Goblinworks Executive Founder
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In a sense, yes, and in a sense, no. All of the benefits of LG would be withheld from him once he accumulated enough violations of conduct, but he wouldn't gain any of the effects of any other alignment.
If there is a class ability that requires adherence to a given alignment, then you have to have and adhere to that alignment in order to use that ability.
Goblin Squad Member
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Honestly I think it would be better to have class specific mechanisms for alignment where alignment is that much of a focus, so rather than fiddling with the structure of alignment, fiddle with the mechanics of the classes.
so if, as in this example, the paladin, which is not just a LG class, it is a HOLY class, has special mechanisms built into their skills that will affect their alignment, then it is focused on special rules for paladins, rather than making the alignment system for LG treat everyone as though they're trying to be a paladin.
The same with Druids and degrees of balance, or whatever other motivations a druid may have. Perhaps it's a druid for corrupting nature (Chaotic neutral or neutral evil?) So you build mechanisms into the druid skillset for dealing with balance. Playing this way will push you to evil, playing this way will push you to good, playing this way will sit you on TN, playing that way pushes you to LN or CN.
That way a Lawful Neutral Wizard doesn't have to act the same way as a Lawful Neutral Druid.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm of the opinion, and I realize it is not wildly popular, that since all characters are classless they should start at 0,0,0,0 neutral. Then we all play and see where our various natures take us.
I agree with that in principle, the problem is that if you want to be a paladin for example, you can't start as one until you push your alignment up, but I suppose you could just use your weapon skills and others until you get to the point where your paladin abilities come into play. I guess it's hard at this point without seeing how the ability systems work and how they relate to skills.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If the alignment starts at zero it won't take much at all to put you in LG territory.
Whether it could work for people who really want to be Paladins would pretty much depend on how skill training works and how your progression begins.
In Pathfinder core rules I see Paladins start with Aura of Good, Detect Evil, and Smite Evil. If the Paladin at character creation has an opportunity to perform a single lawful good action before training those skills then they could have their starting Class Features. It would just be really awfully easy to soon after make a non-Lawful Good choice which would render those class features inactive until LG status was regained.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Why should characters become playable with no alignment, unless grinding alignment provides a benefit?
If grinding alignment provides a benefit, then people will find a way to manipulate the system to grind alignment faster, and be rewarded for doing so. I think that rewarding players for manipulating the alignment system is a perverse incentive that effort should be made to avoid. Allowing players to set their alignment and punishing them for actions which violate it, while rewarding them for not violating the rules of their selected alignment might be a little bit more sticky (as opposed to carroty)
One of the goals involved is preventing the case where a paladin helps N people to gain law and good points, and then spends some of those points to murder someone before building them back up. Creating a system where one blatant evil act results in immediately forfeiting all of the alignment benefits (becoming of 'lapsed lawful good' alignment) until an atonement which is actually expensive (perhaps costing training time, or maybe just costing coin, goods, and playing time) works around the issues of "I only murder occasionally, and I give stray kittens to orphans the other six days a week."
We also want to keep things symmetrical- if becoming a Chosen of Pelor requires a lot of work, becoming a Chosen of Asmodeous should take just as much. That is my objection to a system of irredeemable evil acts- it makes it trivial to max evil, and basically impossible to reform from it or recover from a single lapse.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wouldnt mind such a system if you can also set ranges... for example "good" or "lawful". Not everyone places so much importance on their choice, and for some it isn't important at all, and would much rather it just reflect their actions, rather than their actions reflect their alignment. I'm one of those. Alignment to me is not a goal, it is a reflection of my actions. Most of my characters would fall somewhere in the NG/NN/LG/LN range somewhere, but not neatly, and I wouldn't even know where to place them.
It's not part of my motivations, or my characters to adhere to a particular alignment.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I doubt it would be grinding, but instead playing naturally. Your alignment would be defined by how you are in the world. It would be a grind were you trying to become what you are not.
Consider: If a Paladin grinds to the equivalent of level 20 then to keep playing he would gradually acquire the skills of another archetype, and no other archetype requires Lawful Good alignment.
Should he be forever bound to Lawful Good, never to escape its shackles, no matter what his evolved playstyle may have become and all because he made one choice before he ever really knew what he was getting himself into?
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Goblin Squad Member
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From the sounds of it, alignment will be the most challenging aspect of the game to control.
I intend to govern my company as a Lawful Neutral bandit, mercenary, bounty hunting, smuggling and perhaps a rare assassination thrown in, company.
Lawful, because we do have certain rules.
Neutral, because we take no particular side based on ideology only based on who offered more and delivered first.
However the good vs. evil aspect will be the most difficult to balance. I'm wondering if the game will have an indicator for various actions, that will let us know which way the action will lean.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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There would have to be an indicator IMO. Or at least it should.
EVE gives a generic pop-up warning if you're about to break Concord rules (if you have 'ignore buttoned' that box) and that's it. I got nailed by Concord once for trying to come to a friends aid after he attacked a loot stealer (who then came back in a bigger ship). I was in the same fleet, same joint mission, same player owned company, yet because the loot stealer didn't steal from one of my kills I didn't have the rights to shoot at him. So in popped the NPC Police. This was early in my EVE play, later I would have run and gotten a healing ship to go heal by friend, which would have flagged me as shootable to the loot stealer... go figure the logic there.
I really don't want to see PFO have such a complicated and hidden flagging systems. It just leads to griefing. Hiding stuff like that or burying in a maze of UI is just wrong.
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Personally, I think they should have four counters, and your alignment would be based on the percentage total of those counters, so if you gain 100 evil points you will always have those points, but you can gain 100 good points and thus be considered neutral.
As for class and alignment, there are varients for paladins of different alignments, I think since this is a more freeform leveling system, that they should have these abilities automatically adjust to your alignment, so if you have smite, then it would be smite the opposite of your highest alignment. So lawful would smite chaotic, good would smite evil, etc
In this way, alignment can come purely from playstyle and be completely unneeded for playing something in particular (like a paladin), yet it is still reflected in your abilities.
Neutral could be a difference of less then 20% on opposing axi, and true neutral would be neutral of both types, which could be achieved from activily trying to remain neutral or from not caring and just happening to land on neutral.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One of the goals involved is preventing the case where a paladin helps N people to gain law and good points, and then spends some of those points to murder someone before building them back up.
I believe we need a system of diminishing returns for your chosen alignment, with increasing effects for opposing alignments.
The system would store a Rating for each end of the alignment axis, and would multiply each new addition of Alignment Points by a Factor that would be a function of the Rating. For a Good character, the Good Factor would decrease new Good Points as the Good Rating got higher, but the Evil Factor would increase new Evil Points as the Evil Rating got higher.
With this system, each Evil act would require the Paladin to do an ever-increasing number of Good acts to atone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One of the goals involved is preventing the case where a paladin helps N people to gain law and good points, and then spends some of those points to murder someone before building them back up.I believe we need a system of diminishing returns for your chosen alignment, with increasing effects for opposing alignments.
The system would store a Rating for each end of the alignment axis, and would multiply each new addition of Alignment Points by a Factor that would be a function of the Rating. For a Good character, the Good Factor would decrease new Good Points as the Good Rating got higher, but the Evil Factor would increase new Evil Points as the Evil Rating got higher.
With this system, each Evil act would require the Paladin to do an ever-increasing number of Good acts to atone.
Sounds good to me!
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Goblin Squad Member
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It is sounding like a hybrid of DarkLightHitomi's concept and Nihimon's extension would work best.
At the moment as attracted as I am toward Druid, Wizards can be of any alignment and I could simply play my native ethic.
My second character I might leave dormant, gathering experience as destiny's twin until I see where I need to position him. If everyone is a Paladin then they are going to need someone to provide conflict in the tales.
One of the goals involved is preventing the case where a paladin helps N people to gain law and good points, and then spends some of those points to murder someone before building them back up.I believe we need a system of diminishing returns for your chosen alignment, with increasing effects for opposing alignments.
The system would store a Rating for each end of the alignment axis, and would multiply each new addition of Alignment Points by a Factor that would be a function of the Rating. For a Good character, the Good Factor would decrease new Good Points as the Good Rating got higher, but the Evil Factor would increase new Evil Points as the Evil Rating got higher.
With this system, each Evil act would require the Paladin to do an ever-increasing number of Good acts to atone.
This sounds like it would work. I certainly think that one act shouldn't just kill your alignment, unless that act is really bad. Like a Paladin murdering the High Priest of their deity.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@DarkLightHitomi What you described is nearly identical to what I proposed pages back, excepting that you want these numbers to grow ad infinitum throughout the life of the character. Even applying something like Nihimon's suggestion just to keep it in check would only result in the slowing of the highest numbers, eventually causing neutrality.
Even without it, the more Evil you do over the life of your character would make it that much harder for the life of your character to remain Good.
It's possible such a long term effect would be desired, though I believe not. If actions are to remain absolute in nature, it's not best for that system to inject a form of relativity.
If you go back a bit in the discussions, we've got a similar system in which all four are measured and simply cancel each other out. A zero balance of the opposite must be achieved before points can start accruing.
@Nihimon Are you thinking on a scale of 1000 that the amount of Alignment gained is inversely proportional to how much you already have? Like n((1000-c)/1000) [n=new, c=current] all decimals rounded up kinda thing? So at 100 Good you'd get 90% of say a +10 Good boost [10((1000-100)/1000)=9], but at 900 you'd get 10% of +10 Good instead [10((1000-900)/1000)=1]. Meanwhile if based on my 0 of opposite needed to accrue model, an Evil act would get the full 10 for doing an act, even though Good is down to sipping on the dregs of every Good action they do from being so close to max.
I could get behind this, or TN decay. Either one would be fairly effective I think.
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My system would not lead to neutral, you continuously accrue based on actions with diminishing returns on total.
For example, if I have 1000 points total, then an additional 10 points would have a 1% alteration, instead of the large effect it had at the beginning, increasingly difficult to alter your alignment. So as you play you set your alignment and it becomes more difficult to change, so a year down the road you decide you want to become NN and your LG, then it will take you a lot longer then if you made that choice in the beginning.
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As for doing things that require atonement, that should be it's own system, not alignment. In the PnP a paladin could do something against his code and lose his powers without actually changing his alignment, he doesn't stop being LG until he atones, he just can't use his abilities until he atones.
I figure certain actions would cause the paladin to be flagged (could be as simple as if flagged as a criminal) then he loses his abilities until he atones and gets rid of the flag.
Edit: Reread and addressing certain concerns,
My system would not slow the highest numbers alone, all numbers would slow. If you had 900 good and 3 evil, then gained 3 more evil, it is stil less then 1%, hence even the low number is slowed by the total.
Keeping it check would simply be,
Programming that equals,
When highest alignment score reaches 98% max for a signed integer variable, then divide all scores by 2 from all alignment scores.
In this fashion, the relation between scores is maintained until you have a difference of thousands. If I recall correctly a signed variable has a max of 32,???, so if it were to reach the point that you have high scores of 30,000 for Law and 6 for chaos when it divides, then yeah the effect becomes odd, however the difference between 15000 and 3 is so large, that it won't actually affect the relation percentage, it was less then 1% and is still less then 1%.
L vs C
Before # after. %before # %after
30k/6 # 15k/3. <1% # <1%
30k/20k # 15k/10k. 60% # 60%
30k/30k # 15k/15k. 50% # 50%
As you can see, relational accruacy only drops at less then 1%, we don't really need accuracy at less then 1% because it really only matters when the percentage is within a limited variation from 50%. Same is true for flipped numbers.
It actually becomes easier to stay the same, and becomes harder to change for whatever alignment you are.
If you have 10k good points and 1k evil points (and let's presume neutral to be between 60%/40% and 50%/50%) then an evil act worth 10 evil points is a .1% change. At the beginning when you have 20 points of good and 10 points of evil, then an act worth 10 points is 25%.
Thus it becomes harder to change alignment (in using this system I would make evil and chaotic actions give more points) so the beginning of the game basically sets your alignment, it is still possible to change alignment later, but it will be a slow and gradual thing (just like the PnP says, save for extremely rare events)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Actually I was referring to the need to literally put in twice as much work of one over the other.
100 Good - 50 Evil, if you get 10 more Evil you don't need 10 more Good to counteract it, you need 20 to maintain the same ratio. Particularly when you get into the cases of halving values, you introduce inconsistent action repercussions.
ie. Say the threshold for being Good requires you to have as twice as much Good as Evil.
At 30k Good that allows for a LOT of leeway for inconsistent Evil actions, halving that drops your available Evil pool by half as well. So while at 14k Evil you still had 1k to play with, as soon as Good hits 30k you're suddenly left with only 500 to use. Which is counter intuitive to gaining more Good in the first place, which is meant to drive a gap between your Alignment changing thresholds.
I think Nihimon had a good idea for slowing Alignment acquisition, that still maintains the principle of measuring the 4 poles separately from each other. I just think having them counteract each other makes more sense than calculating an ever increasing battle between each. The additional impact of having an opposing Alignment act hitting your value at full strength as opposed to the diminishing returns of furthering your Alignment towards max.
This also has the benefit of consistent behavior that a player should be able to measure, knowing exactly how much impact an opposing alignment action is going to have on their overall Alignment at any given time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nihimon Are you thinking on a scale of 1000 that the amount of Alignment gained is inversely proportional to how much you already have?
I was only suggesting that the acts which reinforce your chosen alignment should have diminishing returns, while the acts which work against your chosen alignment should have the opposite - increasing returns.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for time to mellow out the increasing returns. The players will be living in the real world where even a Lawful Good character can be a jerk. I should be able to kill the occasional jerk without wrecking my alignment. But if I'm slaughtering them en masse, then I should suffer the consequences.
Lol, got an idea. You choose an alignment from the outset, it can never change, you can fall as certain things will cause a fall (killing innocents to test out your new throwing axe, chopping up those of your faith, mass murdering animals of nature), but the alignment stays.
AAAAAaANNNND here is the last one, for pf online, any dialogue choices are marked as according with alignments. You can always check how neutral good you were out of all the choices that came up. Maybe you stick with it, maybe you don't, but the game doesn't kill your alignment over some dialogue choices and present you with a new one.
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Don't think alignment should be chosen, in the PnP it is supposed to be an overall concept of our characters motivations, but the GM would change it if you acted against, depending on what you did and how severe it was. Same thing here, just the computer has the job of changing your alignment based on how you act.
@Darcnes
It doesn't have to be halved, you could just drop 1k instead, the point is to have diminishing returns on alignment shift so that it becomes harder to change your alignment. But you also need to bear in mind programming, it would be much easier to have a Int variable, a more expensive option would be a Double variable, but either way you have a cap on the number.
Also, I specified using percentage of total for a reason, besides needing 66% on good vs evil is rather high if you want most people to have an alignment besides neutral.
Besides, why should we see or even care about exactly how many points we have in each catagory? Should we really consider alignment grinding part of gameplay? Should we really consider whether or not we have enough alignment points before taking action? Alignment should reflect our actions, not the other way around.
You could also have a running tally that includes only the latest 3 hours of actual gameplay, this would mean only recent actions affect alignment, thus you would have to continuously maintain your actions as befit your alignment, particularly if you can't see your scores, which is a boon in my eyes, I want to avoid alignment grinding at all costs. A paladin player should never decide that taking an evil action is alright because it's not enough to change alignment (of course that's where my flagging idea comes in, but still)
Why should a player know exactly how much alignment they have? That's not a benefit in reality, nor plausable, nor known to the characters. It's purely meta and with no purpose for the players to know it, they need only know which of the nine alignments they have and what acts support each.
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@Nihimon
I would really like your opinion on my flagging idea for characters with restrictions like paladins.
To recap the idea,
Paladins lose their status when they break their code, which does not always require an alignment shift. Thus you can have certain actions flag the paladin as having violated their oath. Their powers would be locked out until they atoned, or in the case of needing alignment, they simply can't atone until their alignment is back to LG.
The same system could be used for druids and some clerics. I.E. druids would get the flag for wearing metal, clerics might get flagged for going against their religious code, etc.
Personally I think this is better then relying on alignment to restrict paladins, and allows you to have anti-paladins or paladins of other alignments by simply changing the code and the actions that violate the code and flag the player as an oathbreaker.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@DLH Not suggesting any player visibility to the workings, just how they might be gone about, and how that would impact the player. I figure the player will get a nice little compass star or something at start that indicates where you are between Alignment axis, but nothing at all of a numeric representation.
I haven't really touched on UI much in any of my ramblings so far, I'm far more interested in providing the devs as many good ideas as we can come up with and getting them streamlined into something they can in turn derive ideas from.
Regarding programming I'd like to point out that what I suggested can easily fit in small data types, with but a couple lines to determine existence of opposing points and thus which pool to apply new points to, and lacks any need to calculate a ratio between the two.
Either way could work, and ultimately it's trivial to the players themselves except in leeway down the road. This is all just brainstorming for devs to look at if interested.
It's worth mentioning that while some players play the game as provided, others play the numbers. Neither method of play is more legitimate than the other, it's simply preferred by an individual whose opinion is their own. The only time this shouldn't be the case is when griefing is involved.
@Nihimon Yeah, I could see using the inverse of a player's alignment calculation for opposing actions.
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I just think that in the case of alignment, running the numbers should be discouraged. It is done to be false, which could generally go against the alignment they are trying to portray. Therefore how much leeway they have shouldn't be much of a consideration.
Also, Nihimon's suggestion of always weighting against the current alignment has a very heavy pull neutrality. I think evil and law should be heavy against good and chaotic. In real life, you don't see criminals slipping down the slippery slope to good, in fact criminals who have done two criminal acts almost always go on to three and four.
I also say law, because people generally get stuck in rut as they get older and find change difficult, then again, many players have the false belief that lawfulness means following the laws of the land, so this could go either way.
I just think having a heavy pull against change is better then a heavy pull for neutrality, particularly in a game where most people are expected to fall outside NN.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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One of the goals involved is preventing the case where a paladin helps N people to gain law and good points, and then spends some of those points to murder someone before building them back up.I believe we need a system of diminishing returns for your chosen alignment, with increasing effects for opposing alignments.
The system would store a Rating for each end of the alignment axis, and would multiply each new addition of Alignment Points by a Factor that would be a function of the Rating. For a Good character, the Good Factor would decrease new Good Points as the Good Rating got higher, but the Evil Factor would increase new Evil Points as the Evil Rating got higher.
With this system, each Evil act would require the Paladin to do an ever-increasing number of Good acts to atone.
That's probably a better way to implement a system where alignment is declared and only adherence to said alignment is measured.
As long as an evil character has to perform more and more evil actions to atone for his occasional good acts.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Thus you can have certain actions flag the paladin as having violated their oath.
I think it would be exceptionally difficult for the system to determine when a Paladin has violated their oath. I expect that, when you got down to the details of what that system would look like mechanically, it would bear a striking resemblance to PFO's Alignment system.
... they simply can't atone until their alignment is back to LG.
I think this would work great, and really like the idea that the Paladin would have to do something above and beyond simply getting their alignment back to LG.
As long as an evil character has to perform more and more evil actions to atone for his occasional good acts.
Of course! Blaeringr can't simply run around saving kittens all day without suffering the consequences!
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I was thinking that the paladin flag would be like when getting flagged as a criminal, it isn't a scale it's certain actual actions that cause the flag, it's unlike alignment because alignment is a scale and shows the general trend of actions, it's like quantative vs qualative.
Also thinking the flag, because a paladin shouldn't be able to get by with murder, just because she has plenty of good points to spare.
You could just say she loses her abilities if she gets the criminal flag, but then it wouldn't work for anti-paladins.
The idea is they make the list of actions, most people catch the criminal flag from actions labaled as "criminal", but if the list of actions is seperate and accessable from elsewhere in the program, then they can have other flags be raised by actions as well and each flag can have a different selection of actions.
Basically the game checks the list of actions, it would have to do this for the criminal flag anyway, but then when an action is taken any number of flags can be droppped on the performing player. So my paladin flag idea is adjustable and changeable, and an add on to the criminal flag system they are already developing.
BTW, Atone is spell, I was refering to it and though you were too, though now I wonder.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Also thinking the flag, because a paladin shouldn't be able to get by with murder, just because she has plenty of good points to spare.
I see! Sorry, I was not fully grasping it earlier.
In essence, you're talking about a simple binary flag that can be flipped "off" even while the Paladin's Alignment is LG, if the Paladin does something specific like engages in murder.
I think that's a fantastic idea. As much as I realize I'm likely to want to kill some obnoxious jerk just because he's being obnoxious and thumbing his nose at me, there's a lot of value in making the decision to play a Paladin a meaningful decision.
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Yep!
I also think that if they set it up from the beginning, then they could have religiongs for clerics act the same way, with each religion having it's own rules while allowing a range of alignments (One step from diety or the core religion's alignment) and make religion a meaningful choice, and possibly even allow the creation of new religions (through a relgion maker widget that you can select certain rules, allowable dieties, and stuff), obviously you select a few allowable alignments (such as any good plus NN) and as long as a player is outside that alignment, they can't get the class abilities back.
This would be relevent to paladins, druids, and clerics all with one mechanic that could even be a tool for additional player made content.
Though I will start a new thread for this since it's drifting from alignment abit.
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Codes of conduct are not tied to alignment, and this sytem could work for the monks inability to wear armor, or the druids inability to wear metal, etc.
Murder might lead you to an alignment shift, but what about other actions? What happens if commiting a lawful good act, or an alignment neutral act would be disallowed by your code as a paladin? What if you're a cleric of Pharasma? Creating undead wouldn't normally make you stop being neutral (I don't see it as evil, just unpleasent and taboo), or at least not after one casting (if no one agrees with my non-evil assessment), but that one casting is all it would take for Pharasma to cut you from all power.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I very much hope that there won't be aligment system in the game or it will be just a decoration.
Programs are not able to determine the context of actions in our level of technology.
So a new question appears:
Why does everyone write about aligment in recruting topicы? It doesn't matter i think.
I very much hope that there won't be aligment system in the game or it will be just a decoration.
Programs are not able to determine the context of actions in our level of technology.
So a new question appears:
Why does everyone write about aligment in recruting topicы? It doesn't matter i think.
Ummm, you might want to read up on some blog posts. There will be an alignment system and it will be part of the game mechanics, not simply a title.
Here is a thread that lists blog posts- Link
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Goblin Squad Member
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Why do we need an alignment system in a sandbox MMO? Let our actions speak to our reputations. Instead of the LG NG CG, LN N, etc etc
We could have: Trustworty vs Decietful , Brave vs Cowardly, Risk Taker vs Cautious, etc
Have about 10 - 20 of these traits on a sliding scale. And you would have a better impression of how the player plays than just being tied down to LG or CE for example.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@nanacano: Preferring the number three does not make it a product of five and eight. Responding that a computer program cannot track player activity and from that activity determine a value called 'alignment' does not make your assumption true.
Context can be given a measurable value that can be tracked by a computer program.
If you kill another player outside the context of declared war, duel, or similar (unprovoked murder) the game knows your alignment has shifted toward 'more evil' from 'more good'. At some point, possibly immediately, you will find yourself no longer able to enter a good aligned settlement, even if you have a house there... or if caught inside that settlement the Guards may well attack you as an invader.
I suppose similarly if you give coins to a beggr in an Evil town something equivalent might happen: not sure how that would work.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Since the game has decided on making it a large concrete part of the game, it's going to have to be very sophisticated to not come off as annoying, cheesey, and easily gamed. I wish them luck becasue it sounds incredibly hard to pull off.
Murder is one of the easier things to track. Its going to be the smaller things like social interactions that can possibly shift alignments that I see problems with. Not everyone can easily detect alignment so interactions between good and evil people should remain unknown. But I can see a bunch of good aligned players upset that they are shifting alignment because they are unknowingly interacting with evil characters. If some game mechanic lets them know who was the cause of their alignment shift then the whole point of trying to be a subtle, sneaky, evil character is lost. And in reverse how can an evil character lie and manipulate good characters if their interactions are shifting them towards good? Like I said it sounds impossible to pull off.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Not impossible. As you saw, broadstroke actions are pretty easy to spot: murder and theft being only two of these. Second, we know that evil aligned characters will not be able to enter good aligned cities. I expect this to be not a complete blanket: rogues and bards can have disguises I understand. Acrobat-skilled players will likely be able to vault or climb many walls (hopefully). But infiltrators will not be able to engage in the open without drwing aggro from guards it is pretty safe to say, and interaction with disguised evil characters, as at a market, can easily also not flag alignment shift.
But if a Paladin knowingly enters into a contract at Tony's Legitimate breadmaking Business, which is probably not a Good aligned establishment then that Paladin is opening himself up to an alignment hit.
As for simple social interactions it will likely be treated just as any social interaction, so long as it generates no transaction, no proof. Anyting that constitutes proof is measurable and trackable.
So it might get complicated, but complication is exactly what computers are designed to track.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not seeing the problem with that. Illumination please?
If Goblinworks' player-management system is going to rely on alignment as heavily as they seem to be planning, maintaining a desirable alignment for a character irrespective of their actions is going to be big business.
You propose a system that will track changes in a character's alignment due to character interaction. I'm suggesting that any tracking is meaningless because entire operations will be constructed around out-of-game communication and alignment farming to protect critical members of one's own organization (or those willing to pay) from the negative effects of alignment shift.
A character cannot take an alignment hit if he never directly interacts with anyone in a fashion contrary to his alignment.
The rabbit hole is /deep/.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am still failing to see the problem you see.
It will be important for some players to maintain a specific alignment, but alignment may in theory change, depending on player decisions and interactions in-game.
What happens in the meta-game should be irrelevant. What matters to the game is what happens ingame.
If a character does something in game to affect their alignment it will matter. If a character does something out of game it only matters out of game and nt at all in game.
Exception: bannable offense on th forum may impact a character in-game.
If a character does nothing in-game to negatively affect his alignment in-game he or she will not suffer an alignment hit in-game.
Still don't see the problem. I apologize for my myopia.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If a character does nothing in-game to negatively affect his alignment in-game he or she will not suffer an alignment hit in-game.
Still don't see the problem. I apologize for my myopia.
You're closer to understanding my point than you realize.
If a character does nothing in-game to negatively (or positively!) affect his alignment, he will not suffer an alignment hit. And that's exactly my point.
Players of evil characters will be able to arrange for their characters to benefit from "good" transactions through out-of-game communication, and vice-versa.
Because Pathfinder Online is a game with no classes, the paladin example is only a convenient construction, but it serves its purpose. The player of a paladin could run an assassination business from an out-of-game forum, laundering both deed and payment through one or more less alignment-restricted characters. His character's alignment would be unaffected, and he would not lose his powers, no matter how many innocents the player sentenced to death for cash.
That's a clumsy illustration, but it makes the point. No matter how strict the alignment system is, players will be able to get around it.
. Second, we know that evil aligned characters will not be able to enter good aligned cities. I expect this to be not a complete blanket: rogues and bards can have disguises I understand..
Are we sure about this? Honestly I've not seen where its been plainly stated that NPC guards will automatically detect alignment and attack based on alignment alone. I would be very interested in seeing an official word of this if its been discussed.
Personally I would rather the NPCs only respond to an action. But I plan on playing a rogue type character so that feeling isn't surprising :p
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally I would rather the NPCs only respond to an action. But I plan on playing a rogue type character so that feeling isn't surprising :p
I think there's some merit (if some very serious technical challenges) in the disguise idea, but overall town guards' inability to recognize criminals until they act is the biggest problem facing player accountability in an MMOG.
It's my understanding that Goblinworks intends to implement a reputation mechanic in Pathfinder Online as well as an alignment mechanic -- I would expect that it is some combination of these two things that initiates a violent reaction in NPCs. A good thief should have to keep his reputation low.