change the status quo all that much.
I see several problems with alignment as a gameplay mechanic (ignoring any philosophical problems one might have with it). The first problem is that it is useless as an actual gameplay mechanic. I think some of the disagreements we’ve had in this thread make that particularly clear. If we want to treat this as a mechanic for helping us play our characters, then alignment needs to indicate what behaviors reflect that alignment.
The
rules try to do that, but they ultimately fail. The descriptions are too broad. They reflect the author’s biases. As
one essay I read on alignment put it, “Much of AD&D's alignment system was written from the viewpoint of the Lawful Good individual ONLY.” The way AD&D presented alignments was certainly silly (if not outright retarded), but d20-decended systems still have problems. Let’s look at Neutral Good and Neutral Evil.
Neutral Good
A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them.
Neutral good means doing what is good and right without bias for or against order.
Neutral Evil
Someone who is neutral with respect to law and chaos has some respect for authority and feels neither a compulsion to obey nor a compulsion to rebel. She is generally honest, but can be tempted into lying or deceiving others.
A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. She has no love of order and holds no illusions that following laws, traditions, or codes would make her any better or more noble. On the other hand, she doesn't have the restless nature or love of conflict that a chaotic evil villain has.
Some neutral evil villains hold up evil as an ideal, committing evil for its own sake. Most often, such villains are devoted to evil deities or secret societies.
Neutral evil represents pure evil without honor and without variation.
Here is what the rules have to say on Neutral with respect to Good and Evil.
People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent, but may lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.
Neutral Good is the average good person, but Neutral Evil is Hitler. Even though Neutral on the Good-Evil axis is not supposed to kill innocents, Neutral Evil does so because it is
EEEEEEEVIL. All Evil alignments are similarly marred. That’s not to say that being Evil is a good thing, but the lack of nuance means that characters who ought to have an Evil alignment end up overloading Chaotic Neutral instead. The vengeance seeker who wants to kill everyone who hurt her but has no desire to harm innocents can’t be NE because NE is Hitler. The stereotypical thief who robs everyone he meets can’t be CE because CE is Jeffery Dahmer. Of course, when players do play Evil alignments, they embrace the extreme definitions that the rules provide.
When I originally simplified the alignment definitions, I tried to address two problems. First, I tried to provide a fairly simple metric against which to rate an action. I felt this would making easier to judge what aspects of alignment an action possessed. I think this was mostly successful. Second, I defined the combinations of alignments as all combinations of the two axes. My hope was that this would eliminate bias and allow for a bit more nuance in play. It wasn’t really all that successful. There were some non-obvious implications. Defending yourself may be an evil act. Paladins doing what paladins do may be committing evil acts. A vigilante who punishes a local pedophile in such a way that he can no longer be a threat committed an evil act.
The first major revision I have decided to make to the alignment system is that alignments have ranks. You are not just LG, you are Lawful X Good X. Ranks range from 0 to 10 (with paragons of those alignments being 11, of course), and each rank has 10 points. I will provide a chart (like the Honor or Glory charts from L5R) of how certain behaviors add or subtract points from your alignment rank. Vigilante justice might be expected from someone with a low Good rank while always trying to save and redeem might be the expected behavior of someone with a high Good rank. This is analogous to Wisdom in
Mage: The Awakening. Someone with a high wisdom loses Wisdom for hurting people while someone with a low Wisdom does not. Alignments will no longer be an axis, so Evil will be the opposite of Good, and Law will be the opposite of Chaos (like Infamy is the opposite of Glory).
One benefit of this change is that it allows me to redefine alignment-dependent effects.
Detect alignment will now reveal the alignment rank for the person you casted it on. Under this system, someone with a high Evil rank must be the love child of Hitler and Stalin raised by Pol Pot. As Mike was getting at, the current system of tying alignment-based auras to hit dice is pretty terrible. The cruelest bureaucrat is probably only going to be an aristocrat 5, so he wouldn’t even have an aura when
detect evil is cast upon him! I still have some work to do fleshing this out, and how alignment detection will work specifically, but I think this will be a big improvement.
There’s a problem though. How does neutral fit into this scheme? It was kind of evident in my previous examples, but neutral as an alignment is pretty much fundamentally stupid. How does a Lawful Neutral government even work? I don’t just mean what kind of laws does it pass, but how does it react in a crisis? There’s really no neutral way to react to a famine. LN doesn’t make sense, and CN and NN are not in a better situation. Ignoring the completely stupid cosmic balance aspect of NN, neither alignment really stand for much if we use a less-stupid baby-stomping villain definition of Evil.
The answer is to just get rid of Neutral. If you want to be perfectly neutral, you are 0,0; standing for nothing and only staying there by doing the ridiculous cosmic balance shit. It will be hard to maintain, and everyone will hate you for it, but that is now pretty much expressed in the mechanics. Everyone else will have a low rank one way or another. Except for those explicitly trying to balance neutrality, I think this results in alignment as a more accurate reflection of behavior because LG is no longer necessarily Lawful Cop.
For alignment-based effects, I’m thinking that they will scale with rank. This is why I copied the somewhat unintuitive rank system from L5R. For ranks less than 1, the character will suffer whatever alignment-based effects a neutral character would suffer under the old system. For other ranks, the character will receive a greater portion of the effect or even more. I envision a system where someone with a really high alignment rank actually gains more than 100% of the effect because having a high alignment rank is something special.
Edit: fixed a bunch of spelling mistakes + edits
