Let's Talk About Character Alignment and Player Freedom

[Ogre Time Yay]

Okay, so in my time away from CD, there was a point where I did a lot of research on character alignment and what it means to be each alignment. The topic fascinated me for a time as I started to question if Good actually meant heroes, and Evil actually meant villains. I came by some topics that expressed that "characters of evil alignment simply just don't care for anyone else, and at no point should ever be in the same presence as a good alignment character, same way a chaotic character should always be at war with a lawful character." This made me think that maybe alignment is interpreted different based on the campaign it's being applied to.

And then out of no where, I suddenly got this urge to ask myself, should character alignment really matter all that much?... I'll elaborate.

So before you start any RP campaign, one of the things you choose for your character is his/her alignment, at this point in the character creation it's literally just two words put together, Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good for example. However these two words suggest that you should be confined within the boundaries of that alignment no matter what. So if you have a character with certain quirks, some things that enrage them, some things that make them happy, some things that influence them on whether or not they should do good or bad things, or if they're a character that simply runs on impulse, all of that would be restricted and cut down to only what that character alignment would allow. I understand that's part of the challenge of the RP, and therefore welcomed to D&D, but wouldn't it be more realistic for a character to simply do as that character intends to do based off of how the player made that character's personality? Would it at all be possible for a character to murder a man in anger one day, then donate to charity selflessly the next?

One might say that falls into the realms of Chaotic Neutral, but there was another topic I went through that said something along the lines of "Neutral characters don't do both good and evil things, they do neither, and want nothing to do with either side." This might be another case of "depends on the campaign," but it also makes me curious about where this campaign stands on the matter. I'm not saying character alignment is a bad thing, it certainly has it's uses at certain times, I just wonder if it would truly matter if the character's actions were left completely in the hands of the player.

Should the alignment make the character, or should the character make the alignment? I'd like to see everyone's thoughts on this.

[Mystic Warden]

Realistically you can't really squeeze fully developed personalities into 9 boxes. Even a simple DISC-profiling (usually taught to salespeople to get a good measure of his clients) has 4 basic behaviour type and from those one, two or three could be significant/dominant (over 50 on a scale 1-100). The mere permutations of those are way-way over 9. Not to mention that everybody has better and worse days when he is "not himself" and does things which he normally does not do.

The only reason the whole alignment grid exists is the alignment-related spells and abilities. If those didn't exist we could easily go without any alignment system and use the "character makes the alignment" approach.

But as it exists and is a core part of DnD we have to live with it. And it also kinda dictates the "alignment makes the character" approach. Because the "character makes the alignment" approach would exactly mean the kind of impossible squeezing in I mentioned above.

[Edge]

This is waaaaaay too big of a topic to tackle from my phone, so I'm just going to leave my input for now as follows.

Alignment should be fluid. It should shift and adjust pretty much constantly, and change completely if a character shows a pattern of behavior different from the past for a consistent amount of time. But while that's perfectly feasible in a pnp campaign with a DM watching your character's every move, it's far less realistically possible on NWN.

I disagree fundamentally with the idea that alignment cannot cover a complex entity realistically, for the above reason. But I agree that the nature of NWN makes it impossible to maintain appropriately to properly do so. So we have to make do with an approximation. And with that comes having an acceptance of receiving alignment shifts... Which almost never happen unless specifically requested, because people get pissed off of their characters get shifted in a direction they didn't want.

[Ogre Time Yay]

Oct 16, 2017 9:22:42 GMT -5 Mystic Warden said:

Realistically you can't really squeeze fully developed personalities into 9 boxes. Even a simple DISC-profiling (usually taught to salespeople to get a good measure of his clients) has 4 basic behaviour type and from those one, two or three could be significant/dominant (over 50 on a scale 1-100). The mere permutations of those are way-way over 9. Not to mention that everybody has better and worse days when he is "not himself" and does things which he normally does not do.

The only reason the whole alignment grid exists is the alignment-related spells and abilities. If those didn't exist we could easily go without any alignment system and use the "character makes the alignment" approach.

But as it exists and is a core part of DnD we have to live with it. And it also kinda dictates the "alignment makes the character" approach. Because the "character makes the alignment" approach would exactly mean the kind of impossible squeezing in I mentioned above.

That's a good point, I also wonder if it would be more fitting if a character covered maybe only three of those boxes at most, every now and then, kind of showing where their morals and mindset are teetering towards. I agree it would be strange for a character to pull a flip from something like Chaotic Evil, to Lawful Good spontaneously, especially since it would be hard to consider a character Lawful if he or she switches it on and off when they please.

[Ogre Time Yay]

Oct 16, 2017 11:56:12 GMT -5 Edge said:

This is waaaaaay too big of a topic to tackle from my phone, so I'm just going to leave my input for now as follows.

Alignment should be fluid. It should shift and adjust pretty much constantly, and change completely if a character shows a pattern of behavior different from the past for a consistent amount of time. But while that's perfectly feasible in a pnp campaign with a DM watching your character's every move, it's far less realistically possible on NWN.

I disagree fundamentally with the idea that alignment cannot cover a complex entity realistically, for the above reason. But I agree that the nature of NWN makes it impossible to maintain appropriately to properly do so. So we have to make do with an approximation. And with that comes having an acceptance of receiving alignment shifts... Which almost never happen unless specifically requested, because people get pissed off of their characters get shifted in a direction they didn't want.

That actually sounds -amazing-, I'd be all for giving DMs permission to constantly shift alignment on my characters depending on their actions. It would lean more towards how I'd like to view my character's alignments, as showing where they currently stand, but not who they are. One of my characters kind of represents this actually (you might already know who it is), he may be labeled as "Good," but some of the things he has done in his fight for Good have been pretty damn extreme, borderline evil, and he'll admit it too. However, I can see how constantly changing alignments could be a bit more of a problem to other characters, like a Paladin for example.

[Edge]

Paladins mainly, and to an extent other classes with alignment recs at all such as cleric, monk, barbarian, druid, etc., are sone of the biggest reasons people dislike alignments, as you can get pretty screwed out of your class of you get shifted too much or if the DM is a jerk about it.

[Arya]

I support Edge's points.

Also to add: the alignment can define a character very much but what the sheet does not define is how the alignment plays for a character in story. A Hoarite paladin LG is not the same as a Shaolin monk LG, nor a polite CE Vhaeraunite drow the same as a CE Cyricist. Plus with the NWN system, you have the points to help represent tendencies in addition to prompting alignment changes once a person does enough of diverging action, plus differing perspective, to warrant. Kelemvorite LG monk will likely lean more LN than a LG Lathanderite one due to dogmatic discrepancies of their respective gods and orders.

I used to be very sensitive about alignment shifts because as Edge pointed out, some DMs had been $&@%# about shifts in the past on previous servers. It is not an unfounded concern. But I am trying to incorporate the idea of not just embracing character change, but also the creativity to express alignment in the different ways there is. There are clear rules such as good respecting life, evil not, etc. The debates on where the line is drawn is endless.

This however does not mean there is no room to consider how to stay true to those two words on the sheet, or if a character develops later, which happens over months to years, depending how often toon is played and exposed to events/stories on the server.

My thoughts!

Best,
Arya

[trylobyte]

For my part I always assumed NWN/DnD alignment meant general behavior, a sort of 'how you act when nobody's looking' approach.  And it's a very general one.  Alignment won't determine what you do in any specific situation, but if you look at the character as a whole and all their actions over a long period of time they will generally stay true to it.  Good characters will generally be helpful and selfless, Evil characters will generally be selfish, Lawful characters will generally be obedient of their codes, and Chaotic characters will generally do whatever they want.  I prefer to reserve alignment shifts for either very out-of-character actions (A Good character doing something Evil, for instance) or for 'major decisions' with a large-scale impact.

There's an issue with dynamic alignment-shifting as OTY proposed, and that's the fact that there are many, many, MANY more opportunities for some shifts than others.  Go on and find me a quest that actually lets an Evil character be evil without getting the entire party on their case.  Compare that to almost every quest which if completed in the obviously-intended way would give Good points.  It's also hard to find ways to get Chaotic points without derailing a quest unless the DM specifically accounted for it.  So in many cases, dynamic allocation of alignment points simply isn't practical otherwise the whole of the server will wind up Neutral or Lawful Good, bar those few villainous holdouts who consciously ignore all involvement with anything that might benefit someone.

[Edge]

It took a couple hours of searching but I finally found the picture that sums up my feelings on alignment in one fell swoop.



That posted, now....

Oct 16, 2017 18:57:21 GMT -5 trylobyte said:

For my part I always assumed NWN/DnD alignment meant general behavior, a sort of 'how you act when nobody's looking' approach.  And it's a very general one.  Alignment won't determine what you do in any specific situation, but if you look at the character as a whole and all their actions over a long period of time they will generally stay true to it.  Good characters will generally be helpful and selfless, Evil characters will generally be selfish, Lawful characters will generally be obedient of their codes, and Chaotic characters will generally do whatever they want.  I prefer to reserve alignment shifts for either very out-of-character actions (A Good character doing something Evil, for instance) or for 'major decisions' with a large-scale impact.

This is pretty darn accurate. A few quirks that point toward an alignment not your norm and moments where the character is acting out of sorts for some reason are exceptions, not the rule, and shouldn't earn more than what in NWN is represented by a 1 or 2 point shift at worst.

There's an issue with dynamic alignment-shifting as OTY proposed, and that's the fact that there are many, many, MANY more opportunities for some shifts than others.  Go on and find me a quest that actually lets an Evil character be evil without getting the entire party on their case.  Compare that to almost every quest which if completed in the obviously-intended way would give Good points.  It's also hard to find ways to get Chaotic points without derailing a quest unless the DM specifically accounted for it.  So in many cases, dynamic allocation of alignment points simply isn't practical otherwise the whole of the server will wind up Neutral or Lawful Good, bar those few villainous holdouts who consciously ignore all involvement with anything that might benefit someone.

Which I personally chalk up to being a system designed around the idea of a small group of people playing with an ever-present overwatching DM. It shows cracks when used in an always-on world like NWN where DMs might or might not always be available and watching, or be intimately familiar with every character's quirks and traits. It's not so much a problem with the alignment system itself, it's a problem with it being applied to a game world and system that it wasn't completely made for.

[Ogre Time Yay]

All very good posts, thanks for contributing! This helps me to have a better understanding of the topic.

[Mystic Warden]

Oct 16, 2017 19:07:44 GMT -5 Edge said:

It took a couple hours of searching but I finally found the picture that sums up my feelings on alignment in one fell swoop.

The title on the first one should be "What DnD forces you to do with your character". People actually know that alignments are much more complicated than that.

[FaeFae]

My opinion is that NWN's version of being 0-100 on an axis makes enough sense when you consider your alignment to be a sum of averages rather than an absolute. 

The saying goes...
One cheat meal won't make you fat, just like one salad won't make you skinny.

But if you eat anything you want all the time, you're probably chaotic evil and should consider more salads if you don't like that alignment!

[Edge]

Oct 17, 2017 14:02:40 GMT -5 Mystic Warden said:

Oct 16, 2017 19:07:44 GMT -5 Edge said:

It took a couple hours of searching but I finally found the picture that sums up my feelings on alignment in one fell swoop.

The title on the first one should be "What DnD forces you to do with your character". People actually know that alignments are much more complicated than that.

As I said in my above post, I disagree completely. D&D forces nothing of the sort. Some players interpret it that way, but the system is clearly intended and designed to shift and alter with time and the character's development. NWN does help with this with its 1-100 mechanic, as fae mentions, but that's counteracted by the problems inherent in multiplayer world without an ever-present, highly character-familiar DM.

[Fire Wraith]

Oct 17, 2017 14:08:39 GMT -5 FaeFae said:

My opinion is that NWN's version of being 0-100 on an axis makes enough sense when you consider your alignment to be a sum of averages rather than an absolute. 

The saying goes...
One cheat meal won't make you fat, just like one salad won't make you skinny.

But if you eat anything you want all the time, you're probably chaotic evil and should consider more salads if you don't like that alignment!

If you eat what you like and don't care about society's views on your diet, you're probably chaotic, but not necessarily evil.

Now, if you like to eat babies and puppies and kittens and don't care what society thinks of it, you're probably chaotic evil.

[Arya]

Oct 17, 2017 14:02:40 GMT -5 Mystic Warden said:

Oct 16, 2017 19:07:44 GMT -5 Edge said:

...

The title on the first one should be "What DnD forces you to do with your character". People actually know that alignments are much more complicated than that.

It may be a case where D&D requires alignment(s) for classes, clerics of god A or god B, etc, but it does not force it. It simply has consequences for going one way or another, I would say. :-) In that way, it can feel limiting.

Having that said, there can also be opportunities. Growth from atonement rites, or even a realization that one needs to find favor with another deity or organization is also possible with the right DM and story. It has happened to a lot of the years old established characters at some point - where they have a big realization or two in their careers that lead them to growth and shifts over months or years. It actually helps add to the characters when they make changes, for the most part.

Best,
Arya