I think my next setting the alignments will be based on Laff-A-Lympics

You can be ScoobyDooby, Yogi Yahooey, or Really Rotten. Your alignment will be tested as you enter the ruins of Yabad A'badu the first city, seeking the Sprocket of Gas-Ou and the stone egg of Deehn-Oh. Will you discover the secrets of the Exit Stage Left spell?

How I want to approach Alignment in one of my design ideas is to use it as a form of Archetype. Having an Alignment asks the questions: What and How are you Aligned? To me, this is part personality, part inner strength, part motivation, part moral compass, part attitude, part soul. What is it about you (the character) that truly Defines you, and how you Approach Life and the World?

The standard D&D alignment structure wouldn't work. Palladium's alignments are closer to how I see them, but these don't work either.

Seeing them as Approaches helps. It doesn't matter what class or profession a character is. Are they a Paragon (someone who lives by their Virtue) or a Marauder (someone who desires and enjoys causing problems/destruction)? Are they Carnal (a person who craves and loves pleasure) or a Seeker (someone who questions, learns and seeks answers)? Engineer (a person who loves to Create) or Zealot (a person who defines himself as a follower and worships another power)?  Warlord (someone who seeks power and position over others and craves a following) or a Protector (someone who watches and stands guard for others)?

Its a work in progress and I don't know if it would actually work. Part of the problem of alignments of any kind is that every person can be multiple alignments at different times in his or her life. This is just part of us being us as humans. People change, so what defines us has the potential to change due to life experiences and circumstances.

I've played it RAW, Law vs Chaos, and no alignments.  Right now, I tend towards no alignments.  But, if want something more epic, I'll lean into Law vs Chaos.

The usual Law-Chaos/Good-Evil. Certain species are almost always a particular alignment (e.g. shadow elves are always chaotic evil) while picayunafolk tend to be neutral good. Dragons tend to mirror their AD&D counterparts, although blue and green dragons (Ayundellian blues are unable to fly, rather they are aquatic) tend more towards good.

Humans are all over the place. Any in one realm would be lawful neutral, while others elsewhere are chaotic evil, and still others lawful good.

If cooking up one's own game then alignments can be tricky if they do not reflect AD&D types. AD&D green dragons are almost always lawful evil, but Ayundellian green dragons tend to be neutral with good tendencies. So what, you ask? Well, if I end up with a long-time AD&D player and say "traveling down the forest trail you see a green dragon lounging on a rock in the sun, looking at you" what will that player automatically assume?

The original idea of D&D was "good vs. evil," and looking over the statistics from the 1977 rules and manuals good had a clear advantage- unless really lucky with the dice it was highly unlikely a red dragon could beat a gold dragon, or even a silver dragon, age category the same. Likewise elves were clearly superior to orcs. This is why you had distinct alignments for monsters.

Others have already mentioned that they don't use alignment for one reason for another; I'd like to join that chorus. 

Even when they represents 'natural alliances', I think the world is more interesting when 'Lawful Good' kingdoms can go to war for one reason or another.  And sometimes the players want to build up a town in support of 'good' aims, and sometimes they want to burn the world down.  People are often inconsistent - even serial killers can be good friends and neighbors.  Alignment may indicate a certain direction in moral outlook, but those can be handled by descriptive words like: honorable, treacherous, generous, selfish, etc. 

When you run into orcs, it's more interesting to know whether you CAN negotiate with them or whether they'll betray their promises the moment your back is turned - and how you as a character can make that determination. 

I do not like a cosmic 'judge' that tells you whether an individual is more good or evil regardless of what they're doing in that moment. 

My players choose an alignment, but I don't referee it very closely, except in the case of Paladins and Rangers.  I pay more attention to Clerics adhering to their deities' dogma.

Quote from: deadDMwalking on August 10, 2021, 05:02:10 PM
Others have already mentioned that they don't use alignment for one reason for another; I'd like to join that chorus. 

Even when they represents 'natural alliances', I think the world is more interesting when 'Lawful Good' kingdoms can go to war for one reason or another.  And sometimes the players want to build up a town in support of 'good' aims, and sometimes they want to burn the world down.  People are often inconsistent - even serial killers can be good friends and neighbors.  Alignment may indicate a certain direction in moral outlook, but those can be handled by descriptive words like: honorable, treacherous, generous, selfish, etc. 

When you run into orcs, it's more interesting to know whether you CAN negotiate with them or whether they'll betray their promises the moment your back is turned - and how you as a character can make that determination. 

I do not like a cosmic 'judge' that tells you whether an individual is more good or evil regardless of what they're doing in that moment.

The fact that a lawful good kingdom might go to war or do something nasty would only be more interesting because it is lawful good.

Why would that happen? Going to war needlessly is NOT something a lawful good kingdom would do, so now you have a mystery that needs solving. What is behind it?

A good deity doing something evil- to mortals. But an immortal being of great power and perception might do that to avert a great evil in the future. Without definite alignments it could just happen for any old reason.

I would also referee alignments pretty closely, to indicate that choices have consequences. Sure as a chaotic evil character you can do whatever you like- but nobody will ever TRUST you and the first azuralupin you encounter you're dead. If you want to be lawful good you MUST abide by that even if it hurts. If during the game you can't deal with it you are allowed to change your alignment to one you can deal with (e.g. from lawful good to chaotic good since you prefer individualistic ways of fighting for good).


In the case of AD&D deities get their power from followers, and logically they should all be more or less on the same "frequency." If a god is a car you'd want parts that fit that car and the best fuel for it.

In retrospect the reason most other creatures, even humanoids, had distinct alignments as opposed to humans was because AD&D was a "humanocentric" game and thus humans displayed the greatest variety and versatility.

Quote from: palaeomerus on August 09, 2021, 02:16:05 AM
I think my next setting the alignments will be based on Laff-A-Lympics

You can be ScoobyDooby, Yogi Yahooey, or Really Rotten. Your alignment will be tested as you enter the ruins of Yabad A'badu the first city, seeking the Sprocket of Gas-Ou and the stone egg of Deehn-Oh. Will you discover the secrets of the Exit Stage Left spell?

I haven't seen "Snit's Revenge" in decades.

I'd buy your game module. Does one character run as though she doesn't have knees?

There are a lot of reasons two lawful good kingdoms could go to war, even if you assume alignment is a strait-jacket that prohibits uncharacteristic/emotional reactions. 

Kingdom A is LG, as is Kingdom Z.
B is an ally of A and isn't quite as LG as B.  Likewise Y is an ally of Z and has a mutual defense treaty.

If B is invaded by Y, both A and Z can go to war against each other - failure to stand by their word would be a violation of the 'lawful' part, and failure to defend an ally wouldn't be 'good. 

But just as individuals are able to be 'mostly good' but still do some pretty terrible things, it makes sense that kingdoms do, too.  France and England are both 'lawful' countries and are generally committed to ensuring a high quality of life for their citizens (good) but have gone to war against each other repeatedly. 

Alignments making it more interesting- why would they, and if there isn't a decent justification are they lawful or lawful good in the first place? As you point out it can get tricky, but often only BECAUSE an entity may be lawful- they may have to go to war because they must honor a treaty that may well have been ill-advised- you can cook up a lot with THAT one!

Quote from: RebelSky on August 10, 2021, 12:58:38 PM
How I want to approach Alignment in one of my design ideas is to use it as a form of Archetype. Having an Alignment asks the questions: What and How are you Aligned? To me, this is part personality, part inner strength, part motivation, part moral compass, part attitude, part soul. What is it about you (the character) that truly Defines you, and how you Approach Life and the World?

The standard D&D alignment structure wouldn't work. Palladium's alignments are closer to how I see them, but these don't work either.

Oddly enough, I do exactly that, alignments are archetypes, and I do it with the D&D alignment structure.
LG = positive masculine
CG = positive feminine
LE = negative masculine
CE = negative feminine

And I think what this says is that, no, actually, AD&D style alignments fit archetypes REALLY well. It's just that it's only giving you two dimensions. You'll need a couple of more if you want to get a 16-archetype structure. In my Gothic horror fantasy (or is it fantasy horror?) campaign, I also add the axis of "human" vs "alien" and "believer" vs "pagan." I don't call these alignments, but the axes are there.

Just as an example, if I may geek out about my game world a bit, when it comes to the monk class, I've never been satisfied with the "Oh, that's for oriental campaigns" line. William of Gellone was a Catholic monk known to be formidable with the open hand, so I was determined to make the monk fit my non-oriental setting. What I ended up doing is basing them (aesthetically, anyway) on Eastern Orthodox monks, but for the fantasy element I made them something of "psionicists"--I've always been intrigued about the PHB monk's abilities of mental defense and reasoned, this is a substantial advantage when facing demons & devils. So these monks would be Lawful (masculine) per the PHB (even nuns would fit the masculine archetype), "human" (just like they are a human-only class in the PHB, and here opposed to alien creatures from other planes), and "believers," though I'm not entirely opposed to the possibility down the line of creating a pagan counterpart.

If I wanted to I could then go back and hash out 16 different archetypes. They might not be a perfect match for the Meyers Briggs archetype set, but then again, my understanding is the Big Five model has more scientific backing anyway, so I'm not going to break my back over it.

For D&D I use the classic 9 alignments.  IMO it's a defining element of D&D, and despite all of the arguments online, in my decades of play I've never been in a game with even a single argument about alignment.  For other games, I prefer different systems.  I like TMNT's system with scrupulous, anarchist, miscreant, etc.  Chris's allegiances above sound appealing.  For my current game I'm just having the players make a short list of precepts for their characters in order of priority.

Since I'm currently rereading the Belgariad with my son, I'm reminded of a conversation where Garion and Belgarath were discussing how to determine sides in a conflict.  Belgarath says he like to keep it simple, to which Garion responds "Like good and evil?"  Belgarath answers that no, that's complicated.   He prefers "Us and them."  That seems like a pretty good practical basis for an alignment system.

When I run D&D, Law, Chaos, Good, Evil, and the Balance, are universal cosmic forces that vie for dominance.  They are not intelligent in any way and are absolute in their thinking.  The gods are mediators and try to keep things under control without starting a cosmic war.  Player characters who join the cause of one of these forces can become pawns in a very dangerous cosmic game if they aren't careful.

Quote from: GriswaldTerrastone on August 10, 2021, 05:54:25 PM
Alignments making it more interesting

I have never found that alignments make things more interesting.  They're designed to simplify what are otherwise complex motivations, and there is no version where they are actually internally consistent.  I'd prefer to address the complex motivations. 

For example, it's generally considered 'evil' to advocate for genocide.  But 'good' dwarves might argue that goblins are a pest and DESERVE to die - every last one of them.  By not having alignment, I don't have to worry about whether that's GOOD or EVIL.  I can have Dwarves that are a reliable ally for the PCs, generally supportive of 'good' causes, but they can serve as an obstacle when their anti-goblin policies become an issue for the other 'allied races'.  I never have to argue or defend a position to have genocidal dwarves that are otherwise generally good; I never have to determine whether the Paladin perceives them as good or evil, and whether the player is offended by that choice. 

Alignment creates far more problems than it solves - and honestly I don't know what problem it is SUPPOSED to solve.  I don't need alignment to help me decide whether different factions can work together or not - and what else is it supposed to do? 

Alignment is a very one-dimensional thing. How many people, fictional or real, are considered evil, but felt completely justified in their ways? Who knows what objective good is? In a world with gods and a clear, distinct notion of good... Why are there still "evil" things? They know they're wrong. Do they do evil for the sake of it? If I use a healing spell to cure a serial killer, is it good magic? If I kill the serial killer, am I good or am I just as much a killer as he is? Is genociding a race of "evil" creatures good?

I know the OSR tends to like objective morality as opposed to moral relativism; I think this is just a reaction to wokes and "reality is subjective" crap, but in terms of morality no one has the last word. No one can definitely prove the existence of absolute good and evil beyond our own human assessment of different things. If you're interested in my personal view of morality, some things are unequivocably black and white, but there is a gray area.

Without a clear, objective good, there's always room to wonder if the villain was right, if we did the right thing, if we're fighting on the right side, etc. and that can add some spice and depth to your games/stories