was pondering the ins and outs of alignment today and was wondering if a 3rd component might help players decide exactly how to play a particular alignment.
No this need no be a rule to be tracked, it can simply be a choice a player makes when choosing an alignment to further define thier charcter in thier mind.
For lack of a better word lets call this 3rd component the strength of your alignment
so we've got
Law -> Neutral -> Chaos
Good -> Neutral -> Evil
Strong -> Moderate -> Weak
I give you an example compare Practicing Christians to Non-Practicing Christains, both techincally have the same alginment but interact with other people very differently.
Ok So lets look at an alignment example
Weak Lawful Evil
Would have a set of ideals they believe in but are not overt in thier beliefs. Although they may not consider people's right to freedom in principal they're not above helping free said people if its a reason that makes sense to them.
Strong True Neutral
The extreme tree hugger who could actively work aginst any of the extreme alignments Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Evil, Chaostic Good its all the same to them kill em all and maintain balence.
Weak Lawful Good
The lost paladin, the cynical paladin, still believes in his ideals but the stength of his convictions is failing him, he knows he should offer some money to the staving childern but knows in the back of his mind those childern will be forced to give thier daily earnings from begging to the local gang leader. And sure he could stop him but another would only take his place the day after departing.
Anyway its a bit clunky but figured might offer some people a way to further define a loose alignement.
Other possible scales you could use
Overt -> Covert
you make it well known where you stand on issues or you hold your true values very close to your chest, you may even go aginst your alignment to prevent others from knowing your true nature.
Passionate -> Indifference/Cold/Distant
You are near fanatical about your ideals -> you have a vauge outline of how you think the world should work but your could care less if anyone listens to you or adopts it.
As I said not really a rule so much as a tool for further defining your charcters alignment.
Anyone else got a method of further defining alignments into a charcter persona so to sepak.
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I don't run it personally, but I've seen several people do a variant of what you have there, only treating the two directions of alignment seperately for strength, for example someone could be Strong Lawful, Weak Good or another combination like that. That might help provide more customization for characters who have much more invested in one of the two aspects of their alignment.
A friend had a system that employed the xy axis we hated in math. You piked an alignment and actions adjusted your place on the axis on a constant basis. Aligned items and powers worked best when you were 'in the right place' alignment-wise. As your focus drifted, such things faded in usefulness. Our Pally went of the deep end and donated everything he got to the poor. That's when we discovered the GM gave bonuses. He struck with a club (guess which 3.0 god) that 'counted' as a +5 weapon and got to reroll turn attempts. These were 'divine feats that the character accessed through devotion.
I have alignment detection work kind of like that. Detecting either eil intention or presence. Intention would the thug or someother redeemable figure. Presence is a core of evil, this isn't the scorned queen or vengeful street tough, it's the demon summoner or mastermind. The evil behind it so to speak.
Players usually state that they might be more good than lawful, or
more chaotic than good. I would bad guys the same way.
For lack of a better word lets call this 3rd component the strength of your alignmentso we've got
Law -> Neutral -> Chaos
Good -> Neutral -> Evil
Strong -> Moderate -> Weak
But what if I'm strongly chaotic and weakly neutral? That doesn't make me SCN, it maces me SCWN!
I consider the alignment concept to be more complex than the two simple axes it has right now.
You have the moral axis (Good - Neutral - Evil)
You have the ethic axis (Lawful - Neutral - Chaotic)
And then I have several informal modifiers for each axis.
One is, indeed, strength. I don't consider the axes to be comprised of three discrete values. They're more a slider. Your moral slider can be way to one side (and then you are "very good" or "very evil"), or it can be exactly in the middle (and then you are absolutely neutral). Let's call absolute good 100% and absolute evil 0%.
You can be at 77% (or, indeed at at 74+Pi%, or 77,120978, or 77 1/2), which is probably good, but not as good as that paladin who is at 98%. With 43.X% you are neutral, but with a very slight inclination towards evil. 5% is quite evil. Of course, I don't write down any of these numbers, I used them just for illustration. People will have to decide how good, or evil, or neutral they are.
If you want to use this, I suggest that 0-33 is evil/chaotic, 34-66 is neutral, and 67-100 is lawful/good. Or, if you don't want to quantify the concepts (who says that lawful is "better" than chaotic and gets the higher number??), go with 0-100% good/evil/lawful/chaotic. Everything up to 33% in either direction can be considered neutral. Of course, you're getting problems about "lines in the sand" with this.
Another thing I always think about is why you have that alignment. I informally call that the active/passive component.
Passive means that your personal outlook just aligns with the alignment concepts. A passively evil character is just selfish and doesn't want to help others, while a passively chaotic character just never cared about traditions or external restrictions and just lived the way he wanted to all his live.
An actively aligned person will champion his cause. He considers it a cause, not just the way he thinks. An actively lawful person doesn't just subject himself to a rigid self-discipline, he actively advocates order and fights the forces of chaos, he tries to cover the whole world with order.
A paladin, for example, is basically always actively good, and many are actively lawful as well (their code will see to that).
As I said, I don't have a written-down rule set to govern how my characters, and the characters in the campaigns I run, will break down their alignment, but the notion has always been there.
I'm Neutral Good with Chaotic Tendencies.
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Green Ronin's Advanced Players Guide has a small section on Alignment Scores, that rates each component from 1 to 10 along a spectrum.
A fiend or angel might have 10s in evil and 9s in law or chaos, but a rogue might have only a 7 in evil, since he's not built out of evil, but more of a selfish opportunist, willing to prey upon the misfortunes of others. The exact score would have some bearing on how strong your aura would be, for the purposes of spells to detect alignment, and you could even tweak alignment-dependent effects, so that, say, a Holy Word or an Axiomatic longsword might have lesser effects if you are only 'kinda bad' or 'a little bit chaotic,' while still inflicting full effect on a vrock or succubus.
Yey! Let's add a couple new stats on the character's sheet. Instead of "Alignment: Chaotic Good", let's have "Good" and "Lawful", and scores from 1 to 20, reflecting both the alignment and its strength. Good: 1 = strongly evil; 10 = neutral; 20 = strongly good. Lawful: 1 = strongly chaotic; 10 = neutral; 20 = strongly lawful. Each action that's strongly oriented towards one side of these alignment axis modifies the score by one point. A Paladin can do some necessary evil things if he repents afterwards by doing good deeds, and he wouldn't need the Atonement spell until after having shifted towards the opposite side. In some cases, a modifier extrapolated from these scores (-5 to +5) could be added to Diplomacy checks with people of the corresponding alignment. Animals and other mindless creatures won't have a score (and are therefore considered Neutral).
Examples of strong acts:
- evil: torture, killing innocents or defenceless opponents
- good: give significant amount to a good-aligned church, sacrifice own well-being to keep someone alive
- lawful: keep prisoners and send them to the local justice office, obey a contract to the letter, prevent theft
- chaotic: provokes local authority, contradicts previously agreed-upon contract
I also had an idea, a long time ago (read: in AD&D2's time) to add a component called "Balance" which is the old-school True Neutral. With the above system, it's now a role-playing component, as characters can do strong acts of different alignments and hover around Neutral.
Actually Louis, I think that you've got a good idea.
I was sort of persuaded towards a 10 point system, but or a 100% system, but maybe a 20 point system would be good.
I'm Neutral Good with Chaotic Tendencies.
I'm Chaotic neural with Chaotic tendencies.
I used to scale a PC's alignment on a scale of 1-5 (If I recall, Neverwinter used a similar tracking system) for each component. Neutrality was zero, or the absence of motivation towards one of the valences or equal motivation towards either. I would never change a PC's alignment more than one step at a time and without reason, but it was helpful to track.
For example, a Necromancer, experimenting and communing with the dead has slowly eroded his morality (Chaotic 3, Good 1) if he loses the final rank in good (by perhaps experimenting on a living creature) he becomes Chaotic Neutral, slipping further would push him into evil.
Because of the morass of issues caused by the broad spectrum of interpretations of alignment, I have lessened my focus on it in the game considerably and abandoned such a tracking system. This is mostly due to the fact that my players are a mature bunch who generally play their alignment, and more importantly generally play heroic characters.
I don't explicitly track it, but I tend to look at alignments on a 1-5 scale, with 1-3 being the mortal range, and 3-5 being the outsider range. Weak angels that interact with mortals frequently should be paragons of good, but still understandable. Top tier angels who view good on a planar scale are just as insane to mortal perspective as a demon, its just a different perspective.
Helps a lot when I want to remind myself to portray EXTREME LAWFUL GOOD. Also helps make evil outsiders more manipulative and/or psychotic. And sometimes more appealing, as far as deals-with-the-devil. Hey, this pit fiend is willing to bail us out of this, no questions asked! Awesome!
First try is free. Nevermind your grandkid will be a blackguard beyond any that has come before. Or that the situation he bailed you out of means a guard you might have killed will go on to kill the father of a paladin. And so on and so on.
I'm Chaotic neural with Chaotic tendencies.
Chaotic neural? Your synaptic pathways open at random moments? That ought to be quite a sight to behold... ;-)
Chaotic neural?
I'm Chaotic neural with Chaotic tendencies.
Yes. It's one of the nine alignments in the Psychopathfinder game.
Psions usually have that alignment.