A eulogy for Alignment in CRPGs

[Junmarko]

This is the best summary of the nine I've seen.

This reads like it was written by a fruitcake.

Was it you?

 

[IDtenT]

I am gay.

 

[Hag]

The only use of alignment is to know whether you should play tabletop with a guy. Ask him his favorite alignment, if he answers "chaotic neutral" you know he'll be a useless idiot and if he answers "chaotic evil" he'll be a stupid idiot.

 

[thesecret1]

I just leave the alignment field blank on my character sheet, and whenever it comes up mechanically (ie. with some spells), I just ask DM to decide what my character's alignment is based on the actions taken up until that point.

 

[Semiurge]

This is the best summary of the nine I've seen.

This reads like it was written by a fruitcake.

Was it you?

No.

How about you come up with better definitions then?

 

[Maxie]

I just leave the alignment field blank on my character sheet, and whenever it comes up mechanically (ie. with some spells), I just ask DM to decide what my character's alignment is based on the actions taken up until that point.

It's worse when your GM makes retarded comments like 'this action wasn't in line with your alignment!' and you have to spend the next 24h at the police station for assault

 

[thesecret1]

I just leave the alignment field blank on my character sheet, and whenever it comes up mechanically (ie. with some spells), I just ask DM to decide what my character's alignment is based on the actions taken up until that point.

It's worse when your GM makes retarded comments like 'this action wasn't in line with your alignment!' and you have to spend the next 24h at the police station for assault

Did the goblins whose dungeon you raided report you to the police?

 

[Atlantico]

As usual people with autism cannot understand what alignment is and what purpose it serves in pen and paper AD&D

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

But when it comes to videogames, there is no such salvation - the DM is hardcoded, and he's not taking your questions. And without the benefit of a systemic Alignment framework to (rudimentarilly) assess your moral quandries and dish out your "just" rewards, you're left with the pressing ennui of endless possibility, where every door is just as good as the rest, and the path to choose is the one which gives you one extra goblin's worth of XP. Perhaps I'm being overly dramatic, but it's undeniable that there will be less character feedback to your decisions. Ethical choices and consequences still exist, obviously, non-D&D games have them, but you're restricted to setpieces which need development resources to script and, of late, voice and animate - i.e. they cost money.

Even if the OP is directionally correct, isn't this exactly the opposite? A tabletop session benefits from a consensus framework of morality, as to not burden the DM, an amateur player like the others, with having to come up with his own ad hoc system, while in a videogame the developer has total control by definition. Too much freedom was never a problem in videogames, only bad design.

 

[Gregz]

Alignment was fine until the modern moral revisionism.

Obviously, monsters are evil, and as heroes, it's your job to kill them. Sadly the monsters are the ones running society now, so everything is fucking backwards.

 

[Dark Souls II]

>does anything that transgresses the ZOG's jewish "morality" invented in late 19th century
>"NOOOOOOO you must be so chaotic and evil!!!111one"

 

[mondblut]

That's very optimistic of you (and a very strange hill to die on), to assume that a common bandit is capable of "building a castle" and "putting down roots".

Yet everyone who owns a castle can trace his ancestry back to a bandit.

 

[Skinwalker]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

 

[NecroLord]

This is the best summary of the nine I've seen.

Autism.

 

[NecroLord]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

"Chaos" as in freedom, not entropy or destruction.
Lack of order and structure in favor of flexibility and freedom.
The "chaos" part is also secondary to Good, so, in most cases, we have a benevolent daredevil character.

 

[Atlantico]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

You're not wrong, and Lawful Evil is the same kind of contradiction -- ultimate good is lawful and ultimate evil is chaotic, but alignments are not there to railroad you as a player. They're guidelines for you on how to help make decisions for your character. These are words to help you along, not lock you down.

The alignments try to describe human decision-making and behavior, but as a player you have (and have to have) some wiggle-room when making decisions. Ultimately the purpose of alignments is a role-playing aid, even though alignments do have other gameplay functions, e.g. with regards to spells and artifacts etc.

An Evil character doesn't have to be moustache-twirling cackling Hillary Clinton character. Look at do-gooders like George Clooney, typical Evil character who neurotically pretends to stand for everything "good" in the world, decrying injustice in the world, lamenting the plight of Africans, poverty etc. He does that to hide and distract his own evil ways.

 

[Semiurge]

Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

1984 is an example of a lawful evil system with a severe case of government overreach into people's private lives, so there can indeed be a point where too much ordah becomes evil even if the intentions are good, which they of course aren't in the 1984 example.

 

[huskarls]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

I would make some terminally online retard chaotic neutral because their actions don't match thoughts, always unpredictable if they are going to convert to another christian sect or become trannies.

 

[Damned Registrations]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

"Chaos" as in freedom, not entropy or destruction.
Lack of order and structure in favor of flexibility and freedom.
The "chaos" part is also secondary to Good, so, in most cases, we have a benevolent daredevil character.

I always thought the classic 'chaotic good' example was robin hood. The disnified version that gives to the poor, anyways. Or other such example of noble rebels in general. Luke Skywalker would be another example.

Generally speaking it's always been a fairly shit idea though; mechanically it does a bunch of unfun and world breaking shit with spells that can detect evil. Detect truth has the same problem really. In a world where you can't get away with deception, you've basically gutted a huge number of potential character archetypes. Who the fuck is going to join team bad guy when anyone worth their salt can spot you easily and you're KOS as a result?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

Nigger they're both lousy in their absolutes. Without some chaos there is no assertion of individuality and no scope of change, whether for good or bad.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

TBH, "Chaotic Good" is a contradiction in terms. Order is a necessary part of goodness, chaos is inherently not good.

Gary Gygax considered the lawful-chaotic axis as being orthogonal to the good-evil axis, once he differentiated the two in an article, "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and Their Relationship to Good and Evil", appearing in the sixth issue of The Strategic Review:

Now consider the term “Law” as opposed to “Chaos”. While they are nothing if not opposites, they are neither good nor evil in their definitions. A highly regimented society is typically governed by strict law, i.e., a dictatorship, while societies which allow more individual freedom tend to be more chaotic.

and

The terms “Law” and “Evil” are by no means mutually exclusive. There is no reason that there cannot be prescribed and strictly enforced rules which are unpleasant, injurious or even corrupt. Likewise “Chaos” and “Good” do not form a dichotomy. Chaos can be harmless, friendly, honest, sincere, beneficial, or pure, for that matter.

Original Dungeons & Dragons had considered good and lawful to be identical, and evil and chaotic to be identical, but Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (and Holmes Basic D&D) implemented this new two-axis alignment system.

Gygax provided a list of terms to define law and chaos:

Reliability	Unruly
Propriety	Confusion
Principled	Turmoil
Righteous	Unrestrained
Regularity	Random
Regulation	Irregular
Methodical	Unmethodical
Uniform	Unpredictable
Predictable	Disordered
Prescribed Rules	Lawless
Order	Anarchy

Although Gygax in practice might not have defined good and evil in a way that was completely orthogonal to his conceptions of law and chaos, they were reasonably close to being so. The real problem with his two-axis alignment system is that the lawful and chaotic concepts lacked the necessary coherence, especially once they were redefined by Gygax in the AD&D core rulebooks, where he attempted to describe each of the nine possible alignments as a distinct philosophy and in the process hopelessly muddled the notions of law and chaos.

 

[Pathfinder: WoTR]

People who argue over the RP-implications of the classic d&d alignment system are retarded, of course, as it's just a simplified legacy system used to calculate spell effects and damage resistance according to whichever vague categories your character and the attack target fall into.

But if you insist on using it to determine your character's personality and choices (you shouldn't), you can make it make more sense by treating the unfortunately named chaotic-lawful axis as individualist-collectivist instead. That produces better defined believable archetypes like "good collectivist" (paladin do-gooder who is ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good of all people), "evil collectivist" (machiavellian type who is ready to sacrifice the others for the god of his people), "good individualist" (a loner nomad with a heart of gold), "evil individualist" (self centered villain with no other concerns except for his own goals), etc.

 

[Skinwalker]

1984 is an example of a lawful evil system with a severe case of government overreach into people's private lives

1984 is built on lies, it's evil to the core, not evil because of its lawfulness.

Furthermore, O'Brien reveals that underneath the outward rigid lawfulness of the system, internally it is complete chaos, and has no ultimate purpose or meaning. There doesn't seem to be anyone really in charge, and it's not going in any particular direction.

 

[Semiurge]

1984 is an example of a lawful evil system with a severe case of government overreach into people's private lives

1984 is built on lies, it's evil to the core, not evil because of its lawfulness.

Furthermore, O'Brien reveals that underneath the outward rigid lawfulness of the system, internally it is complete chaos, and has no ultimate purpose or meaning. There doesn't seem to be anyone really in charge, and it's not going in any particular direction.

Sustaining the satanic system is the purpose. You can observe the same in today's heavy bureaucracy, it exists mainly for itself.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

In 10 thousands years if man is still around this shit will be old fucking trash. I can't imagine Christianity or any belief lasting for 100k more years and beyond. At some point someone would have to say.... "yeah utter fantasy bullshit."