Monitoring your own alignment.

[Keovar]

Quote:

“No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realize that they're so far over the line that they can't remember where it was.”

-- Karrin Murphy, in 'Cold Days', book 14 of 'The Dresden Files'

That got me thinking; how will someone know their alignment status? Will it just be a number on their character sheet? Or maybe it's a dot in a square that moves a little bit down with an evil act, and a little bit right with a chaotic one (and in the opposite direction for opposite acts, of course)? Will you need to visit a spellcaster to have them read your alignment for you? Obviously if you're out there killing random people and stealing everything you can, you know you're headed for CE status, but what about more subtle things, small things that seem 'necessary' at the time, and not such a big deal that they'd outweigh the good you've done... but could there be a point when you look back and realize you're so far over the line you don't remember how it happened?

[Blaeringr]

Keovar wrote:

Quote:

“No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster.

They don't? Dammit...

[Dakcenturi]

IMO there are two options for this.

1) The player isn't directly aware of their alignment aside from a simply LG, NG, CG, LN, TN, CN, LE, NE, CE. Then simply when the commit an act it tells them there was an alignment shift. This makes it a little more realistic and less meta-gamie, but could potentially have issues of penalizing uneducated players since they wouldn't know where exactlly they stood on the alignment scale.

2) Have a very specific 3x3 chart with a dot of where your current alignment is and specify so you can accurately track which actions have how much alignment shift and see how close you are to an alignment change.

I could see either one being viable, just depends on where the designers are going with visibility of meta data.

[Keovar]

Dakcenturi wrote:

...Have a very specific 3x3 chart with a dot of where your current alignment is and specify so you can accurately track which actions have how much alignment shift and see how close you are to an alignment change...

That's what I meant by the 'dot in a square' idea. It wouldn't be precise data, but you could get a general idea. Of course, you would then have someone make a web app which can produce more precise numbers by scanning a screenshot. By taking before and after shots, people could compile a table of what actions produced what results, and the numbers would be out in a couple weeks. At that point, there may as well be numbers directly on the character sheet.

[Dakcenturi]

Yup, and honestly I'm torn on this one, the first example I mentioned is much more immersive but has significant potential issue, the second is less immersive but has a lot more functionality around the player having a better idea how to play their character.

[AvenaOats]

It's an interesting question. I'm assuming this and other such features will be heavy in information display, so am wondering how that will all be represented. What I like, is how it's adding a lot of density to the world. :)

I assume it will be the case that Alignment will be visible and clear how much you'll take a hit or "gain" for certain actions. How it's represented or displayed, not sure? I'm imagine because there is so much, there might have to be tables to reference: All in a day's work for rpgs?!

[Jameow]

I think players should have full access to seeing their own rating, perhaps just a dot in a box that doesn't move is fine (IE as long as you're LG, it stays in the middle of that box)Or a more precise one.

I also like the UO title system, it would be nice if there were various titles oyu got at different allignments, that somone could choose to display or not. "The Glorious" "The Dastardly" etc for various acheivements and alignments. So if someone wants to be known as "The Dread Lord X" if they have the title, they can choose to display it. Or they could keep it hidden if they didn't want everyone to know.

[Keovar]

Jameow:
I think true neutral would be the centre of the alignment box, moving the dot left, right, up, or down as one's alignment shifts. It could be plotted as a graph, with true neutral being the 0,0 coordinate.

I'm not sure about using anything too similar to the UO titles. There were some that just thought 'dread lord' sounded cool, became evil to make it happen, and then ended up as random PKs because that's the playstyle being red pushed you into.

[Jameow]

Only initially before they started adding in stuff you could kill for negative karma :P There was even a Positive Karma champion spawn, so you could still get the titles without being a Red.

[Keovar]

Well, it's been a decade or more, so some details I forget while others were after my time. The point was, I wouldn't want to make cool-sounding titles be a reason for people to turn evil.