Now, I am not saying that this little essay was not mildly entertaining, I would question its usefulness. I mean... this reads more like a glorified rant than an instructional model, the little tag along on the end notwithstanding. Far more useful would have been something more along the lines of adapting the alignments to fit your particular groups' paradigm.
For example, the idea behind Lawful X is not tied to laws per se, but to Order. Yes laws are actively endorsed and obeyed, because they bring about order. But the Paladin in a LE land wouldn't be concerned with that land's laws so much as the Higher Laws of his Deity, Laws of Order and Justice - Laws of Good. Now, I would argue that this is pretty obvious from the get-go, but some people would disagree. Fine. Explicate it from the beginning, and you avoid the fights later. Ditto with the nature of hereditary evil and other arguments that are, in my 24 years of gaming, mostly arguments for the sake of arguments. None of my GMs have felt the need to throw in the inane ork baby just happening to be in the middle of their military camp just for the sake of "moral conflict". Besides, subtle decisions seducing the characters work better than overt choices with easy solutions (turn the ork baby over to your church superiors and let them handle it).
This also ignores the fact that alignment is NOT the bane of RPG existence many contemporary role-players make it out to be. Of course I've played D&D (in every incarnation, from the red-box up), but it is far from my game of choice. I have numerous problems with it. However, I use alignment in EVERY game I run. Notice I said run, not play in. When it comes to a succinct expression of what a given NPC is about, the two letter codes of LE, TN, NG, etc. are perfect. They fulfill the same function as the Tags of "Price of Freedom" (yes, seriously showing my age there); namely, a quick and dirty expression to key in on. It doesn't force any particular personality, but it does reveal a persona. It doesn't hamstring players into 'choosing an alignment', but it makes the overall attitude of an NPC readily apparent.
I appreciate what your stated intent was, but I'm just not seeing it in the completion.
As JTS states alignment is just a game device to give an idea of the relative behaviour between PCs and NPCs, nothing else. It was created for a wargame turned rpg, OD&D. It worked perfectly in that context but it is more or less useless outside of it. Yes, JTS uses it in other contexts as well but he could use anything else and any other set of concepts that provides for a quick reference of potential conflicts between PCs and NPCs. The attempts to rationalize aligment into a moral or etical code just lead nowhere.
The problem is that alignment is hard to keep as just a rough guideline when there are a wide variety of alignment-based nukes. It becomes really important to decide where you fall on the LG/NG split when Chaos Hammers are falling. In order to use alignment as a rule of thumb, a lot of the higher level cleric spells may need to get looked out carefully. As far as a lot of spells are concerned, alignment isn't just shorthand, it's a targeting sequence.
But I don't think it's terribly hard to make the alignments easy enough to work with. I wrote an essay on the subject that seems to be working well in my game. http://www.tekh.org/beholden/alignessay.html
Just to clarify a point or two...
I'm not exactly saying that "alignment is just a game device to give an idea of the relative behaviour between PCs and NPCs". What I'm saying is twofold:
First, Alignment is primarily a game device to give an idea of relative behavior based upon morals/ethics. As such, it is incredibly useful, when used correctly, in any RPG.
Second, if the morals of the GM and/or the ethos of the playing group are outlined with even a modicum of clarity at the beginning, then most of the inane alignment arguments are eliminated early on. If from the beginning my co-players and I agree that Lawful Good does not mean pretentious holier-than-thou snob, but could actually mean humble servant who believes in order and protecting the weak (gasp! what a concept!) then arguments later on are minimized. By and by, since I am posting anew: If I'm playing a LG Paladin, and Bob is playing a TN Druid, why should I even care what Bob thinks LG looks like? As a Christian, for example, I turn to the Bible and my fellow Christians for definitions of what is "proper Christian behavior". Non-Christians really aren't qualified to dictate to me what Christianity is. They don't know my God, so how would they know? Similarly, why should I as a player care what Bob the druid-player thinks LG looks like as long as the DM and myself agree? Let him have his view - I'll run my paladin my way.
My point was that alignment should be an aid and a tool, not a straightjacket. Character is determined by habitual action, not by single incident. If a player consistently violates the already established ethics of LG behavior, then yeah, whack him off his LG pedestal. Otherwise, just remind him, and show the guilt about his trespass later. (This addresses, I believe, Samhaine's concern).
Perhaps my little article could have used a bit more focus. The idea here is what you do when characters come into conflict during a game. Obviously, alignment is how people define their characters and (in D&D at least) the concept has very real in game effects.
The point is this;
Adventuring party X contains both a theif (a rogue of non-lawful alignment) and a character of some lawful bent. This situation creates a built-in conflict, "Hey! Don't steal that!"
The questions remains, what does the party do to fix the problem? Let them fight it out or force one person to back down? And on what do they base this judgement? The argument here is entirely a practical one. For a player to say, "I'm playing my alignment." may justify his character's actions to the group or GM, but it doesn't count as an in-game argument.
I only strayed into the realm of discussing what alignments mean in abstract terms because, well, it was fun. Besides, if the alignments don't have clear definitions then an article discussing them doesn't have much meaning. Reference what I said in the about page 87. A LG dwarf might steal on occassion, even though this act is chaotic (disregard for law and order), evil (hurting others) and heavily frowned upon in dwarven culture. This doesn't mean that the LG dwarf condones theft or would tolerate it from people in his adventuring party. I wrote the article to give advise on the more complicated problems that arise when you're trying to keep a party on track and away from each other's throats.
This article was not even as good as many forum posts that don't claim to be articles. In fact it was very poor. OTOH, it reminded me why I don't use the Good and Evil alignments & stick with OD&D Law-Neutrality-Chaos. I find that works much much better and avoids the common problems. Plus my Nazis get to still be Chaotic the way they should be - "Lawful Evil" doesn't make any sense.
I agree the original Law-Neutral-Chaos makes far more sense and allows for better true Roleplay - rules are your servant not the other way around which is the biggest problem with D20 IMO, their efforts to create a "unifying ruleset" have made players and DM's slaves to the rules.
The analogy of the thief given by David C above demonstrates a serious problem with the whole good-evil mixture: it constantly lets the Paladin determine what is good or evil. What's the difference really between stealing from some rich guys house by a thief and stealing from an Orc's camp after the Paladin has murdered them all? Oh the Paladin may say the stuff was originally the property of other people's they stole from - fine then go find those people and give it back to them, but the problem there is how do you know they didn't steal it? You gonna murder them too Paladin? "But but, the rules of war say I get the booty!" Ok fine then you're admitting that your livlihood depends on the success of the Orcs stealing from others. Isn't that called money laundering?
Law-Neutral-Chaos is the only "rule" that makes sense because it tells us how the character (or npc) feels about society. A lawful person obeys the laws of society no matter how crazy they are (this gives the Paladin permission to ignore the ethical dilemma I proposed above since society has laws regarding the spoils of war), a neutral person is more care-free making their own laws up as they go, and a chaotic person cares nothing for laws but does what they want to survive.
This allows a Paladin and Thief to adventure together because there is no "good" or "evil" here since those are arbitrary and are simply the actions of whatever they do with their decisions in regards to society.
This allows a Paladin and Thief to adventure together because there is no "good" or "evil" here since those are arbitrary and are simply the actions of whatever they do with their decisions in regards to society.
Wasn't the point about the thief/paladin relationship above that they are at opposite ends of the Law-Chaos axis, one upholds the law and the other ignores it?
Re: #3: Check Your Alignment, Tires Rotated Free
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