Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Brom_Blackforge Aug 17, 2004 13:54:35	I'm currently running a Greyhawk campaign, and one of the PCs in that campaign has led me to consider some kind of mechanism to gauge alignment change. The character was created as Chaotic Good, but he's been doing some things that I considered less than good (for instance, he fried a fleeing, unarmed prisoner with a lightning bolt). The party recently faced a big bad guy with spell resistance to spells cast by good characters. When things started looking dark, this PC started to head for the exit, fully intending to leave the rest of the party to their doom within a couple of rounds. I decided that, since he was a borderline case anyway, I would permit the character to become Chaotic Neutral (which I viewed as closer to the way he's been played anyway). At the time, I even made some out-of-game jokes about starting down the path to the Dark Side. Now maybe I've been playing too much of the Star Wars video game, "Knights of the Old Republic," but the concept of Dark Side points has stuck with me since that gaming session. So I checked out the Star Wars Roleplaying Game rulebook, and found that characters are considered "evil" when their Dark Side points exceed their Wisdom scores. Of course, there's no such thing as alignment in the Star Wars RPG, at least not from what I saw as I flipped through the rulebook. So, how to adapt that system to D&D? I think it would work to simply declare that a character with "Dark Side" points equal to or less than half of his or her Wisdom score is Good, and a character with "Dark Side" points greater than half but not more than his or her Wisdom score is Neutral. Then, as in the Star Wars RPG, any character whose "Dark Side" points exceed his or her Wisdom score are Evil. Assigning "Dark Side" points is completely within the discretion of the DM, and I wouldn't consider it a hard-and-fast rule. I'm not even sure I'd let the player know exactly how many "Dark Side" points the character has, nor even necessarily use it with everyone. It just seemed like a good way to measure taint on a character's soul caused by evil actions.
#2 zombiegleemax Sep 14, 2004 6:56:39	I personally use a method I picked up on through Neverwinter Nights.According to their starting alignment I give them points on two separate 0 to 100 scales. on the lawful/chaotic scale if your lawful you start with 85 points, neutral you start with 50 points and chaotic starts with 15. On the good/evil scale its good 85, neutral 50 and evil 15. During play I give out penalties or bonuses depending on how their acting(but only for the more extreme stuff). 25 and 75 are the alignment shift points. So far this has managed to keep my players on their toes especially the chaotic good cleric of lathander who occasionally is a bit to harsh on foes who surrender their weapons and give up and yet he continues to beat the poor duergar down.