The use of DnD alignments in non dice games

[Giyari]

[source: Tumblr rookerie]


What are your views on character alignments outside of DnD style games? Useful and informative? Hindering and restricting? Hilarious when you end up with 10 chaotic neutral/evil characters and one neutral good character who wonders what the fuck everyone is taking?

 

[Red Rider]

Depends on how they're handled. If it's a "fluid" treatment where small deviations from the character's usual alignment are allowed then there probably won't be much trouble; it's just an abstraction meant to help you structure a fictional character's moral compass.


That said: for games where moral ambiguity is a feature or a focus (like many White Wolf titles) I'd be really hesitant to include alignments.

 

[Ixacise]

Alignments are pretty shitty since they lack any sort of naunce but I guess they have their purposes in more simpler Black and white type morality games and good for a hasty overview.


Also lawful evil is most fun alignment

 

[Miz]

I have never personally done it for any game out of D&D (and I have even removed alignment from D&D because it isn't really specific). However its possible to be used if you want a simple standardized mechanism for personality. I foresee though, certain aspects would probably be scaled back if you took it out of the epic fantasy lingo of D&D (and put it into a more realistic world).


For example - Good and Evil scale might be renamed where:


Good Alignments become Selfless Alignments


Neutral Alignments become Unselfish Alignments


Evil Alignments become Selfish Alignments


Though that is just one way to look at it. I pretty much made that up on the spot, so there are probably better ways to incorporate it if you wanted. I personally agree though that the alignment system lacks nuance that is important to personality.

 

[Kaerri]

I like the use of alignments to clarify what a particular group is like. "We're all neutral good here" tells an incoming player that an evil-aligned character is going to cause a lot of friction, while a lawful-good will cause rather less. It also tends to tell me, personally, what the game is going to be like. I prefer to play good characters, generally in the neutral-to-lawful spectrum, and if a particular game has a lot of evil-aligned PCs, it probably isn't one I'm going to enjoy.


That graphic made me laugh, by the way ( )

 

[Ashurbanipal]

Alignments, like horoscopes, offer little useful information but are still fun to poke at.

 

[SkyPiratesAssemble]

The Alignment system is a rather good way to map out a character's moral code. However, I disagree with you on lawful characters being boring if written correctly. Lawful is a measure of a character's commitment to honour, discipline, and a code. A lawful good character wouldn't stand by and let a manipulator of law go free, but he wouldn't enact vigilante justice and lynch him in the town square either. Alignments show a great deal of information about a PCs morality at a glance. Will a character try to be diplomatic in the pursuit of good or is she a murder hobo? Will the character protect a population or will they seek to use them for their own benefit? Lawful good isn't Lawful Nice and Chaotic Evil isn't chaotic stupid.

 

[Giyari]

I feel like people take this thread too seriously

 

[Shining Lotus Sage]

I like virtues better.


 
For the same purpose.

 

[Kaerri]

I actually don't like the virtue/vice system, at least the way White Wolf did it last time I played a game that had it, because it's too specific. I liked D&D alignments because it put you in a general sort of category and I could let the details work themselves out ingame.

 

[Shining Lotus Sage]

Was thinking more Scion and LotW/WotG.

 

[Ignitedstar]

Straight up, it's a hindrance. Build a fence and tell yourself— as a writer, your character developments can't go in certain directions, even if you want them to.


Moralities help us put characters in action. They're more dynamic when their moralities are questioned well.

 

[Tabby]

My hatred of D&D alignments could power all of Western civilization for millennia, shortly before consuming the earth, followed shortly thereafter by the rest of the universe, in an apocalyptic pyre of flame that fades into the cold black nothingness of frozen hatred.


So uh, if I'm pretty blunt and maybe a little inflammatory here, sorry bros.


My view of it is that they are barely adequate as purely roll-play, D&D lingo for people who don't understand roleplaying, essentially 'training wheels' for people who don't yet comprehend actual characterization beyond "I hit on the barmaid," and should be left behind immediately when people realize that their characters can respond to different situations differently.


The concept is inherently horrendously flawed for portraying actual human beings, people who change and react differently to different situations, who can be bitches to people they dislike while being loyal to their friends, who can follow some laws but not others (or not very well), who can do bad things for good causes. You can often shoehorn a given character into one alignment - I bet anyone familiar with the alignment system can name some alignments that my examples fit in pretty neatly - but none of those encompass an entire living breathing character and all their behaviors, much less their entire worldview, and trying to fit an entire character into some constraining little box named Neutral Good or Lawful Evil is little more than an insult to the character if any real work was put into them. Yeah, I get that Lawful Good is an actual in-setting mechanic to some degree with Paladins and falling and all that stupid shit, but we're talking more big-picture-roleplaying stuff here, and you can do Paladins falling just fine without alignments. and have it MEAN more in the process to boot.


Doesn't help that it's very perception-based and depending on how you see it, you may have a totally different view of what those alignments even MEAN, much less how a character fits into one or the other.


Riddick - Chaotic Evil? Chaotic Neutral? I've seen him claimed on all of the evil axes, while I personally see him as Chaotic Good since he goes way out of his way to save pretty much everyone who isn't actively trying to kill him, and hell, even some of the people that did try... but he will kill the SHIT out of you if he thinks you're a 'bad' guy or otherwise not worth saving. He sure LOOKS like a chaotic evil type of guy at start, but as you get through pitch black and the following movies you realize, shit, he sure does a LOT to try to help people, and pretty much all the people he hurts deserved it something fierce. But then again, how many people can you murder the fuck out of before you stop qualifying for Chaotic Good? Three? Five? Sixty? How much do they have to deserve it first?


How about Magneto - Lawful Evil? To humans, sure, to mutants he's probably closer to Lawful Good - now which interpretation is more correct? Killing people is bad - perhaps evil even - but he goes out of his way to save mutants and didn't start shit with humans until he eventually became convinced (possibly correctly, again depending on perspective) that humans and mutants couldn't coexist. While I won't pretend to be intimately familiar with the entire xmen history, and I know he did some pretty evil shit, from what I know a lot of his plans were more "fuck off and let us live in peace" AND he does good stuff/helps good guys for good reasons to boot - that doesn't sound very Lawful Evil to me... but killing people does... hmmm.


They're neat little boxes - classifications - that mean NOTHING to actual people, characters, and frankly I think they're a plague on roleplaying as a whole that people even use them to communicate. As an overall community, I think roleplaying has moved miles past where we actually needed Lawful Boring and Chaotic Stupid to describe characters, and while I recognize that they MAY have some use for 'newbie' roleplayers, or more accurately rollplayers, I feel like they don't deserve any real attention beyond that.


Honestly if you want to use them conceptually, just break them down along the "follows rules/does not follow rules" and "is a douchebag/is not a total douchebag" axes, and you have the exact same level of new player friendliness without all of the pseudointellectual bullshit about what Lawful Neutral even is.

 

[welian]

-laughs at Giy's picture like the joke it was meant to be-


That being said, I enjoy plopping alignment into character sheets sometimes. It really is like a horoscope imo, and I'm for anything that makes players think about how their characters might be defined and fit into a larger system.


Also I still think it's hilarious that my brainless beauty technopath character is chaotic neutral.

 

[Protagonist]

D&D's morality system is pretty good, though I do believe it needs a bit of work. I would replace the "lawful" axis with an "altruism" axis of sorts.


Chaotic=Hedonism


Neutral=Egoism


Lawful=Idealism/Altruism


A Chaotic Evil Character would be a sadist who hurts people because it's fun. He'd burn an orphanage because it's fun.


A Neutral Evil Character would be a guy who hurts others for self-gain. He's the jerk who robs random people on the street.


A Lawful Evil Character would follow an "evil" radical ideology. He's a Nazi or an ISIS fighter or a Stalinist.


A Chaotic Good character would be a bored guy who helps people because damn it, helping people is fun!


A Neutral Good character would be an idealized capitalist who's twisted helping themselves into helping others.


A Lawful Good Character would be a guy who helps people because of their devotion to an ideology. An idealized patriot, if you will.


So, Batman, for example, is normally implacable on the DnD scale. Here, he'd be soundly an Idealistic Good character, because he's both good and motivated by ideology more than anything. Samus Aran would be Egoistic Good, as she makes a job out of saving the galaxy from evil space pirates. Sonic the Hedgehog would be Hedonistic Good, because he's "just a guy who likes adventure" in his own words.

 

[Yuel]

They are just a pointer of what your character is/can do. Of course, it depends on WHICH edition of D&D you are talking about.

 

[hellrazoromega]

Alignments can be fine as a guideline but the problem is that much like the stereotypes in Old WoD, people try to tell you you are doing it wrong if you don't play your Chaotic Neutral character like an idiot who does everything on a whim (or some other such silliness). Just like many people tried to say that if your Malkavian was not bouncing off the walls in straight jacket you weren't playing right (Anyone who LARPed with certain segments of the Camilla years ago knows what I mean).


Another issue is that you can go on the interwebs and find several different opinions of what "x" alignment is supposed to be like. If used right alignments can be a good thing but sadly they so rarely are. If I have players that can really use them as a guidelines the fine but often I just skip them.


Add to that the fact that people do have tendencies and might broadly fit into an alignment if you take lifelong snapshot, that does not mean that something cannot make them totally blow those tendencies out of the water in both small and large ways. Older editions of D&D have the issue is that they tie spell effects (and other things) into alignment, "Protection from Evil" for instance but since it can be argued that evil is subjective, things get sticky. Even those people seen by many as evil (i.e. Hitler) do not think of themselves as evil. One of the Devs at White Wolf back in the day said, (and I am paraphrasing here) that very few people think of themselves as evil and the ones that do aren't the one we need to be worried about. Alignments also get silly when entire sentient races get a certain label, all Drow are CE or all red Dragons are CE--uh wait a minute, Why?!?! I can see the argument that outsiders were "created" to fit a certain purpose so that they are locked into an alignment, I don't agree with it, but I can acknowledge the argument as potentially valid. But when an entire race like the Drow has to get so labeled it's just silly. Even with great societal pressures there are always exceptions, the Antebullem South of America had those who detested slavery even though it was the norm and pressure was heavy for it not to change. Yet even D&D 5e says that Drizzit is the only Drow to overcome his races evil nature? That's stupid IMO.


So to be honest outside of D&D and it's clones I don't even consider alignment.

So, Batman, for example, is normally implacable on the DnD scale.

See that is just the thing about alignments, I have seen convincing augments that Batman can fit both CG, NG, and even LG (granted his own law not the law of the land) alignments. So subjective they can be a mess. Then one has to ask which version of Batman are we talking about? The modern Dark Knight, so many cling to nowadays? The 1950s and 60s more kid friendly version? The 1940's WWII version who violates his own established rule about guns because there war a war on? The same Batman who killed several time in that era? Picking a character like Batman, who has no definitive version (though people like to think he does) because he is 75+ years old and has been written by so many over that time, can get tricky. Because of the many versions people can make convincing arguments for several alignments. ( )


Not trying to shoot you down, because some versions of Batman might not neatly fit on the scale, but broad snapshot of him might. I just honed in on that because I wrote many a pre-grad paper on Batman the the perceptions people have of him as a modern figure of myth.

 

[Giyari]

^This thread^

 

[hellrazoromega]

^This thread^

Sadly sarcasm is tough to translate without the benefit of voice and body language. The graphic in your OP was sarcastic but the questions that followed did not seem so (depending on how they were read), that darn lack of the aforementioned cues to read. ( )


Anyway, I see nothing wrong with a bit of healthy debate on the subject, so long as it is civil. From my perspective it is fun and not serious at all, but based on words alone I see how someone could take my post for being over serious---darn cues again.( )

 

[Giyari]

@hellrazoromega haha! yeah, too true. And you're right, nothing wrong with some debate and discussion

 

[sorrow made you]

I think DnD alignments are good for concept aids and guidelines, but could possible pose as restrictions if they are blatantly placed on a character. Alignments can easily guide a character into a set of morals or habits, or qualities that would develop them into a fully fleshed character. But I see characters much like how I see people: layers and layers of shite. In other words, people are not just painted black and white with a definite label. They're painted with many colors that could easily muddle into brown (gonna say this is equivalent to gray alignents, or ones that may not really fit any one alignment). Alignments can change depending on character development, which is something that is entirely possible in any kind of game, but is more prone (in my opinion) in non-dice games.

 

[hellrazoromega]

Looking deeper at the OP I would add that I see dice games as trying to codify a great many things, and they will always fail in some aspect(s). Non-dice games have the benefit of being more adaptive in many cases. Alignments would be a stricture that they just don't need, IMO. In dice games they can be decent guidelines if used properly, but as I said befre the sad fact is they so rarely are in my experience.