The thread where the "necessity of Christian morality" was asserted for RPG communities (or perhaps it was characters, that doesn't really matter) is now too old to allow for more comments itself. These spats of religious bawling on all sides grow more tiresome with the decades and more bedraggled with the centuries, and of course our digital spaces for roleplaying games could never have been exempt, being alike to any other clustering of human souls in one room that might pine dearly for that sanctuary.

Unfortunately, the subject has such a galactic gravitational force preventing any escape that I too must start yet another thread.

If Tacitus is worth his salt concerning his history of Germania, then Christianity will succeed wherever there is a people predisposed for compatibility with its cherished Biblical doctrines--which is of course consistent with the Gospel parable of the farmer sowing his seeds across fertile, weedy, and droughted land, et al. This faith grows, so it would seem, where it is best able to do so, with whom it is best able to do so; this even considering however it is that you may wish to define a single person's pious election to Heaven (i.e. "Salvation.")

Therefore, any Hobbesian accusations against the pre-Christian, "pre-civil" world (as nothing more than a spiritual, moral, and cultural cannibalism) are ridiculous on their face:

No virtuous king could have successfully marshalled so many masses of disdainfully apathetic cowards towards the construction of the Egyptian pyramids; at least, not without overtures to a counterintuitive Machiavellian pragmatism which disgusts the Christians to begin with, not least because these methods would so invalidate the apparent power within their holy scriptures to monopolize the birthrights of the world's nations. It is all too convenient to this intellectualized Christian worldview, that everything predating the Victories of the Church over Byzantium and Rome, was nothing more than an unbroken chain of inherited tyrants--and Hobbes implies as much in his own dogmas concerning the State of his fevered pet Man in Nature.

This concept of "unbroken chains of inherited tyrants," is disturbing in the myriad and contorted paradoxes so exhibited with its grotesque abandon. Each tyrant who failed to conceal a toddler's arithmetic of his doomed vanity would readily perish at the hands of his usurper: All of his laborious triumphs naively carved onto his daunting stones to bask beneath the constellations abruptly scraped, sanded, and suffocated at the fleeting leisure of this cursed kingdom's next pretender, with the astounding effort of a candle's light being pinched with some new lickspittle fingers; and so we would know even less than we do now of these ancient peoples.

Worse, this intellectualized worldview grants unscrupulous credibility for the pretenders to clear thought: That families in our pre-history are not actually necessary for the propagation of any nations, or their cultures, despite their relics ever looming upon and within the archaic places of this earth, along with their solemnly ordained graves filled with the compassion of these now ancestral communities. Human nature is never so absolute that such a devouring and frenzied totalitarianism demanded from this fanciful revisionism could be so minutely sensible as an antitoxin to contemporary delusions which beguile us as so-called "enlightenments."

All of this is to say: Building a bunch of blocks into a fancy pile and calling it a "city" will never scare away such a feral set of manners, and there is no coherent police force that could be deputized from among these abominable beasts--they would lack the stoic teamwork required to control their own wailing and their own teeth from gnashing. Even the Christian Godhead desires to respect our human free will to discover his plans on our own time, and so building a smaller pile of bricks to then be named as one of his churches fulfills naught from good works, primacy of faith, nor theosis, to wrest us from our goblinoid origins. A lukewarm faith it is that rests upon the laurels of its pews merely built upon the ashes of our grandfather's fires. This distasteful accounting that has raided all areas of our learning and praying does little else than to beg the elementary questions of chickens and eggs from this trespassing fox.

None of this is to indignify any of the Christian faithful that we recognize, as their collective desire to defeat real Evil in the world remains admirable with the full respect due to them all (this regardless of my own reservations, notwithstanding the concerns that we all share for those politicized church missions wearing lamb skins, though they may be cases of misplaced hearts.)

Too many useless opinions have been taken for granted in our classical education about the Philosophy of Man, as well as our religious upbringing concerning the Destiny of Man, and those opinions deserve only that Grace found for them after casting them into the Gehenna where they finally belong. Gamer Christians should expect themselves to be more capable in respecting their non-Christian peers--particularly if their Messiah would ask them to lovingly convert their peers as a life's calling--and this respect must also be reflected back in kind upon the Christians by anyone else otherwise; this is at least one slate that we may be able to wipe clean, since it's clear that the lies poisoning our scholarship go further back than we've properly appraised. In doing this, we may also finally grant our ancestors the love that we have spared them of, due to our lack thereof for each other as we now live with.

Because I tend to be so wordy, all I'm saying here is:

Can we count on Christians to at least follow "Honour thy Father and Mother" with a little more common sense?

Just to make sure we're on the same page, given the forum this is under, are we speaking here in the context of developing RPG alignment systems?

Because I think at very least for game purposes, it can possible to say, The Good Guys do xyz, The Bad Guys do abc, and that can be more or less arbitrary and not necessarily require any sort of Christian morality.

I think if you look closely enough at alignments in D&D, you'll can see the system is not the same across all editions. And that alone I think demonstrates that they can be as arbitrary as anything.

I think there are some Biblical truths that are pretty hard to shake. Matthew 7:13-14 is one of my favorites. "Enter ye in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many are they that enter in thereby. For narrow is the gate and straitened the way that leadeth unto life, and few are they that find it."

In other words, there's more wrong ways to do something than right ways. Even when it comes to RPG design itself. Why even have this forum? What value is it to bounce ideas back and forth? Why work so hard? Why have so many games been created if they're all basically just as good as one another? Shouldn't the first one have sufficed? Or at least the first game of each genre? Of course we constantly work towards improvement. Because it's hard to come by just by accident.

And I do think it's both more interesting and more true to bake that into a game's "alignment system". To have good and evil not simply be equal but opposite, but for there to be an asymetry to it. But for evil to in a way be easier. Quicker, more seductive. While the righteous have to walk a much more narrow path.

You do get this in the 1E AD&D alignment system. Good requires adherence to human (or "creature") rights, of which 3 are enumerated. For evil, purpose is determinant. So you could have a noble purpose, like "won't somebody please think of the children," and both good and evil characters can pursue that purpose and even be allies in that quest. The difference is evil will step on grandma in the name of thinking of the children. Good does not.

In some ways, that makes evil more free and more effective.

But good is better at making friends. They get an actual advantage in loyalty in terms of the game mechanics. And it makes sense. I mean how much loyalty can there be among people who think it's okay to stab each other in the back? Of course characters who don't do that will generate more loyalty.

So it's in a sense fair. In a sense balanced. But it's not equal, not opposite, not symmetric. It's more interesting than that. And it feels more real than yet another lifeless tidy and neat game model.

Quote from: Lunamancer on February 16, 2023, 04:12:16 PM
I think there are some Biblical truths that are pretty hard to shake. Matthew 7:13-14 is one of my favorites. "Enter ye in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many are they that enter in thereby. For narrow is the gate and straitened the way that leadeth unto life, and few are they that find it."

Damn, can the KJV turn a phrase or what?

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Just to make sure we're on the same page, given the forum this is under, are we speaking here in the context of developing RPG alignment systems?

Because I think at very least for game purposes, it can possible to say, The Good Guys do xyz, The Bad Guys do abc, and that can be more or less arbitrary and not necessarily require any sort of Christian morality.

I think if you look closely enough at alignments in D&D, you'll can see the system is not the same across all editions. And that alone I think demonstrates that they can be as arbitrary as anything.

Yes, I think I've finally winded myself chasing anything in this roundabout way.

The alignment definition issue becomes so aggravating when trying to force your real-life beliefs about reality into this fantasy game, which results in a kind of reverse metagaming. This is one flamewar where "Thar be dragons!" really is the most potent argument to put out the flames. I'm not saying that you have to divorce yourself from your upbringing to play the game, it'll come through without you trying, but in making it a mission statement you wind up alienating yourself from everyone else, and that goes for any angle you take with your conceptions of spirituality. The example I was gave was just really overwrought for the sake of that perspective.

Morality is such a complicated issue that the entire Scholastic tradition struggled with the concept of evil for centuries, right through the Reformation and into today on top of that. These theologians tended to be much smarter and more skilled academically people than us talking about the same ideas for a game, so it's not surprising that the system had gone through several revisions before the debacle we got from 5th edition, and that only happened because of the famous abuses of these alignments leading to poor play. I agree, they're just supposed to be a roleplaying guide, not a game mechanic to be broken like feat builds or stacking spell modifiers.

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In other words, there's more wrong ways to do something than right ways. Even when it comes to RPG design itself. Why even have this forum? What value is it to bounce ideas back and forth? Why work so hard? Why have so many games been created if they're all basically just as good as one another? Shouldn't the first one have sufficed? Or at least the first game of each genre? Of course we constantly work towards improvement. Because it's hard to come by just by accident.

Improvement, sure, but creativity will push for some tinkering and adjustment simply to see what happens. This leads to systems with interesting ways of tackling the same problem, often in a way that the previous system wasn't designed to do otherwise. Since you can't port that stuff over, you just release a new system and see how people like it. Sometimes that also demands new settings, or different ways of looking at the previous setting, so that it's compatible with the new ideas.

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And I do think it's both more interesting and more true to bake that into a game's "alignment system". To have good and evil not simply be equal but opposite, but for there to be an asymetry to it. But for evil to in a way be easier. Quicker, more seductive. While the righteous have to walk a much more narrow path.

You do get this in the 1E AD&D alignment system. Good requires adherence to human (or "creature") rights, of which 3 are enumerated. For evil, purpose is determinant. So you could have a noble purpose, like "won't somebody please think of the children," and both good and evil characters can pursue that purpose and even be allies in that quest. The difference is evil will step on grandma in the name of thinking of the children. Good does not.

In some ways, that makes evil more free and more effective.

But good is better at making friends. They get an actual advantage in loyalty in terms of the game mechanics. And it makes sense. I mean how much loyalty can there be among people who think it's okay to stab each other in the back? Of course characters who don't do that will generate more loyalty.

Means and ends, horses and carts... You don't need to "win" your friends to get anywhere.

It makes sense that an evil character would get involved in a scheme like that, if he felt he could cover up his attack on grandma and still be given the rewards for saving the children. If the truth ever got out the entire ordeal will have become counter-productive for him, so at least we could say that evil is only focused on the short term, and then gets angry when his efforts to save the children are met with "ingratitude." That's probably why he draws that knife from behind his back...

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So it's in a sense fair. In a sense balanced. But it's not equal, not opposite, not symmetric. It's more interesting than that. And it feels more real than yet another lifeless tidy and neat game model.

Agreed. It's still a necessary component of the game, but it's not something you can level up with +1's and extra slots.

Clearly, it's been twisted out of shape from what it should be.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 17, 2023, 12:05:19 AM
Morality is such a complicated issue that the entire Scholastic tradition struggled with the concept of evil for centuries, right through the Reformation and into today on top of that. These theologians tended to be much smarter and more skilled academically people than us talking about the same ideas for a game, so it's not surprising that the system had gone through several revisions before the debacle we got from 5th edition, and that only happened because of the famous abuses of these alignments leading to poor play. I agree, they're just supposed to be a roleplaying guide, not a game mechanic to be broken like feat builds or stacking spell modifiers.

I'm always a bit hesitant at deferring to academics. Sometimes they obsess over apparent conundrums that sometimes has a really easy answer from an outside field of study. There's an economist I read who happens to be Christian, he's really interactive with his followers, and a lot of his followers are atheists, and so sometimes certain questions comes up in the comments on his blog. And sometimes his particular field of expertise offers up a pretty concise view on things that you wouldn't get from a theologian.

Like if the Christian God is so good, why does he do all these awful things to people, particularly in the old testament? And the way this economist put it was like this. If you destroy property, that's vandalism. It's a crime. It's wrong. Right? Well, not if it's your own property. And so if God, as creator of all things, is the owner of all things, then He can kill one of his creations without being bound by the moral code of Thou Shalt Not Kill. There's not a whole lot of room for arguments there. It's a straight line from the definition of ownership. It's no great mystery to me that an economist would be far more likely than a theologian to zero in on the definition of ownership. How much ink would a theologian need to spill on that question? An economist nails it in one line. And I'm sure there are a few other seemingly contradictory things you'll find in the Bible that get resolved by this insight.

So there's a perfectly valid moral double-standard between mortals and deities. That's worth remembering when designing your game world cosmology.

Recent discussions about WH40k mythology along with your mention of JP when I first got here gave me a thought about that. It's best that you start with set of labels for the appropriate meanings.

"Lawfulness" is D&D's means of describing guidelines for orderly societies, but this has been abused to basically mean the communist enforcement of ethics, quotas, legislation. This is how the Space Marines view their own Imperial "Order" in practice, except that it produces a nihilistic effect during the dramatic fight against Chaos. Then there's the whole "Neutrality" issue where people take this as a cue to opt out of everything. This belief system is constantly weighted in favour of Chaos, because the concept of "cooperation" that this other side relies on in opposing Chaos has been screwed up.

If games were to revert back to a strictly 3-way model as Gygax started OD&D with, a better axis would be like "Law-Order-Chaos." Order doesn't try to be perfect, it chooses elements from the two extremes for the best effect. From there, Law is the idea that you can't make adjustments, your word as spoken is always your bond, et cet., and Chaos is the idea that absolutely "everything goes" as far as anything can go, and it's someone's else's problem if the world is destroyed. There's no exact "neutrality" here unless you import the unaligned concept from 4e, strictly referring to any person (or animal I guess) that takes a position according to a hero's call to action. It might be easier to see how good and evil can fit onto that axis without the flamewars we've wound up with instead.

Law/Chaos does get tricky. Mainly because there's a lot of confusion as to what actually tends to bring law & order.

One of the more obvious cases would be something like which side of the road to drive on. It really doesn't make much of a difference. Just so long as everyone is doing the same thing. There, the law of man can just choose arbitrarily and it works just as well. The absence of such a law would result in chaos.

But not any arbitrary law of man moves society towards law and away from chaos. There's a local bridge where I grew up that was never completed. There was construction on each end, but the middle was never built. My high school math teacher told a story that basically said it was a rounding error that scaled up, and they ended construction once they realized the two ends would never meet. I don't know that was actually true. But back in 1897 Indiana's state legislature tried to declare the legal value of pi to be 3.2. You can imagine the chaos such a law might cause.

When studying economics, I came to appreciate the idea of spontaneous order. Sometimes things can just come together without someone barking orders on a bullhorn.

One economist I follow tells a story about the time he told a joke in a room full of anti-trust lawyers about three men in a Russian gulag, each in turn telling what they did to get thrown in there. The first man says, "I showed up to work late every day and was accused of robbing the state of my labor services," the second said, "Well, I showed up to work early every day and was accused of brown-nosing." Finally, the third man said, "I showed up to work exactly on time every day, and I was accused of owning a western wristwatch."

They all laughed. They get that laws cannot be valid if they cannot distinguish good behavior from bad, guilt from innocence. He then told a joke about three men in a federal prison for violating anti-trust laws. The first one charged more than his competitors and was accused of price gouging. The second charged less than his competitors and was accused of predatory price-cutting. And the third guy charged exactly the same prices as his competitors and was accused of collusion and price fixing. Nobody laughed.

And then there's a book titled "Three Felonies A Day" written by a lawyer with a foreword by the legendary Alan Dershowitz that makes the point that there are so many laws on the book, that the average person commits three felonies a day without even realizing it. I can't remember if this book itself makes this point or if someone else did and used this book as receipts, but there gets to be a point when if there are more laws than anyone can keep track of, if you can't perform basic life functions without consulting a lawyer, then laws are producing chaos.

It seems to me that when the laws of man tend to sow chaos when they deviate from The Natural Law, which although often associated with Thomas Aquinas is really a set of ancient ideas predating Christianity.


All that said, I think the original idea of OD&D alignments was a lot simpler than that. You've got your hero on your hero's journey who begins in the ordinary world (that which is familiar, home town or village, civilization, order) and on a journey crosses into the extraordinary world (that which is unfamiliar, the unknown, the dungeon, the wilderness, another plane, chaos), hopefully succeeds then comes back. Home where you're safe is Law. Out there, where the danger is, is Chaos. Along the way on the journey, you will find those who will tend to be friends, enemies, and neutrals. It's almost more natural to call them Good, Evil, and Neutral. But D&D went with Law, Chaos, and Neutral.

Neutral actually is important precisely for these game purposes. Now much like Zap Brannigan, I have my share of qualms with neutral. It's such a non-committal non-choice. But I can appreciate it has a valuable game function. Even if Neutral doesn't easily fit in a philosophical ideal, because it's good for the game, to me you're better of making it fit into the alignment paradigm rather than discard it as inconvenient. Note that this neutral is not like the neutral you describe. It does not slip into chaos from not engaging. Bandits are given a neutral alignment, belonging neither to civilized society nor the wild.

I do think the second axis is also important. Even from a strictly monomyth perspective, the masculine and feminine each can be positive or negative.

Also, remember the economist with the mad jokes I was talking about? Part of the point is almost that it's not possible for law to have any meaning if it isn't capable of distinguishing good from bad. In fact, he gave the same criticism to the typical Left/Right political spectrum, pointing out that if that's your only measure, on the far right you'd get a guy like Ron Paul hanging out with Hitler and on the far left Mother Theresa hanging out with Joseph Stalin. It is rather absurd. In fact, he proposed his own political spectrum, Good and Bad, where that puts Ron Paul and Mother Theresa together on the extreme good end of the spectrum and Joseph Stalin and Hitler together on the extreme bad end. Which makes a lot more sense. It may not be perfect. It may leave out a lot of vital information. But it's almost like the good/evil axis is generally going to be the most relevant one.


The original Monster Manual was the first book in the AD&D line. So there weren't even any rulebooks yet at this point. The monsters in there conformed to a 5-alignment system. The familiar Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Evil, and Neutral. That tracks perfectly with the positive and negative masculine and feminine with that annoying neutral serving a solid game purpose. And I can really live with that, because without the 4 other neutral alignments (LN, NG, CN, NE), the differences in these five alignments is stark enough to be meaningful. True Neutral ends up being the home for both the apathetic as well as those consciously seeking perfect balance.

This 5 alignment system makes a reappearance in Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys RPGs which uses a 5 ethos system: Sunlight, Moonlight, Shadowy Darkness, Gloomy Darkness, and Balance.

In Lejendary Adventure, he takes an interesting turn. In a lot of ways, he's trying to return to RPG roots. The "alignment system" in LA is more of a reputation system, with just 3 types of repute. Repute, Disrepute, and Dark Repute. But he places Repute and Disrepute on a single access, so that they cancel one another out and nobody can ever have both at the same time. While Dark Repute gets a place all its own. Repute is kind of like good, disrepute kind of like evil. The quickest way I can explain Dark Repute is to think collateral damage. It's something "chaotic" characters would rack up more of than other characters.

With that, you can go back and draw lines to D&D alignments. Like if you have very high Repute with very little Dark Repute, it's like being Lawful Good. Very high repute with also very high dark repute tracks to Chaotic Good. And very high disrepute gets you Lawful Evil/Chaotic Evil according to the amount of Dark Repute. Where it gets really interesting is neutral. If you're not engaging at all, you're just not going to earn much of any of the three types of repute. So you'll have low repute/disrepute scores. But if you engage in a balance of Repute and Disrepute, you are likely to earn some Dark Repute along the way, so while repute and disrepute cancel each other out, the "conscious balance" version of neutral will have more dark repute than the "unengaged" version of neutral.

Basically, the game with just 3 alignments is able to not only express all of the alignments of the 5-alignment system, but is also able to distinguish conscious balance from just not getting involved. Pretty cool in my book.

I recognized that 5pt alignment system having originated with the Eric Holmes blue box rules made as a basic OD&D set. It really should have been restricted to the DMG in subsequent offerings, especially since players back in the day seemed to buy the MM first, though on account of it having been released first.

The Law/Chaos terms are clearly academic in intent, which explains all of the confusion. They're not about morality so much as they're about the "security" of the hero's domain within the story, with chaos then being a state of Insecurity. Those jokes do illustrate what I has hoping to convey with the separation of "law" and "order" (and the casus belli of anarchism) with The Law representing a false order or subversive chaos. The Good-Evil axis would suffice if the player's are already invested in the hero's journey of their characters. I guess I should have phrased those as "Enforce everything I say" vs "Permit anything I do," though it would be harder to see the difference between the justifications when reading these oversimplifications without any window dressing.

Looking through the archetypes of the monomyth, I can see a better answer to demystifying the quandary of neutrality within good-evil lines, and it resides within The Fool: He's not strictly bad, though not really good, yet he also has the will to be invested in the tale with all of the other big players. Apathy or abstention is the sort of neutrality that best encompasses NPCs that don't adventure or are "extras" in the plot, the truly "unaligned" will. You're just as likely to meet rivals as you are friends and enemies, so that likely is accommodated by the naivety of the fool.

So I might propose Good-Foolish-Evil, as the guy sitting on the fence in a conflict. but not outside of it altogether. Animals and magical beasts of a similar nature might be better termed as "Wild" than anything else. Given the nature of the nature of adventuring, the Evil alignment should be restricted to the GM books, and you only change an NPC into Foolish or Good NPC through the course of play. It seems like the best way to handle attitudes about the rule of law for characters can be handled by character backgrounds. Neutral is still a great label for those NPCs that haven't taken a stand, but definitely would if persuaded, unlike those that won't (or somehow can't).

As far as the masculine/feminine or positive/negative idea, I think those would be terrible to include as an "alignment" system. It's because they are context sensitive as natural forces that they are generally beyond discussions of morality, and the case of how someone uses their sexual force to pursue outside ambitions doesn't get the same point across. Considering that the feminine being associated with "negativity" is somehow a patriarchal tool of oppression is more nonsensical when you realize that positive and negative forces are only electromagnetic polarities and not value judgments--saying otherwise is like believing that up and down, left and right can exist in the emptiness of outer-space beyond our atmosphere. They could add colour to your magic system, but they don't belong as value judgements for a magical universe, as they serve relatively mundane purposes, like gravity.

Between the two of Gygax's latter alternatives, I really like the system from Lejendary Adventure as a means for tracking your standing with various factions. The moral and orderly experiences of the individual character through adventuring are left for the player to adjudicate and respond to.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 19, 2023, 12:52:31 PM
As far as the masculine/feminine or positive/negative idea, I think those would be terrible to include as an "alignment" system. It's because they are context sensitive as natural forces that they are generally beyond discussions of morality, and the case of how someone uses their sexual force to pursue outside ambitions doesn't get the same point across. Considering that the feminine being associated with "negativity" is somehow a patriarchal tool of oppression is more nonsensical when you realize that positive and negative forces are only electromagnetic polarities and not value judgments--saying otherwise is like believing that up and down, left and right can exist in the emptiness of outer-space beyond our atmosphere. They could add colour to your magic system, but they don't belong as value judgements for a magical universe, as they serve relatively mundane purposes, like gravity.

I should clarify before proceeding, in terms of mythic symbolism, the feminine is synonymous with chaos, the masculine with order. Each can be either positive or negative, which does have some moral import, not just directional. So a classic manifestation of the positive masculine archetype would be the Wise King, whereas the negative masculine might be the Tyrannical King. And the negative feminine is something like the Devouring Mother. My point was that the two-axis alignment system of law/chaos vs good/evil you see in AD&D actually does sync up to these archetypes in the mythic structure. It's not just a morality system. It also synchronizes to the mythic archetypes. Four out of Five of the alignments in the Five alignment system, anyway. So, about that neutrality.

QuoteLooking through the archetypes of the monomyth, I can see a better answer to demystifying the quandary of neutrality within good-evil lines, and it resides within The Fool: He's not strictly bad, though not really good, yet he also has the will to be invested in the tale with all of the other big players. Apathy or abstention is the sort of neutrality that best encompasses NPCs that don't adventure or are "extras" in the plot, the truly "unaligned" will. You're just as likely to meet rivals as you are friends and enemies, so that likely is accommodated by the naivety of the fool.

I thought about that for a bit, and I think it's a good call with the fool. Although I find perhaps an even more compelling argument for them striking a balance between law and chaos if you consider their role in relationship to the king. And you place the Fool as the neutral between good and evil. So really the Fool could fit into any of the neutral alignments in the 9-alignment system.

And it turns out that AD&D 1E, which first introduced the 9-alignment system, does include a class whose alignment restriction specifically fills in all the varieties of neutrals in the 9-alignment system. And that would be the Bard. The 1E Bard, of course, is a super bad-ass, and we'd be tempted to say a Bard is no "mere" fool. But they're certainly ideally suited to do everything that needs doing to fit the role of the Fool.

QuoteBetween the two of Gygax's latter alternatives, I really like the system from Lejendary Adventure as a means for tracking your standing with various factions. The moral and orderly experiences of the individual character through adventuring are left for the player to adjudicate and respond to.

I rather like it. And you know what? You might even be able to crash land it right into AD&D. Gamers have been complaining about alignments forever. Unfortunately it's not so easy to jettison alignment because it has a lot of tie-ins to the game. But if you take a close look at some of those things, like Detect Evil, for example. it mainly refers to things of magical or supernatural nature. When it comes to characters, an evil character has to be high level to be detectable as evil. That's a feature built into the repute system. Because you start at zero regardless of your predilections. And with reputable acts swallowing up disrepute, and dark repute muddying the waters, you've got to advance high enough for a clear direction to emerge in the repute scores.

I'll spare the community much of what I usually say about religion, morality, and ethics, but regarding RPG's, I found it remarkably easy to instill a 'game morality' during a campaign.

Basically I had gotten fed up to the back teeth of players using chaos and evil as excuses for swanning around trashing everything. Setting up sessions and storylines is great but if players demolish it and ignore the significance you start wondering if hobbies like stamp collecting have a serious advantage. So I banned alignment. No longer relevant. Oh how they moaned....

But it worked. Without a game framework to exploit, they began gaming with a natural morality and since most people are pretty decent, the game was able to fall back on historical stereotyping that worked so much better. People have watched, listened, and read legends, myths, fables, and fantasy stories since they born, and without an imposed morality system they went back to the generic behaviours they understood. Exactly what I hoped for.

But at times I did pose serious challenges to the players. In one case they had entered the ruin of a city they expected to be live  and populated, only to discover a lunatic had taken over. A patrol of evil guys was coming, they took cover, so I told them they heard a baby crying, a mother desperately trying to silence her child, and the leader of the patrol hearing the noise and ordering that the unhappy people should put out of their misery. I have never seem the players react so impulsively ever. They were out of cover swinging swords almost before I had finished the sentence, helping the mother and child to safety. It is of course ordinary social behaviour programmed in by instinct.

it's often considered cool and interesting to try alternative societies in RPG's but the sad truth is players usually don't relate to them because they have no experience or understanding how that society would work. To be fair, that happened with pseudo-medieval frameworks too, the players having huge issues getting arrested whilst camping in woodland that turned out to be a noble's reserve. Simply warning them beforehand doesn't always work too well, it feels like you're controlling to the game to them. Better to show an example and give info away, so in that case, what I should have done was have the players witness another group of ne'er-do-well's getting into trouble with an NPC lord ordering their prompt executions on suspicion of poaching on his land.

An actual real world scenario might not work too well - how many players know that Ine's Law of Early Medieval Wessex demanded that persons traveling through woods off the beaten track should regularly shout or sound horns, else be declared criminals?

If I was running games now I would still throw away alignment - I hear the latest D&D revision has done exactly that. But what does alignment actually mean?

Good - work toward charity, welfare, society.

Evil - work toward tyranny (not necessarily your own)

Law - work for the maintenance of tradition, putting the group first.

Chaos - working toward political and social change especially with emphasis on individualism.

You can supply your own morality and ethical definitions on these categories of course but I find that without getting too religious  or socially significant, the broader and simpler frameworks are easier to understand and adopt.

Quote from: Lunamancer on February 19, 2023, 10:59:21 PM
I should clarify before proceeding, in terms of mythic symbolism, the feminine is synonymous with chaos, the masculine with order. Each can be either positive or negative, which does have some moral import, not just directional. So a classic manifestation of the positive masculine archetype would be the Wise King, whereas the negative masculine might be the Tyrannical King. And the negative feminine is something like the Devouring Mother. My point was that the two-axis alignment system of law/chaos vs good/evil you see in AD&D actually does sync up to these archetypes in the mythic structure. It's not just a morality system. It also synchronizes to the mythic archetypes. Four out of Five of the alignments in the Five alignment system, anyway.

This might explain the significance of the Damsel in Distress as one kind of Magic Elixir. The Feminine being Chaotic intends for the taming of the experiences in the Underworld in spite of the trials of the disturbance to the Hero's Order. Anything on the Evil side would seek to perpetuate the Chaos and deny the Hero's Resurrection. Sounds about right?

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I thought about that for a bit, and I think it's a good call with the fool. Although I find perhaps an even more compelling argument for them striking a balance between law and chaos if you consider their role in relationship to the king. And you place the Fool as the neutral between good and evil. So really the Fool could fit into any of the neutral alignments in the 9-alignment system.

And it turns out that AD&D 1E, which first introduced the 9-alignment system, does include a class whose alignment restriction specifically fills in all the varieties of neutrals in the 9-alignment system. And that would be the Bard. The 1E Bard, of course, is a super bad-ass, and we'd be tempted to say a Bard is no "mere" fool. But they're certainly ideally suited to do everything that needs doing to fit the role of the Fool.

As far as I was aware, the bard wasn't a strict class in AD&D, but a composite through multi-classing, maybe becoming a "prestige class" in its own right. You'd have to rely on the version presented in the Strategic Review to be able to say that you "started as a Bard" from level 1. Reading the appendix description more carefully, it looks like the lines saying "they begin play as fighters, then add thief levels between 5th and 8th levels" is more like design notes creeping into the appendix text, because it's not like it was ever said that clerics "gain the spell casting powers of the wizard, but with a separate spell list." I like the idea of bards losing thieving skills once they become lawful, but I wouldn't mind compensating them with the abilities of the monk as a trade off.

Back to the subject, you're right about the essence of that character though, as the bard is capable of heroism without the need to stepping on the toes of his compatriots. Being neutral, he could provide motivation for the more lawful heroes to begin and continue their quest, but as a Mentor, not a true Fool.[Edit: Probably not what you meant.]

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I rather like it. And you know what? You might even be able to crash land it right into AD&D. Gamers have been complaining about alignments forever. Unfortunately it's not so easy to jettison alignment because it has a lot of tie-ins to the game. But if you take a close look at some of those things, like Detect Evil, for example. it mainly refers to things of magical or supernatural nature. When it comes to characters, an evil character has to be high level to be detectable as evil. That's a feature built into the repute system. Because you start at zero regardless of your predilections. And with reputable acts swallowing up disrepute, and dark repute muddying the waters, you've got to advance high enough for a clear direction to emerge in the repute scores.

As caldrail has mentioned with his own successes with something similar above, I don't doubt why a video game like Fallout went with a Repute system like LA has. Obviously, magic and deities don't fit the setting of that world, although its more important for the freedom for the player to react to the goals of conflicting factions in a world without any authourity. Alignment is "emergent" (more like reprieved) in the sense that the temptation to break given definitions of morality simply vanishes.

As a Catholic, I feel compelled to chime into this discussion, if for nothing else than the fact that my co-religionists seem to be getting a bum rap in it. There is an important distinction to be made about the alignment system of D&D (all editions), the way it has been misinterpreted, and the way that it has been conflated with some sort of spirituality in the '80s, and subsequently disparaged by the Libertarians in the '90s and the Postmoderns in the new Century.

The first thing to point out is that OD&D Alignment has been mostly lifted from Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné stories, where it is a faction descriptor. The forces of Law are those for Civilisation, and the forces of Chaos are arrayed against it and for Barbarism, that is, the implementation of the so-called "Law of the Jungle." And in OD&D, the point of Alignment is to identify which races are on one side or the other of this conflict.

Of course, because the conflict has a spiritual dimension, the players started to ponder on this dimension and concluded that, as Lunamancer put it, there are different brands of Civilisation and Barbarism, and perhaps feeling that the first system was too one-dimensional  , a second dimension of Good vs Evil was created to distinguish these nuances of Tyranny vs Rechtsstaat and Subsidiary individualism vs. Social Darwinism. However, those are still subfactions inside the Civilisation and Barbarism factions, not necessarily personal philosophy.

Now, having been brought up in AD&D 2nd Edition, I have a soft spot for standard 9 Alignments, but it is important to understand that the Neutral alignments can in fact equivocate between the people who refuse to pick a side and those who deliberately try to establish a balance between the two opposing factions.

Just allow me to, finally, disagree somewhat strenuously with ClusterFluster that "the entire Scholastic tradition struggled with the concept of evil for centuries;" they most definitely didn't. The meta-problem is that the concept of good and evil are necessarily abstract enough that their treatment requires some background in metaphysics, which the vast majority of people didn't have, so they came to encounter the same problems that had been encountered centuries before and had to rediscover the same answers generation after generation. The problem compounded when the Enlightenment came, Newton's Programme took over philosophy, and the Aristotelian concept of Final Forms fell into desuetude. If philosophical entities can only be defined in terms of their material constitution — if the properties of a composite body are entirely determined by the properties of its component parts — then Good is simply a matter of opinion and Evil is an unsolvable problem.

I now agree that this is a useless discussion.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 20, 2023, 07:41:50 PM
I now agree that this is a useless discussion.

Eh. Is it the faction thing? I don't dispute that. I don't think it's untrue. But I do think it's incomplete. What if you have factions, but instead of team jerseys, you have behavior codes? I think that's the more accurate description of alignments.

One time I was on a forum talking about my experiences with Tomb of Horrors. I don't think it's reputation as a character killer is entirely accurate. Even on first read, I could see clear a sensible path. In fact, I ran it and players actually did figure out most of the puzzles and traps. Things critics have insisted was impossible. And the deadly stuff, I couldn't help but notice, most of the worst stuff, the auto death stuff, serves to negate stats. They kill statistically strong characters same as statistically weak ones. To me, this all makes it clear. The intent of this module was to provide a challenge for very high level characters while still being doable by reasonable, mid-level characters. And that the determination of success or failure was shifted from mechanics to playing smart.

Luke Gygax responded to my comment saying, actually it was meant to be a character killer.

*shrugs*

Who do I believe? Arguably one of the most authoritative living person on the matter? Or my own lying eyes.

I think the reality is Gary Gygax actually was brilliant, and there are layers built into the game. A lot of people think they have *the* interpretation. You can't prove them wrong because the facts point to them being right. It's just incomplete as evidenced by other facts that point to other interpretations.

Don't be snowed that the alignments are just factions.

I had the good fortune to attend an event with Gary Gygax, and when it got to the Q&A, someone asked him why he stole dwarfs from Tolkien. He said, "I didn't. I stole them from Norse mythology, same place Tolkien stole them from." Just like my interpretation here of Law & Chaos I stole from mythic symbolism. Same place Moorcock stole it from. It's not a coincidence that we both zeroed in on civilized vs savage.


Moorcock

QuoteJust like my interpretation here of Law & Chaos I stole from mythic symbolism. Same place Moorcock stole it from. It's not a coincidence that we both zeroed in on civilized vs savage.

I'd say it's more Enlightement XIX century symbolism than anything mythical.