2. The Active Balancer i.e. Mordenkainen, the Servants of the Balance in Moorcock. These folks actively work to keep the forces of Alignment in Balance whether it's Good vs. Evil Law vs.Chaos,or combinations of the two. Often distrusted by all comers because of perception of shifting loyalties.
I've always found that goofy. It strikes me that if you are trying to maintain the status quo, that seems like a fairly lawful thing to be doing. Of course, you can use that argument to say proteans are actually lawful because they are trying to return reality to its rightful state, in the form of amorphous chaos stuff (adherence to tradition is the realm of law, after all). You could also argue that they are evil because they are plotting to destroy every living thing in the universe. I don't care how you cut it, genocide is bad regardless of your intentions.
I can understand animals being neutral (though cats are pretty close to NE, IMO) or elementals but if your creature type is both aware of what it is doing and so dedicated to a cause that it will crush an entire plane of existence (or two), then I think you're going to have to take a moral stand at some point.
It seems like a cop out that inevitables and proteans can get away with horrendous acts and not change alignment for it.
What I'm getting at is somehow various creatures get a get-out-of-alignment-free-card and don't have to take (moral) responsibility for their actions, while mortals are judged for every little deed. How much of your alignment is based on nature (or intention) and how much is based on action?
(I can imagine the paladin in a party getting into a heated discussion over why smite evil should work on the protean/inevitable that just murdered an entire village for whatever reason.)
[Note: I'm mostly just mulling these thoughts over; I realize that the concept of alignment is vague but am interested in different ways to interpret them or the rules.]
Lawful characters believe that their duty to uphold society's laws is more important than their individual preferences.
How do you interpret that when different societies clash? If it is the social norm, or downright law, to jump off a cliff after causing a noble to bleed, then is it a "when in Rome" situation? Or do you confine yourself to a very narrow "my society" view? If you're blatantly ignoring laws because they don't conform to your views are you still lawful? And wouldn't that just mean that your "individual preferences" were the laws and customs of your society? What if you come from a very open-minded and individualistic society but are very dedicated to those views? Or even the opposite, but you're thrown into a lawful society that has laws you don't agree with?
"It's not so much that we don't want tyranny, we just don't want his kind of tyranny."
I've always view lawful as a more methodical outlook on life. A lawful individual likes structure because it is reliable and easier to plan around.
I should point out that I define good and evil fluidly for the purposes of smite and protection as needed. So if you are a pragmatic neutral person who happens to be killing a cop to cover up a crime, then you can be smited for it, even if it wasn't giving you a good feeling doing it. An evil person who is evil in every way but has a soft spot for kids, can be the victim of smite good if he gets in the way of his evil buddy.
I like that a lot, seems like an excellent way reword or punish a character for their role-playing. I wonder though, if your BBEG has a soft spot for his minions (I know, it's a stretch) or whoever, and he puts himself in harms way to save them, would this act of altruism be enough to stop a smite evil from effecting him. (Maybe a paladin has to destroy a clutch of evil dragon eggs and the mother is just trying to protect her children.)
I am now writing a setting where claiming to serve any alignment is considered insane. By the way, all Outsiders are irrevocably insane. They're also generally quite powerful, so it's hard to argue with them.
The cosmological 'good' is not good. It's just a kind of madness that in small doses might appeal to common people. Those small amounts of madness might be called faith.
I am now writing a setting where claiming to serve any alignment is considered insane. By the way, all Outsiders are irrevocably insane. They're also generally quite powerful, so it's hard to argue with them.
The cosmological 'good' is not good. It's just a kind of madness that in small doses might appeal to common people. Those small amounts of madness might be called faith.
A setting designed to attack moral stances and faith?
A setting where your personal beliefs and actions are more important than any label anyone or any force might attach to you.
A setting where your personal beliefs and actions are more important than any label anyone or any force might attach to you.
Any given set of belief can be fit into the VERY wide terms of G/E/L/C imho. However, to brand anyone as such IRL is politically incorrect.
Are you very orthodox/deterministic, you likely stray towards lawful, and secular/free-willed people more inhabit neutral or chaotic specters.
This applies to religions, philosophies and other views. The evil v good axis comes into play on what the basis of the religion/philosophy/view entails, and what you practice.
To refuse that something can fit into the established perceptions of reality without basis for philosophical comparison smacks of ill education in the field, and a tad of teen angst.
If you want to be able to conveniently kill when you want to kill, and spare people when you feel that your unique criteria are filled, subject only to your mood/cognition/situation, and without an established maxim or reasoning to fall back on, you are likely CE.
Had to deal with a few "murders of convenience" in my Kingmaker campaign. Had I known how it would turn out, I would caution the cleric from choosing Sarenrae as her deity. I took away the Good alignment from one player, and cautioned the rogue that he was stepping the line of evil. They gave me the same excuse, that alignment does not cover everything, and is flawed. I corrected that the term was not "cover" but "cater", as being allowed to conveniently murder helpless non-evil prisoners is easily covered by alignment.
Rather:
Someone that says 'I am a good person' may be considered sane.
A person that says 'I am aligned with an objective force of good that is tangible and testable' is a nutcase.
I don't believe the alignment system is coherent or usable beyond generalisations and cannot rationally apply to individuals. Players can handwave it and get on with the game if you don't look too closely but I want something that holds up to examination as if you were examining a real life system of morality. The alignment system does not. By comparison, having no system of alignment is far better in my eyes.
The point is that alignment is not a system of morality. It is a system of categories in which the applications of such systems can be classified.
Take Islam:
- Follow the peaceful verses, promote good relations over old wounds and disregard the later, violent verses of the Quran: NG or CG, depending on how secular you consider yourself.
- Step in line with the faith, but make no effort to neither cause harm, nor be selfless: Any neutral.
- Follow the violent verse of the sword, promote the idea that all who are not of the faith must serve or die, and convince others to kill themselves to further these ideas: LE or NE.
To follow alignment as anything else makes it shallow, yes. That is why the paladin code demands he ACTS goodly and honorably, yet he can still follow LN and NG gods, who often promote morality that does not conform fully to the paladin code.
But yes, outsiders are alien to our modern mindset, as they are often supposed to embody ideals that does not, and sometimes indeed CANNOT conform to any reasonable system of ethics/morality.
I don't believe it is reasonable as a system of categories into which these things can be classified.
Neither are stats a reasonable sum of a human being, but it is the limitation of the system to keep it simple and easily workable.
For what it is, I think alignment is adequate. But, just like everything else in PF, when compared to real life, it is shallow and overly simplistic.
Trying to reinvent morality in a high fantasy setting that is not based in the real world is gonna be a headache though. I have yet to play a game that has a BETTER system, even if many have more elaborate ones.
I'm not telling you how to play the game. I'm telling you how I play mine. I do not feel I am losing anything by ditching the system.
It doesn't help that some of the categories on opposite ends of the scales are meant to categorise concepts that aren't mutually exclusive.
A setting where your personal beliefs and actions are more important than any label anyone or any force might attach to you.
Exactly my point! In real life, people interpret "good" and "evil" based on their own criteria, thus the arguments over alignment in the first place. We each individually have our own ideas about what is right and what is wrong and, to some extent, we need someone else to be wrong so that we know we are right. In Pathfinder, alignment is used as a quick and easy way of identifying who is "wrong" and needs their head caved in.
I think Pathfinder could be tailored more to the ideals of the individual rather than generalized classifications of alignment.
Trying to reinvent morality in a high fantasy setting that is not based in the real world is gonna be a headache though. I have yet to play a game that has a BETTER system, even if many have more elaborate ones.
I'm not suggesting reinvent morality; I'm saying ditch it altogether and focus on how NPCs (whether commoners or gods) view a character's actions.
As an arbitrary moral system, sure, alignments work fine, and if that's all you need in a hack-and-slash, great! But if you want to go deeper, you've got to tailor the system to an individual's perspective.
(Also, while it's not a moral system, Deadlands uses a system that rewards players for role-playing their hindrances. For instance, a Heroic character who rushes into a burning building to rescue a child would get a fate chip [something like a hero point] for doing something incredibly stupid but in line with his character. Similarly, a Greedy character who decides breaking into the BBEG's vault is a good idea will also be rewarded. Or a Randy character who wants to sleep with BBEG's daughter. All of these provide ways for the DM to motivate and mess with characters while also propelling plot or opening new avenues to explore. It's a bit more difficult to do that with the alignment system.)
A Chaotic Evil guy might see himself as Lawful Good; he enforce the law of "the strong survive, the weak die" and get rid of the weaks who are bad for the world, thus doing good.
I've played a lot of neutral characters that use whatever means necessary to kill the people eating monsters. I was doing this before Supernatural went on the air.
I've played a lot of neutral characters that use whatever means necessary to kill the people eating monsters. I was doing this before Supernatural went on the air.
The Winchesters are at the limit of "Fighting Evil with Evil".
There is "The end justifies the means", while not necessarily evil is in the "Good is not (always) Nice" category... kinda goes with "Evil isn't (always) Bad".
Most people (real world) don't think in Good and Evil, they think in "beneficial to me" and "detrimental to me". And, are in the neutral, fight/flight, pleasure principle category. Therefor, subjective.
I would offer that probably 98% of the masses are neutral from this perspective. You actually have to be aware enough and have the time to ponder, reflect.
Good, Evil and Beyond are for those enlightened or quickened enough to mentally, morally or ethically zoom out and see patterns beyond themselves. And, perhaps act on that knowledge.
A step further, evil, psycho- socio-path may not even be able to see this... and are so into themselves (zooming in instead of out) and focused that they are unaware of "Good". They cannot comprehend it, often say "Why do you try to stop me?" Indicating they feel their enemy is weak/stupid.
But, "true goodness" may be unfathomable to them.
Also, there is a difference between a good aligned cleric/paladin following a good god, and the common good-aligned adventurer. Just as between a evil cutpurse and an evil cleric/antipaladin.
A paladin and a cleric of good are expected to act within strict codes of behavior, and promote good on a whole different level. This is reflected in how they detect when you cast Detect Good, compared to a good fighter/wizard etc, no matter how nice they are. The opposite is true for evil clerics and antipaladins.
So there is room for MANY different perspectives within one alignment. A paladin NEEDS to be a shining beacon of virtue, and do all he can to preserve good and fight evil, so he can represent the angelic powers of heaven. Just like an evil cleric NEEDS to be a "baby-eating monster" to appease his twisted masters in hell.
But a good/evil wizard, for example, can ignore much of the world of active ethics and just react according to situation, whereas the good one will offer help for free if needed, and the evil will not shy away from unethical methods in his experiments.
If you perceive alignment as "there are only 9 different perspectives on life, and they are completely inflexible", yeah, you'll find alignment to be ridiculously restrictive.
It is not that the alignemnt system represents real life, but it represents a polytheist world where gods have magic powers, and can and will raise people from death.
-The christian concpet of faith would be usless in such a world.
-I can easily think of a world where morality is 'undone' a world where the good gods were killed by the evil gods. A world created by a vague, cold, diest god that has no interest in life that evolved over time, a world seeded by mad aliens, or a world created by capricious fey. But these are all different from the 'norm'. Games run in the norm benefit from the fantasy alignment trope. 9 different morals is really enough.
The Winchesters are at the limit of "Fighting Evil with Evil".
You ever notice how they only help attractive people?
If you perceive alignment as "there are only 9 different perspectives on life, and they are completely inflexible", yeah, you'll find alignment to be ridiculously restrictive.
I don't think the problem is that they're inflexible; right now they're like soggy noodles, but making them stricter would be worse than leaving them as they are.
It is not that the alignemnt system represents real life, but it represents a polytheist world where gods have magic powers, and can and will raise people from death.
-The christian concpet of faith would be usless in such a world.
-I can easily think of a world where morality is 'undone' a world where the good gods were killed by the evil gods. A world created by a vague, cold, diest god that has no interest in life that evolved over time, a world seeded by mad aliens, or a world created by capricious fey. But these are all different from the 'norm'. Games run in the norm benefit from the fantasy alignment trope. 9 different morals is really enough.
Are you suggesting that the alignment system is enforced by the gods? Wouldn't they have the same disagreements about alignment that we have? In the real world, we may have various ideas about right and wrong, but every culture has some sense of morality. In Pathfinder, it's not a question of faith; atheist characters are subject to the same "moral" system as everyone else and can be resurrected just as easily.
IMO, lawful and chaotic aren't really questions of morality so much as outlook and they can be interpreted in vastly different ways.
IMO- on the 8th day, G*d saw what lucifer had done, sealed him deep within the Earth, and went off to create the world the right way.
Now stop talking about real world religion.
By the way, I also had a summoner who would summon a Hound Archeron and just let it go after the most evil SOB in the room. He was neutral and would occasionally summon a hell hound, just never at the same time.