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Ye Olde D&D Alignment System

Deuce Traveler

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You have to remember that the alignment system as we know it today had evolved from something much simpler. At first, we didn't have the 9-point alignment system, but instead a 3-point alignment system based: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. According to my 1980 D&D expert rulebook (before AD&D 1st edition), written by David Cook and Steve Marsh, "Law represents respect for rules, and willingness to put the benefit of the group ahead of individuals... Chaos is the opposite of Law. A chaotic is selfish and respects no laws or rules... Neutral is concerned with personal survival. Neutrals will do whatever is in their best interest, with little regard for others."

This is a lot more broad than the 9-point system. The Chainmail miniatures game that D&D was derived from had only two sides: Law and Chaos. This was because of literary influences like Poul Anderson's "Three Hearts, Three Lions" and Michael Moorcock's Elric series. It's interesting to note that in the early years of development, Gary Gygax leaned more towards elves potentially being soulless supporters of Chaos, such as in Anderson's and Moorcock's writings. Elves had better stats than humans, but they couldn't be raised because they had no empathy and no 'soul' to save. Your awesome human Fighting Man might not have the abilities of the elf, but at least he could be brought back to life. In this way, you could think of the forces of Law as those of man and their growing cities, Neutral as those supporting Nature and otherwise being left alone, and Chaos being those who served ancient evils and unnatural magic. Basically, he envisioned something that would have been closer in theme to what the Warhammer tabletop RPG ended up being.*

But then the Tolkien cartoons came out in the 1970s and there was a huge Tolkien revival, so hobbits.... err... halflings... were added and elves were on the side of the law and D&D became more based on Tolkien's vision than that of Howard/Anderson/Moorcock. Later, Gygax, David Cook, James Ward, and Robert Kuntz started embracing the 9-point alignment system because it allowed them to expand some of the game ideas. For instance, Gary Gygax wanted to add a paladin class but needed a device to make the paladin ethos stand out from other Lawfuls. James Ward and Robert Kuntz wanted to play around with the idea of planes, and different denizens, so you needed to show why a devil was different from a demon alignment-wise. David Cook ran with this idea and created the very awesome Planescape setting based upon alignments and philosophies. But I don't think the expansion of the alignment system was ever well thought out. It was a means to expand on some cool ideas, and not really meant to be taken as seriously as it ended up being today.

One final note, Gary Gygax and I conversed some years back on the ENWorld forums and he liked to troll people about the alignment system. One DMing proposal he liked to introduce was the following: have a group of paladins accept the surrender of a tribe of orcs. The paladins take the men, women, and children of this orc tribe back and teach them the ways of their holy religion. They spend the funds to corral them, safely transport them, and give instruction on holy writing and script. When the paladins are convinced that the orc tribe has converted, they then shackle the entire population of orcs and behead them one after another. The reason is that the paladins believe that the orcs souls can be saved at this moment, but if they are returned back to their land they would simply revert to their evil ways. The paladins wipe them out, but they spent their time, fortune, and labor saving the souls of the orcs, which to the paladins was a charitable act done out of love. Now watch the players devolve into a yelling match about whether or not the paladins committed an evil act. Gary didn't have a stance on this himself. He just liked to poke at his fans.

* On a side note, Gary told me once that he and Steve Jackson (the British designer of Warhammer, not the American designer of Steve Jackson games) were actually friends and when Gygax started looking like he might lose the company of TSR, he tried and failed to get Steve Jackson to buy shares in the company to help him out. Steve Jackson didn't understand everything Gygax was trying to tell him when they were cleaning up Gygax's property... maybe partly because he got some bad rashes from poison ivy in Gygax's yard. He told Gary later that if he had known the exact situation Gary was in, than Steve would have done all he could to have had Games Workshop do a takeover of TSR with Gygax's support.
 

Neanderthal

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Games Workshop were the place to get TSR products when I were a lad, and White Dwarf had some o best AD&D content I've ever seen pre issue 100 or so. Wonder how a Games Workshop owned TSR would have turned out, probably a lot more fucking expensive knowing GW.
 

Sykar

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Not enough options to role play as a dirty old man with good intentions. Game is shit.

26065.jpg


:hmmm:
 

Deuce Traveler

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Not enough options to role play as a dirty old man with good intentions. Game is shit.

26065.jpg


:hmmm:

He's forgetting a mascot of D&D:

pic_elm2.jpg


From TV Tropes:
  • The Casanova: One of Elminster's defining traits is that he'll flirt and/or sleep with virtually anything that is female and not related to him. Even ghosts, liches, and dragons in human form. If we account for the disparity in series entries, the number of his conquests probably rivals James Bond. Even outside of his saga it's pretty much a Running Gag.
    • Seriously. The first thing he does after emerging from the Can in Temptation is find some random village that has been taken over by bandits and liberate it. The second thing he does is sleep with one of its women.
    • The series also doesn't shy away from the results of all that sex. Daughter is centered on one of Elminster's children with various lovers, who meets some more near the end of it. Technically, fertility of the Chosen is under Mystra's complete control, but she rarely has good reasons to veto a magically strong bloodline.
Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Elminster's Daughter notes that Elminster has left a trail of children across western Faerûn over the years (including the dowager queen of Cormyr), but in the case of Narnra Shalace, it was because he was attacked by the evil goddess Shar (a rival of Mystra) through her mother and had to leave them for his own safety.

Deus Sex Machina: Elminster is made one of the Chosen at the end of Making of a Mage by having sex with an avatar of Mystra. In midair. And they get seen by a merchant on the road, which becomes one of the most hilarious moments in the book.

Interspecies Romance: Elminster manages to romance elves, a song dragon, and the goddess of magic, among others.

Questionable Consent: In Elminster: The Making of a Mage, while he's a thief Elminster and his partner Farl hide a prostitute (unconscious at the time) in the bedroom of a cross-dressing baker from the wrath of her clients (whom they just robbed), stroking both of them so they'll have sex after waking up-just for laughs, apparently. The pair end up happily married, yes, but they couldn't know that would happen.

For the record, I can't stand the Forgotten Realms books.
 

Elex

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D&D owned by GW mean a D&D close to the origin sticked with strategic tabletop rules, miniatures, more monsters manuals for sell more miniatures.
not a big difference after all.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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D&D owned by GW mean a D&D close to the origin sticked with strategic tabletop rules, miniatures, more monsters manuals for sell more miniatures.
not a big difference after all.
The post-Gygax, post-Blume version of TSR soon shifted in 1987 into a new focus on campaign settings, with the release of a Forgotten Realms campaign setting box set, a Dragonlance campaign setting hardcover, a Greyhawk campaign setting hardcover (the following year), and the start of the Known World campaign setting gazetteer series for (non-Advanced) D&D. Numerous accessories were released over the next several years for both the Forgotten Realms and Known World settings, with a smaller but substantial number for Dragonlance, and a few for Greyhawk. Furthermore, TSR launched new, major campaign settings in 1989 (Spelljammer), 1990 (Ravenloft), 1991 (Dark Sun), 1994 (Planescape), and 1995 (Birthright), along with several minor campaign settings (e.g. al-Qadim in 1992).

If Gary Gygax had been left in control of a GW-owned TSR, there probably would have been some increase in the amount of campaign setting material published, but it's doubtful that it would have amounted to more than a small fraction of TSR's actual output described above.
On the positive side, the Forgotten Realms would have been left forgotten. +M
 

Daemongar

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If you didn't play tabletop D&D, it would be hard to explain ROLE playing to someone. Let me explain some random 1st level player I created:
* I am an elf
* I wear a blue hat
* I'm 6'1
* I weigh 200 lbs
* I am a Mage
* I worship Blibdoolaploop
* I wield a sling, but do sometimes use a dagger
* I am partial to fire spells
* I hate gnomes for a long, poorly spelled reason
* I speak with a shitty accent that kinda sounds Australian, like I watched Crocodile Dundee twice. I'll forget the accent after 4 sessions.
* I am unusually strong for a mage, but have poor health. I am very intelligent, but not very wise. I am considered ugly, but am very quick.
* I am chaotic neutral in my worldview.

All that shit above describes the character I invented. I play that character. I act out that character and fight shit as that character. I murder NPCs my DM wanted to keep alive as that character. I do very stupid things no sane DM could predict as that character.

If I selected a different alignment, I would play the character differently - down to how i interact with everyone ("Play your alignment...")

It is a good mechanic for creating unique and interesting characters. It is a bad mechanic for playing fucking video games. Stop pissing on alignment.
 

Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal

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Catholicism - Lawful Good
Orthodoxy - Neutral Good
Protestantism - Chaotic Good

Confucianism - Lawful Neutral
Buddhism - True Neutral
Daoism - Chaotic Neutral

Islam - Lawful Evil
Atheism - Neutral Evil
Judaism - Chaotic Evil
 

laclongquan

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Planescape Torment Alignment is a good system until they introduce the universal reputation in Baldur's Gate 1. Universal Reputation works (with Fallout 1), but not when you aligned it with Alignment system. They ruined a good thing~
 
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Zombra

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The alignment system is awesome, because in the world of D&D good and evil are objective things. Of course this is simplistic. It's supposed to be. You can have stuff like the Detect Evil spell which would be meaningless in the real world. You can have creatures like orcs which are literal embodiments of the dark side of man, and illustrate the depravity of real-world men with allegorical reflection. You can have an artifact like the Necronomicon which drives good men insane but nurtures evil. None of this is can really be done in a fair way without having rules for it. If you hate the rules, fine, don't use them, but don't pretend that there is no possible value in using them.

I get it, some people are only comfortable with rules that describe how many stabs with a sword it takes to kill a dood. Those people are cowards and limited thinkers.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Why would have been this a good thing? It's the most popular D&D setting to this day and many cRPGs from the 90s are set in the The Realms.
The most popular AD&D/D&D campaign setting was also the worst. After Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR at the end of 1985, TSR created the Forgotten Realms setting as a replacement for the Greyhawk setting, which had been based on Gygax's personal campaign. The Forgotten Realms was intentionally designed to be as bland and generic as possible to appeal to the lowest common denominator seeking a history-less and culture-less pseudo-medieval setting for their AD&D campaigns. Even back then, there was a strong preference amongst the mass of RPGers for bland, generic, quasi-medieval fantasy settings, which is why the Forgotten Realms has persisted as the most popular AD&D/D&D campaign setting for three decades over its worthier competitors.
 

Nalenth

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Why would have been this a good thing? It's the most popular D&D setting to this day and many cRPGs from the 90s are set in the The Realms.
The most popular AD&D/D&D campaign setting was also the worst. After Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR at the end of 1985, TSR created the Forgotten Realms setting as a replacement for the Greyhawk setting, which had been based on Gygax's personal campaign.

The Realms isn't my favorite, but i don't hate it, either. I like the Planescape setting much more for example.

The Forgotten Realms was intentionally designed to be as bland and generic as possible to appeal to the lowest common denominator seeking a history-less and culture-less pseudo-medieval setting for their AD&D campaigns. Even back then, there was a strong preference amongst the mass of RPGers for bland, generic, quasi-medieval fantasy settings, which is why the Forgotten Realms has persisted as the most popular AD&D/D&D campaign setting for three decades over its worthier competitors.

This isn't entirely true. The setting has a relatively well-established lore and history.
 

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