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.

Alignment and Roleplaying

Since the early days of Dungeons & Dragons alignment has been a key factor in the creation of characters, it can define classes, alter people's perceptions and change the way players play the game.

Is this a good thing?

As a mechanic alignment is at once, like many things, a useful tool and a terrible limitation. At a pinch it gives a good indication of those parties opposed to the player characters, a chaotic good character might be opposed by the evil wizard whose plans he meddles with, and the lawful constabulary who cannot abide his methods. As a games master it gives me an instant touchstone where I can set up oppositions and tensions before the character has even really acted. That having been said it also binds the player into acting a certain way, and whilst alignment can be changed it does bear with it some penalties, especially Paladins, for example, who lose all of their class abilities if they stray from their alignment.

Having no alignment system allows characters to act based upon their own intuition, acting in character or simply as they themselves would act. The problem with this is that without any guiding factor it also allows players to act arbitrarily, saving lives at one moment and torturing and killing at another. Whilst this might have a place in some campaigns (with an interesting, well played character) in most it just serves to break the illusion of the game world.

So is there a happy medium?

One option is reward based roleplaying, although this comes with its own caveats. In such a model we reward the players for acting in character, perhaps giving them certain qualities that they can aspire to (I believe many White Wolf games do this) and rewarding them with experience or new skill dice for consistant roleplaying or character progression. The problem with this idea is that it artificially manufactures roleplaying, players start acting in character in a way that is noticable in the hopes of scoring that precious experience that will give them the edge.

In the end alignment and roleplaying is always a contentious issue and it's about knowing what your party want. If they enjoy the smash and grab gameplay of a dungeon crawl then giving them an alignment is not such a sin since they are already treating the game mechanically, playing to win rather than for a narrative. This is entirely fine, but if your party wants some involved roleplaying then let them play their characters as they want and their commitment to the story will make them act accordingly.