Anyone here besides me use them in d20 games?

I use them in my Eberron game and like to poke my players with conflicting priorities. Alignment-related spells now only deal with supernatural amounts of Good, Evil, Law or Chaos (Outsiders, Divine Spellcasters, Alignment Spells, etc). The requirements for said spells are in the process of being toned down, as they are less effective, but still essential when dealing with most supernatural things that have an interest in your soul/flesh/whatever.

My girlfriend is working on a companion mechanic for abhorrences, ie things a character is against. So if a PC has primary abhorrence: Elves, they will go out of their way to oppose elves and be prejudiced against them. How this opposition manifests depends on other allegiances and the PC's background. If the PC is allegiance: good or peace or something pleasant, they'll probably just avoid elves. If they have allegiance: evil, mayhem, wealth, whatever - those pointy-eared tree-huggers better watch out!

Clerics should certainly have their religion, church, beliefs and/or domains as components of this system.

Characters should probably start with 2 or 3 each of allegiances and abhorrences, potentially go up to a maximum of 4 or 5 and change through roleplaying and dramatic circumstance - or after discussion with one's GM.

This feels so much more RIGHT than those straitjacketing Virtues/Vices of nWoD. Argh! And I like how it allows more shades of gray than the alignment system.

Future posts on freedom of behavior vs. giving the players peanuts for roleplaying while gaming. WARNING: Will be very strongly worded against both big gaming (D&D/WoD) and Forgie stuff!

I considered it. Before putting it into action, I considered making some allegiances inherently aligned, rather than making you explicitly declare an allegiance to good or evil.

Of course, a player could have an allegiance to a good and an evil entity... conflict ensues. Not sure how to approach this from a "magical alignment" standpoint.

I'd say just make certain things magically aligned such as divine spellcasters with allegiance to particular causes/beings interpreted as "aligned"...by which I mean vulnerable to alignment-based spells and such.

Aberrations
Elementals
Fey
Outsiders*
Undead
These would all be inherently "aligned" as they are, in most d20 games, infused or made up of planar energy.

*Never liked the term "Outsider". I prefer the Planescape term "Exemplar", as technically, all planar things are "Outsiders" when off their home plane.

So instead of spells like Protection vs. Evil or abilities like Turn Undead, have more generalized things like zone of natural purity (thank you Eberron), which work against general types - in this case Aberrations, Evil Outsiders and Undead.

Since formerly alignment-based spells are now more specific, their requirements and level should be tuned down.

I pretty much use a combination of allegiances and a point based honor/nobility system in place of alignments and it works really well.

Acts of bravery would increase your honor score, for example, while acts of cowardice would reduce it.

Where allegiances come in is modifying your honor gain/loss, so someone with the Code of Bushido as an allegiance would gain more honor from bravery but lose more from cowardice.

All characters gain small rewards for having a high honor, while certain classes (such as Paladin or Knight or Samurai) gain significant advantages from a high honor.

But a character like a thief could generally be as cowardly and dishonest as he wanted and ignore the whole thing.

I also like True 20's Virtues and Vices system, but usually use the system described above.

Chuck

Question: what's the difference between Virtues/Vices in True20 and those in nWoD?

Thing is, what I want in most of the games my friends and I like to play is a mechanic that gently encourages particular behavior rather than the "pay them in peanuts" n/WoD uses. Of course, the other issue with n/WoD is its vagueness in "doling out the dots". It's a system that can can encourage GMs to set...unrealistic standards of PC behavior. After-session emails for me have sometimes consisted of low-level arguments as to whether I (or other PCs) deserved Willpower for roleplaying to our traits sufficiently and could never get their individual standards clearly stated.

White Wolf's mistake is leaving certain rules ambiguous in the interests of "storytelling simplicity" but as the rest of their mechanics are very much NOT rules-light. Page space that could be used for rules-clarification is instead filled with the seemingly-obligatory "what is a roleplaying game" section and the "storytelling" chapter which often seems like a text on how to inflict your players with clinical depression.

Admittedly, I'm biased, as my favorite RPGs are pulpy D20, Red Dwarf and Kill Puppies for Satan. My bias is that I play for fun and to see/do things I never could in the real world. I don't always know what floats everyone else's boats.