Alignment

[kenada]

I’ve added the explanatory text to the wiki on Obsidian Portal. The rest will come tomorrow. I wanted to call Good/Evil the Morality track, but I couldn’t think of a good name for the Law/Chaos track.

[kenada]

FWIW, I’ve started posting tables. I’d welcome some feedback on the acts I’m adding.

[kenada]

I’m also considering punting on it and sticking with the standard alignment rules, as problematic as they seem.

[Thomas Kerwin]

I think it'll work pretty well, but don't get bogged down too much in the table, just put stuff that seems right and we can use it until it seems like something is wrong. Maybe don't bother having as many divisions too, how about doing 0-3 4-7 8-10 to get started. It'll make it easier to get something workable.

I think the table needs a couple more things about stuff like stealing or property damage. 

[kenada]

I think it'll work pretty well, but don't get bogged down too much in the table, just put stuff that seems right and we can use it until it seems like something is wrong.

The tables are kind of the point of the system though.

Maybe don't bother having as many divisions too, how about doing 0-3 4-7 8-10 to get started. It'll make it easier to get something workable.

Just using three ranks would break down as 0: no aura, 1: faint aura, 2: moderate aura, 3: strong aura, 11: overwhelming aura.

I think the table needs a couple more things about stuff like stealing or property damage.

I have those in a draft.

[kenada]

Well, I punted. The basic rules are ‘use the book as a guideline’ and ‘don’t be a dick about alignment’.

[BobChuck]

sorry it didn't work out.

I've finally figured out why Alignment is such a problem.

Alignment isn't subjective; your own personal views on whether or not its okay to eat babies doesn't change the nature of the act.

Alignment isn't objective, either; there's no single universal set of rules to dictate what is and isn't good or evil.

Alignment... Morality, depends on the story you are trying to tell.
D&D and Pathfinder assume a High Fantasy setting, story, and style of play, so those games use high-fantasy Morality is the default.
World of Darkness is a dark story about hard choices between success, survival, and sanity, so the morality of the setting is quite punitive.
Shadowrun is a near-future game set in a crap-shack world, so the game doesn't include any rules on morality at all, except for how other people view your actions - just like the real world, for what it's worth.

So the real question isn't "how do I want alignment to work in my game" so much as "what kind of story do I want the players to tell?"

Does that make sense?

[kenada]

There are two things I want out of alignment:

• It should be mechanically interesting.
• It should serve as a role-playing aid

While alignment interacts with a lot of systems in D&D, it ultimately fails both of those for the same reason: the metrics that govern alignment are hidden to the players. Someone playing a good-natured scallywag doesn’t know specifically how a DM will interpret his actions until the DM tells him he changed alignment, and a paragon of virtue is going to have a hell of a time playing that unless he acts like Lawful Cop, which is generally ridiculed as boring. If L5R hid honor like that, then playing Honor-dependent characters (like a Matsu Bushi) would be a horrible experience.

My revised system attempted to do the same for D&D, but it was going to be a whole lot of work when I don’t have the time to do it. I also think it might need further alignment, with just Morality and Social Attitude tracks. I like the dual-nature approach, but I think it ends up with too much overlap between the two and bloats the tables by including redundant entries between them.