The Gaming Den

RiotGearEpsilon wrote:Law and Chaos make more sense when you boil them down to their metaphysical extremes. Law as a force that invokes predictability, servitude, hierarchy, and stability, Chaos as a force that invokes inspiration, instability, manumission, equality. Either can be 'good', but neither of them has anything to do with benevolence or malevolence, necessarily.

So Chaotic characters work to make society more unstably equal in an inspired fashion, while Lawful characters try to build up hierarchies while being predictable servile? I honestly have no idea how either of those could make a good guideline for PC behavior.

Does a Lawful character find his alignment shifting if he does what the Chaotic character tells him to and divides the treasure equally?

RiotGearEpsilon wrote:Law and Chaos make more sense when you boil them down to their metaphysical extremes. Law as a force that invokes predictability, servitude, hierarchy, and stability, Chaos as a force that invokes inspiration, instability, manumission, equality. Either can be 'good', but neither of them has anything to do with benevolence or malevolence, necessarily.

And this is why alignment is a problem. I can vaguely attach chaos and inspiration, but manumission and equality make me laugh and laugh and laugh. I connect it much more to might makes right, and if you don't have might, you're essentially equal to shit. Law can handle matters of equality much better (though it can also make things utterly crap for people on the bottom).

Well, ultimately, if you're going to use alignments, you need to define them objectively. That means you're going to use definitions that people have not traditionally attached to Law and Chaos because no one agrees what those alignments mean.

So you can make them work. You just have to be extremely clear about they mean, be unapologetically arbitrary about it, and make it clear that they are cosmic forces, not moral forces.