I don’t have a computer right now (composing this on cellphone) so I can’t type well enough to really write. But I’d like to start a little discussion. Alignment systems in TTRPGs: yea or nay?
For the longest I wasn’t going to include one in my home brew RPG, but as I reflected on my annoyance with inconsistent player morals, I think, yeah, I want that. I want to be able to point at that entry on a character sheet and say, what are you doing now?
Wanna change that “nice” to “naughty”? Again? Why don’t you just start your next guy as naughty and save yourself the trouble? Why do you keep doing this to me mothafuckas? This was supposed to be a fun game, not a morality play, not a psychodrama.
I don’t want to make that alignment have metaphysical reality / game effect to it, just want a guardrail for player behavior. Assuming it would even work, I dunno…
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Alignment systems are a good shorthand way of dealing with morality when your campaign has some degree of moral concern but isn’t real deep in role playing and for explaining NPCs the party will not spend much time with.
If your campaign is at the murder hobo level nobody is going to care. This is perfectly fine, I have played at a lot of erratic “whoever shows up plays” games where the point was to get together with friends and beat up on monsters. Moral choices didn’t exist in these games, most of the time people couldn’t remember the plot from game to game.
At the other end, if your campaign has a complex plot, the villains have changing plans and meet the characters multiple times, the characters have backgrounds and individual motivations then a game alignment system is going to be too simple.
Alignment systems work when the campaign is between those two ends. When the players care if the NPC that is hiring them is trustworthy but are not too worried about the long them consequences to their reputation.
grognards are always thinking of the murderhobos in these discussions, but what i’ve encountered that really gives me a case of the ass is players doing vile things in realistic rp-focused scenarios. the movie The Thirteenth Floor posits VR life producing the same effect, and there may be something to that. it’s easy to forgive murderhobos for seeing a class description and number of hp/gp and going for it, what then of the player who looks a more realistic npc in the eye and decides to be ted bundy?
I have disliked alignment systems for a very long time. I feel like they don’t tell you a whole lot.
Let’s use the D&D alignment system (either one, really; lawful/neutral/chaotic on their own or combined with a good/neutral/evil axis) for an example. If you’re telling me a character is lawful or lawful good, you’re telling me about their approach. Approaches are changeable. If I’m going to bother defining a character by something I’d rather it have to do with who they really are, not what approach they might take in some hypothetical situation that’s so generalized it’s never even described.
Another way of looking at it is that “law” is a society level concept. I can’t remember where this comes from but there’s a sort of ranking system of what’s important to people. Close friends and family then I think acquaintances and very much last, the nation you’re part of. So what does that tell us? It means the gold dragon who we’d generally expect to act in a lawful good way is going to be pure chaotic evil when it finally catches up to the villain that poisoned a whole clutch of its eggs. And how many people who share the lawful good crede with it will stand up in protest? Honestly… I don’t think that many of them would unless it was taken to very uncomfortable extremes. And that brings us to another problem with them. How true to the alignment are you, really? Do you have the moral fortitude to caution a dragon parent who’s lost a clutch of offspring against going too far? Does that make you a shallow twit or a person with deep compassion?
And frankly, people ignore what little guidance alignment does provide. I have plenty of examples but I won’t bore you with them. Alignment is like a shoddily painted picture of a door on a wall that’s trying to pretend to be a whole building.
I’m kind of writing a game myself and what I’ve been using to fill that spot instead are what I’ve been calling vulnerabilities. They’re kind of similar to GURPS disadvantages except my focus is less on mechanical aspects and more on building a story. Whether you’re greedy or gullible, have a nemesis or a secret, you’re wanted by the law or you have someone you must protect… All of these say something about who you are, and maybe a little about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
I find these vastly more useful and they can be easier to point out when players aren’t portraying them properly. My system gives a minor benefit when people take these optional vulnerabilities so I feel like I’ll have an easier time telling people they can’t change their minds in the middle of a session as well.
So you want players to “pick a morality and stick with it”? That probably will require that there be in-game consequences for not sticking with it.
Instead of a hokey old-time alignment system, how about this? There’s an assortment of pairings of a vice and a virtue, and there are several character creation options that will give a character some or another set of such. Perhaps a moral creed or religion, or perhaps tie it to class or something.
To the extent NPCs have such creeds as well, it’s limited to intelligent ones and characters interacting with creed-compatible (more virtues in common, fewer cases of one’s virtue being another’s vice) NPCs get charisma bonuses for those interactions.
Character actions that align with one of that character’s virtues will receive bonuses to their rolls. Actions that align with one of their vices will receive maluses. If more than one applies to the action, these get summed to whatever net effect. That can have whatever in-universe explanation seems appropriate: the gods/karma/etc. favor or disfavor you because you are acting in accordance with or against your creed; or acting in a way the character knows is questionable makes them do it only half-heartedly, versus giving their all when doing what they know is right; or similarly.
An example could be to make a virtue of coming to the immediate aid of a beleaguered team-mate, with the corresponding vice being to delay doing so for selfish reasons. This pair would be a natural fit to the Paladin class in settings that include such. On the other hand, a more conservative character might consider bailing someone out who bit off more than they could chew, instead of letting them get schooled by hard knocks, to be a vice, in which case they’d get maluses if they tried to aid that team-mate if the team-mate’s own choices played a big role in their getting into trouble, rather than just bad luck. (That Paladin would meanwhile get bonuses either way.)
The result is that there are advantages to not making big moral swerves; but moreover, it could lead to genuinely tricky decisionmaking, especially when presented with choices that are morally ambiguous because they align with one virtue and some other vice simultaneously …
@2 Great American Satan says: There are a lot of ways that sort of interaction can go wrong. Most of it boils down to the players and DM not being on the same page. As DM you can’t make the players play the game as an acting session and as a player you can’t negotiate your way out of a fight if the DM isn’t playing along.
When I’m joining a new group or organizing a new game I always assume things will start at just above murder hobo level until I have a chance to learn about the players. I then adjust maturity level to suit.
If you’re not already aware of it, have a look at Burning Wheel with it’s beliefs and instincts mechanics. It’s far more about making the player think about why the character is doing the action, and encourages a far more nuanced concept of morality for characters
Apparently the original goal of the system was to link serious roleplaying to in game mechanical rewards
Honestly i think this is mostly a D&D problem, because it’s never been able to shake it’s roots as a tactical war game
oof, this is a lot of reading. i’ll do my best to check it out asap.
read it, and while it’s worthy material to exist on the topic, thanks for your contributions, i have nothing to say to it right now. my next post is adjacent, but if i put it here, it would be like i’m talking past everybody, not engaging with them.
I’ve played a lot of TTRPGs and I’ve never really been able to run my roleplaying via the alignment system, and when DMing I can’t really get much roleplaying information from alignment when looking at an NPC’s chart.
However, I think they are actually useful specifically for DM’s. Alignment doesn’t really matter on a personal level, but I think it makes sense at organizational levels. At least the classic D&D alignment chart and not something like Burning Wheel’s. I like to think of organization or societal alignments as the greater trends that flow out of the institutionalized decision making process, without having to think of exactly how their structure creates that outcome. Basically a shortcut that leads to a world that feels richer while taking less brainpower. I also think that anything on the moral neutral axis line means they care about some other continuum than morality, or on the law/chaotic axis line they care about something other than the group or individualism. And that can be anything, from nature to industrialization, from knowledge to ignorance, from harmony to discord, etc.
When my players are exploring a society, it is truly helpful shorthand to know that the mages guild they’re talking to is a Chaotic Neutral (knowledge) faction. Their members are going to be a variety but the institution in general will favor individualism and the pursuit of knowledge divorced from Morality. Or that the cop equivalent are most likely going to be Lawful Neutral (Personal Power), or that the healers coven is Chaotic Good, or the Church is Neutral (Institutional Power) Good, etc. It really helps me focus the way their institution acts, even if the characters the players meet don’t generally fall into those strict lines.
Strange, that last, given that real-world churches skew heavily toward lawful evil…
@10 when I’m worldbuilding I prefer tropes over reality when it comes to institutions for the same cognitive load reason lol. Truthfully, I usually roll a die on the alignment chart to see what alignment a society is, or what an org is, etc.
The D&D alignment system is so weird.if you try and take it literally. Imagine a world where people can be literally good or factually evil. And you can identify those people with a simple magical spell that’s widely available. And some special people don’t even need the spell!
Unless you’re assuming that PC classes are vanishingly rare , wouldn’t cities post paladins at their entrances to scan for evil people and keep them out? Could you submit your alignment as evidence in court? “His alignment is Good, so clearly he either didn’t murder the victim or he had a good reason! Case dismissed!” Would courts require you to have your alignment checked naked to make sure you aren’t wearing any Amulets of Alignment Confusion? Leaders would require an alignment check for government positions as well, probably annually just to make sure you haven’t fallen.
Such a world would look nothing like our own. So, either embrace it as part of the fantasy, or toss alignment out and ignore it. (Or do what Eberron does and try and make it A Thing and also largely irrelevant.)
how did eberron do that, if you don’t mind?
Eberron was put together under the requirement that it include EVERYTHING from the D&D core books. Anything D&D has to have a place in Eberron. So, they couldn’t just scrap the alignment system.
But at the same time, the setting is all about pulp-era tropes, and that includes Noir. And you can’t have Noir without surprise betrayal. But when a PC can just cast “Detect Evil” and determine that the femme fatale is, in fact, likely to be fatale, you’re rather ruining the genre.
Eberron ducks this problem by… making characters complicated and contradictory. Keith Baker’s favorite example is that the Queen of Aundair is Neutral Good.. but fully intends to restart the Last War, even knowing that untold millions of sentients will die, because, damnit, Aundair should rule a united continent according to the proper interpretation of the old empire’s rules that started the Last War in the first place! While the King of Karnath is a Evil vampire who fully intends to protect the peace, for entire selfish reasons. See, alignment exists, but you can’t just blindly trust it!
Um…kinda? I mean, if you’re asking me, anyone who wants to restart a massive war to gain power is at least a little bit evil. The Queen feels more straight Neutral to me. Meanwhile, while the King certainly has done enough bad things to be evil, he’s not “Bwa ha ha, now I’ll pull the wings off this fly because I ENJOY BEING EVIL” sort of evil. Again, he feels like a more selfish version of neutral.
And, in fact, almost everyone in Eberron ends up feeling some shade of Neutral, despite how we’re assured that all the alignment mechanics still work and are meaningful!
In my Eberron, alignment detection spells and the like only work on planar creatures that are definitionally linked to an alignment. A Devil is fundamentally evil in a way elves and halflings just can’t be. I otherwise mostly ignore alignment.
makes a lotta sense. im cooking up my own ttrpg bc who isnt and im not going to include “metaphysical” alignment like dnd has, tho i do think that’s a fun weirdness of dnd and i do like to use it when i play that. while i do think a lawful good person could have legit reasons to lie to or murder you and therefore detect evil isn’t a slam dunk, sounds like eberron’s read of things goes a little extra in the cheesening. your solution is solid.