| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Would you riot if mint was banned?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I can type the letter U again. No idea why it stopped working before.
Would you riot if mint was banned?
What do you mean by mint?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Mint is the center plot piece of the Hell's Rebels AP.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Ah. Thanks.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Would you riot if mint was banned?
No. :P
I don't even like mint, but Chinese Food is like my favorite thing in the world, and I wouldn't even riot or rebel over it. Seriously, how dumb can someone be?
"Without *insert food stuff here* in my life, it's not worth living! Viva la revolution!" - Nobody Sane Ever
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Mint chocolate chip is my favorite ice cream flavor! Down with Thrune!
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Mint chocolate chip is my favorite ice cream flavor! Down with Thrune!
Good morning sir. :P
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
How will you handle Alignment?Very carefully. (D-D)
Joking aside, I'm not really sure. On one hand, I really like that there are tangible forces of good and evil in the multiverse, so that you could have a holy sword and an evil fiend who needs to be impaled on said sword to truly die ('cause alignment regeneration is a thing in d20).
However, I have grown to despise alignment for its intended (and ever failing) purpose and the discord that it produces on internet forums and within individual groups. I revile the fact that entire character classes are banned from tables because of the problems it creates. I hold immense, unadulterated, contempt for the pervasive idea that alignment somehow affects your actions rather than the other way around.
Yet, perhaps ironically, I like the way alignment defines good and evil. Because of the rather clean definitions, it's not hard to decide overall how good/evil a character is and I like that it's separated from any sort of rule-based system of morality where things are simply absolutes (such as religious laws where it's a sin to wear polyester or eat lobster).
These days I see alignment as two very different systems. One representing things that are mechanically empowered or connected to the energies of certain planes, and one that represents your character's outlook, and the two happen to share names and some interactions, but they are fundamentally different (as seen by how you can have creatures whose Alignment differs from their [Alignment]).
Very likely, the moral alignment portion of the game will be gutted and replaced with a section discussing roleplaying your characters. The same altruism, respecting life, concern for others, and hurting, oppressing, and killing will of course show up, but a lot of the presentation will be different. It will have little (if any) mechanical effect on the game and serve primarily to tell a good story and help serve as a tool for people to make great characters with.
>I hold immense, unadulterated, contempt for the pervasive idea that alignment somehow affects your actions rather than the other way around.
But it does clearly affect your actions, at least as much as any other thing affects your actions. If you walk down the street, notice that there is a sale in the smithy and decide to make a detour to buy a MWK longsword, your actions were affected by the current price of the martial killing implements. If your character likes to help orphans find new families, donates money to hospitals and volunteers to build new, better roads with their Shape Stone, they would naturally become Good-alligned over time. If they are later called upon to defend the world from Satan who spams Unholy Blight 2.0(swift action to cast, 500d8 base damage, will DC 40, area 2 mile radius burst) their allignment would(very likely, at least) affect their actions-for example, they might end up acting as supports for the more Evil heroes, purely because their allignment won't allow them to survive fighting this Satan directly. In the worst case scenario, they might even make a detour to kill some orphans to switch their allignment to Evil, if there is nobody else who can stop Satan from destroying the world(you need to kill, what, at best 100 orphans to become Evil? That is less than 100 000 that would die if the world blew up.). Notice how if their starting allignment was changed to Evil, but everything else remained the same, they wouldn't have needed to go on an orphan-killing spree, and therefore it was their allignment, and nothing else, that affected their actions in this case.
I mean, they(Good heroes) likely won't like it(killing orphans), and might end up drinking heavilly afterwards, but what are you going to do if there are no other options? Let the world blow up?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Would you riot if mint was banned?No. :P
I don't even like mint, but Chinese Food is like my favorite thing in the world, and I wouldn't even riot or rebel over it. Seriously, how dumb can someone be?
"Without *insert food stuff here* in my life, it's not worth living! Viva la revolution!" - Nobody Sane Ever
I can see this happening if:
* the food in question had a significant cultural/religious value(like red wine is for catholics)
* if the food was so widespread it was involved in almost every recipy(like salt or pepper)
* if it was used for other things, not necessarily related to eating, which would make replacing it very hard if not impossible(like salt was in the middle ages or ethanol is currently)
* if it was produced locally, so banning it would make a lot of people lose their jobs
* if someone rich and powerful really liked it and organised a revolution
Basically, there are a lot of reasons quite sane people would begin a revolution because %food% was banned.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Would you riot if mint was banned?No. :P
I don't even like mint, but Chinese Food is like my favorite thing in the world, and I wouldn't even riot or rebel over it. Seriously, how dumb can someone be?
"Without *insert food stuff here* in my life, it's not worth living! Viva la revolution!" - Nobody Sane Ever
I can see this happening if:
* the food in question had a significant cultural/religious value(like red wine is for catholics)
* if the food was so widespread it was involved in almost every recipy(like salt or pepper)
* if it was used for other things, not necessarily related to eating, which would make replacing it very hard if not impossible(like salt was in the middle ages or ethanol is currently)
* if it was produced locally, so banning it would make a lot of people lose their jobs
* if someone rich and powerful really liked it and organised a revolution
Basically, there are a lot of reasons quite sane people would begin a revolution because %food% was banned.
Hell's Rebel's Spoiler
So nobody is rebelling over the mint itself really. It's sorta awkward that they don't push his evil more obviously at first but then... He'd be kinda a dumb bad guy if he took over and went full heavy handed over the general populace immediately. Not that it matters too much. He's so sketchy most of the population don't trust him anyways.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
">I hold immense, unadulterated, contempt for the pervasive idea that alignment somehow affects your actions rather than the other way around."
Let me give an example of why I think alignment does affect behavior, though I do believe that concious choice can affect alignment over the long term.
Just recently I came out of McDs and there was a lady with a drink on her roof and she just started to drive away. I ran, just barely caught her drink from smashing on the ground and handed her the drink through the window. But I didn't choose to do so, rather I reacted instinctively without thought.
In my opinion, and a psych degree has strengthened my belief, that an action taken without thought was either prepared in advance via methodd similar to nlp, or is a reflection of a person's inherent character.
An evil/selfish person would have instinctively stood clear pf the falling drink and continued about their day without actually choosing to.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
">I hold immense, unadulterated, contempt for the pervasive idea that alignment somehow affects your actions rather than the other way around."
Let me give an example of why I think alignment does affect behavior, though I do believe that concious choice can affect alignment over the long term.
Just recently I came out of McDs and there was a lady with a drink on her roof and she just started to drive away. I ran, just barely caught her drink from smashing on the ground and handed her the drink through the window. But I didn't choose to do so, rather I reacted instinctively without thought.
In my opinion, and a psych degree has strengthened my belief, that an action taken without thought was either prepared in advance via methodd similar to nlp, or is a reflection of a person's inherent character.
An evil/selfish person would have instinctively stood clear pf the falling drink and continued about their day without actually choosing to.
In my admittedly limited experience with learning about psychology, human mind is such a total clusterf+%@ of b++$%!@& shortcuts evolution took during the last million years that anyone who claims that they understand how it works on a fundamental level is either fooling themselves or trying to fool their audience. Even the best examples of deconstruction I have seen only go into surface stuff, like describing biases and crowd psychology. Any theories related to "inherent character", on the other hand, sound like something completely untestable to me-it's not like you can independantly verify what a given person's character is.
I think that psychologists can be very good at describing how people behave in very specific circumstances, but fail utterly at describing why people act like that. For example, there was this theory of "Ego depletion" that was at the heart of a whole field of psychology. There was a lot of studies that showed that it was, actually, a thing. It was found just everywhere, all over psychology. Then in 2014 someone tested it again, and found no effects. Then a whole bunch of studies were done, and found no effects once again. Then they redid the original study that first coined the term, and found no effects. So now psychology is kind of in trouble, because one of the central ideas just kinda of...disappeared.
Getting back to your original point, you can say that you ran after the car and helped that lady. Okay. However, why you did it is an open question. It could have been because you are Good and that forced you to do that(I don't think so). It could be that you have some pre-cashed ideas about helping old ladies, and that came into effect. It could be that you just felt good that day and subconsciously decided to do that. It could be that that lady looked a bit like your first grade math teacher, which caused you to be better disposed to her at the start.
Point is, humans just aren't machines, no matter how much one might want to believe that they are. They don't act in strict, programmed patterns, and you can't truly force them into any action no matter what you do, just like you can't play chess with a pigeon. Trying to do that will just end up with your figures all over the place and everything covered in s&**.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Well said, Klara.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And another thing to point out:
NLP has been scientifically discredited and acknowledged as a pseudo-science back in the 70's. Given that TheAlicornSage referred to it as something true, I have doubts on the validity of the aforementioned psychology degree.
First, what is alignment if not a bias towards a particular type behaviour, similar to handedness being a bias towards a particular preferred hand/direction? Therefore, I would consider "like describing biases..." to be perfectly applicable. I don't think alignment is a source, rather a bias that predisposes one to particular actions, a bias that can be altered by habitually choosing a particular type of action when you actually get to choose.
Second, I did say opinion.
Third, psychology is good at describing people, but not individuals. Specific circumstances not required.
Fourth, people are machines, jist very complicated ones with lots of emergent behavior. If the game of life can take a handful of absolute rules and do all it does, both chaotic and regular, then a complicated biological computer can do amazingly emergent things.
Think of a computer, and someone we'll call Bob who knows nothing of computers. Bob might be familiar with windows or mac, and maybe Bob also understands logic gates and how a processor works, but there is still a vast gulf between them that can lead to the computer doing things that Bob doesn't expect or understand. Bob might not understand the structure of the windows system and trying to figure it out from knowing how a processor works and the user interface os a very tough job. However Bob can still know that there is a perfectly logical structure there.
The same can be said of the human mind. We understand the basic processor for the most part, neurons, and most people understand the basic "user interface" of talking and socializing, but there is a gulf between the two. Psychology has revealed some, not much, but some of that gulf.
Fifth, I never said NLP is real, though I suspect there are multiple things being referred to as NLP. I merely made a comparison. However, I can set in mind a course of action ahead of time to be triggered without concious choice. In fact, that is how I fight, I set up various actions and let them be triggered by my opponents, while my concious mind studies the opposition and adjusts my preplanned actions to suit the environment and opponents. I also do this when doing any kind of stunts or crazy things as well as constantly doing that with safety contingencies. As I know how to program, I see many parallels there with programing.
Sixth, I trust only psych experiments I have studied myself and found to be solid as many of the studies I know about are seriously flawed. Most commonly by the premise being to "high level" in a similar sense to high level programming vs low level programming, or a lack of accounting for other factors. I.E. "Is racism a built in thing?" vs "is categorizing people via easily discernible cues into categories developed by that individual based on prior experiences a thing?" Notice how one is more specific and results can be more misleading than for the other? Notice how the later isn't just seeking info on a visible output but also tries to figure out a underlying method/reasoning?
Example, there is a test that came out recently that supposedly finds your hidden biases for gender or race. It is a test where words show up and you quickly associate them with a left category or right category by pressing the corresponding shift key, then you see whether you were right or wrong. They do this four times and on the very last time they switch the categories. Not only is there the issue of the word associations being different based on culture and individual experience (child of a single working mother isn't likely to associate "going to work" with "father"), but also they fail to acvount for the possibility of mental shortcutting where the brain associates each word with pressing a particular key, regardless of what the category is. This second aspect thus makes this not so much a test of hidden biases, but rather how well you can adapt associations between a stimulus and an action. And yet this test made it so far as to be on the news.
Oh, and my mistrust is not just for tests saying what things are, but also for tests saying what things are not.
Besides, a true scientific study makes a statement then tries to prove it false rather than collecting results snd saying those results must be true.
Not to mention all the cultural bias that affects even psychologists in developing a hypothesis to be tested.
TheAlicornSage, on alignment, I suspect you've misunderstood the basic premise that is being discussed. The issue at hand is silly shenanigans like the fact that, according to Paizo, summoning Celestial Badgers makes your alignment Good. If you alternate burning orphanages and summoning Celestial Badgers, it'd be hard to say that you're good at heart as result of having Good alignment.
Yes, but that stems from alignment being based on morality yet having parts be divorced from the very thing it is based on.
Using alignment based on motivational types gives different alignments which are more easily usable, tie better into roleplaying a character, and neatly solves the whole issue of whether burning an orphanage has any bearing on anything related to your recorded alignment by simply making it a "burning children does not affect anything related to summoning celetials."
Of course, you could relate them if desired, in which case it is still easier since the motivational types are clearer, thus actions can be more easily (though still not perfectly) be determined as fitting or unfitting with a specific alignment.
Personally, I use these alignments for characters and spells such as detect alignment or protection from alignment. But then I treat celestials as beings of high positive energy, and fiendish as negative energy, (with undead as necrotic/spirit energy. I find most opposites like to come in multiples anyway. I.E. 2, -2, and reciprocal of 2.)
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Put simply, alignment determines nothing about your characters actions. It represents a trend in your characters actions. Trying to say that alignment determines actions is like trying to attribute someone's grade point averages to be the cause of someone's academic achievements, when in fact your GPA is a reflection of your academic achievements.
Now in some cases, people may simply see a specific GPA as a goal and try to maintain that, which would be akin to someone making a conscious effort to uphold goodness (or evilness) as a standard, yet the result is still based on their actions, not the other way around, in the same way that the GPA itself doesn't determine how well you do academically aside from being some sort of goal that you may have set for yourself (like trying to maintain your GPA standing).
Put another way, having a high current GPA doesn't mean that you will simply get good grades. It requires you to actually get good grades to maintain. In the same way, being Good or Evil doesn't actually mean you will simply be Good or Evil, it requires you to continue to do Good or Evil, as it's merely a reflection of a trend.
In fact, in the case of people who are only Good or Evil because they see it as a goal, I find these to be the weakest in terms of actually being able to maintain that alignment, since all it takes is for them to have their desires to be Good or Evil broken, and it all falls apart. If the reason you do good things for other people is because you're trying to be a good person, if you lose sight of the desire to be Good (perhaps feeling it is no longer worth the effort), then you have little other than tradition keeping you there.
However, if you are good as a side-effect of living a life of love, altruism, and kindness, you'll be unconcerned with whether or not you are Good or Evil, or how others perceive you, and instead do what you feel is right. You don't give homeless children your food because you're trying to be Good, you do it because you feel they need it, which is good, and your alignment comes to reflect that. Interestingly, the fact you're doing it out of care for the other person more so than the desire to achieve some sort of quality makes it a much deeper aspect of your character.
But if you started doing more Evil things, then your alignment would shift to reflect the ongoing trends.
If alignment determined action, then people's alignments couldn't actually change naturally because people would choose to take a course that was befitting their current alignment. If anyone ever says "Your character can't/wouldn't/shouldn't do that because they're X-aligned" they are doing it wrong.
Huh, refreshed the page after playing for a while, last Ashiel's post 2 seconds ago.
On a more related note, what do you think of the idea of keeping alignment only for outsiders and deities, since those are literally made of their respective alignmentstuff, while mortals are mortals and not bound to anything in particular?
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Huh, refreshed the page after playing for a while, last Ashiel's post 2 seconds ago.
On a more related note, what do you think of the idea of keeping alignment only for outsiders and deities, since those are literally made of their respective alignmentstuff, while mortals are mortals and not bound to anything in particular?
That's mostly what I've been meaning but apparently failing to convey.
I used to run a persistent world campaign via OpenRPG and very early on we had a lot of issues with players trying to tell other people how to play their alignments, or making predeterminations about other characters and their actions because of the alignment on their character sheet, or just generally tripping up where alignment seems to cause people to trip up (and it's never in the simple mechanical sides).
So what I did to solve that issue was to make all non-subtyped characters be treated as Neutral. They simply lacked an alignment and acted as they felt was appropriate for their characters. I made it so that Clerics and Paladins gained the alignment subtype associated with their aura class features (which in turn represented their greater connection to the cosmic forces of whatever their aura was associated with, if anything; it also had the side benefit of allowing their attacks to bypass DR of their mortal foes). In the cases of effects that targeted alignment, I made them 1/2 as powerful vs non-aligned foes (so a Paladin's smite now worked against virtually everything but only added +1/2 the Paladin's level to damage, unless they were fighting things like evil clerics or outsiders).
And y'know what happened? Everything just worked. People stopped worrying about what other people's alignments were and just played the damn game. Pretty much overnight, the complaints and irritating behavior ceased and people starting playing their characters rather than trying to play an alignment.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm not saying the complete opposite. What I'm saying is that it is a two way street, only on one side is short term and the other long term.
If you always act good, then it becomes habit, and you will act good more often even in little things that are not conscious choice. Basically, choosing good reinforces being good and actually makes it harder to go evil as you need to overcome the habits you ingrained in yourself. This is why the good guys who burn an orphanage for the greater good do the task with distaste, because it goes against the grain for them. I would consider them as having the good alignment so long as doing evil actions feels wrong to them. But of course, if they keep on doing such bad things, their habits change, they get used to it, and eventually it doesn't bother them anymore at which point their alignment has shifted.
Seriously, knowing how you would feel if you make a certain choice affects that choice, but yet still leaves it as a choice. Are you going to slice your leg open and pour salt in the wound? Not likely. And your reason for not doing so is probably because you would feel bad (in the form of physical pain in this case), but if you had sufficient reason for doing so, you might choose to do it anyway.
I see alignment the same way, it biases you towards certain actions, but you can overcome that bias, and over time if you habitually act counter to it, it will eventually shift.
However, how feel about an action is a reflection of your alignment, and thus you can't just make yourself evil one day so you can fight the bad guy (not to mention that in becoming evil you likely would no longer care about what that guy is doing).
Ninja'd
"Pretty much overnight, the complaints and irritating behavior ceased and people starting playing their characters rather than trying to play an alignment."
I always tell players that if they are having trouble trying to play character because of alignment, then they either chose the wrong alignment or are attaching things to alignment that shouldn't matter to the alignment.
Of course, only twice has it come up in my games. Then I switched to motivation alignments for the roleplaying factor.
I guess the too late done right thing is that your alignment is how you feel about certain things, your values that you try to follow, and that can affect your choices without controlling your actions.
It extended to other people's characters, which is a common problem with alignment. Also, again, trend =/= cause.
I just plain hate other people telling me how to play my characters. Strangely, the only time I need to worry about it is with the more extremely orange folks who are afraid I will be a liability instead of an asset.
It extended to other people's characters, which is a common problem with alignment. Also, again, trend =/= cause.
You are correct, but I think this can be misleading, depending on how something is looked at, or being talked about (also the confusion over the term "cause" in the first place).
I would say part of the disconnect here is that I do partially agree with TheAlicornSage in that alignment can be a kind of "soft cause" of... or, more accurately, I'd say "influence" toward... instigating action - akin to habitual reinforcement of general principles, rather than hard-coded requirement of action (outside of innate alignment) -; even while I also agree with you, in that alignment, on its own, is rarely enough to dictate action.
What this means, of course, is that alignment does not, on its own, determine actions, unless taken in a vacuum, which alignment rarely (if ever) is.
But... could it? Yes. Sort of.
Presuppose a situation in which a person who has been practiced at being Good for their whole lives (intentionally, or just having chosen that consistently) is placed in a situation where the outcome does not really change or require effort in any way.
A hypothetical contrived example: under a calm emotions (or similar) effect, a lever that, if pulled one way will heal or raise from the dead a random innocent in the world, but if pulled the other way will kill a random someone you don't like; either way, you get the same amount of money, and, once pulled, is destroyed (so it cannot be pulled both ways). You get no influence on the people in question.
A good person will, by default, choose to do the Good thing because they are good people, and have done so.
Evil people, on the other hand, will do the Evil thing.
As soon as something else comes into play that could influence their decision, however, no matter what that is, their alignment's influence over the situation becomes less solid; that makes the above example extremely rare (as well as hypothetical and contrived).
So, let's say in that same scenario, instead of a random person you don't like, you get to choose your target of death. A number of otherwise good people may very well choose the "kill" option because, suddenly, they have reason and rational thought influencing their decision, rather than just generic moral pull.
This could, be compared to the gentle pull of gravity, in physical analogies.
In space - a hypothetically neutral system - gravity's influence is... low. Very low. In fact, it's so low that the net effect on an individual appears to be weightlessness.
But that's not true - not really. Instead, everyone is still subject to gravity's pull, but you've escaped the point at which that pull is a primary influence in your options.
If left to your own devices, whichever celestial object of sufficient size you are closest to will exert its influence until you're pulled close enough to have a very, very hard dive toward its surface and pretty much stay there forever (specific exceptions aside; I'll get back to these in a moment).
On the other hand, as soon as any other influence comes into play, the direct influence of gravity is so much less that it can often be ignored... but it's still incredibly important by virtue of the fact that it can and does either influence, assist, or compel certain actions in order to achieve certain effects (such as using gravity as a slingshot to reach other places faster).
I'd suggest alignment is somewhat similar. For most creatures, they're just kind of drifting, and able to use their limited thrust to head toward one gravity well or another (among other options), but never living truly long enough to impact on the surface of their chosen alignment. Creatures of inherent alignment, on the other hand, are pretty much surface-bound to their alignment/gravity well - they've taken the plunge and are pretty much stuck there barring exceptional circumstances (such as, say, a rocket ship pushing them out of the gravity well, or a goddess sending a mind-reading succubus on a psycho-trip through dreams-ville). Those adrift working at leaning closer toward one thing or the other, however, can often overshoot and miss, or use their current position to kind of sling-shot themselves far and fast toward an entirely different orbit. And then there are the tricksters - those who play with alignment so that they can continually orbit an alignment, but never really commit to its gravity well by staying juuuuuuuuust a hedge "faster" forward instead of falling in.
In the end, of course, none of this is truly cause - it's all influence based off of your relative position due to you're own actions.
And I think this influence is what people are viewing as a cause - it's not, exactly, a cause, though it can be, barring other influences. But people are complex and influence is diverse. That said, entirely escaping the influence of what you're closest to means actively expending energy to move away (though sometimes you can trick the very thing influencing you to go in a different direction much more effectively than you ever could otherwise).
But that's just an analogy, and probably has it's own holes.
Oh, and TheAlicornSage: NLP may have several real things associated, but NLP notes:
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP has since been largely discredited scientifically,
... just so we all know what we're talking about. :)
Lol, thanks for the link.
The nlp I am familiar with doesn't seem to have become popular enough for wikipedia, probably because of whoever created that. I wonder though if they the nlp I heard about was taken by someone and without them understanding it, fleshed it out into a scam.
From what heard a bazillion years ago now, nlp was a methodology of changing or forming habits based on affecting how think and describe the habits you currently have and the habits you want. Certainly was not expected to be a miracle pill or fix anything any quicker than other therapies.
It is like the difference between imagining a hot pizza, with perfectly melted cheese, all the best toppings, sizzling sound, and the delicious smell versus thinking of the pizza as being cold and oily, with the cheese growing mold, the grease curdling, smelling like rotten eggs, etc.
It works by changing how you view things, which changes how feel about them, and that makes it easier to change your habits, and it is done by changing how you think of those things, how you describe them and talk about them both in verbal speech and the speech in your head.
When I heard about it, it was just small thing being researched with positive results. So when it was said earlier that it was discredited, I just figured the research had come out less than satisfactory, but it seems you were talking about something else completely.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
You're basically describing how neuro-linguistic programming was supposed to work. Someone administering it was supposed to talk people through changing their perceptions and rehearsing situational reactions.
That you heard someone pushing it in recent years isn't much of a surprise. That it's been recognized as useless pseudoscience hasn't stopped people from trying to spread it and make money off of it. Lots of things go that way- the polygraph is basically worthless, but plenty of people are still convinced it works in some capacity other than tricking gullible criminals into confessing preemptively.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
*reads thread*
You know... I like cake :P
By the way, I totally love the idea of describing alignments as gravity wells.
Mythbusters actually tested the polygraph and after several methods and attempts, they were unable to fool the polygraph in any capacity. While that is not equal to perfect reliability, it does mean there is at least a reasonable enough reliability to direct investigations if nothing else.
As for nlp, the wiki page has some seriously major departures from what I was trying to describe not even including the ridiculous one session miracle cure claims.
I can say though, that even the wiki page states that the refraning techniques (the techniques of getting people to describe and thus view things differently) are used elsewhere in psychology.
Also, what I heard was decades ago. Recent is not an applicable word.
What the whole thing sounds like to me is that certain individuals took what at the time were cutting edge theories probably with some actual basis, then wrapped them in a bunch of bs and either scammed people (or were so ignorant and dogmatic as to actually believe what they created and refused to listen to anyone trying to correct them.)
As I know of these reframing techniques or similar from other places, the core concept of reframing is probably fairly sound, and nlp probably is not sound because of all ridiculous bs built on top of the reframing, or possibly that plus their specific methods of reframing.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Put simply, alignment determines nothing about your characters actions. It represents a trend in your characters actions. Trying to say that alignment determines actions is like trying to attribute someone's grade point averages to be the cause of someone's academic achievements, when in fact your GPA is a reflection of your academic achievements.
Now in some cases, people may simply see a specific GPA as a goal and try to maintain that, which would be akin to someone making a conscious effort to uphold goodness (or evilness) as a standard, yet the result is still based on their actions, not the other way around, in the same way that the GPA itself doesn't determine how well you do academically aside from being some sort of goal that you may have set for yourself (like trying to maintain your GPA standing).
Put another way, having a high current GPA doesn't mean that you will simply get good grades. It requires you to actually get good grades to maintain. In the same way, being Good or Evil doesn't actually mean you will simply be Good or Evil, it requires you to continue to do Good or Evil, as it's merely a reflection of a trend.
In fact, in the case of people who are only Good or Evil because they see it as a goal, I find these to be the weakest in terms of actually being able to maintain that alignment, since all it takes is for them to have their desires to be Good or Evil broken, and it all falls apart. If the reason you do good things for other people is because you're trying to be a good person, if you lose sight of the desire to be Good (perhaps feeling it is no longer worth the effort), then you have little other than tradition keeping you there.
However, if you are good as a side-effect of living a life of love, altruism, and kindness, you'll be unconcerned with whether or not you are Good or Evil, or how others perceive you, and instead do what you feel is right. You don't give homeless children your food because you're trying to be Good, you do it because you feel they...
>If anyone ever says "Your character can't/wouldn't/shouldn't do that because they're X-aligned" they are doing it wrong.
Hmm. I thought my example of that exact situation (where characters shouldn't do something because of their allignment) was quite solid. Can you explain what part of it was wrong? I am honestly quite curious.
>gravity well thing Tacticslion wrote
I hate to break such a beautiful analogy, but in space gravity is usually the strongest influence around. Gravity on the ISS is, for example, pretty much as strong as gravity back here on earth. Weightlessness isn't something you feel when there is no gravity-instead, it is something you feel when there is no floor and thus nothing to compress your bones and muscles against the pull of gravity.
Great post though.
Hopefully tacticslion is more understandable than me, for he said basically the same thing more beautifully, though I think he doesn't credit the bias enough myself.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"I think the question lies in the classic 'prescriptive vs. descriptive alignment',"
Hmm, that is a good way to put it, so I'll say my claim is that alignment is a little bit of both.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think where the confusion comes in is the fact that good characters tend to do good things, which in turn gives them a good alignment. The fact that Good characters are predisposed to do good is due to the character, not the alignment.
Your Alignment has 0% influence on your character's actions. At no point does it influence anything that your character would do. However, it is a reflection of what is the norm for your character, and a character that typically chooses to do good things rather than evil things has a track record for choosing good over evil.
So when a Good character does a good thing, or doesn't do an evil thing, it's not because he's a Good character. He's a Good character because he does good things, or doesn't do evil things.
Because Alignment does not dictate actions. It is only a reflection of the norms of that character.
It really isn't a complicated thing but it's still difficult to grasp for very many people. And getting it wrong leads to people doing things like saying "They can't lie, they're Lawful" or "That person is Evil, they can't do Good things", or "Your character wouldn't do that, he's Chaotic Good".
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"The fact that Good characters are predisposed to do good is due to the character, not the alignment."
You imply that alignment is somehow not the predisposition.
Alignment is predisposition.
Saying someone has a good alignment is equivalent to saying they have a predisposition to doing good.
The fact that it also reflects the norms for that character is emergent from the norms generally following the predisposition/alignment.
###
"They can't lie, they're Lawful"
This is a separate issue. This is a false attribution. This what happens when one person thinks that lawful is somehow supposed to mean absolute truthfulness, which is false regardless of whether alignment is descriptive, prescriptive, or somewhere in between.
###
"That person is Evil, they can't do Good things"
This straddles the two issues. It falsely attributes an alignment as being iron shackles and inflexible, falsely implies that only one alignment will ever be motived to take a particular action, and assumes that alignment is 100% prescriptive.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
>Saying someone has a good alignment is equivalent to saying they have a predisposition to doing good.
Not really, no. Barring a few edge cases, it means they have been knowingly doing Good things in the past, which usually implies they would be predisposed to a similar sort of behavior in the future.
At least, the way I understand it.
>Your Alignment has 0% influence on your character's actions.
I still think that it is worth pointing out that allignment currently has measurable mechanical effects and as such will influence any given character's actions on the same level as other mechanics already present in the system.
E.g. if BBEG has Proteciton from Good cast on them, a Good character would go for a Fireball, while a Neutral character would consider casting Heightened Charm Monster.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
>Saying someone has a good alignment is equivalent to saying they have a predisposition to doing good.
Not really, no. Barring a few edge cases, it means they have been knowingly doing Good things in the past, which usually implies they would be predisposed to a similar sort of behavior in the future.
At least, the way I understand it.
>Your Alignment has 0% influence on your character's actions.
I still think that it is worth pointing out that allignment currently has measurable mechanical effects and as such will influence any given character's actions on the same level as other mechanics already present in the system.
E.g. if BBEG has Proteciton from Good cast on them, a Good character would go for a Fireball, while a Neutral character would consider casting Heightened Charm Monster.
Yeah, I'll agree with that. :P
"The fact that Good characters are predisposed to do good is due to the character, not the alignment."
You imply that alignment is somehow not the predisposition.
Alignment is predisposition.
Saying someone has a good alignment is equivalent to saying they have a predisposition to doing good.
The fact that it also reflects the norms for that character is emergent from the norms generally following the predisposition/alignment.
No, alignment isn't. Alignment is reflective. Alignment is only a reference to how a character normally acts, not why they normally act that way.
If alignment determined how you acted, you wouldn't ever change alignments, because you would just act as you were predisposed to acting more often than not because you were predisposed to it.
However, alignments are reflective of the character's actions. For example, most people are Neutral. Based on the information about Intelligence and Alignment, infants would be born Neutral alignment. Now, because as the character grows, experiences, and acts upon the world in turn determines their alignment, they can grow to be any alignment that makes sense for the character.
However, if alignment was deterministic and had influence on the actions that the person would have, then you wouldn't have Good or Evil people, because they would be predisposed to acting Neutral, and since alignments reflect the norm and are explicitly noted as not requiring someone to be wholly consistent, they would never stop being Neutral because to become anything else they couldn't be predisposed to be Neutral.
It just does not work.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Though I'd argue babies are obviously chaotic evil, because they spend all their time making you cater to them while destroying everything, don't understand consequences for their actions and have no capacity for empathy. :3
You are assuming a predisposition is immutable, but actually they can change over time. The enthusiastic soldier becomes cynical and disillusioned. The guy who wants to be president to make a positive forgets his purpose and does nothing more than continue to play the political games he had to play to become president in the first place.
Children develop their predispositions as they grow based on their environment.
>gravity well thing Tacticslion wrote
I hate to break such a beautiful analogy, but in space gravity is usually the strongest influence around. Gravity on the ISS is, for example, pretty much as strong as gravity back here on earth. Weightlessness isn't something you feel when there is no gravity-instead, it is something you feel when there is no floor and thus nothing to compress your bones and muscles against the pull of gravity.
Yes and no. Gravity is everywhere and is constant - something I tried to indicate, though perhaps poorly - which means you never truly escape its influence. But you can be so much closer to one celestial body or another that the influence from the others effectively doesn't matter to your relative experience. For example, if I'm in orbit around Io, I do not greatly care that Venus exists. Does Venus exert gravity? Yes. On me, even. But it doesn't really matter for anything that I'd choose to do on or around Io (unless I'm trying to get away from Io, which is what I meant about using my local gravity to escape said local gravity).
And I can put myself in a place where gravity is the least locally influential force in anything that I greatly care to do.
That said, I won't argue the analogy is perfect! Nor my understanding of gravity*! Not by a long shot!
*
Great post though.
Thanks!
(Sorry for typos: I think I got them, but phone posting is an error-ridden process...)
EDIT: no, but I fixed the typo, and now the coding isn't working right. Huh. Okaaaaayyyyy...
You are assuming a predisposition is immutable, but actually they can change over time. The enthusiastic soldier becomes cynical and disillusioned. The guy who wants to be president to make a positive forgets his purpose and does nothing more than continue to play the political games he had to play to become president in the first place.
Children develop their predispositions as they grow based on their environment.
Nothing of which is based on alignment.
If the predisposition is because of alignment, then it wouldn't change unless their alignment changed. However, predispositions due to circumstances (such as a soldier becoming cynical) are not due to alignment but may make a character act more in accordance with an alignment, and thus as their norm changes so too will their alignment (assuming the alignment no longer reflects their new norm).
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Alignment isn't a nature vs nurture deal. Alignment reflects what a person has become at the point he or she has become an adventurer, or at whatever point they've been put onto a character sheet. It reflects what they've done, and what one could reasonably expect from that person, in way of behavior.
That's how I see alignment. What happens after the game starts throws all that up in the air. Does what the character experiences change their outlook on life? Does his expected behavior change over time due to his outlook being challenged by reality? That's roleplay. How the character experiences things, and responds to them dictates his (or her) alignment.
As interesting as this is, debating what alignment is, perhaps we should step back for a moment, forget the existing concept, amd think about what rules we want in the mechanics to involve moral concepts, and decide whether we want alignment to be descriptive (in which case it should change easily and have minimal effects), or if we want it to represent something deeper that isn't so easily altered.
Basically, of all the possibilities mentioned and unmentioned, which would we want to be the case, and how can we shape mechanics to reflect, reinforce, or possibly enforce that choice.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
To be fair, I just want less obnoxious arguments on what alignment is or isn't.
As long as the rules changes achieve that, I'll be happy.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
If you were choosing your soul-weapon-thingy(like in RWBY-a single weapon you will then become attached to and use to kick ass) what would you choose?
I would like alignment to non-codified, and let the character's behavior have in game RP consequences, not mechanical ones, with the rare exception of a Paladin, if they are still required to be LG or the like.
If there aren't paladins or other exemplars of an ideology or way of being, then so be it.
Then you need to look at celestial and fiendish, outsiders, and spells marked as evil, and choose how to handle them.
That's easy. You ignore alignment crap on spells. You let what the caster does with them in the game decide if there are any RP consequences.