I'm between campaigns and taking the chance to actually write up my session 0, welcome to my table guide. Right now I'm trying to make some examples for my 'how alignment is handled' section.
I run with a light hand on alignment and use the rule that if the character can rationalize their actions to themselves, then that is enough. I'm trying to come up with a benign example to demonstrate this and became immediately stumped.
My example:
Your character captures a criminal, collecting a sizable bounty.
Good: The community is safer because of my actions.
Evil: I have personally profited from this.
Lawful: I have maintained order, and we all benefit from this.
Chaotic: ???
Given the assumption that alignment is how a character explains their actions to themselves, how would would a chaotic neutral character justify their actions in the above example?> Or do you have a different recommended example where each alignment justifies their actions differently?
"I did it because I wanted to"
Lol, a huge pet peeve.
I feel that some players that use the CN excuse as a rebellion against an alignment system they find restrictive, opting to just not engage with it at all.
Hence why I want it as a session 0 topic: that your character is the alignment you say it is. I could go on, but I don't want to derail my own thread... If I haven't already.
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I don't think there is a Chaotic reason to do that beyond 'It gave me the money to stay self employed, which is to say free.'. Nor do I think the reason you have listed as 'Evil' is actually Evil. Personal profit is the main reason I can think of most Neutral people to do bounty hunting (a not uncommon occupation for them), and wanting to profit from things is only Evil if you're willing to hurt innocents or do other evil stuff to do it.
I think for capturing someone with a bounty to be Evil, you either need to know they're innocent and not care, or enjoy the idea of hurting and imprisoning people for its own sake (ala Jubal Early in Firefly).
I don't think there is a Chaotic reason to do that beyond 'It gave me the money to stay self employed, which is to say free.'. Nor do I think the reason you have listed as 'Evil' is actually Evil. Personal profit is the main reason I can think of most Neutral people to do bounty hunting (a not uncommon occupation for them), and wanting to profit from things is only Evil if you're willing to hurt innocents or do other evil stuff to do it.
I think for capturing someone with a bounty to be Evil, you either need to know they're innocent and not care, or enjoy the idea of hurting and imprisoning people for its own sake (ala Jubal Early in Firefly).
Does this change help with the evil question? What I'm trying to communicate is that they are putting there selfishness ahead of any other concern:
Your character captures a criminal, collecting a sizable bounty. You some doubts about if what you did was right, but you go to sleep that night telling yourself that:
Good: The community is safer because of my actions.
Evil: I have personally profited from this.
Lawful: I have maintained order, and we all benefit from this.
Chaotic: ???
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I mean, that helps, but I still think that a lot of Neutral people would have that reaction. I'd personally put 'At least I came out ahead.' under Chaotic (as a counterpoint to 'We all came out ahead' under Lawful, which is what your current Lawful thing amounts to) and 'I don't care about what's right.' under Evil.
Like, for a Neutral person, you have doubts and may even do something about them, but comfort yourself with the practical side of things. If you're Evil, you just don't care at all.
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I'd say "I've profited from this" would be a better justification for Chaotic rather than Evil.
For Evil, I'd see a rationalization of something like, "Those lives weren't worth anything anyway." Something that represents a callous indifference to the life, safety, and/or well-being of others which can justify any horrors you inflict. (Torture for fun? Not like I harmed anything of value, so what's the problem?)
I'd say "I've profited from this" would be a better justification for Chaotic rather than Evil.
lol, I think your players are being evil and using the CN defense.
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lol, I think your players are being evil and using the CN defense.
It's more that if 'good of the community' is Lawful, then the Chaotic equivalent would be 'good for me and people I personally care about', combined with the default 'mercenary but not a complete a~%~+&@' Alignment usually being some variety of Neutral.
I mean, if profit is always an Evil motive, most PCs are Evil, as they do a fair amount of stuff for money.
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I think most people have said some pretty helpful things, but I'm not sure you're starting out with character alignment on a good foot. I think you have your axioms wrong and thus I wrote a bunch, and you can read all of it below. I prefer a moral absolutism approach, but a relativistic approach can work, but IMHO you need to re-frame it.
tl;dr: you shouldn't base a character's alignment on how they think of their own actions but on how most other people think of their actions.
reductio ad absurdum: Making bank is fine, using all the laws to make bank is fine, making bank on drugs and slaves is fine - and Good - if you're a Denizen of Leng They should totally be LG in their stat block!
I don't want to start a riot, but "Alignment as how the character rationalizes their actions to themselves" is very subjective, which is why in my games the alignments are fixed and mean a definite thing, but a characters alignment can change based on actions in relation to those definite, true things.
As in your example: Your character captures a criminal, collecting a sizable bounty.
* I could say that it is Good and I am Good that i have captured this criminal and personally profited from it.
* I can also be (in my setting, not yours) Evil and say that the community is safer because I have caught this criminal, thus I am Good. I beat them within an inch of their life when they offered up no resistance, but that is beside the point, the community is safer and I am doing my civic duty to catch criminals!
* I am upholding Law and - as an anarchist - each individual is the law unto themselves, thus the criminal stealing for his family is not a criminal at all, and I aid them in escaping, as I would a slave in Towny-mc-slavertown. Thus I am Lawful.
* I am Chaos incarnate, and capture the criminal, his family, and all neer-do-wells because - by statistics, probability and all that is random-clumping of data - they are probably all criminals and need to be hung for their crimes whether we or they know it! And I am Lawful as I am following mathematical laws of probability to catch criminals.
I realize that the Law-Chaos axis analogy is beginning to stretch a bit, but I highly doubt (insert reviled political figure here) ever thought they were "Evil" or "Unlawful".
Most of the time, how you see yourself is less informative than how others see you. How did you catch that criminal? How did you treat them while in captivity? Is the society they are being sentenced in and convicted in itself just?
There's a Pathfinder fiction from almost a year ago that shows this nicely. IIRC all Hellknights are Evil but I don't think Ulthor in this bit of fiction thinks of himself as "evil": Tales of Lost Omens: Rat Trap
Also, re-reading it, Hellknights are usually Lawful but apprehending an individual in a country not your own (Absalom isn't in Cheliax) and rando's in a bar accidentally getting in the way "Will be guilty of obstructing a lawful enforcement action." is not really following the law of the land - in this instance, Absalom. So he's not being particularly Lawful. Though, again, this axis is really hard to pin-down, without a concrete definition (and even then it can be fuzzy.
I highly doubt that ANY of the cops who have killed anybody while on the job would label THEMSELVES as anything other than Lawful Good.
And I bet almost everybody would totally disagree with them! (I sure as heck do!!!)
I'm not stating this to get anybody angry, or to bring politics into our past-time, just using something that most people are probably thinking in one way or another.
lol, I think your players are being evil and using the CN defense.
It's more that I view the Good/Evil divide as being representative of if lives (especially of others) have inherent value worth protecting, and Lawful/Chaotic of as representing whose benefits should gain priority (greater social order or "me & mine"), especially if one would be lessened to preserve the other.
So a CN Thief would have little qualms violating social order to steal wealth from another for their own benefit, but would hesitate to take the life of someone who "didn't deserve it." A CG Thief might steal to profit themselves, but rarely/never kill to do so and avoid stealing from those who would starve/suffer without the money. And a CE Thief might just merrily slaughter a beggar for the apple in their hand, because they were hungry and the screams were funny.
Meanwhile, I've always thought of a LE Assassin or Slaver as justifying themselves by saying lives are a commodity like everything else, and thus have a price tag. The same ordered market system that applies to goods and services can thus be applied to the business of trading or ending lives. As long as there are customers willing to pay for it then the LE Character is just providing a service for the greater community, regardless of if the current laws of the land say it is legal or not.
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and Lawful/Chaotic of as representing whose benefits should gain priority (greater social order or "me & mine"), especially if one would be lessened to preserve the other.
I'm mostly in agreement with the rest of your post but would actually say that Chaotic isn't necessarily 'me and mine', it's individuals rather than the social order. For CN (and CE) that's usually gonna be 'me and mine', but CG (and CN revolutionaries and political idealists) probably care just as much about strangers...they just care about individual people rather than abstract groups, for the most part.
R0b0tBadgr; I really appreciate your reply, it is helping me out.
I'm using a relativistic approach because I want this to be very permissive. I'm working to avoid moral absolutism and how others consider their actions because I'm sympathetic to players having to deal with different GMs having a different interpretation of the alignments. I want a method that allows the player and GM to have minor disagreements.
Every character is the hero or their own story, so I want every alignment to have a framing that so that every character can say that they are doing the 'Right and Good' thing , in whatever their twisted framework is.
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Ok... honestly I've tended to look at the moral compass of Good/Neutral/Evil as whom they are looking out for.
Good characters try to do right not just by themselves, or even just themselves and those they know but even to people they don't know and may never even meet. A good character will make a sacrifice they feel they can afford to make for someone they don't know, and won't necessarily expect anything specific in response.
A neutral character, has a closer scope. They aren't out to generally hurt someone, but they aren't inclined to get themselves hurt for someone who they don't know, and aren't invested in. They might be likely to help someone who needs a hand up, especially understanding they may have an opportunity to have that help reciprocated, and it isn't much of a risk to themselves. But a neutral person isn't likely to stand up and intervene in a situation where they know they would likely get hurt doing so, for someone they don't know, if there isn't something in it for themselves. The neutral individual won't con the local poor elderly widow out of her last money, but might relieve the local noble's children who have more than they know what to do with, as from their perspective, no real harm will have been done to them.
An evil character, they are in it for their own gain, preferably at someone else's loss. This doesn't mean they won't help others, but it will almost always be for a selfish reason. They can certainly care bout others, and have positive feeling for others, and these can drive a personal interest in making things turn out good for someone. An evil character can be madly in love with a good person, and that evil person may choose to champion many a cause of good, to gain favor in that love's eyes. They may also take any number of shortcuts to achieve things that will look good in their paramour's eyes. They may be trying to manipulate and control their love, or they may be truly trying to woo their affection. Or maybe they personally crave the approval of their parent, and will do anything at anyone else's cost to earn that approval. But the scope to which they look at the outcome of something is 'how does this impact me, and what I want'.
So Good tends to be highly altruistic... giving of themselves willingly for people they will never meet, and yet being perfectly happy with their choices. Neutral tends to be more local in perspective, concerned about practical things easily seen in life, not so much concerned about a species of creatures they have never met and if they might be intelligent and shouldn't have their livelihood stolen from them. I neutral person isn't likely to make someone else's life intentionally worse than they feel theirs is. There are lines they wouldn't want to cross, but they aren't as generous as the good character. Evil is primarily self-serving, but their actions may be hidden in otherwise potentially good or neutral facades, but details in the means may reveal a sinister undercurrent underneath their methods, especially when things get hard and hard choices have to be made.
Ok, the whole law vs chaos thing is harder to exactly pin down.
Chaotic, I agree shouldn't simply be 'because I want to now'. That is the cheap answer and it isn't very fulfilling.
I honestly think a chaotic individual could choose to be very honor-bound, if that was important to them individually. But they wouldn't be honor-bound by what their family expected of them, instead honor-bound by what they chose and an individual to pledge themselves to.
Your Chaotic Neutral bounty hunter example may limit himself to hunting down people he feels are causing distress to people he knows and at least a degree cares for. There might be people he would refuse to hunt down, on principle, feeling they did nothing to harm others abilities to live their lives and make their own choices. Beggars who criminally ask for money in the wrong places, he'd probably not hunt, no matter the reward. Marauding raiders killing families taking their things and destroying their properties destroying their remaining families lives. That might be worth a visit to see who is the better individual. They might not actually consider themselves better in a moral sense than the marauders, as they are living to the benefit of their potential loss... but they are living at others's expense, so they can't complain about others making a living at their expense. So the CN has no reason to fear that morally they are doing anything to the marauders that they wouldn't expect of others. So they are simply making their choices to make their own individual corners of life better for everyone in that corner, at least as how they would likely see it.
Lawful characters, in my opinion see things through external vantages, often in more concrete fashions than perhaps their own perspectives. They are inclined to potentially honor an external requirement, duty, or obligation over a personal one. I personally love this individual, but shall marry the other, for the sake of my family. So again, they tend to be more altruistic in certain matters, somewhat similar to my perspective on good. But law isn't about Morality, it is about tradition and/or law or expectations. Measuring an action based on it rather than the morality or impact on people in general (or specific individuals).
Chaotic individuals should prefer to measure things by their own perspective and the items they have chosen to value. They don't think other people's chosen values should impact them at all, unless by their own choice. They can choose to have a monogamous marriage with a spouse, and they can cleave to it, with total conviction if that is their choice. But it was their choice to enter into the relationship, and it had nothing to do with anyone other than yes perhaps the spouse. If the family expected a monogamous marriage, it still was not important to them. In fact, if the family expected it, and the couple wanted an open marriage instead, the chaotic couple would almost undoubtedly chosen to have an open marriage. However, the chaotic individual in a self-chosen monogamous relationship, is likely less vulnerable to a pretty face than perhaps the selfish, lawful soul who married someone they didn't really love, for the honor of the family. But again, I think the chaotic individual will all be about internal choices an values that they have chosen to adopt... and ones not very tied to other people's view, but instead their own.
Neutral people don't think that either tradition or individual choices trump specific choices all the time. I'd say they are likely to say that you should do your best to meet expectations from people you know, and worry less about expectations you didn't know about and especially from people you don't know. Some of it may be a bit more flexible lawful than lawful. I could see a neutral person seeing a broken promise, that never comes to the surface as, not a real problem. With a truly lawful person, the failure to meet a promise or expectation would come with personal grief, even if they choose to try to conceal or bury it. A neutral, if it doesn't cause a problem, they may literally feel it isn't really an issue. Of course, the chaotic individual probably would have never gotten into a promise they didn't want to keep.
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Before my game starts, I share my view of the alignment axes with the players and I take their feedback into account. In the end, I play the universe and the gods, so what I finally decide on the alignments holds true.
Note however that I see alignments as probabilities for what kind of action a character will do next. If Good, a Good action is most likely. Same for all alignment components. And Neutral is closer to 50/50 depending on circumstances.
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The perspective of a GM who runs alignment in (at least I think it is) an unusual way.
My mantra is; Alignment is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Alignment is the sum of your past actions, and does not have any bearing on your future actions.
To facilitate this, I don't tell my players what alignment they have. After they've worked out a backstory, I'll think a bit about what alignment seems to fit them, but ultimately what decides their alignment is the actions they take during the game.
When I run alignment, it's fluid. A CN character taking a good action gets a little closer to CG, and an evil action takes them a little closer to CE. If the action is Good or Evil enough, it may result in an instant alignment shift.
I find 2E enables this style fairly well. Even Champions are easily managed - I usually tell my players that as long as they follow their tenets and cause without trying to subvert it, they're probably fine.
Thank for the input everyone. This is what I'm throwing in the alignment section of the session 0 guide. Let me know if when you read that you see anything that makes you feel unwelcome at the table or feel like that isn't a game you could play in.
ALIGNMENT:
Alignment is not a focus in my games. It will come up but I do not intend it to remain in the spotlight or to add artificial constraints to the characters.
I run that alignment is largely how your character justifies their actions to themselves. There will be exceptions and alignment is also a cosmic force with some spells and creatures being inherently evil or good regardless of how they are used and what they do. But anytime an alignment question comes up the first question will be ‘how does the character justify their actions?’
Example:
Your character captures a criminal, collecting a sizable bounty. It was a complicated circumstance but in the end what mattered the most was that (pick one or more):
- Everyone is safer because of my actions. We are better off.
- I have personally profited from this. I am better off.
- I have maintained order, and did right by the rules.
- I considered the circumstance by its own merits, and did right by the individuals.
Since you've removed the alignment descriptions - is that meant to say these 4 statements are completely divorced from any specific alignment? Or are they just hidden from the description?
If the alignments are just hidden, I know I'd complain if the GM used the 2nd description to say that putting my own interests first is evil. I'd view evil as quite a bit more than just being selfish and point out that there are many evil actions that could be done "for the good of the community." (Especially for someone like a LE Tyrant. Is homelessness a problem in the city? Murder all the homeless people to make the rest safer and better off. Unmotivated Workforce? Torture the lowest performer every month - everyone will work harder to avoid being last and thus contribute more to the overall well-being of the town.)
I also dislike the fourth description just because of the vagueness of the term "the individuals." Which individuals? The criminal is an individual who wouldn't say you did right by them, they're going to lose their freedom and/or life as a result of your actions (depending on the punishment for a crime they'd justify). This is part of why I used the term "me & mine" in my description of chaotic - because it helps signify which individuals tend to get highest priority (generally individuals/groups the character likes/identifies with) rather than pretending all individuals get treated the same.
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- Everyone is safer because of my actions. We are better off.
- I have personally profited from this. I am better off.
- I have maintained order, and did right by the rules.
- I considered the circumstance by its own merits, and did right by the individuals.
I'm pretty sure point #1 is LG and point #4 is CG (assuming it applies, I agree its a tad weird in this specific example), while point #3 is LN and point #2 is CN, while there are none that really speak to being Evil.
I don't think that's exactly what you're going for.
I think a player saying their character does something because of their alignment is as ridiculous as someone saying their character fights because he's a fighter.
The classification is descriptive, not prescriptive.
That being said, a lot of the stupid behavior that you see with CN and LG characters is because players don't have a strong idea of what their characters would do. They are (charitably) convenient / (uncharitably) lazy ways of saying "I don't really want to be held responsible for anything I do. Can't we just attack civilians / obey orders without thinking too much about it?"
To be clear, if players agree that the answer is yes, there's no problem. The only problem is when everyone jots down IDK (CN) on their sheet but half the group is really NG and half is really NE.
If people choose an alignment, I'm happy as a GM to question a characters actions in light of their stated alignment, nd then propose an alignment change if they consistently behave a certain way. Their behavior should't change because their alignment changed - their alignment changed because their behavior was inconsistent with their old alignment.
For all its flaws, you can't do away with the alignment system any more than you can do away with the class system. You can't say "I'm not putting anything down for my class, you can determine what my class is by what I do" any more than you can say "My class is a wizard, I must cast a spell because that's what wizards do!"
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For all its flaws, you can't do away with the alignment system
I agree with everything you said, except this. Personally, I think you can get rid of the alignment system, but that's an argument for another day thread.
IMO, alignment follows actions, it doesn't dictate them. You don't chose an alignment and then act accordingly, even though that's technically how the game rules are written. As a GM, I really don't care what you recorded on the character sheet. Your alignment will reflect the actions you take and if I notice one of my players repeatedly and demonstratively emulating an alignment different than what is recorded, I'll notify them it has changed. In my experience, most players generally act neutral with good tendencies regardless of their character. Course there are exceptions with alignment restricted characters being the most common deviation.
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Alignment following actions is canonical in Pathfinder and Golarion. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Picking Alignment as a starting character is basically a part of defining your backstory, it's a statement of what your past actions have led to alignment-wise. That's important, but it doesn't really effect your alignment's possibility of change going forward, your decisions do that.
I once made a LN monk that specialized in crimes. I wrote her under my understanding of 'dharma', which in this perspective was 'the roles and duties of the position a person finds themselves in'.
A thief, for example, is bound to a certain set of paths by their actions- they can run away (and there by risk being hunted down later), they can hide their crime (in which case they have to risk discovery), or they can get caught and face their legal (or illegal) punishment (which might come up anyway if they fail at the first two options). In many ways, the first two options are their own form of punishment, since the thief may have to live in fear of punishment. You might have to deal with bounty hunters, or people planning to blackmail you when they find out your secret.
The monk would commit crimes, but only after carefully considering and accepting responsibility for the potential paths that would come from it. She thought that the most shameful thing was to take an action, and shy away from dealing with the consequences. If you want to avoid punishment, then you have to take the appropriate steps to do so.
For example- what if there is a witness? Do you eliminate the witness? What if the party can't stomach that? Then they better suck it up and come up with a new plan that lets them escape, since going only half way with the 'hide the crime' plan will insure they get caught.
And you better not whine when you get caught after having to change the plan. You need to save your energy for the plan to break out of jail.
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Good: Welfare of those involved; stopping harm important
"The people are safe."
Lawful: Community's welfare as its own entity/system.
"The town should be able to get back to normal."
Evil: My welfare, reward; harm irrelevant
"I came out A-OK, so why do I have any doubts about this?"
Chaotic: Of course feels remorse, they just stole somebody's freedom. A PC would have to reference either good/evil or their own freedom to justify capturing someone else. Unless, of course, the villain had been stealing people's freedom, then they needed to be stopped.
While chaotic is usually framed as just that, chaotic, on the alignment grid it can also represent individuality and promotion of self-reliance, free will, and being free of coercive systems/situations/etc.
Many use Chaotic as license for bad (harmful/amoral=evil) behavior, much like some people use "freedom" as an excuse for such license.
A lawful person, in turn, could use a person's community to judge a person, while a chaotic would lean toward measuring them as an individual.
And so forth.
ETA: Rules being rules are enough for an exemplary lawful person. Even if they chafe at them, they wouldn't want to disrupt the system by defying them. The system's too important, as is hierarchy.
Meanwhile a chaotic person would need rules to be justified, perhaps for each and every separate instance. Rules are simply another source of advice. Hierarchies just represent job positions, perhaps responsibility, not innate superiority or authority (which the person has to earn on their own).
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Chaotic: ???
Are the ??? placeholders or an expression of the perpetual confusion with which chaotic characters justify their actions? :)
I thought this approach is the default. Alignment is the label you receive for your actions, not a guideline for what you have to do. If your character sheet says CE and you helped too many grandmas across the street and built too many orphanages, the GM might say "I think your PC is actually at least neutral, not evil."
Also, your example reminds me of the dialog options of the PF Kingmaker game, where sometimes you have options that say basically the same but in different alignments. Which I'm fine with, that's the freedom of roleplaying and actually required to play different PCs of a party working together.
I think trying to define 9 alignments based on a single action/activity is going to be pretty difficult -- regardless of the action/activity. I tend to view alignment more as being based off a series of actions and how society would view you as a result. I do agree that CN tends to be the difficult one as it is often used by players as a means "to do whatever I want" which I don't think is really what it was meant to be. Personally, I would probably eliminate both LN and CN, but that's a different issue.
Now the problem of course is that "society" is going to vary from place to place. Just look at American History. The "patriots" of the Revolutionary War are revered in the U.S. but were "rebels" and "criminals" to the British. Both are technically correct because it depends on the point of view. More specifically, I think the bigger problem is that very few people will view themselves as actually being evil. There's always a justification in their mind. Terrorists typically do not view their actions as evil, but rather as righteous and necessary to support what is right (in their eyes). This of course, I think is why CN gets used as often as it does. Players know that they are likely to do some shady stuff by the time its all said and done, but will usually justify it in some way. "How was I supposed to know there were orphans in the basement of the building I fireballed?" "Sure I stole from that merchant, but he's really stealing from the commoners by selling shoddy and overpriced goods." "I didn't mean to kill that guy in the bar fight, but he started it after all when he threw a punch! That's what he gets for bringing a first to a sword fight right?"
All that said, I too tend to be pretty lenient on alignment when I GM for all those reasons. It really does tend to be in the eye of the beholder. Granted, some acts will definitely be clearly evil, but those are also pretty rare. Even the biggest of murder hobos rarely waltzes into town and just starts killing everyone. But, if I do think that the CN PC is really just acting evil but calling himself CN to avoid the stigma/penalties/whatever, I will certainly warn a player. Even CN will have a mix of good and evil in there. I suppose to go to the original example, the CN PC might not ever bother to try to find out if the target is truly guilty or not. The CN character just doesn't care so why waste time on it? The Evil character might find out the target is innocent but still won't care, or will still inflict cruelty, etc. Whereas the good character may well try to get the target out of it somehow. CG would just let him go, LG would probably try to petition the courts, etc. NG might try to analyze the likelihood of success in the courts before deciding whether or not to just let the prisoner go.
While it's difficult to boil down a character's behavior into two letters, it has to be done in the context of a game.
There are spells that harm chaotic but not neutral characters and detect good but not neutral characters, so as complex as it is, at the end of the day the answer to "Do I detect evil?" can't be a dissertation on the inherent evil of capitalism and Kantian philosophy of deity-based morality. It has to be yes or no.
While it's difficult to boil down a character's behavior into two letters, it has to be done in the context of a game.
There are spells that harm chaotic but not neutral characters and detect good but not neutral characters, so as complex as it is, at the end of the day the answer to "Do I detect evil?" can't be a dissertation on the inherent evil of capitalism and Kantian philosophy of deity-based morality. It has to be yes or no.
You have obviously never talked to someone from Cheliax.
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For decent overview I tend to like
Pathfinder (2e): Basics of Character Alignment
Basics4Gamers
https://youtu.be/xTSoM7JE4u8
It's been a few months since I watched it, but in general I agreed with most of it's points.
Personally I don't like moral relativism. If you allow moral relativism in a game someone can come up with reasons to justify nearly anything.
I really don't want to go there, but I think the Nuremberg trials successful determined that average people can be influenced easily by someone in a position of authority to do atrocious things.
For an approach to alignment based on the character's intent, I feel like there are basically two flavors to a "chaotic" justification to take an action:
- It seemed like the thing to do at the time (i.e. not a specific overarching principle or set of principles, but consideration for the complexity of a situation and taking a course of action based on more than the typical rules). Good actions or evil actions can both be justified that way, but the point is that it's not an arbitrary set of rules/expectations/society/etc. that's the governing justification.
This one is notably subject to some argument that it's actually "neutral" between chaotic and lawful, and more often than not I'm inclined to agree. This is really kind of the default place between chaotic and lawful. It's a good place to start the discussion on chaotic alignment motivations, though, because someone who does things because of the rules may see this attitude as their opposite. And indeed, many posters before me have suggested that "because I wanted to" and "because I make my own choices" are the epitome of chaotic. I generally disagree, though. If someone wants to act only for their own interests, or judge each situation separately, I strongly encourage them to just play NG/N/NE rather than chaotic. Doing things because you want to or because they made the most sense at the time tends to take into account the prevailing laws and often leads to choices to go along with those as the path of least resistance and best outcomes.
- It was specifically to tear down some restrictive structure (i.e., because the rules are stupid, because it's more fun to root for the underdog, because it makes a mess for someone else to deal with, because some people just want to watch the world burn, because slavery is bad, etc.). Again, there are good and evil variants of this, depending on the nature of the structure and the nuances of the motivation.
This one is kind of funny to describe as chaotic for a lot of people, and brings to mind unpleasant comparisons of the horseshoe theory of political perspectives - that it's not really an independent ideology but the rejection of one, so it's empty and purposeless and just another form of group society behavior and rules, like teenage rebellion where everyone dresses the same to express their individuality. But...in isolation, it kind of does the job of being an opposite stance to law. And for chaotic evil creatures that just want to destroy everything indiscriminately for reasons not particularly subject to mortal morality, it does just fine. For chaotic good, it may represent someone who is willing to accept many harms to society for the sake of avoiding lesser ones that impinge on freedoms that they perceive as worse, while still working to better the situation. I think there are a lot of analogues here, like the fight to decriminalize drugs - some people support this because of the evidence that the war on drugs is worse for society (probably neutral, by my logic), and some people just want people to be able to get high because no one should be allowed to stop them (chaotic).
Personally I don't like moral relativism. If you allow moral relativism in a game someone can come up with reasons to justify nearly anything.
There area bunch of variations of moral relativism that are 1 - too nuanced to really bother getting into and 2 - I don't know well enough to meaningfully do that anyway.
So I'm going to take up your second sentence. I'll take your view as moral relativism means that alignment doesn't restrict your choices, and say, okay, sure, why not. What does that mean?
Players coming up with ways reasons to justify nearly anything is a nonsense problem. 95% of the time, alignment doesn't mean anything. Where it does, it's just kind of an arbitrary category (damage) that isn't really more impactful than the difference between cold and electricity.
And for Champions - focus on the tenets. They basically solve the "which alignment loyalty thingy is more important here" problems.
So if your players are doing things that you think are outside what can/should be justified by alignment, just tell them their alignment is changing. Almost no character will be impacted by it.
But maybe you don't want to do that. Let's look at that.
So in this moral relativism conundrum, alignment is a reflection of choices, not of consequences. If the characters are bending their interpretation of alignment such that they *mean* well and are good people when they do bad things (or whatever mismatch between intent and action you're struggling with), that doesn't mean that everyone else will see it that way. There are plenty of ways to connect the party's choices to the events that follow without being all, "you did an *evil* thing so everyone knows you're *evil* now and you've grown horns" like it's a video game. Just - give them interesting consequences so they have an opportunity to reflect on it. That's really how behavior changes.
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There area bunch of variations of moral relativism that are 1 - too nuanced to really bother getting into and 2 - I don't know well enough to meaningfully do that anyway.So I'm going to take up your second sentence. I'll take your view as moral relativism means that alignment doesn't restrict your choices, and say, okay, sure, why not. What does that mean?
Players coming up with ways reasons to justify nearly anything is a nonsense problem. 95% of the time, alignment doesn't mean anything. Where it does, it's just kind of an arbitrary category (damage) that isn't really more impactful than the difference between cold and electricity.
And for Champions - focus on the tenets. They basically solve the "which alignment loyalty thingy is more important here" problems.
So if your players are doing things that you think are outside what can/should be justified by alignment, just tell them their alignment is changing. Almost no character will be impacted by it.
But maybe you don't want to do that. Let's look at that.
So in this moral relativism conundrum, alignment is a reflection of choices, not of consequences. If the characters are bending their interpretation of alignment such that they *mean* well and are good people when they do bad things (or whatever mismatch between intent and action you're struggling with), that doesn't mean that everyone else will see it that way. There are plenty of ways to connect the party's choices to the events that follow without being all, "you did an *evil* thing so everyone knows you're *evil* now and you've grown horns" like it's a video game. Just - give them interesting consequences so they have an opportunity to reflect on it. That's really how behavior changes.
The bolded is incorrect. In my experience alignment has very powerful meaning and within any one individuals mind they have a clear idea of things that encapsulate good and evil, and order (law) vs chaos.
The problem is that different people hold different ideas about that.
And in my opinion, for games to work everyone but the GM needs to shelve their ideas on it and ask the GM how it works. The GMs ideas should be the determining factors, because that essentially represents the cosmic forces of the universe. D&D and it's derivatives work best when you have an absolute moral constant within the universe.
Also, you seem to be veering into personal attacks for which you have no basis. Perhaps attack isn't the correct word, but you're definitely making assumptions.
I almost always make characters that are neutral neutral or lawful neutral (probably my own personal alignment) unless the class is required to have another alignment and let the personality of the character develop and see where it goes. I'm very much okay with my character's alignment changing through the campaign and sometimes avoid playing characters with restricted alignments so I'm free to do whatever I want without mechanical repercussion to my character.
However, when I've GM'd I've had players be thoroughly resistant to me tell them "That's a pretty seriously evil act, enough to at least stop you from being good and probably straight to evil. Do you still want to do it?" I never just tell my players they've executed the action and their alignment has changed, I warn them about what they are doing. Some players are deliberately going down an evil path. Sometimes people just want to be edgy. Sometimes people just want to do evil things without repercussion.
95% of the time, alignment doesn't mean anything.The bolded is incorrect. In my experience alignment has very powerful meaning and within any one individuals mind they have a clear idea of things that encapsulate good and evil, and order (law) vs chaos.
I should have added the word "mechanically." 95% of the time, alignment doesn't mean anything mechanically. I'm such a rules-robot that I neglected to frame that statement properly. I agree that people have super strong opinions about it, that just doesn't change the actual impact on the rules. I also forgot to call out spellcasters restricted by their deity's follower alignments, so it could easily be more like 80-90% of the time.
Also, you seem to be veering into personal attacks for which you have no basis. Perhaps attack isn't the correct word, but you're definitely making assumptions.
If anything came across as an attack, I'm sorry for making you feel that way. I certainly didn't intend anything in there as an attack. The point of calling out the few places where alignment matters mechanically was to encourage you to feel comfortable handling it however worked best since you likely won't break the game doing so. Calling it a nonsense problem messed up the tone, so sorry about that. It certainly can be a real problem, but in my view it's the same kind of problem as when you have a player that's just a jerk and doesn't want to cooperate because "it's what my character would do." Like, it's not the alignment that's why the player is justifying their actions. It's that the player is a jerk or socially inept and doesn't care or understand if everyone else is having a good time. I probably got too aggressive in how I wrote it there because I was really thinking about the analogy you chose, since it's tangential to the issue of player actions. Candidly, I found that analogy really distasteful. Again, I'm sorry for responding to that in a way that made you feel attacked. That's on me.
Assumptions, yeah, I'll own that outright. I'm not a mind reader, so I made guesses at what the challenges you've faced, based in large part on one statement (people can justify anything) and the possible causes for that statement. I offered my opinions for possible ways to handle some of that, and tried to offer two different paths depending on how comfortable you were just flat-out changing characters' alignments (since, as I mentioned, it mostly doesn't matter mechanically if you do or not), but they're always going to be oversimplifications because I'm not at the table and I don't know you or your players.
It sounds like you have a good grasp on them, though. The only other piece of advice I have is the dumb obvious one; if your players aren't happy with some non-mechanical aspect (and frankly, the way you're saying you're handling it sounds fine so I don't know what their deal is), that's one of those "have a conversation out of game and try to work it out" things that's the catch-all rule for handling basically any disagreement. It's pretty much impossible to adjudicate morality as a GM without putting your own opinion on the subject there. What the GM thinks is a good or evil action (or chaotic or lawful, which is more subject to table variation) is going to be what the way the world works.
But, mechanically, there's not a lot where alignment actually matters (and you can make it more/less important, or add some nuance, and the GMG has relevant advice there). I really like this, because I think alignment is kinda dumb in large part because there's so little consensus and people feel so strongly about it. I figured I might opt to remove it from the game entirely, but I don't really need to because the actual impact is fairly small.
So uh, keep doing what you're doing, except please don't compare players choosing and justifying their actions because of what character alignment is written on paper to real-world genocide by people "just following orders."
95% of the time, alignment doesn't mean anything.The bolded is incorrect. In my experience alignment has very powerful meaning and within any one individuals mind they have a clear idea of things that encapsulate good and evil, and order (law) vs chaos.I should have added the word "mechanically." 95% of the time, alignment doesn't mean anything mechanically. I'm such a rules-robot that I neglected to frame that statement properly. I agree that people have super strong opinions about it, that just doesn't change the actual impact on the rules. I also forgot to call out spellcasters restricted by their deity's follower alignments, so it could easily be more like 80-90% of the time.
Also, you seem to be veering into personal attacks for which you have no basis. Perhaps attack isn't the correct word, but you're definitely making assumptions.If anything came across as an attack, I'm sorry for making you feel that way. I certainly didn't intend anything in there as an attack. The point of calling out the few places where alignment matters mechanically was to encourage you to feel comfortable handling it however worked best since you likely won't break the game doing so. Calling it a nonsense problem messed up the tone, so sorry about that. It certainly can be a real problem, but in my view it's the same kind of problem as when you have a player that's just a jerk and doesn't want to cooperate because "it's what my character would do." Like, it's not the alignment that's why the player is justifying their actions. It's that the player is a jerk or socially inept and doesn't care or understand if everyone else is having a good time. I probably got too aggressive in how I wrote it there because I was really thinking about the analogy you chose, since it's tangential to the issue of player actions. Candidly, I found that analogy really distasteful. Again, I'm sorry for responding to that in a...
It's okay, it's very easy to make a statement that sounds one way in your mind and read another way by others. Attack wasn't really the right word, but it did kind of feel like you were making assumptions, but not it comes across as you were making suggestions on how to handle things. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
As to my post 2 ago, my statement wasn't an analogy to player actions, it was literally a statement about human beings and how under differing conditions people can find many ways to justify even the most atrocious actions, so that they don't feel like they're evil. "I was just following orders" is an open route to evil. I bring it up because I've had a player try to justify murdering NPCs that they were suspicious of without any evidence. And their logic was "if we get the wrong person we can always resurrect them". The same player also suggested wiping out entire villages trying to eliminate a problem and reasoned that killing everyone and then resurrect them later after they figured out who the real culprit was, was the better thing to do.
As to why moral relativism is bad for a TTRPG...well because everyone needs to be on the same page. Otherwise players will not have a coherent idea about what kinds of behavior they can be expected to avoid or carry out (if they care about maintaining a specific alignment).