Alignment: That Thing Your Mother Never Warned You About - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 zombiegleemax Sep 20, 2003 3:27:16	Alignment is the two-word description of a character’s outlook on life. It’s his societal leanings and his moral compunctions. It’s what separates men from beasts and Beholders from Elves. It is also the most unclear, most debated concept in Dungeons and Dragons, in any edition. Alignment is the division of hundreds of thousands of worldviews into nine archetypical descriptions. Basically it is nine sets of clothes for literally millions of people, each choosing the one that fits them best. Alignments don’t define a character; the character defines himself by using the alignment as an adjective. They are not straitjackets meant to shackle a person to a certain course of action, but rather a fluid system describing each act as it occurs. A person who does a preponderance of acts specific to a certain alignment is thusly described as being of that alignment. They are both descriptors and models for action and thought. Good…Bad…I’m the Guy With the Greataxe What is good? What is evil? Can one exist without the other? How could you even tell? Are good and evil relative? Deep questions with deeper answers. No one knows the answers, but we sure get a lot of opinions. One more can’t hurt…But it's not like I'll pretend to answer them all either. Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit. “Good” implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others. “Evil” implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
#2 zombiegleemax Sep 20, 2003 20:37:36	Originally posted by Barrid Neutrality: It Worked for the Swiss Good stuff. I think a mention that "neutral good" doesn't mean "kind of good," because I had the hardest time convincing this new guy to our group that it doesn't mean that. He had played for years, apparently, but man he was convinced Neutral Good meant kinda good and Lawful Neutral meant you only sorta follow law.
#3 Edymnion Sep 21, 2003 22:03:26	We can always use a good firm understanding of what alignment is and is not, but there's something I'd suggest you adding. What about changing alignment, how long it takes to change alignment, and what has to happen before an alignment change is justified? I've seen several people on these boards suggesting an alignment shift just because the party's rogue stole from a team member one time, and that’s just not in the spirit of the rules.
#4 gadren Sep 27, 2003 1:23:44	In my campaign, I've found it works quite well to implement the Alignment Scaling system found in The Book of Hallowed Might written by Monte Cook and published by Malhavoc Press. Basically the idea is that each alignment axis indicator has a rating from 1 - 10, with 1's being effectively neutral, and 10's being very high and hard to roleplay. For example, our Lawful Good Paladin is L3G7; L3 meaning that he has a real respect for authority, structure, and dicsipline, but he's still unconfortable with the idea of it being OK for a few to suffer for "the greater 'good' ", and G7 meaning that he is giving and selfless and takes higher principles seriously, but he's not such a zealous advocate of good that he won't even hurt a hair on a murderer's head. The one thing I still have problems with is when the character in question shows strong traits on opposite ends of the same axis. For example, let's say someone is playing a character similiar to one of Alexander Dumas's musketeers. You have the dillema of a character who adheres to a fairly strict code of honour and conduct in certain matters, but in others he'll fight at the drop of a glove and duel in the street and brawl in bars despite the city's laws against it. Is such a character lawful, neutral, or chaotic on that axis? Well anyways, that my two copper pieces...
#5 zombiegleemax Sep 27, 2003 1:33:23	For Edymnion: Changing Alignment Or Lawful to Chaotic in 4.68 Seconds Yes, almost all (valid) alignment shifts are not shifts in truth, but rather merely using proper terminology. I’ll discuss what makes a valid alignment shift since I threw that little disclaimer in there as well. Basically there are three types of alignment shifts, henceforth called a “shift” due to laziness. You can shift because your character consciously chooses to move from one alignment to another. You can shift because your character has committed actions that are best described by a different alignment. Finally, you can shift because you chose a starting alignment that greatly differs from the way you play the character. Lets do the last one first. How is this different from the second way? Simple. The second way is a person who previously played one alignment, now, willingly or not, plays a different alignment. In the third way, the character never was of the alignment they had written down. This is the easiest one to fix and is not really a shift but a redefining. As a DM, you need to just tell your player, “I don’t believe your character is Chaotic Good, a move to Lawful Neutral might be more appropriate.” Usually, the player won’t mind the shift; after all, it was a mistake. But occasionally you’ll have a player who chooses an alignment to gain benefits, but plays without the restrictions of that alignment. Specifically the Lawful Good requirement for being a Paladin, the Lawful requirement for being a Monk and the “one step” requirement for being a Cleric. There are other alignment restrictions, but these are the most abused. If a player chooses an alignment specifically to gain a class but then does not play up to the alignment requirements, you have two options. Discuss how the player can rework his existing class abilities into a different class, such as making a 5th level Monk into a 5th level Fighter that has Unarmed Strike abilities. Or you can simply shift the character’s alignment and have them play by being an ex-class member or by the loss of his abilities that must be someone regained. The second is the one that most DMs tend to flub. Sorry guys, but a lot of you overreact when it comes to alignment. Except in extreme cases (and usually related to the Paladin), one or even a few acts cannot change your alignment. It takes many acts for a shift to occur, how many is really up to you, and that’s where we get into trouble. Severity of an act shouldn’t really be an issue because, lets face it, an evil act is an evil act. We might want to believe that killing a child is more heinous than killing an adult, but really, killing is killing is killing. Also, don’t treat a series of acts as one act, even if they were done together. Each act is a single act that combines to make an event. Ok, so, you want some handy guidelines to follow so you don’t jump the gun on alignment switch right? Well, the best thing to do, especially for you DMs who don’t keep track of every act, is to generalize. Think about the conduct of the character on the whole. If the majority of his actions lean toward an alignment different from his current one, treat it as it is, a leaning. Talk to the player and say, “Your character’s actions are causing his alignment to lean towards XX, you can continue on this path and shift to XX or you can “straighten up” and continue to be YY.” Repeat this process any time you start to feel that an alignment shift might be coming up. If the player decides he doesn’t wish to change his ways, move his alignment ONE STEP towards the end goal. I cannot stress this enough, you cannot go from Good to Evil in one step. If a Lawful Good character is robbing and killing people you shift his alignment to Chaotic Neutral or True Neutral. If they continue to do evil acts, you then can shift their alignment to Chaotic Evil or Neutral Evil. You can add in more steps, such as moving from Lawful Good to Chaotic/Neutral Good before going Neutral or going Lawful Neutral before going Chaotic/Neutral, but that’s all up to you. If you’d like to be able to plot a character’s transition from one alignment to another act by act, you can use a sliding scale. Set up one for each alignment type: Lawful to Chaotic and Good to Evil. The scale runs from 1-100 with Lawful and Good at 100 and Chaotic and Evil at 1 and Neutral at 50. So, a Chaotic Neutral Character would have a point on the Law/Chaos axis at 1 and a point on the Good/Evil axis at 50. For each act contrary to the character’s alignment, you shift the points accordingly. Shifts usually occur near midway point between alignments, such as making 75 or 80 the point that Law becomes Neutrality. For those DMs who wish to assign weight to each act (which I already discussed and do not recommend) you may do so. This greatly speeds up the alignment shift whereas if each act were weighted the same (1 point) it takes quite a while for a character to shift. Remember, an alignment is a definition of your moral and social outlook. A preponderance of acts in a certain outlook defines you as being of that alignment. Allowing a character to shift from one alignment to another in a matter of 4-5 acts means that he was already very, very close to that alignment in the first place. As shown by the previous method, if you generalize the character’s alignment including acts done prior to level 1, they should be closer to their current alignment and not easily swayed by a single or a few random acts. And, since I worked back to front, lets do the first alignment shift. This one is very similar to the second as well. Just as before, the difference is subtle: the character chooses to change alignments. You can use either of the aforementioned methods for discovering and shifting alignments, but remember to keep the process slow and steady. I’ll repeat again what I’ve said a few times in this and prior posts; alignment is a character’s social and moral outlook. You can’t shrug that off in a day. So you wanna be a Good lil’ Drow now that you ran into Drizzt. Prove it. Walk the walk and talk the talk. Each act the character does that is Good moves him further up the chain, but simply deciding to be Good isn’t as easy at it seems. Old habits die hard. You may occasionally want to steal or kill. That’s fine. It will slow down the shift, but it won’t stop it. But once you finally reach your goal, being of that new alignment should be second nature to you. In any case, always remember that an alignment is a reflection of you; you are not a reflection of it. Making decisions based on alignment should be easy for your characters but fun role-playing experiences for your players.
#6 gadren Sep 27, 2003 1:33:32	In my campaign, I've found it works quite well to implement the Alignment Scaling system found in The Book of Hallowed Might written by Monte Cook and published by Malhavoc Press. Basically the idea is that each alignment axis indicator has a rating from 1 - 10, with 1's being effectively neutral, and 10's being very high and hard to roleplay. For example, our Lawful Good Paladin is L3G7; L3 meaning that he has a real respect for authority, structure, and dicsipline, but he's still unconfortable with the idea of it being OK for a few to suffer for "the greater 'good' ", and G7 meaning that he is giving and selfless and takes higher principles seriously, but he's not such a zealous advocate of good that he won't even hurt a hair on a murderer's head. The one thing I still have problems with is when the character in question shows strong traits on opposite ends of the same axis. For example, let's say someone is playing a character similiar to one of Alexander Dumas's musketeers. You have the dillema of a character who adheres to a fairly strict code of honour and conduct in certain matters, but in others he'll fight at the drop of a glove and duel in the street and brawl in bars despite the city's laws against it. Is such a character lawful, neutral, or chaotic on that axis? Well anyways, that my two copper pieces... P.S. One other thing, I find that breaking alignment up into increments like I discussed in the begining makes it easier to adjust character's alignments. At the end of the session, I might say 'Steve, because of the way you risked your life to save that old lady from that undead thing, your alignment shifts from evil 6 to evil 5'. This goes over a lot more smoothly than all of a sudden springing on him one night that his evil alignment has changed to neutral.

Post/Author/DateTime

Post

zombiegleemax

Sep 20, 2003 3:27:16

Alignment is the two-word description of a character’s outlook on life. It’s his societal leanings and his moral compunctions. It’s what separates men from beasts and Beholders from Elves. It is also the most unclear, most debated concept in Dungeons and Dragons, in any edition. Alignment is the division of hundreds of thousands of worldviews into nine archetypical descriptions. Basically it is nine sets of clothes for literally millions of people, each choosing the one that fits them best. Alignments don’t define a character; the character defines himself by using the alignment as an adjective. They are not straitjackets meant to shackle a person to a certain course of action, but rather a fluid system describing each act as it occurs. A person who does a preponderance of acts specific to a certain alignment is thusly described as being of that alignment. They are both descriptors and models for action and thought.

Good…Bad…I’m the Guy With the Greataxe

What is good? What is evil? Can one exist without the other? How could you even tell? Are good and evil relative? Deep questions with deeper answers. No one knows the answers, but we sure get a lot of opinions. One more can’t hurt…But it's not like I'll pretend to answer them all either.

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.

“Good” implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

“Evil” implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

zombiegleemax

Sep 20, 2003 20:37:36

Originally posted by Barrid
Neutrality: It Worked for the Swiss

Good stuff. I think a mention that "neutral good" doesn't mean "kind of good," because I had the hardest time convincing this new guy to our group that it doesn't mean that. He had played for years, apparently, but man he was convinced Neutral Good meant kinda good and Lawful Neutral meant you only sorta follow law.

Edymnion

Sep 21, 2003 22:03:26

We can always use a good firm understanding of what alignment is and is not, but there's something I'd suggest you adding. What about changing alignment, how long it takes to change alignment, and what has to happen before an alignment change is justified? I've seen several people on these boards suggesting an alignment shift just because the party's rogue stole from a team member one time, and that’s just not in the spirit of the rules.

gadren

Sep 27, 2003 1:23:44

In my campaign, I've found it works quite well to implement the Alignment Scaling system found in The Book of Hallowed Might written by Monte Cook and published by Malhavoc Press.
Basically the idea is that each alignment axis indicator has a rating from 1 - 10, with 1's being effectively neutral, and 10's being very high and hard to roleplay. For example, our Lawful Good Paladin is L3G7; L3 meaning that he has a real respect for authority, structure, and dicsipline, but he's still unconfortable with the idea of it being OK for a few to suffer for "the greater 'good' ", and G7 meaning that he is giving and selfless and takes higher principles seriously, but he's not such a zealous advocate of good that he won't even hurt a hair on a murderer's head.

The one thing I still have problems with is when the character in question shows strong traits on opposite ends of the same axis. For example, let's say someone is playing a character similiar to one of Alexander Dumas's musketeers. You have the dillema of a character who adheres to a fairly strict code of honour and conduct in certain matters, but in others he'll fight at the drop of a glove and duel in the street and brawl in bars despite the city's laws against it. Is such a character lawful, neutral, or chaotic on that axis?

Well anyways, that my two copper pieces...

zombiegleemax

Sep 27, 2003 1:33:23

For Edymnion:

Changing Alignment Or Lawful to Chaotic in 4.68 Seconds

Yes, almost all (valid) alignment shifts are not shifts in truth, but rather merely using proper terminology. I’ll discuss what makes a valid alignment shift since I threw that little disclaimer in there as well. Basically there are three types of alignment shifts, henceforth called a “shift” due to laziness. You can shift because your character consciously chooses to move from one alignment to another. You can shift because your character has committed actions that are best described by a different alignment. Finally, you can shift because you chose a starting alignment that greatly differs from the way you play the character.

Lets do the last one first. How is this different from the second way? Simple. The second way is a person who previously played one alignment, now, willingly or not, plays a different alignment. In the third way, the character never was of the alignment they had written down. This is the easiest one to fix and is not really a shift but a redefining. As a DM, you need to just tell your player, “I don’t believe your character is Chaotic Good, a move to Lawful Neutral might be more appropriate.” Usually, the player won’t mind the shift; after all, it was a mistake. But occasionally you’ll have a player who chooses an alignment to gain benefits, but plays without the restrictions of that alignment. Specifically the Lawful Good requirement for being a Paladin, the Lawful requirement for being a Monk and the “one step” requirement for being a Cleric. There are other alignment restrictions, but these are the most abused. If a player chooses an alignment specifically to gain a class but then does not play up to the alignment requirements, you have two options. Discuss how the player can rework his existing class abilities into a different class, such as making a 5th level Monk into a 5th level Fighter that has Unarmed Strike abilities. Or you can simply shift the character’s alignment and have them play by being an ex-class member or by the loss of his abilities that must be someone regained.

The second is the one that most DMs tend to flub. Sorry guys, but a lot of you overreact when it comes to alignment. Except in extreme cases (and usually related to the Paladin), one or even a few acts cannot change your alignment. It takes many acts for a shift to occur, how many is really up to you, and that’s where we get into trouble. Severity of an act shouldn’t really be an issue because, lets face it, an evil act is an evil act. We might want to believe that killing a child is more heinous than killing an adult, but really, killing is killing is killing. Also, don’t treat a series of acts as one act, even if they were done together. Each act is a single act that combines to make an event.

Ok, so, you want some handy guidelines to follow so you don’t jump the gun on alignment switch right? Well, the best thing to do, especially for you DMs who don’t keep track of every act, is to generalize. Think about the conduct of the character on the whole. If the majority of his actions lean toward an alignment different from his current one, treat it as it is, a leaning. Talk to the player and say, “Your character’s actions are causing his alignment to lean towards XX, you can continue on this path and shift to XX or you can “straighten up” and continue to be YY.” Repeat this process any time you start to feel that an alignment shift might be coming up. If the player decides he doesn’t wish to change his ways, move his alignment ONE STEP towards the end goal. I cannot stress this enough, you cannot go from Good to Evil in one step. If a Lawful Good character is robbing and killing people you shift his alignment to Chaotic Neutral or True Neutral. If they continue to do evil acts, you then can shift their alignment to Chaotic Evil or Neutral Evil. You can add in more steps, such as moving from Lawful Good to Chaotic/Neutral Good before going Neutral or going Lawful Neutral before going Chaotic/Neutral, but that’s all up to you.

If you’d like to be able to plot a character’s transition from one alignment to another act by act, you can use a sliding scale. Set up one for each alignment type: Lawful to Chaotic and Good to Evil. The scale runs from 1-100 with Lawful and Good at 100 and Chaotic and Evil at 1 and Neutral at 50. So, a Chaotic Neutral Character would have a point on the Law/Chaos axis at 1 and a point on the Good/Evil axis at 50. For each act contrary to the character’s alignment, you shift the points accordingly. Shifts usually occur near midway point between alignments, such as making 75 or 80 the point that Law becomes Neutrality. For those DMs who wish to assign weight to each act (which I already discussed and do not recommend) you may do so. This greatly speeds up the alignment shift whereas if each act were weighted the same (1 point) it takes quite a while for a character to shift. Remember, an alignment is a definition of your moral and social outlook. A preponderance of acts in a certain outlook defines you as being of that alignment. Allowing a character to shift from one alignment to another in a matter of 4-5 acts means that he was already very, very close to that alignment in the first place. As shown by the previous method, if you generalize the character’s alignment including acts done prior to level 1, they should be closer to their current alignment and not easily swayed by a single or a few random acts.

And, since I worked back to front, lets do the first alignment shift. This one is very similar to the second as well. Just as before, the difference is subtle: the character chooses to change alignments. You can use either of the aforementioned methods for discovering and shifting alignments, but remember to keep the process slow and steady. I’ll repeat again what I’ve said a few times in this and prior posts; alignment is a character’s social and moral outlook. You can’t shrug that off in a day. So you wanna be a Good lil’ Drow now that you ran into Drizzt. Prove it. Walk the walk and talk the talk. Each act the character does that is Good moves him further up the chain, but simply deciding to be Good isn’t as easy at it seems. Old habits die hard. You may occasionally want to steal or kill. That’s fine. It will slow down the shift, but it won’t stop it. But once you finally reach your goal, being of that new alignment should be second nature to you. In any case, always remember that an alignment is a reflection of you; you are not a reflection of it. Making decisions based on alignment should be easy for your characters but fun role-playing experiences for your players.

gadren

Sep 27, 2003 1:33:32