Quote from: RPGPundit;607522Or are you one of those guys who likes to constantly wallow in "shades of grey", who loves anti-heroes and villains-who-can-be-redeemed?

That's me, baby. Basically, if there's 0% chance the player character might ask the villain out for a date then I don't consider them written to their full potential.

Incidentally that's why I prefer humanocentric settings instead of monster zoo.

Quote from: Bill;607631My lack of observation skills.

I don't have the book handy; I am at work.

Can you just paraphrase the dmg entry that supposedly makes detect evil useful in some way?

Quote from: Blackhand;607641It's tiny enough.  I don't think they'll ban me or sue me for posting the paragraph in it's entirety, verbatim.

Spell Explanations, p. 41

Detect Evil:  Basically, the degree of evil (faint, moderate, strong, overwhelming) and it's general nature (expectant, malignant, gloating, etc.) can be noted.  If the evil is overwhelming, the general bent (lawful, neutral, chaotic) has a 10% chance per level of the clereic of being detectable.

Based on the description given, I judged Zert to be faintly evil, and expectant (meaning he might commit some faint evil). His description says he can go either way on the party (accompany or murder), and wants to get rich.

This doesn't make the spell more or less useful, just shows you how to adjudicate the spell.

It doesn't put a target over a evil beings' head with the psychic impulse to kill the person / creature out of hand.  It's not a free excuse for a lawful good character to commit what amounts to murder, just to make sure that they understand what they are dealing with.

My bad - the part I was thinking of is actually on page 60 under the heading of "Detection of Evil and/or Good".  It makes clear that, as regards to people, it is really a "detect immediate evil intent" spell.

Quote from: DMG Pg. 60It is important to make a distinction between character alignment and some powerful force of evil or good when this detection function is considered. In general, only a know alignment spell will determine the evil or good a character holds within. It must be a great evil or a strong good to be detected. Characters who ore very strongly aligned, do not stray from their faith, and who are of relatively high level (at least 8th or higher) might radiate evil or good if they are intent upon appropriate actions. Powerful monsters such as demons, devils, ki-rin and the like will send forth emanations of their evil or good. Aligned undead must radiate evil, far it is this power and negative force which enables them to continue existing. Note that none of these emonations are noticeable without magical detection.

In like fashion, powerful magic items which have some purpose as respects alignment will radiate evil or good - unless they are aligned with neutrality, which is neither, of course. Most other magic items will most certainly not, even though their effect might be for evil or good. Likewise, items which are not magical but which have powerful effects will probably not give any evil or good aura. Poison is a prime example. It is perfectly neutral and has no oura whatsoever. Unholy water will emanate evil, lust as holy water will radiate good. Places sanctified to some deity of evil or good will certainly give off an appropriate aura.

Thus, a trap, for example, is neutral and gives no evil or good reading. If the same trap leads victims to the lair of Juiblex, for instance, there will be an aura of evil about it; while if it brings victims into the realm of Bahamut, it will send out an aura of good. Using these guidelines, you should hove little difficulty in adjudicating the attempts of characters empowered to detect evil or good to do so. As a side note, be sure to remember that all such detection requires not less than one round of stillness and concentration whether the power is from some inner source (paladins, for example), or by some external means (spells, swords, etc.). Therefore, the character must stop, have quiet, and intently seek to detect the aura.

Quote from: RPGPundit;607522Do you want there to be things, creatures, and people in your world that are objectively black-and-white Evil? Not necessarily "stupid evil" but none of this "they're just misunderstood" crap?

Or are you one of those guys who likes to constantly wallow in "shades of grey", who loves anti-heroes and villains-who-can-be-redeemed?

RPGPundit

I do not belive in "evil vs good", often it is really evil calling themselves good and everything that opposes them evil, while the actual good seem to go more for the "misunderstood" or perhaps shades of grey.
I go for neither:
I go for colours, not greyscales.
What i mean, is that opinions often equals morals, and in some cases, several different morals may be correct even if they are more or less opposing in several cases, they might also be opposing in only a few cases.

However, in some cases, only one certain colour is good and correct, and in another case, another colour may be the right one.
Then there is the spectrum of false/right asumptions and conclusions as well.
A false assumption/conclusion often may seem like a specific colour, because it may propagate the wrong colour in some cases.
Does that makes them evil?
No, but it may lead to cruelty, and mentalities like "the end justifies the means" and "It's for your own good".

Really bad offenders are often victims themselves ... ok there may exist people that should be dropped dead on the spot, but they are really far fewer than some obviously belive, and it is really hard to tell them apart.

To me, villains normally has, for them, good reasons to do what they do.
Ok, the players may not aggree on those reasons, but still.

For me, it depends on the campaign setting - alignment to me always seemed like an extension of the campaign setting rather than rules that should be strictly enforced in all games.

In a FR type universe, demons, devils, etc are real, and evil is actively at work collecting converts. These things and their counterparts are for the most part pure representations of alignment. Their acts and the acts of their divinely enabled mortal servants give ample proof of their relevance.

The question of alignment by action (or inaction) or even by thought is of the realm of mortals who understand their actions will have consequences in the afterlife.

There is a lot of fun in that type of universe, like personalizing the divine minion(s) who deliver clerical spells and only appear to the cleric.

But for a setting like Ravenloft, the horror is that understanding consequences is just beyond your ability, especially on the path to salvation.

Really depends on the genre and the setting.

In my OD&D game, Dwarves and Elves are locked in a genocidal war. They don't like humans and consider them inferior, but occasionally useful. I use the Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic alignment chart and I definitely prefer that to Good vs. Evil for my OD&D.

In that campaign, there are Evil forces. There are demons lurking in the shadows along with their mortal acolytes and they are Capital E-Evil. But there are plenty of people who are Lower Case e-evil who are just assholes who want to take your shit and be a douche.

Some of them are even PCs.

As for "redeemable evil", I only use those guys in Superhero games. That's a fine genre trope that the players enjoy and I certainly haven't overused it.

Have only read the OP for now, but my initial response is that it depends on a variety of factors including time invested in the game, structure of the group, the game itself, and the mood I'm in. I can get behind a much more realistic "shades of gray" style game, but that's not appropriate for every system nor every group. Occasionally I like having free reign to just run free and kill the evil guys who are evil because they're evil without having to concern myself with deeper moralistic problems.

This is how I often prefer games like D&D or Rifts. Moral issues enter more into games like Vampire. Though the two can flip flop as well.

Quote from: Blackhand;607624Ditching alignment ditches a lot of mechanical aspects of the game.  One has to throw out an assload of spells, magic items and conventions.

More trouble than it's worth, and if players know the game and expect to be able to perform certain actions it might get a little testy.

Massive overstatement made from a position of ignorance. In reality, ditching alignment altogether is surpassingly quick and easy. And I base that on actual experience with the issue, which I reckon you don't have.

QuoteDo you want there to be things, creatures, and people in your world that are objectively black-and-white Evil? Not necessarily "stupid evil" but none of this "they're just misunderstood" crap?

Or are you one of those guys who likes to constantly wallow in "shades of grey", who loves anti-heroes and villains-who-can-be-redeemed?

False dichotomy, these two options are not complementary.

You don't need "objective Evil" in the D&D sense of inherently Evil races, spells, cosmological forces, etc.. In fact, your campaign world can be infinitely more interesting without it. Consider the quick passage of just a few centuries in real history: Romans fuck up the Britons, everyone else on the continent fucks up the Romans so they withdraw and leave the Britons alone, Saxons fuck up the Romanised Britons, Danes fuck up the Saxons. None of them are Objectively Evil Races in the D&D sense. And yet, contrarily to your claims, it's not just shades of grey, either. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few downright horrid irredeemable fuckers on each and every side, just like how there were decent, honourable fellows as well. And all in all, it's an infintely more interesting background with much more varied chances for adventuring than "Evil orcs are threatening the village again".

Quote from: Premier;607680Massive overstatement made from a position of ignorance. In reality, ditching alignment altogether is surpassingly quick and easy. And I base that on actual experience with the issue, which I reckon you don't have.

You don't have any fucking idea.  There's been more than one essay written about this from the game designers themselves, not to mention from various independent sources.  Why don't you look something up before you tell the next person how you think it is.

What you say is only true if you don't use half the published materials you probably don't even own.  You basically just ignore all questions of alignment, high level spells and planar interactions (which are based on alignment).

I'll wager the vast majority of your "experience" is with PC's of levels 1 through 5 at best.

The only way you can do this is if you say "well you just REMOVE that and CHANGE this" until there's a huge chunk of material just missing.  Also, how do you actually use a paladin in that scenario?  The answer is, you REMOVE a bunch of stuff.

As in you don't use it.  Which is EXACTLY what I was saying about it having mechanical ramifications, to which (if they are experienced) your players may or may not prefer.

If you REPLACE the alignment system with a morality system (or something similar) to mitigate this approach, one has to ask why you would be bothered to do it at all when you could just play a different game.

Keeping alignment is fun for me. It's a multifaceted tool. It can be grossly broad brushed upon a race and social era, and still retain precise variation down to the individual level. The magic of alignment is its capacity for a GM to interpret it through their setting; it's a quick shorthand like so many GM tools!


About high or low contrast evil... depends on my campaign dials. I can retain roughly the same setting across tables, but from different campaigns across those same tables I can adjust the contrast dial. In one I may focus on petty individual evil, with "shades of grey" and potential redemption et al. While just down the (setting) road, perhaps in a different social class or neighborhood, there can be a tyrant of unmitigated evil.

And the good thing is that both interpretations of (gonna use color theory terms!) Alignment Intensity/Saturation satisfies part of my desires of play. I like to paint with different colors!

It's why I think the much-maligned alignment system was a stroke of genius: it reduces complex theo/philosophy down to a primary color wheel. It's not there to do the painting for you. It's there to give you a palette with which to adjust accordingly to your painting's (setting's) context. You as GM choose the value and intensity of a given hue-shorthand. It's not there to replace true theo/philosophical complexity -- it's there to save you time and prevent head-explodey

Sometimes I feel like stark contrast between good/evil, law/chaos. Sometimes I feel like examining the "value" within an alignment, looking at various "tints and shades" within the same "hue." And sometimes, I like to look at the similarities between hues during lowered intensity/saturation. Very easy, useful tool for me.

That said, if you are going to make a game module, I prefer taking a strong viewpoint nowadays, just for clarity's sake. Paint with bold primary colors and let the GM adjust tone and brightness (intensity and value) as they see fit. Constantly painting in muddied tones gets old after a while. Further they also complicate discerning contrasting borders when trying to readjust for your own table.

I find alignment disassociative, always have. I can find no correlation to it in "reality", so I've always ignored it. the only setting where it made sense was Planescape, which was one of the masterstrokes of that setting: creating a rational for the D&D alignment system.

Anyways, its easy enough to ignore, despite claims.

I want evil to be evil but I also want the grey stuff. So take a typical opponent for D&D, a tribe of goblinoids. I am quite happy for them to basically be just a group with interesting dietary tastes that are just trying to do the best for their cubs.
ON the other hand I am totally happy for the maniacally evil Prince to be a sadistic psycho who tortures political prisoners and is irredeemibly evil.

On the side of good I am again happy for there to be absolute good, peaceful, calm, loving heal all and forgive all trespasses good. I am also happy to have pure the world with fire good where the belief is the justification for action even if the action may appear Evil.
 
I don't want the PCs thinking they are good if they gleefully kill inteligent creatures they meet and take their stuff with no rationale for that action other than more coin to spend on better kit and training or your eyes will help me cast better spells.

As an aside on the Evil side I am thinking of changing the material/somatic components of some cleric spells from holy Symbols to live Sacrifice.
If you are a Priest of Merga the Goddess of Death through unbearable suffering it seems reasonable that the material components for an Astral Gate is a sacrificed virgin.

Well, hell, in Game of Thrones it's not like the White Walkers look like they're entertaining very many moral quandaries. There's all kinds of room for Objective Evil in morally grey campaign worlds.

Probably the more restrictive question is, "Do you like objective Good in your campaigns?" That's a bit harder. I've come around to liking forces for Good in a campaign - though they may be very few in number or relatively powerless or infrequently encountered - as long as they have to think about what they're doing. If the forces of good have to strategize instead of just ride around on white horses that makes goodness more fun to play. Sort of the opposite of "Evil will always win because Good is dumb."

I've always found alignment easy to remove.  Super-easy.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;607719I've always found alignment easy to remove.  Super-easy.

A lot depends on edition used and rules subsystems in play.

There's basically three and a half places where alignment interacts with other rules:

(1) Acting in Character: Alignment has very little influence on this in OD&D, but it's a little stronger in the Basic branch and has a formalized point rating system in AD&D. Not sure about 3e and later, but I think they started scaling alignment back to the informal Basic approach. If this is being used, GMs may adjust experience awards based on whether the player's behavior seems to match the standards of the chosen character alignment.

(1.5) NPC Reactions: Related to alignment-as-behavior. It works about the same across all editions. At the very least, an NPC of an alignment opposed to a PC will have a negative reaction, and in some versions evil alignments get a flat penalty in any negotiation. Can be dropped from any edition without consequence.

(2) Spells: Only a few are relevant to alignment issues. Detect Evil and Protection from Evil, as I mentioned, work different in OD&D and really don't depend on the alignment concept, but later editions tie them closer to alignment. The other factor is that certain cleric spells are not usable by Law or Good.

(3) Magic Items: All swords and some other items have an alignment and will refuse to work or only work partially for those of an opposing alignment.

Some GMs ignore the magic item alignment part, which doesn't affect game play much in any edition. In OD&D, removing the cleric spell restriction means clerics can cause damage just like magic-users, which changes game play; in later editions, this has already been eroded with crap like Spiritual Hammer, so dropping the cleric restriction isn't a big deal. However, eliminating alignment in late-edition D&D also means you have to roll back Protection from Evil to the original rules.  Dropping the experience and behavior rules is probably not a big deal, especially since I consider the tracking method described in the 1e DMG to be ridiculous and useless.

So, it's easy to drop alignment in any edition, but it *will* affect game play, in different ways for different editions.

Quote from: RPGPundit;607522Do you want there to be things, creatures, and people in your world that are objectively black-and-white Evil? Not necessarily "stupid evil" but none of this "they're just misunderstood" crap?

Or are you one of those guys who likes to constantly wallow in "shades of grey", who loves anti-heroes and villains-who-can-be-redeemed?

RPGPundit

BOTH.

In my games there are definitely EVIL individuals that are often the NPCs.

Sometimes there are also 'Shades of Gray" characters that can be persuaded by player characters to do the 'right thing' or at least something small to help out the good guys.


- Ed C.