Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479272Alignment does not function well as a rule because it neither constrains nor incentivises PC behaviour.

Meh. I find that removing the pretense for those traits in the alignment system was an absolute improvement in the system.

Quote from: Peregrin;479320That's true.  And diseases like the one I have are relatively rare, so in the long-run it's a net-gain (cue doctors talking about the rise of autoimmune diseases in industrialized nations, blah blah).

My post was just really dry humor.

Anyway, I'm not sure you can get more off-topic than autoimmune diseases, so, yeah.

That's ok, I don't think anyone else is discussing the topic anymore either.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;479380Meh. I find that removing the pretense for those traits in the alignment system was an absolute improvement in the system.

I simply removed it as a meaningful rule in any way at all. As I said earlier, the PCs declare alignments, which I then ignore, and they then speculate about the alignments of things around them, which I neither interfere with nor encourage. But if you are going to keep it as a rule, you ought to have some way of making it tie into the rest of the rules meaningfully and intelligibly. The old "alignment change penalties" were about as close as it got, and they were too crude and ambiguous for my taste. Positive incentives beat negative incentives beat punishment for encouraging or discouraging behaviours.

Quote from: Benoist;479369Adressing this because to me the nuance is important. By saying Team Left I do not mean merely "left wing". I mean someone who let's his imaginary belonging to a "team" of politics cloud every position he takes, every opinion or POV he can come up with. Being part of the team is more important than truth or fairness. It's about holding the position first.

And yes, there is a Team Right as well.

My father belongs to that one.

Quote from: Benoist;479376People keep saying that, but I actually never had alignments issues at an actual game table. Ever. It's typical internet ramblings born out of slanted "I don't like this" POVs and theoretical scenarios, as far as I'm concerned.

I leave again and we get back into this?
ALignment is a setting-level rule.  It works well in settings with cosmologies  with cemented polar truths; it does not work well in settings without them.

like all pieces of rulesets (rules), it is good for some games and not others.  It is not a good rule or a bad rule.

Quote from: LordVreeg;479403I leave again and we get back into this?
ALignment is a setting-level rule.  It works well in settings with cosmologies  with cemented polar truths; it does not work well in settings without them.
like all pieces of rulesets (rules), it is good for some games and not others.  It is not a good rule or a bad rule.

It's next to meaningless in settings without them.

Quote from: LordVreeg;479403I leave again and we get back into this?
ALignment is a setting-level rule.  It works well in settings with cosmologies  with cemented polar truths; it does not work well in settings without them.

like all pieces of rulesets (rules), it is good for some games and not others.  It is not a good rule or a bad rule.

It's a bad rule because it's unclear what its effects are on PC behaviour even in contexts that support its existence. It's not even very clear whether it's prescriptive or descriptive.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479412It's a bad rule because it's unclear what its effects are on PC behaviour even in contexts that support its existence. It's not even very clear whether it's prescriptive or descriptive.

I find that, while not a rule I use or personally like anymore, it is a rule best suited to a very skilled GM.  For a rule that has been around since the beginning of time, it is open to abuse and misuse from mediocre of bad GMs.  But it is a rule that can add a lot to certain games with a skilled GM.

It's a cooking spice oft misused or paired with the wrong food, but in the hands of a great chef, it can create foods that would be worse without it.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479355Yeah, yeah, you don't like me being mean to you. It doesn't take that many words to say it.

If I had a real problem with you or anyone else here being mean to me, I wouldn't bother posting here.  My problem is that when you are being mean, you aren't being informative or interesting and you are generally too dry and serious to be funny when you are being mean, unlike Kyle or RPGPundit.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479355Basically, there's tons of shit you could do here to induce a "truly held" desire to repent.

Instead of arguing over what is or isn't possible or should and shouldn't be possible at a mechanical or philosophical level and whether intelligence requires free will and the possibility of redemption or not, I'll cut to the chase with the problem I have with a game setting being structured like that at a practical and pragmatic level.  

The problem is that if you give Good the magical means to turn any other creature Good or at least away from Evil, then the obvious and primary objective of Good characters would be to use those means to do so and to avoid to whatever extent possible slaying anyone, no matter how horrible their past actions are.  While there wouldn't be anything inherently wrong with such a game, I don't think most role-players are looking for something like Jehovah's Witnesses: The Saving and it undermines the point that monsters serve in most games, as mentioned earlier in this thread, which is to personify Evil into a creature so you can metaphorically kick its butt.  Forced redemption also raises all sorts of other issues with free will and justice such as those raised in the Babylon 5 episode Passing Through Gethsemane as well as by the Confessors in Legend of the Seeker/The Sword of Truth.  

And because of that, I think there is some value in giving players prone to want to play good heroes (as several people that I game with do) some opponents whose butts they can kick without angst and having to worry about saving them more than slaughtering them.

And while people have offered up things like zombies as an alternative, if redemption and fixing evil is always on the table, I could make an argument very much like the one that you've made to thwart the clear intention of the Atonement spell to allow forced alignment changes to argue that some combination of spells could be used to thwart the clear intention of the Raise Dead spell and permit the restoration of zombies.  And, ultimately, tagging a living monster as irredeemably Evil serves the same purpose as saying that you can't raise the undead and fix them.  

Why is an irredeemable evil sentient monster interesting?  The same reason the Terminator was interesting, back to the Terminator quote that Kyle paraphrased earlier in the thread:

"It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

I agree it would be boring if every Evil character and creature in a game was so inflexible and single-minded, but I think such creatures certainly have a place in role-playing games, especially if butt-kicking opportunities are an objective of the game.

As for why one would want to justify killing helpless babies, I wanted a naturalistic setting (Glorantha does nothing for me) and modeled the early part of my game on Keep on the Borderlands so I considered it a given that Evil monsters would have offspring and that at some point the players would have to deal with them.  I had two choices.  One was to declare them just as irredeemably Evil as their parents and the other to make them innocent until they've done Evil.  The latter choice not only would oblige good characters to spare the babies but to keep them from harm.  My players weren't interested in playing Romper Room: The Field Trip.  Even if they were, it simply punts the problem down the road when they reach the point where the Evil kicks in and they have to be either confined or killed, hence my questions earlier about what to do with them (e.g., interment camps?, reservations?, imprisonment?).  The only way I see out of that trap is to not have irredeemable monsters in the first place or make them unnatural, which I presume is one of your points, but that simply creates a different set of problems for the players and doesn't entirely eliminate the problem of how to deal with babies even simply likely to grow up into brutal killers who are going to eat innocent people or even simply leaving the babies behind to fend for themselves in an environment where they are likely to be killed without adults to defend and care for them.  In any event, the goal was not to say that killing babies was Good but to give Good characters the ability to exterminate Evil even in baby form, which would be part of a naturalistic setting.  And if I were to do it again, I'd probably make a different choice about how to handle it.

Worms gotta eat, same as the buzzards.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479360Sure, but why not provide a concrete incentive, especially if there's decent, readily available explanations in the setting?

The short answer is that I don't need an incentive to play my character the way I enjoy playing my character and if you start trying to give me incentives to play my character a certain way, you are unlikely to improve my experience and quality of play and stand a decent chance of making my experience and quality of play worse.  It's like turning the key in the ignition of a car when the engine is already running smoothly.  It's not going to make the engine run better and it will probably make a nasty noise when the starting motor tries to engage with an already running engine.

Quote from: Benoist;479376People keep saying that, but I actually never had alignments issues at an actual game table. Ever. It's typical internet ramblings born out of slanted "I don't like this" POVs and theoretical scenarios, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, as a system of defining behavior, it was ok, it gave you a nice big bucket to toss things in.  

However, there were always edge cases.  Take someone who doesn't give a crap what the "Law" is, yet follows his own ethical code without deviation, even to the point that if his enemies know his code they can use it against him?  Is that "Chaotic"?  You can have discussions into the wee hours of the night about every single alignment (and back in the day, I did).

Most players I actually gamed for long periods of time "got" alignments and role-played them.  For people that didn't stay long at the table, it was a never-ending hassle.

I ended up having alignment really only matter if someone was "aligned", ie some class that got some divine powers, and had detect spells, and anti-alignment powers only work against the Aligned.

If I went back to my old Greyhawk campaign, I'd use alignments because, as Vreeg said, they are part of the cosmology there.  It's a base assumption of the setting.

Quote from: John Morrow;479435If I had a real problem with you...

...I'd probably make a different choice about how to handle it.

Can remember when I had the patience for a post like this.  All I want now is to hit the donate button.  Well done.

Quote from: CRKrueger;479457However, there were always edge cases.  Take someone who doesn't give a crap what the "Law" is, yet follows his own ethical code without deviation, even to the point that if his enemies know his code they can use it against him?  Is that "Chaotic"?

Neutral.  That band between Good and Evil, Law and Chaos where pragmatism and self-interest rules.  

I think a big part of the problem comes from the labels.  Try these:

Good to Evil -> Benevolence, Self-Interest, Malevolence
Law to Chaos -> Order, Pragmatism, Liberty

As an added bonus, treat the first axis as an end and the second axis as a means, except when you are dealing with Self-Interested Order and Self-Interested Liberty, at which point the means become an end.

778 posts so soon? Let's aim for 1500 with this bad boy! :cool: