Your Alignment Is Not Your Motivation

[Neal Litherland]

When you ask someone what do you want, and they respond with money, you tell them that getting money is easy. Anyone can do it, if they're willing to get their hands dirty. How important is money to you? Would you prostitute yourself? Kill someone? Steal it? What stops someone from doing anything to get their hands on that lucre is their morality.

Put another way, someone who is lawful good, and someone who is chaotic evil can have the exact, same goals, but they will take wildly different means to achieve it. But it's that meeting of the minds on achieving a goal that allows them to work together... even if it's only for a single mission.

Anyway, I went into more detail on this in my most recent piece Alignment Isn't Your Motivation, because I think it's something many players, and even DMs, could benefit from thinking about.

[JosMartigan]

You have a lot of valid ideas regarding the separation of overall character from alignment tendencies.

When I'm playing a character and faced with a hard choice. I take into account a lot of different factors including loyalties, alignment, motivation, past actions, and tendencies. Alignment should be just one aspect of a character that a player considers when involved in a game.

One thing I dislike is when players equate insanity with chaotic. Since insanity is a lot of different things, law and chaos should have little to do with one's sanity.

[Kileanna]

I've just read your blog and I really like your POW regarding to the alignment system, very similar to mine.
Seeing a character as a combination of class/alignment/deity/race often creates unidimensional characters. You give some good advice to keep players and GMs from falling into alignment stereotypes and helping to give a more dynamic and realistic feeling to characters.
One of my players was playing a paladin. His main goal was to protect all forms of life. Now he's a LE antipaladin. His goal is unchanged, but now he thinks of undead as alternate life forms that need to be protected and, regarding them as misunderstood, has devoted his life to do so. Same motivation... with a dark twist.

[Daw]

Kileanna,
How terrible of you to force an allignment shift because the paladin realized that undead have value too. Unless the poor misunderstood holy warrior failed to realize that a good, healthy and safe environment for the undead's childhood phase is needed to ensure healthy and effective adults (you know, undead). Doesn't everyone understand that the hurtful (evil) stereotype is due to poor education and prejudice....

[Kileanna]

Despite the ironic answer, that's exactly what he thinks of undead!
And the alignment shift came from other things that he did that truly deserved an alignment shift. Anyway he must be the less evil antipaladin evil.
He might have slayed a full tribe who destroyed a food shipment to feed the people in town and used their flesh to replace the lost supplies, but he did it to avoid people starving. He's a misunderstood hero.

[Derailer of Threads]

I see another falling paladin thread coming...

[Rosc]

Derailer of Threads wrote:

I see another falling paladin thread coming...

Then play a Dwarf Paladin. They get a racial bonus to CMD against trip attempts.

[Dave Justus]

I don't exactly disagree with you, although I do think from a fantasy perspective your alignment can be your motivation. Doing good because you want to be good, a light in the darkness, for example fits right in. Alignment is complex, probably why it gets bogged down in simplistic arguments, and certainly part of that complexity is that at least some aspects of it include what motivates you. While the specifics will vary, a lawful person is motivated by order, it describes both the methods they will use and the way the want the world to be.

I also think you are too glib in dismissing alignment conflicts if you share a motivation. Lets take our goblin fighters for example. If I am good, I'm probably not going to go for the evil characters plan to turn half of the children in town into shadows and sick them on the goblin tribe, no matter how effective it may be at saving (the rest) of the town from goblins.

That said, certainly motivation beyond just an alignment is important for a character to have, and can contribute to a well functioning party. I would add though that a motivation for a character should be created in consultation with other players and the GM, and fit into the party and the campaign. If I am running skull and shackles, I expect that you will make a character whose motivation is connected, or at the very least compatible with, becoming a pirate. If you show up with a character whose only ambition in life is to become an ascetic hermit in a desert, I'm probably going to tell you to try again.

[Drahliana Moonrunner]

Dave Justus wrote:

I don't exactly disagree with you, although I do think from a fantasy perspective your alignment can be your motivation. Doing good because you want to be good, a light in the darkness, for example fits right in. Alignment is complex, probably why it gets bogged down in simplistic arguments, and certainly part of that complexity is that at least some aspects of it include what motivates you. While the specifics will vary, a lawful person is motivated by order, it describes both the methods they will use and the way the want the world to be.

I also think you are too glib in dismissing alignment conflicts if you share a motivation. Lets take our goblin fighters for example. If I am good, I'm probably not going to go for the evil characters plan to turn half of the children in town into shadows and sick them on the goblin tribe, no matter how effective it may be at saving (the rest) of the town from goblins.

That said, certainly motivation beyond just an alignment is important for a character to have, and can contribute to a well functioning party. I would add though that a motivation for a character should be created in consultation with other players and the GM, and fit into the party and the campaign. If I am running skull and shackles, I expect that you will make a character whose motivation is connected, or at the very least compatible with, becoming a pirate. If you show up with a character whose only ambition in life is to become an ascetic hermit in a desert, I'm probably going to tell you to try again.

I can see a character in desperation using an evil means to acheive a good end. But not without consequences... best example... the endgame of "Torchwood:Children of Earth". The means that the hero chooses come at dire consequences.

[Leliel the 12th]

I like this article. My own two cents;

I always had alignment as an element of motivation...

But, and this is a large but, it depends on a pre-existing motivation and method. Law craves structure, Chaos puts personal freedom above all else (and in fact can have a large hierarchy-Chaotic people just work for it because they want to and their direct superiors need to convince them they're the best leader), that's simple enough.

Good and Evil? I invoke The Nightmares Underneath; Good is defined by wanting to protect or create something, while Evil is defined by wanting to destroy something. That has a lot of nuance (an Evil rebel could want to destroy oppression and destroy the sorry state of his home), but when it comes down to it, evil always chooses the violent, seemingly permanent solution (the rebel is more inclined to burn the corrupt king alive than just replace him, and his solution for social ills is to plunder the wealth of those who don't deserve it, regardless of whether they're a threat or not).

That doesn't mean the evil and good characters can't be friends. They just loudly disagree on the means.

[Kileanna]

I can't completely aggree on creation vs. destruction.
I think an evil character can be devoted on creating something: build an evil empire where he's the sole authority, p.ex.
The difference to me is motivation. Evil, in the end, is always selfish. Even if it covers itself as a selfless motivation like «I want to bring stability to people» in the end an evil character is selfish and will not think what's better to others people, he just knows what he has to do and will do it no matter if he is in fact harming other people in the way. An evil person is willing to sacrifice others, harming people, etc as long as he can achieve his goals.
Even if a good character might have selfish motivations, he probably won't be willing to sacrifice others or harming people, and if he had to, he'd probably look for a way where the less people possible were harmed.
Of course, I'm not saying that an evil character is unable to be selfless or a good character selfish. Everybody can make evil or good acts no matter his alignment.

[Daw]

Drahliana, I think Torchwood: Children of the Earth was an accepting evil for expedience sake. It was giving in to fear and despair.