Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 RCanine Aug 02, 2014 13:36:30	I've been thinking more and more about how Lawful Evil is an allowed alignment, but it's only allowed for specific factions, and it's been bugging me a bit. I think the reasons why are as follows:   How does my faction know my alignment? Do I know my alignment? For example, I'm a neutral evil dude. I'm basically in it for me. I'm really good with the spying and the skulking, and when I was an impressionable youth, my family was all killed by the Netherese, so I joined up with the Harpers. I actually believe in all that goody-goody protect the weak stuff, and I fervently believe that concentrated power is a bad thing. Maybe I take some freelance jobs the other Harpers don't know about. When I'm in deep cover and I get compromised, I'm going to save my skin first, the mission second. I might even point a few fingers at people who don't deserve it when the Harper brass starts asking around, just to make sure I don't lose this sweet gig. In my mind, I'm a good guy. Everyone thinks I'm a good guy. And when I'm the sole survivor of a mission I look like a good guy. And I'll do good things every once in a while, especially if it helps me get what I'm really after.   Fiction is rife with characters that are, for all intents and purposes, evil dudes working for the benefit of an ostensibly good organization. History too. The closest things to "good" factions are labor unions, political parties, religious groups, militaries and non-profit groups. Yet they are dotted with characters of questionable morals and motives.   I understand the organizational burden of supporting evil characters, but if we allow any amount of evil, we shouldn't funnel it into a subset of our factions. Once we start adding any sort of mechanical elements tied to alignment, it dilutes alignment as a useful tool for role play.
#2 warfteiner Aug 02, 2014 15:26:58	You pose some interesting questions, for sure.  Alignment is and always has been a bit of a hot-button topic in organized play.   First and most simply, the alignment of your character is a 'known' thing to the faction and the character itself.  Your example covers a bunch of topics, but at the heart of it, you are who you are and the public perception really does not account for much.  For example, if a community philanthropist does good deeds every weekend and donates a portion of his time during the week to putting new roofs on the homes of the poor people in the neighborhood, the perception of that person will certainly be 'good'.  People may even call him a mentor or a pillar of the community.   But later, when it's discovered that the philanthropist was a murderer and tried to dispose of the bodies of his victims in the crawlspace beneath his own house, that perception certainly becomes 'evil'.   He knew it was evil all the way through (arguably; I'm not trying to get into a psychological discussion) his performance of those actions.  No matter the public persona, his evil actions defined his character for as long as he performed those evil actions.   Allowing evil characters into organized play creates some fantastic story elements for the players and the adventures that everyone will be enjoying.  Allowing only lawful evil characters help us, as players, DMs, admins, and organizers, ensure that there is some structure to those story elements - and allows us to put some preventative measures in place to ensure that all players walk away from the table with a great play experience.   tl;dr: perception of alignment is important, but play experience for everyone is more important (in my opinion).  allowing LE enhances story, while NE/CE get too close to disruptive themes and actions.
#3 Voort Aug 02, 2014 17:03:21	How does my faction know my alignment?   Divination spells?
#4 Be3Al2 Aug 03, 2014 9:19:43	What you describe above could probably either count as Neutral (compare to the Starter Set Rogue if you can) or count as disruptive by leaving the other PCs in trouble and thus not allowed because of that. The restrictions are there to give an easy way to turn away players who cannot play evil characters in a suitable way. I would guess that players who could make a suitable evil characters would also be able to make a character they are perfectly happy with that is not evil.
#5 Tyranthraxus Aug 03, 2014 21:32:22	As Voort stated, there are many ways to work out alignment. Items can be keyed to certain alignments, some classes have inbuilt ways to find out and then of course divination spells. Its not too difficult.   I can see why the Lord's Alliance and Zhentarim were picked as two factions that would embrace LE.   The Lords Alliance is a collection of people who want to civilise FR. That is they want to creation societal structures and an enforcement of law.  Of course this means that people from amongst their own number are the best placed to get this done and you start to get the tendrils of an evil philosophy filter in, as these people in turn dont want to lose their positions of authority to others. They start to enforce rules they benefit them, whilst denying others.
#6 Pauper Aug 04, 2014 7:46:40	A very good question, though in some ways the game (or more accurately, its designers) are really to blame for fuzziness regarding alignment. (At the risk of drifting off-topic, earlier editions not only considered alignment more 'strict' in terms of how it was reflected in your character's actions, but also had low-level magic that specifically identifies a creature's alignment. Third Edition both loosened the 'straightjacket' of alignment and lowered the ways in which the rules interacted with it, and Fourth Edition nearly entirely did away with rules-specific alignment interactions.)   The kicker is that, in a home game, your alignment can shift based on your character's actions -- alignment change has always been a part of the game, though how easy it is to change alignment has varied by edition. In the OP's example, his Harper may have started the game Neutral Evil, but a lifetime of good deeds might well have him 'drifting' through True Neutral to Neutral Good, even if the character himself still thinks of himself as evil. The DM has the power to say 'you've been doing way too much good to be Neutral Evil -- change that to...'   In a convention or other public play setting, the DM really doesn't have that kind of power. In that sense, she's trusting that the alignment on your character sheet actually matches your character's actions and beliefs. It's less an identifier of a character's worldview and more a marker that gives the DM and other players some idea of how your character is likely to act at the table. So while roleplaying a character who 'thinks' he's evil but really isn't (he's got a LE alignment but still does all the NG things every other protagonist-hero does, he just broods about it more) might sound awesome, it's probably better suited for a home game with a steady and constant group of players who can really get to know and appreciate that character's complexity.   If you're playing a LE character at a convention, best just to act like people would expect a LE character to behave.   -- Pauper