PeaBrain's page

Chaotic behavior - at least in this definition, is to my thinking very difficult to find. If there is accountability from an outside source - I say it representative of a lawful society. And I can think of no culture where this is not the case.

I think that ascribing "accountability from an outside source" as being definitive of "lawful" is not a very flexible or useful description: "lawful" should (and to me, does) mean "accountable to some *abstract organization* whose decisions are made with reference to codified rules", while "chaotic" is "accountable to some *set of individuals* whose decisions are made independently". Neither Lawful or Chaotic means "completely irrepsonsible behaviour is OK".

The two blend into each other along a continuum, when the individuals making up an abstract organization make decisions more independently of the rules (e.g. a judge deciding there are extenuating circumstances and reducing punishment or dismissing a case), all the way toward, in a more chaotic society, groups of individuals holding someone to account not based on their individual rational decisions, but primarily because of custom.

If the former happened a lot, it would be a less lawful society (consequences are being determined more by individual judges, and less by Laws) than one where it happened less frequently. Similarly, in a mostly chaotic society with very few *actual organizations*, if customs are so strongly ingrained that consequences typically just go the customary way (every time someone steals, whoever catches the thief chops off his hand, as a matter of *custom* - not strict law) instead of flexibly according to their own independent thoughts on the matter, then it would be not as much of a chaotic society than one with less strongly ingrained customs.

Anyway if you want to check the thread out it's here:

http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/dnd/general/archives/isAlignmentNecess ary

Hope that helps!

That helps a lot, thanks! You indeed were thinking almost some of the exact thoughts (with the same solutions) as I. Also, I like finding that link to Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved - that book looks awesome, I may need to get my hands on it!

-pb

Yeah, that would probably be the way to do it. And you would probably do well to remove spells like "Holy Word" as well, to prevent the almost inevitable "Hey, that guy cast Blasphemy, and you didn't even blink!" argument.

But then I need to worry a bit about not making clerics too much weaker by taking these away... I guess I'd need to find replacement spells to have access to...

As for the Detect Evil ability, I'd recommend replacing it with "Detect Guilt" or some such (there's a dragon article with a bunch of spells like that, somewhere), or else something to the tune of "Detect Hostile Intent". And Smite could just be an all-purpose smite that always works, and it wouldn't break the class. Would probably lead to the Paladin being more careful about using it judiciously, if he knew that it didn't come with a built-in safety feature.

Good points, both, thanks.

In regards to divine casters, you could just axe all spell like Protection from XXXX, Magic Circle spells etc. but you would be weakening the classes without replacing them with other spells, maybe swipe some from the arcane list that have similarities just be careful about the power levels of them.

I always thought undead got the wrong end of the deal in alignment. I make them neutral in my campaigns if they are mindless or have them take on the alignment of their creater if they are intelligent. If you got rid of alignment I would just say they are either mindless or intelligent but prone to act as their creater would. Paladin is a Prestige class in my homebrew with the prereqs of cleric 2 or fighter 2 and church sponsorship(which usually requires tests like performing a special action or deed,i.e. quest). You would have to replace their Detect Evil and Smite with something fairly attractive to keep the class balanced. Maybe they could smite followers of "Evil" gods more times a day or give then a favored enemy(like rangers) based on their god, and throw in a low level divine spell to be usable at will, something in sync with your campaign but not too powerful.
thats all I got now but I'll try some more later.

FH

Ahh, nice ideas - just swapping out some abilities would be good (I like the favored enemy one, in particular...), maybe also giving Paladins a conditional bonus of +4 on Sense Motive:

I don't know if that would be a good/balanced addition to a Paladin... maybe Smite could work the same way.

Hmmm... maybe now that I'm thinking about it, I could probably keep the alignment system in place for the most part, but put an "amulet of undetectable alignment" over the *whole world*, and get rid of penalties for swapping alignmnent (unless you're a divine spellcaster)... hmm... then I could give each individual goblin whatever alignment I wanted and the players would never know... bwahahahaahaha...

As for undead, yeah, I can buy making them more flexible...

Thanks for your $0.02!

-pb

PeaBrain wrote:

Any thoughts on how to incorporate alignmentless play into the existing system?

I guess that my first thought about this is "Why?". What is your ultimate goal here? Simply answering that question should help with figuring out how to incorporate alignmentless into the existing system.

The "why" is that it makes for a much more mysterious and ambiguous world - in FR, for example, not only do you know that most Red Wizards are evil, but you know that *none* of them are good (at least if they're members of the RW PrC).

A world in which you encounter people and creatures and don't know whether they as individuals will be relatively trustworthy or not goes a long way to making it seem more lifelike and real to me - if you can just cast "detect evil" on the city mayor, and he lights up, but the werewolf your party just caught *doesn't* light up, it's a lot less fun to figure out what's going on than if the werewolf pleaded with you that he's really the aggreived party, and the mayor's been persecuting his peaceful people in the woods.

The whole idea of a world where some goblins are really nasty, and others just a bit grumpy, and others are totally caring nice guys who happen to be aggressive scavengers to help feed their big families...

*and* in this world you've got basically of telling the difference between a "good werewolf" and an evil one just by marching him through the gates of Silverymoon and see if the "no evil allowed" alarms start ringing!

"Undead are pretty evil" -- I disagree. There have been a number of "good" undead (the elf-lich in forgotten realms for starters). Also (I think that "Jakandor" started this if anyone remembers that set) I think that if creating undead was possible, to not create skeletons and zombies would be a huge waste of material. You could have a virtual army of skeletons to mine gold or even iron. This isn't evil at all.

Fair enough - but the game was originally set up with undead being products of the negative energy plane, which is supposed to be pretty evil (and fits into my "outsider" way of relegating alignment).

Last thing off the top of my head has to do with detecting alignment. My experience in life is that I can generally tell what general or rough alignment a person is after only a couple of minutes of talking with them.

Oh really? How many people in your life have you met who you'd classify as both being rather intelligent, and strongly "neutral evil"? Personally, I've met quite a few charismatic and interesting people who I only found out much later were really sick and messed up on the inside. Society frowns on cruelty, overt manipulation, and self-centeredness, and people who desire to be liked (which goes for lots of both "good" and "evil" types) will give off a pretty good outward air of being relatively caring and kind or else they can't get anywhere in life.

But seriously, if you lived in a world where your town cleric could cast "detect evil/chaos" on anyone who ran for town mayor, why in hell would any towns be run by someone who wasn't lawful good unless they were ruling purely by force? A world like this would have no "sneaky evil" villians unless it's powerfull enough to have amulets of undetectable alignment...

As far as pinning down an alignment, I feel that most people will play and allow play within one step. I think that it is unreasonable to think that anyone acts chaotic good (for example) 100% of the time. I think that a truly chaotic person would have difficulty doing many (any?) lawful acts, but a "neutral" act shouldn't be that unusual.

What exactly would you qualify as a "lawful act"? And note that "one step away" on the alignment chart would still force a chaotic good person to behave at all times as either good or chaotic, or both - no truly neutral acts.

Anyway, a few random thoughts. But you really need to ask what your ultimate goal is.

Bill

Well thanks for your random thoughts. My goal here is not to really figure out *why* I don't want alignment forced on everything - I'm pretty sure that it's too much of a straightjacket when it comes to intrigue and sneakiness in a campaign, and it also straightjackets roleplaying... characters (as well as NPCs) should have *personalities*, and complex motivations, not alignments.

Hello all,
I was reading some discussion about alignment (evil in particular) over in the Rant thread, and as I wrote up a response there, I realized it wasn't really a rant, so here I am.
I bought the DMG II a month or so ago, and when I read the section talking about alternative alignment systems, my brain nearly exploded: I'm an old-school 1ed (after getting through with the Basic and "Expert" sets) player, who hasn't played much since the late 80's / early 90's until recently, so the idea of mucking with alignments seemed initially crazy.
But then I thought about it some more, and it seemed crazier, and eventually it seemed so downright crazy that it was *necessary*! Not just "muck with", but completely reorganize and trash to pieces (what follows is some train-of-thought stuff on alignment, my own personal view) :
* only outsiders should have dead-set alignments, as they in some sense "represent" those archetypical views
* devout worshippers of gods (in particular, divine spellcasters) should have some slight detectable alignment aura of their god.
* undead are pretty evil
* fey could have slight detectable tendencies in a variety of directions (chaos and either evil/good)

... but otherwise, the average mortal shouldn't be easily pinned down as "this dude's chaotic evil" - a simple 1st level cleric spell shouldn't be able to tell that some guy's entire worldview is based on "me first - I don't care if you all fall into a pit of demons", if it takes a *4th* level spell to simply tell if someone is lying!

So lets say that in my campaigns, I get rid of alignment altogether, for most people. How do I game-balance it? As the DMGII says, this adversely affects paladins and clerics, and diviners in general, and there are a *lot* of places out there where alignment-specific stuff is mentioned.

Any thoughts on how to incorporate alignmentless play into the existing system?

If you want to fix him but good, youse oughtta change your name to Fake Rouge.

Ha!

PeaBrain wrote:

I'm new here, and I'd just like to say

You can only change your user name BEFORE you post 10 times! You may wanna consider that or forever be "PeaBrain" on these boards.

I noticed mention of that "10 posts" cutoff elsewhere, but thanks for the heads-up.

As for worrying about being stuck with PeaBrain as my username, it's all good (as the kids say) - it's a dorky pun on a bit of physics jargon (google search: D-pbrane), I can handle any ribbing I get on account of it by now - I've been using variations of that name online for five years or so at this point. But thanks for your concern. :)

I'm new here, and I'd just like to say that I made an account because of this thread, as the giggling they induce in me cause me to declare (once again) that Rant Threads Rock^{tm}.

Plus, y'all make me appreciate the group of eight year olds I GM, who have basically none of the problems you folk complain about - they don't power game, they couldn't care less about gaining levels or getting magic items (unless one person gets one, then of course they all need to get one and fight over them like a swarm of starving kobolds...), they love my riddles and are young enough to take "Because I SAID SO" as a reason to accept my rulings.

Of course, eventually they'll understand the game mechanics better, and feel the lure of munchkinism (as I once felt the lure of Monty Haulism as a DM), and I'll have reason to come here and rant about it. Or else by then one of them will have backstabbed (or "sneak-attacked" if I'm not to date myself) me to assume the mantle of DMhood, and my job of enticing them to the dark side of roleplaying gaming will be complete.

So sorry for not ranting enough, I'll finish with a mini-rant:

*begin channelling inner eight year old*

Waaaah! I wanna have the time/energy/patience/money/space to put together the cool overhead Digital Map Projection
( http://www.d20srd.org/extras/mapProjection.htm ) setup too! No fair!!!!!

*end channelling*