Post originally by Kobold Lord at 2003-05-24 01:02:17
Converted from Phorums BB System

"(In theory, this form of personality rules should work better than alignment, which is essentially a punishment-based rules approach, providing rules penalizing players whose characters stray from their alignment. Positive reinforcement -- rewarding desired behavior -- is supposed to be more effective than punishing undesirable behavior.)"

I realize that this has nothing to do with the subject at hand, but there's no way positive reinforcement is inherently more effective than negative reinforcement. If you use only positive reinforcement on children, they'll quickly learn to exploit your generosity. If you tell them not to pet the lion in the zoo, and reward them with a cookie when they pull back when they are told, they'll simply start reaching for that lion constantly to get you to offer them another cookie. Negative reinforcement is the natural method of child guidance, where naughty children who touch lions when they are not supposed to get messily devoured. Children taught under the negative reinforcement method do not screw up again.

Back to the topic, shouldn't role-playing be its own reward? I'd hate to see a munchkin who pimps out his "Pacifist" with bonus xp by constantly but "accidentally" provoking fights, and then gains the xp cookie by abandoning the fight immediately (leaving the rest of the party to clean up afterward). Rules exist to be exploited by munchkins, so it may be a better choice to leave personality and alignment nice and vague.

If you're going for the endorphin rush rather than internalizing the desire to be good on its own merits, are you really doing "good" or just selfishly collecting endorphins? And if an opportunity to get the endorphin rush without going through the trouble of the do-gooding arises, why do the good?