Alignment and Resolve

Alignment is one of those things that has never really worked for me in role playing games, indeed they seem somewhat antithetical to the whole experience. Attempting to define an individual’s moral code into one of nine groups seems to defeat the entire purpose of playing the role, and whilst it can be a useful guideline for players who don’t have a well defined character in mind, the rest of the time it just comes off as arbitrary and obtrusive.

In Fourth Edition D&D this is compounded by reducing the number of alignments to five and making ‘unaligned’ a catch all group for almost every character in my group. In short it is irrelevant to us and has little impact upon the game, and this is beginning to bother me.

On Sunday when our group encountered Taluil there was, in my mind, a certain kind of conflict going on for the characters. Half the party are dedicated to the Raven Queen, and here was a cleric of the Raven Queen euthanizing the desperate and needy in order to aid those who still had the will to live. The lack of information on the Raven Queen means you could interpret this many ways, certainly he claimed to be administering her will. So was he an evil character who was killing innocents or a desperate priest making use of what few resources there were to keep himself and his followers arrive? Perhaps that’s a little sanitized since when I say ‘resources’ you have to substitute ‘corpses’.

Caradoc and Du’nn’o clearly took the high ground, albeit in an overtly violent way and clearly they saw this as an evil act, but what if they’re wrong? What if they killed a cleric and mutilated a priest on a false assumption? I cannot penalise the characters for acting out of alignment because their alignment is ‘Unaligned’ and thus provides no framework within which to interpret their actions.

I’m tempted to replace the alignment system with something a little more useful to our group, which will still have relevance within role playing encounters but won’t chain them to a single course. Vampire had a good system for managing this, granting willpower to characters who would act with their chosen conducts. This is a simple enough system to adapt for 4th Ed, granting either an unlimited action point (which persists beyond an extended rest) or a point which grants some other kind of bonus (shrug off an ongoing effect, automatically pass a death save etc). In game this would represent some kind of self belief, or ‘Resolve’*, which allows them to push beyond their limit.

I’ll put this to the masses and see what we come up with, largely characters already seem to have certain conducts to which they adhere, though I’d be tempted to give Du’nn’o and Caradoc one involving punishing ‘Heretics’ after their latest debacle.

*The idea of ‘Resolve’ is specifically stolen from Gareth/Caradoc’s now defunct Bleach RPG, where characters regularly endure beyond the limits of the body by strength of will alone.