Making D&D morality less repulsive.

[Gods_Trick]

You can't RP a crisis of conscience if you don't believe theres a crisis. Said player was a black and white girl. Gave some in game warnings from NPC clerics, and some out of game talks alignment. No dice.

Sulre the paladin Fell after she tried to kill the villains daughter to prevent her from resurrecting him. His NG good daughter. Nice enough person, not particularly good or bad, who like most daughters would prefer to see their Dad alive.

She of course reacted to this by playing the Blackguard card.

It was an interesting example of cardboard Alignments in action in a world that was devoted to RP.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I hope you dropped an interesting example of rocks on her character.

[sabs]

So, you're saying that the PLAYER was terrible and not properly roleplaying the nuance of a Paladin? That was always the problem with Paladins, very few people can roleplay the paladin ethos properly.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Very few people can understand the paladin ethos. Mostly because it doesn't really make sense.

[Gods_Trick]

The player was playing a black & white paladin perfectly well, and thats partly because the black & white paladin follows the code by rote.

Oh it can be played well, but you have to discard a lot of the crap thats the paladins code. By some readings of it, you can't try to redeem evildoers because accompanying them willingly breaks the code.

I wept tears of joy when I found the Kantian paladin, it was a thing of beauty.

[shadzar]

So, you're saying that the PLAYER was terrible and not properly roleplaying the nuance of a Paladin? That was always the problem with Paladins, very few people can roleplay the paladin ethos properly.

One major thing is still following Gary's broken alignment system. People can't look outside of the 9-alignments and figure what to do.

[sabs]

A Paladin saying, screw the Law, she's going down. Just isn't really a Paladin. It's actually quite possible to roleplay a Paladin. It takes extra care, and I try to avoid it because I find the ethos repugnant, but it is doable.

lawful good is all about needing the proof. About letting 1 man get away with murder, rather than sending an innocent man to jail. Gary's alignment system is lame and makes for bland social interactions most of the time. But he was creating a High Fantasy where being Lawful, and Good ment something. Where the world was not shades of grey.

I can respect that.

[tzor]

Tzor, free will spoils the feasibility of keeping alignments square.

There are two things to consider here. The first is that many players simply do not have a good understanding of the terms "law" (I often feel a better term is cosmos as that is the real opposite of chaos) and "good."

The second thing is that D&D is not the DM vs the players; the DM should not put the players "to the test." Players who do not have complex understanding of moral philosophy should not get moral dillemas they cannot handle. If something is "evil" then you make a good case for why it is evil.

In the case of the Paladin, the law axis has never been as firm as the good axis, but even then, one shold not put the player to the test knowing that they will fail it. Once again, "law" means discipline. The lawful person follows all lawful authority, but only in as much as it relates to any higher law or authority (higher law/authority trumps local law/authority in areas where they overlap). There are times when a local law must be broken because to follow it would break an even higher law.

Again, do not put the player to the test. So say you have a "lawful evil" NPC. Let's go back to square one, what is the purpose of good? To kill evil? NO! The purpose of Good is to protect innocents; unfortunately killing evil is often required but that is not in and of itself the purpose. When one assumes it is, the path to the dark side he will soon travel.

So you have a lawful evil person. Is he a threat to innocents? How? Remember, even though the paladin is "lawful" he is not an instrument of "law." Legal justice is not the purpose of the paladin. So, assuming that there is generally a non evil society, the purpose of the paladin is not to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The purpose of the paladin is to protect the innocent by preventing evil from happening. In this case, sunlight is the best disinfectant. If good people realize that this person is truely evil while maintaining the letter of the law, they will band together to defeat him. Once again, this is a more complex situation, and one should never put the player to the test.

In the nice case, revealing the NPC to be the evil person he is, the evil NPC blows a fuse, takes it personally, attempts to destroy the paladin and ... look ... self defense! Moral problem solved!

[shadzar]

A Paladin saying, screw the Law, she's going down. Just isn't really a Paladin. It's actually quite possible to roleplay a Paladin. It takes extra care, and I try to avoid it because I find the ethos repugnant, but it is doable.

lawful good is all about needing the proof. About letting 1 man get away with murder, rather than sending an innocent man to jail. Gary's alignment system is lame and makes for bland social interactions most of the time. But he was creating a High Fantasy where being Lawful, and Good ment something. Where the world was not shades of grey.

I can respect that.

Gary's alignment system was just fucked.

There is NO such thing as "lawful good".

Good and Evil axis was added. But did NOT need to be combined with Law and Chaos.

That is the problem.

Too many people try to define "Lawful Good". Instead leave them separate for added depth. Lawful and Good.

Much easier to define if something is lawful or not, when you arent bothered by trying to answer if it is good or evil at the same time.

But for some reason, so many people can't split them back out to the 4 choices they really are, with the gray in the middle.

Your paladin saying screw the law, can work. As long as that doesn't move the paladin outside of the range that is law and into neutral.

Once moving to neutral from either good or law, then the paladin gets whatever penalty for going outside it.

The biggest problem is that people hate the 9 alignment system, but still use it. The fix is simple use two alignment parts, rather than 9 finite alignment choices.

Then you just have to figure the good/evil parts out as the law and chaos are pretty easy to figure out

the paladin might have been doing good when saying screw the law, but doesnt mean the paladin became chaotic by doing so. Just depends on how big a range you use for the axis.

[Novembermike]

I always preferred something like the Dresden Files system for alignment. You choose three phrases to describe the character. A Paladin might have things like "Protects the Weak", "Avenger of (God)" or some other things that are similar. If something happens that would trigger one of those (goblins attack an outlying farm) then you have to react to appropriately unless you burn a resource.

Basically you get to choose your own characters morality but it's enforced. You could also have things like "Dwarf Hater" or "Likes the Dark", it doesn't have to be about morality, but it helps to define your character's motivations.

[Fuchs]

A Paladin saying, screw the Law, she's going down. Just isn't really a Paladin. It's actually quite possible to roleplay a Paladin. It takes extra care, and I try to avoid it because I find the ethos repugnant, but it is doable.

lawful good is all about needing the proof. About letting 1 man get away with murder, rather than sending an innocent man to jail. Gary's alignment system is lame and makes for bland social interactions most of the time. But he was creating a High Fantasy where being Lawful, and Good ment something. Where the world was not shades of grey.

I can respect that.

Rubbish. First, which law do you follow? The law of the land? And what if an evil army conquers it, are you now obligated to follow the evil law of the land?

A paladin needs to follow one set of law, likely his order's or church's. Not every law in every country.

[shadzar]

I always preferred something like the Dresden Files system for alignment. You choose three phrases to describe the character. A Paladin might have things like "Protects the Weak", "Avenger of (God)" or some other things that are similar. If something happens that would trigger one of those (goblins attack an outlying farm) then you have to react to appropriately unless you burn a resource.

Basically you get to choose your own characters morality but it's enforced. You could also have things like "Dwarf Hater" or "Likes the Dark", it doesn't have to be about morality, but it helps to define your character's motivations.

Thats where D&D should have gone, pick two sides of an alignment, rather than one whole alignment. Then you can acy on each "phase" or part differently.

How exactly is it enforced?

[Novembermike]

I always preferred something like the Dresden Files system for alignment. You choose three phrases to describe the character. A Paladin might have things like "Protects the Weak", "Avenger of (God)" or some other things that are similar. If something happens that would trigger one of those (goblins attack an outlying farm) then you have to react to appropriately unless you burn a resource.

Basically you get to choose your own characters morality but it's enforced. You could also have things like "Dwarf Hater" or "Likes the Dark", it doesn't have to be about morality, but it helps to define your character's motivations.

Thats where D&D should have gone, pick two sides of an alignment, rather than one whole alignment. Then you can acy on each "phase" or part differently.

How exactly is it enforced?

It uses Fate points, which are one of the major resources. Say you have an aspect "Protect the Weak" and there's a bunch of children being attacked. The GM can "compel" you to rescue them. If you do so, you gain a Fate point, but you can also spend a Fate point you already have to ignore it. If you have no Fate points you can't ignore compels. You can also "invoke" an aspect by burning a Fate point and then you can either reroll something related to that aspect or add +2 to it. For "protect the weak" you might use this to reroll initiative in the combat to save the kids.

The number of fate points you start off with is determined by character creation. In a high powered game you start off with 10 and you can spend them for powerful abilities. Wizards have a minimum cost of 7 so they start off with 3 points, which means it's easy for them to run out and be forced to take compelled actions. A lower powered character, on the other hand, might have 9, and they can ignore or take advantage of their character's traits all day long.

The basic idea is that characters with fewer supernatural abilities are more "human" and can go against their nature more easily. Anything that goes below 1 is considered a monster and a slave to their own nature, such as Fae that cannot lie and are compelled to tell the truth if asked three times.

[shadzar]

How is that really different than D&D as a measure to "enforce" playing the proper alignment?

The instant a character voluntarily changes alignment, the experience point cost to gain the next level (or levels in the case of multi-class characters) is doubled.

~~~

If an alignment change is involuntary, the doubled experience penalty is not enforced. Instead, the character earns no experience whatever until his former alignment is regained. This assumes, of course, that the character wants to regain his former alignment.

If the character decides that the new alignment isn't so bad after all, he begins earning experience again, but the doubling penalty goes into effect. The player does not have to announce this decision. If the DM feels the character has resigned himself to the situation, that is sufficient.

Copyright 1999 TSR Inc.

Early levels don't really have a problem with alignments, unless something requires a specific pairing of the alignments. Actually at lower levels, it works best this way to allow player to get a feel for the character in the direction it will go at later levels. Those later levels though a change hits hard.

It makes the player responsible for making sure to pick the right alignment combination, as well as to play it out.

The crux of free will is extended to the players via the system with understanding that there could be a penalty. As the knight tells Indy in Last Crusade, "choose, but choose wisely."

Seems a system that forces a character to have to do something is imposing too much on the player.

D&D enforced the penalty, while Dresden seems to enforce actions.

Might work great for the theme of Dresden, but D&D is supposed to be more free will of the player to play as they like. That is where it came from after all, the idea of no longer playing out historical referenced things, but doing things on the fly and making your own choices rather than having your choices made for you.

What happens when a player still has no Fate Points and wishes to ignore the GMs "compel"? Does a fight between players break out over the alignment?

[tzor]

Rubbish. First, which law do you follow? The law of the land? And what if an evil army conquers it, are you now obligated to follow the evil law of the land?

Basically you need to set up a heirarchy of laws (like Asmiov did with Robots) where the law of Good is the ultimate law. Higher laws trump lower laws.

If an evil army runs a land, not all the laws of the evil army are per se evil. Any evil law made by any ruller (good or evil) should not be followed because the law of good trumps that law. A law that is not evil, even if it is imposed by a evil letigimate ruller should be followed unless it somehow conflicts with a higher law. If the evil ruller for some strange reason has a law that there should be no smoking in pubs, a paladin would not smoke in pubs.

Remember: A paladin follows law because law/order/discipline requires obeying all lawfull authority unless doing so conflicts with a higher principle (with good being the highest of all). The fact that both words have "law" is just a relic of the English language.

[Ice9]

How is that really different than D&D as a measure to "enforce" playing the proper alignment?
...
What happens when a player still has no Fate Points and wishes to ignore the GMs "compel"? Does a fight between players break out over the alignment?

The benefit is that it's more granular. You can act against your nature/alignment occasionally without much trouble, but doing so consistently will run into problems. Also, it lets players "fine tune" their stated alignment by deciding which situations are important enough to go against it.

You could also merge this with the 2E version quite easily, by allowing players to drop to negative FP, with resulting penalties.


Back on the primary topic ...
The problem with trying to enforce a "Superman" code of alignment is that Superman has resources very few PCs - even high-powered ones - have access to. Namely, an external justice system (that has jurisdiction over the places he defends), prisons, and facing foes at a slow enough rate that transporting them there doesn't hinder him significantly.

In many cases, the PCs are off fighting foes outside of any allied countries borders, in large quantities, and with no guarantee that any kingdom they knew would want to deal with prisoners. That does make it rather harder to capture foes as a primary solution.

Now if your goal is just to get in and out, simply removing foes from action is good enough. For which purpose, I had a character with a book full of Sepia Snake Sigils. Any foe that surrendered got to look at a page, and be in stasis for a couple weeks. But that was only feasible because I had a specific spell and a way to make it free - not a solution for every party.

[Novembermike]

Seems a system that forces a character to have to do something is imposing too much on the player.

D&D enforced the penalty, while Dresden seems to enforce actions.

Might work great for the theme of Dresden, but D&D is supposed to be more free will of the player to play as they like. That is where it came from after all, the idea of no longer playing out historical referenced things, but doing things on the fly and making your own choices rather than having your choices made for you.

What happens when a player still has no Fate Points and wishes to ignore the GMs "compel"? Does a fight between players break out over the alignment?

The GM can't compel the player to do anything he doesn't want to. If it's something the player doesn't feel fits his character (for example, Mister Paladin might not "Protect the Weak" Orc children) then the player can negotiate his way out of it. Since all of this is built on catch phrases everyone's allowed a little bit of wiggle room.

If it's something that's obviously in character though (Paladin trying to wiggle out of saving a busload of nuns and kittens with no Fate points) then the GM needs to put his foot down since that's just cheating, but as soon as he's compelled he gets a point that he can spend to alter the situation a bit.

The benefit is that it's more granular. You can act against your nature/alignment occasionally without much trouble, but doing so consistently will run into problems. Also, it lets players "fine tune" their stated alignment by deciding which situations are important enough to go against it.

Basically this. If the player is at 0 fate points and doesn't want to do the compel, you probably need to sit down with them and figure out if they really want to play that character. If you're in tune with your character you're almost always sitting on a pile of Fate points you need to use.

[shadzar]

Seems a system that forces a character to have to do something is imposing too much on the player.

D&D enforced the penalty, while Dresden seems to enforce actions.

Might work great for the theme of Dresden, but D&D is supposed to be more free will of the player to play as they like. That is where it came from after all, the idea of no longer playing out historical referenced things, but doing things on the fly and making your own choices rather than having your choices made for you.

What happens when a player still has no Fate Points and wishes to ignore the GMs "compel"? Does a fight between players break out over the alignment?

The GM can't compel the player to do anything he doesn't want to. If it's something the player doesn't feel fits his character (for example, Mister Paladin might not "Protect the Weak" Orc children) then the player can negotiate his way out of it. Since all of this is built on catch phrases everyone's allowed a little bit of wiggle room.

If it's something that's obviously in character though (Paladin trying to wiggle out of saving a busload of nuns and kittens with no Fate points) then the GM needs to put his foot down since that's just cheating

Cheating to that game maybe, and if that is the hook of the game, then so be it. I get the concept....

So lets say D&D had these "phases":

Pick One:
-Follow law
-Ignore laws
-Strive to neither follow or ignore law, but seek out one or the other when it seems best to you.

Pick One:
-Do good
-Oppose good
-Do whatever but neither really try to do good or oppose it, just what seems right at the time.

How would this fair with D&D?

[Novembermike]

Honestly, pretty bad. I'd probably have it based more on things like:

Law:
Personal Code
Law of the Land
Serves a Master
...

Good/Evil:
Greed is Good
Defender of the Weak
Doesn't Lie
...

Personal Code would fit under a DnD Chaotic character and Law of the Land fits a lawful character, but a lawful character might also Serve a Master and a chaotic character might be an Anarchist.

The problem with just saying Good/Evil is that Good and Evil is that it paints things in broad strokes and good characters can be lost in it. A Lawful Good Samurai is going to act differently than a Lawful Good Agent (Rogue).

[shadzar]

Honestly, pretty bad. I'd probably have it based more on things like:

Well you saw where i was going, just breaking down the D&D alignments so that that sort of fit with that other system.

Many people dont see the separation of the two, and can only see the 9 alignments.

law and chaos axis = A
good and evil axis = B
9 alignments = C

A+B=C

3+3=9?

That is the problem with the alignments in D&D after good and evil were added as choices. Sure you have 9 resulting possibilities, but you are still adding them, when you shouldn't using the 9 rather than your "phase" type.

Law and chaos were the original choices because that is all you needed to pick. You were assumed good as adventurers saving the world. races determined good and evil. When good and evil was given to player, Gary combined them into 9 to TRY (and fail) to make picking easier, but really made it more complicated for 3 decades. Sure you only had to pick one thing, but there is nothing really to define them, and ALL examples fail to express them. That reason is because they should never have be combined, but just added. Rather than "A+B", it should have been "A, B".

The way i always use and work it is like i have explained before, and could help in the topic of this thread as well.

Is the action following ANY laws? Yes = lawful, No = not lawful
Is the action doing good? Considering the lives of others = Good, all else tends towards not-good.

Those two questions pretty much answer the alignment problem.

You just have to set the range for each of them to know how far from the left you must go before you leave lawful to neutral, then to chaotic. Then the same for good and evil...

Where the problem of morality comes from is really simple...and thinking about how it is said that history is written by the victor...

Just look at what you are doing form the point of is it being done for yourself or others....it helps figure those shades of gray. Because they victors will be the ones that decide if it was good or not.

In this thread the simple thing is to not play a game where things in evil exists. D&D was opened up with good and evil to players, so there is more choices...so if you want to remove a level of evils, then remove evil form the game, and have it all good people, but a different type of game.

but it wont be D&D then as good and evil were always parts, and if you remove one permanently then your game is going to be skewed and missing lots of the game...but that is D&D for you, where playing it means you arent even playing D&D...but you are.

I think D&D already has those "phases" in the alignment, but people just got mixed up with them as 9 choices to pick form, rather than picking the two parts. Six choices would have taken less space in books, and given it to explain other things and decades less confusion would have been had.

[Novembermike]

The problem is that the law/chaos and good/evil axis system never worked. What alignment is a Barbarian who refuses to follow the laws of nations but whose life is strictly defined by tribal traditions and follows a strong code of personal honor? Who eats the hearts of his enemies but will not attack someone who isn't a worthy opponent?

[MfA]

Neutral (if he was lawful he'd be an ex-barbarian).

[Sashi]

The Law/Chaos Good/Evil works if you treat it like tags where Law/Chaos is "us"/"them" and Good/Evil is "we like you"/"we hate you" then you never let people be orcs.

[PoliteNewb]

The problem is that the law/chaos and good/evil axis system never worked. What alignment is a Barbarian who refuses to follow the laws of nations but whose life is strictly defined by tribal traditions and follows a strong code of personal honor? Who eats the hearts of his enemies but will not attack someone who isn't a worthy opponent?

I would tend to define "tribal traditions" as the same as "laws of nations"...it's an established code of rules you're supposed to abide by, with punishments/sanctions if you don't.

NOBODY obeys all the laws of all the nations, since most of them contradict each other. Frankly, as long as you're following SOME kind of codified legal system which binds a large group of people, I think you're being lawful.

Personal codes don't even enter into it...hell, just about everybody has a personal code. Any good character technically has the personal code of "doesn't cut the heads off of children", so are they all supposed to be lawful? Fuck personal codes.

So I'd call guy LN, personally.

I don't know how the hell this turned from a morality dispute to an alignment dispute. The 2 often have nothing to do with each other, and the fact that they both use terms like "good" and "evil" and mean entirely different things is going to automatically muddy the waters. Every time I've used the word "good" in this discussion, it was in the moral sense, not the alignment sense. I don't give a fuck what's written on your character sheet...if you stab baby orcs, you're not good (and you're probably evil).

[shadzar]

The problem is that the law/chaos and good/evil axis system never worked. What alignment is a Barbarian who refuses to follow the laws of nations but whose life is strictly defined by tribal traditions and follows a strong code of personal honor? Who eats the hearts of his enemies but will not attack someone who isn't a worthy opponent?

Good question. He is Lawful Neutral.

People keep thinking of laws as written by ONE government. That is the problem. When traveling form land to land, a lawful character doesn't necessarily follow ONLY the laws of the new land, but already was taught some laws. He MIGHT follow the new laws, but they would be added to his own.

Again the problem is assigning current world philosophy to the game. He isn't breaking laws to himself, because he follows a code, but to those currently around him he is breaking the towns laws. He is still acting based on a set of laws...making him lawful. Those laws are those of the traditions of his tribe...a system set in place to maintain order.

Again, Law was a bad choice of words, so just think of Law as Order. It should have been defined as such in the game itself. "Law is used as a synonym for a structure of order".

Then the problem with whose laws would have been done away with...but this wasnt really a problem initially, because characters were expected to be playing shorter campaigns in one land they lived in, not really venturing into foreign lands where law and diplomacy would have been different. Adventurers aren't always diplomats, so the idea should have been translated when D&D grew up from just Law/Chaos to the addition of Good/Evil, as well as having the adventurers travel to other lands, where people would be able to set up their own law of the land.

Eating hearts isnt an evil act, not is cannibalism, if you remember than human are omnivorous creatures...not wanting meat to go to waste from a fallen enemy, isnt really bad. Taking an enemy JUST so you can eat his heart is what I will assume you mean, and that can be an evil thing.

It really is the whole PETA thing and vegans et all...as to if humans should eat meat...but that is for personal morals, and defined by the campaign world.

Not fighting a much weaker opponent that doesnt have a chance, shows not really evil intent...so that leaves us between, which is Neutral.

So when you consider "law" to be a term used to mean "a structure of order", the barbarian is following law, and isnt really doing good or evil but is neutral, and your barbarian would then be: Lawful Neutral....with the information provided.

To pre-empt tzor...Bluntly put Gary fucked up and Mentzer got it right.

Law (or Lawful) is the belief that everything should follow an order, and that obeying rules is the natural way of life.

Frank took original D&D and updated it, while Gary tried creating something new, and through 3rd one of his biggest failures of combining the two axis, and naming them poorly, was continued.