Yes. I agree. Moar 1 hours.

I had an argument with my friend because he wanted to rule 3/9 planes of Hell (we had conquered it) as a Neutral Good Character.

damn levels loss penalty? ya they struck that out in pathfinder at least and pretty sure 3.5.

i think it was Nietzsche that said that no one considers themselves evil.

but ya i could not use the alignment system as concrete and would give my character play room or others play room but ya paladins you kinda have to make a bit more rigid than others

countermonkey.com? lol not sure if these warranted a website but alright hope you get it nice and spiffy soon still kinda barebones atm.

Orc situation, my buddy Josh’s answer: Well, I’m the only one in the party who speaks Orcish, so I’m going to start rolling diplomacy checks to bring them over to worship of my goddess, Desna (he’s playing a bard). You said they stood down, so they’re not hostile? Okay I only need a 7 or better to succeed at this, and I’ll have Kith use Fortune on my roll so that I get two chances at it and can take the better result.

Okay, with the orcs in the Indifferent category, we’re going to take the group into custody, making it extremely clear that any shenanigans and Naraina will track them down to execute them, and have Maia making sure everyone’s healthy and well fed. The next day, I’ll do another diplomacy check to get them over to Friendly, and we’ll begin the process of getting information about other Orc tribes in the area that we can go after, taking similar converts there as well. Since that should take most the next day anyhow, we’ll go ahead and make another diplomacy check to get them to Helpful, and that should put them solidly on our side.

From there, we’ll work out an alliance where we trade with the orcs in exchange for taking down bandit groups in the area for us while we’re off winning more orcish hearts and minds.

I don’t know if you’ve heard this one before (even though you said you heard all the arguments there are) and I don’t game nearly as much as you do, but shouldn’t it come down to trusting the DM and not being an asshole?

What I mean is, if your players act according to their alignment, he should be a good enough DM not to fuck them over. If the whole party is lawful good and they tie up the guards and leave the orc women alone, they acted in character and maybe he shouldn’t follow up on the encounter if it’s just a raid that’s irrelevant on the plot. If those same lawful good characters slaughter the women and baby, that’s out of character and if he tells them and they say fuck it, maybe then it can come back to bite them in the ass like say, a war party of orcs found the ruins of the camp and tracked the party for revenge.

I like alignment too and much for the same reasons you do, but other than acting in character it’s not something to think about too much or argue about. In the end the DM decides what are the consequences should there be any or not in the module or whatever.  Nitpicking stuff like that ruins the flow of the game, which is what it is, not an ethical debate about real life. Good players and DMs will work together so that everyone has fun.

I guess player alignment has a double meaning then since you see the same personality traits in the guys around the table and the bad players are the assholes that ruin the fun.

Says it all: http://www.mightygodking.com/images/ac-ds9.jpg

I really never understood this argument. Killing is killing
no matter the age. If you think that you can kill a regular orc and that’s
cool, but then why stop to think about killing either a woman or a baby. You’re
just going to do it later to the m in their “life”. The second your
character calls a distinction he should just quit adventuring and become a monk
dedicating his life to peace and harmony. Simple as that.

You can kill babies and still be good, just look at abortion doctors.

From what I’ve heard with that last Counter Monkey, god I wish I was introduced to roleplaying in one of your campaigns. I hate my group, they don’t take anything seriously and hardly any campaign gets started, let alone finished.

Awesome video. Keep ‘em flying :D

P.S.- Was this in any way inspired by last Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead?

Alignment fights pfff…. worst fight that ended a game was when after our characters 1st fight with a fair amount of goblins and a couple of goblin leaders (i can’t remember how they’re called right now) and bringing half of us near death the dm said and you now reached the town a player cut him off and said wait a min what about my exp.The dm forgot to tell us it was going to be after quest completion exp. and most players started to argue about it,the game ended there.

When i played a sorcerer with dragon bloodline (Pathfinder) i was a lawful good character.
Aaaand of course rest of my party went like, lets make deal with a balor and get demonic power, whereby me, the only good character goes against them.

It ended that my character turned into a gargantuan gold-dragon and fought against them. We were level 16, so it was justified, but i did still die.

On the note of not allowing you play character, my DM pretty much said “you wouldnt kill that undead alchemist that tried to indirectly kill you, because you are lawful good!”
Rly? Ye, i get it was because we wouldnt split the party, but seriously?

hum.. well, I guess this all basically applies to reality.
At some point, you just gotta accept it, and move on.
Homosexuality, rasism, just let the hatred go and live with it, because nature won’t change by mere arguments.

Thank you Spoony for bringing this up, and thank you for a wonderful time of philosophy.

Have a good day!

Alignment as a label that describes how your character normally acts is what I’ve always been in favour of with regards to alignment and that’s all I’ll say about the system as a whole.

My first character actually ended up Chaotic Neutral after starting out Chaotic Good. There were two major items I think that caused the fall. One was after a battle with a group of hobgoblins, one of them was captured. Now, we knew there was a force of hobgoblins in the nearby area, we were out hunting them, in fact. So we definitely can’t let him go. We can’t take him back to town until after we’ve found the camp as well, by which time he might have escaped and alerted them. 

So first we tried to coerce him to tell us about the camp. Naturally he refused. My character was fully opposed to him being tortured, though. But she also wouldn’t let him go free. So when the time came to decide what to do – she slit his throat. He was an enemy who would be killed and would kill or betray them at the first opportunity was her reasoning. No shift yet – though it was pretty rough treatment.

The last big thing was an attempt to refuse arrest that went horribly, horribly wrong. Her backstory was that a corrupt lordling had gotten her to perform at a party and afterwards and first tried to seduce her, but got pretty forward with her. So she sliced his cheek open to get him to back off – naturally resulting in her being thrown into prison. She escaped and blah blah blah, but the lordling happened to come to the town we were currently in the middle of rescuing. A knight and a group of guardsmen came to try and arrest her – she paniced and tried to escape but it didn’t work and we pretty much ended up butchering them. As it turned out the intentions of the guardsmen were evil, while those of the knight were just to uphold the law.

Yeah, that alignment shift is pretty reasonable, I though, but I also thought her actions made sense, which was the most important thing. And even as a chaotic neutral she wasn’t that crazy, just did what she wanted.

We also had the prisoner dilemma almost happen, except with trolls. I say almost because one of the guys resolved it by running in and murdering them because trolls = evil. His character was kicked out and he rolled up a new one he preferred anyway.

I’ve been here. Even more so because in our group the DM DOES allow you to be evil. The main issue I have though is when the DM doesn’t warn you. You mentioned it very briefly, but when a cleric, paladin, bard, barbarian, or other classes change alignment, you also lose your powers. At least until you “atone” for your actions. I’ve never experienced the level loss, but I have lost my powers before. I was playing a LN crusader and the CE fighter was going to kill someone who had surrendered. We knew full well that he’d come after us again, and kill us given the first chance he had, and didn’t stop him. I immediately lost all of my powers. Why? Because I didn’t stop the CE person from killing the prisoner who probably would have become good once we told him about what we had learned regarding his sister’s death. I was floored. Not only had I not gotten warned about needing to stop the fighter other than being asked “He’s charging through your space, are you going to stop him?”, but I had lost my alignment and my powers over something that arguably wouldn’t have come across my character’s mind. But you know full well that since the DM brought that up, it probably would have been that the guy might have become good. Granted it might not have happened too, but you’re getting punished regardless. I hate that.

I’m in a group doing Pathfinder, and I’ve got a player who’s Neutral Good, and he’s playing it like he’s Chaotic Neutral. However, he’s justifying everything he does as being within his rights as a PC of NG status. I’ve never had to do the level loss thing, but I might have to bring it in if he stays that way.

I think it is funny that you and Nash, another contributor to TGWTG for those unfamiliar with him, both put out videos basically saying to find the middle ground on certain subjects and stay clear of others.  As I get older, now in my early 30′s, I can’t help but become less dogmatic about some things; but, when it comes to the things that are so inflammatory (alignment and politics) I just have clear rules to stay away from them.  Like Spooney said you just hear all the crap there is to say, pick up all the messes, and try to make amends with people in the aftermath.     

In 3.x alignment shifts did take place, but they removed the the level penalty.

Speaking of alignment arguments…

Drizzt Do’Urden, a CG character from a race who is wholly CE is a prime example of how not every member of a race follows the norm. Though, it really is a rarity.

As for Paladins, my most stupid death was of a CN halfling thief being mistreated by a LG pally. I was new to the group, and my character was tied up by the pally, because he didn’t want me to steal anything overnight. figuring that I would be able to escape the rope easily enough, he tied me dangling into a tree to make it harder to escape. I screamed about it, which was giving away our position to the enemies in the distance. He decided to knock me out with a sheathed sword and rolled. He TRIPPLE NATURAL 20′d me, KILLING ME. Fuck, I hate paladins. At least when my head flew off because of it, my head rolled into the enemy camp causing the enemies to attack and kill the lot of them….

As for DM’s arguing alignment changes,

I once played a CN human/natural-born werefox rouge. (Seeing as werefoxes are “always CE,” I was able to convince my DM to allow me to be CN, using Drizzt Do’Urden as an example of how not every member of a race must be forced into the book’s alignment.) We were supposed to kill the head guard in the guard house because the evil baddy of the game would kill us all if we didn’t. (he was trying to take over the kingdom, and captured us into do it, as he already had a network of assassins getting into key places, except for 2 crucial places, or something like that…) I decided to shift into my animal form and bite the head of the guard, to get the other guards to kill him. (I ended up tossed in a well, and almost drown, but somehow managed to survive.) My party decided to wait it out for a few days for the problem would sort itself out, but I had a bit of a problem. I accidentally turned half the town because of what I did.

My DM demanded that I become CE for my actions.

I argued that my actions were a selfish way to get the job done with as little danger to myself as possible. (we were lvl 5, the guard was, like, lvl 15 or something. Suicide missions suck.) It was NOT my goal to turn half the town, just the one guy, so others would do my work for me. I just didn’t care about the guards getting hurt in the process. But I figured they would be able to handle it. (They should have too, it was botched DM rolls that caused it to backfire….) My logic of the situation was well within what I believe CN to be capable of, and finally got my DM to not force change my alignment.

Unfortunately, my character was banished to never be found by the evil baddy or he would kill me without second thought. I had to roll a new character at that point, which was kinda crap. =>.>=

I’ve not played anything like d&d in 12 years or so–and was never into the roleplaying aspect of it (or any game)–but I’m pretty sure I was always chaotic neutral (or maybe chaotic good). Not because I wanted to be a dick, but because I just like playing a character who REALLY likes smashing things. And that’s all. Screw the law, rightness, wrongness, whatever–I’d be loyal to my party and just smash whatever I could, whenever I could.

Maybe my understanding of alignments isn’t so good, but I was under the impression that true neutral characters were the worst(?) to deal with. Got any stories about them, if they’re as much of a strange and difficult lot as I’ve been led to believe?

In my games we have the Alignment check, If your character wants to go against his alignment he rolls a check DC = how far against their alignment they want to act. 

They fail the check then they don’t act against their alignment, it’s simple and puts control into the dice, which if you ask me is where the control of a D&D game should be anyway.

I just remembered one of my most fun moments in Exalted. I was playing a long time character, a Dawn Caste (Warrior). I drew him as this sort of paragon of what it meant to be a hero. I had been playing for a couple of years, racking up about 200 XP (A crapload in Exalted terms), and Oak was now a near-unstoppable badass, even by demi-god terms. In Exalted, there isn’t alignment per se, there are four Virtues (Compassion, Conviction, Temperance, and Valor), rated 1 to 5, with 2 being average. By this point, Oak was sitting on a Five Valor and a four Compassion.

Well, being Solars, we’re being hunted two full legions, under the direct control of Cathak Cainan, a semi-retired General of The Realm. We’re trying to get away, when Cainan orders the burning of a temple with townspeople, knowing that Oak would move to save the people. Well, unfortunately, one kid did die in the fire, a sort of poignant moment our ST had been getting ready to lob at us, one of those “Yes, this man is EVIL” moments. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite ready for Oak’s reaction.

I immediately make two virtue checks, that being a Compassion roll and I get 4 successes on 2 dice, and a Valor check, where I get 5 successes, so a near legendary, and a legendary respectively. I look to the group and go, “Guys, book it. I’ll hold them off as long as I can, and catch up as soon as I’m certain you’re safe from the Legions.”

This… is a blatant lie. As soon as they call their actions to flee, I look to the ST who believes I’m about to do a selfless sacrifice. Instead, I go, “I’m pulling my bow, and I’m gonna Jackie Chan it up the building to get a sniper spot. I’ll pop Arrow Storm Technique/Accuracy without distance combo, and I fire until I run out arrows. I am calling my shot for every soldier’s right eye, and once I’m out of ammo, I summon my sword, and pop Racing Hare to push through the hole in the front I created. When initiative starts, I pop five-fold bulwark stance for the scene.”

What proceeded to occur was an orgy of violence that has yet to be repeated in our group. Over the next few hours, I proceeded to rip apart two legions, including airships, and even warstriders (exalted mecha). I didn’t even stop there, because eventually people broke and ran, and I tracked every one of them down, using survival, investigation, and sorcery, until I found Cathak Cainan, eveyone who followed his orders that day already dead. God, it was a fantastic moment. I don’t think the ST ever really forgave me for that.

Hey Spoony!  I won’t argue alignments, but I do want to point out something you said: “Nobody in real life thinks of themselves as evil”.  Actually, many do, or atleast choose other words like “I’m a monster” or “I’m just a piece of shit”.

There are serial killers that have identified themselves as “monsters” while showing virtually no remorse over what they’ve done.  This is usually due to them detaching themselves from their own humanity in order to do the terrible things they do.  It’s basically the opposite of the serial killer who instead de-humanizes his victims to justify his actions (seeing them as things, animals, stupid whores, it puts the lotion on its skin), but it is essentially the same end result, to detach oneself from all moral responsibility to do what they want to do.

This issue is often brought up on the show “Dexter”, a man who identifies himself as a monster regularly.  I wouldn’t call Dexter chaotic evil because he DOES have a code he follows and DOES try to inact his own brand of justice.  But there was one episode in the second season where a woman called him out basically saying “Dexter, this ‘monster’ thing of your’s is just a pathetic excuse to not take responsibility.  Oh of course I did this, I’m a monster.  You shouldn’t be surprised, I’m a monster”.

There are real life people that think this way, that have some drive to kill, rape, or something else evil, but are so detached that they don’t even try to justify it one way or the other, they just act, not even caring enough to think of themselves as a human being.  Many wishing they infact were not, then they’d have all the justification they’d need.

I saw one special about a serial killer who’s first act was stabbing a 12-year-old boy he never met before, and just watched him bleed on the ground with no sign of emotion.  When the boy, crying, asked why he did that, he casually responded “I just wanted to see what it was like”, and walked away. Incase you were wondering, the boy survived the attempted-murder.

So in conclusion, there ARE people out there who consider themselves evil or monstrous, or long to be that way to live without any conflict or responsibility.

It has been years since I’ve gamed, but the best way to avoid that kind of problem was a combination of creating characters either as a group or at least with close regard to the other characters / composition of the group AND working out a sort of group contract or charter.

Nothing legalistic, just summing up a consensus you reached before the campaign.
Things like “We want an action packed game, not hour long planing sessions over how we break into this Saeder-Krupp research facility”, “We will not sell out other PCs”, “Benny will not attempt to build a world-eating monster” or how alignments, if existant in the system, will be handled, and other stuff.

Doing that beforehand really helps avoiding a lot of pitfalls. Not all, there will always be some grinding halts, but quite a few.

So for this prisoner dilemma a useable compromise would be “Surrendering enemies get one chance. If we face them again, we push them out of the airlock.”

C’mon Spoony, Insano is evil for a reason. For SCIENCE!

Great story as usual, always enjoy these!

It’s a really understandable dilemma, people have varying viewpoints and some people feel more constrained by their personal viewpoints whereas some are trying to be in-character and some think the situation changes things. There are no truly right answers and virtually any point could be argued.

The part where you said that “no one calls themselves evil” reminds me of my psychology teacher, she said the same thing. I don’t completely agree, but I think I understand what you’re saying at the same time.

Excepting situations where I’m really role-playing, and detaching my personal views somewhat from the character, I feel like my viewpoints are closest to true neutral, in that I try to avoid extremes.

I really like these anecdotal videos, I’ve never actually sat down and played D&D(or whatever the overarching term for it is, regardless of setting) but it sounds really interesting. Honestly I can’t even fathom some of the situations you’ve talked about, like with Shadowrun and the drug-injecting water guns and the situation with Tempus in Thieves’ World, I’d love to get into something like that as much as you sound like you have.

Indeed :D, I love me some Zero Punctuation.

Alignments are just tools to help you to roleplay your character. It’s in the fucking book! Both the PHB and the DMG agree that characters may not always act accordingly to their written alignments. That’s normal and should be expected. Also, if the character keeps acting outside of its alignment, the DM can make the player to change it, because he’s clearly not acting to the alignment.

What I usually do is this: extraplanar creatures that embody alignments (like celestials, devas, demons and devils) ALWAYS act to their alignments. That’s what their ARE, after all: in 3rd Edition, that’s the reason why spells like Protection Against Evil affect them more strongly than humanoids. Other creatures, however, not only can have a different alignment than what it says on the Monster Manual (a character who metagames “all orcs are evil because it says so in the MM” should be addressed by the DM), but even if they are from a specific alignment, they can act “out of alignment” sometimes. Clerics, druids and paladins, of course, would be called on it by their gods (because they got fucking divine powers to enforce the deity’s ideals and portfolio, after all) and maybe lose their power or have to penitence, but if the Lawful Neutral wizard says “well, the law says I cannot cast a spell on the city, but fuck it this time, I need to cast this spell here and now”, I’d let him do it. If that becomes and habit of his, hey, maybe you are not so Lawful anymore, so maybe you should go to True Neutral instead; please change your alignment.

If a character is doing something completely outside of his alignment (like a Lawful Good character agreeing to kill the orc babies), I would ask the player how his character justifies taking that course of action to himself. A Good character should not think “because it is easier”, or “because they are all evil”, but maybe the player can think or something else to justify it. If the justification sounds good, I’ll let it slide that time. If he does it again, time to change alignment!

Bottom line is, and this is specially true for humans, alignment should not be set to stone. A Good character probably should not flee from battle or hide in fear while his friends fight and eldritch abomination; but being a coward once does not make you instantly evil, neither being good makes you immune to using the Shaggy-Scooby Solution to a problem, unless you are a 3rd Edition paladin, of course (you’re immune to fear, after all).

I can’t resist doing this… but, you know how to solve the classic “paladin x thief” dillema, don’t you?

“I’m not that kind of thief”

Ah, Spoony. You confused me. I figured you were talking about the Prisoner’s Dilemma (note the possessive), which refers to the game theory thought experiment – it basically sums up as this (from Wikipedia – I knew what it was, but I couldn’t phrase it the way I like):

“Two men are arrested, but the police do not possess enough information
for a conviction. Following the separation of the two men, the police
offer both a similar deal—if one testifies against his partner
(defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates/assists),
the betrayer goes free and the cooperator receives the full one-year
sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in
jail for a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a
three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or
remain silent; the decision of each is kept quiet. What should they do?”

This Prisoner Dilemma (note the lack of possession) sounds equally interesting though.

I don’t think D&D’s alignment system is sophisticated enough for a moral dilemma. If I’m going to approach the Orc Prisoner Dilemma, I’ll have to temporarily ignore that. Otherwise there isn’t a debate.

Here’s my thinking: I’m pretty certain that our current court of law doesn’t sentence people to death because murderers are now somehow no longer a human life; they do it because the murderer will potentially go on to kill others (ie: Joker vs. Batman), and life imprisonment is expensive for the court, and possibly not preferable to a prisoner who might become suicidaly miserable in jail.

Basically, it isn’t about morality or anything out of a book. My mode of thinking is just about saving as many lives as possible. The guards are entirely capable of ass raping you with their swords as soon as your back is turned, so I’m okay with killing them (if not willing to do it myself: there’s still some reasonable doubt that they will learn their lesson. Leave it to the group’s paladin). There’s still some doubt here, so I’ll understand if anyone disagrees here.

The pregnant women, not so much. Assuming they are well into labor, I don’t think any of these women want to risk miscarriage trying to fight you, or exert themselves too much trying to get help from other orc encampments. Unless the pregnancy is not too advanced, let them live.

Their babies are clearly no threat, and can even be taken prisoner without loosing too much food (babies don’t eat much, though are fussy). So here’s my solution: The paladin will kill the guards, and any able-bodied women. Leave the really pregnant women in the camp (tied down and near a pile of food, if you feel like letting the nearby village they’ve been sacking handle it). Finally, kidnap the babies, and let the human village decide what to do.

Sound good?

Spoony, that’d be Eric Knowles and Peter Ditto who note that in Preference, Principle, and Political Casuistry,

How much XP does an orc baby yield?

The simple solution between the orc and the party is ignored by stating that RACE is a blurred distinction that occurs within a species. Orcs are quite obviously a different species of animal. They should not exhibit many “human” qualities, and any degree of communication between the two should be made impossible by the DM. Species which survive using the same resources, do not co-exist within the same habitat without conflict over those resources. This conflict should be recognized and created as a narrative for the party before any such example, irregardless of any alignment issues. In such situations it is not good to save the orc, because they will kill grow up to kill your people. It is not evil to kill the orc because they are in conflict with your species, its like saying that ugly alien is cute, even if it’s race is destroying your countries, burning your farmlands, and murdering everyone.

Narrative trumps alignment, and often creates far more realistic and profound stories.

Here’s a possible solution to the dilemma – claim Lawful Neutral as your alignment. Killing women and children isn’t in your contract.  If the guards came after you later, well that would be on them, not you.  Self-defense is alignment-neutral after all.

Alignments are one of the main reasons why I stray from D&D as a system. But, just like Spoony, I love Planescape so very very much….

My take on the whole dilemma is that before the game begins, hell before even characters are created the DM and all the players need to sit down together and discuss this and come to a consensus on how they are going to be treating alignments in the game. Once everyone agrees only then can you start the gaming process. And if anyone breaks the agreement, then they should be called out on it. Simple as that.

Oh, and if you just CAN’T agree on how to handle the situation? You probably shouldn’t be gaming together.

Now, the way I like to see alignments is not so much as something that dictates how you act, but something which labels your acts. Let me try and explain it – you do not act nice because you’re Lawful Good. You’re Lawful Good, because you act nice. This means that I don’t think alignment change should infer any penalties and, in fact, I think it should happen a lot more often.
Characters who are not Celestials, or Demons or Modrons or Slaadi or any other extraplanar race should have their alignment constantly changed in response to their actions. (For example, look at the Planescape: Torment video game. You start neutral and just go from there) So just because your character starts the game thinking of himself or herself as a Neutral Good all around nice person, it doesn’t mean they’ll remain such during the game.

Now, with the extraplaner characters who originate from a specific Outer Plane and are thus creatures who embody an alignment, there the change should happen really, really hard, and after much dedicated effort from either the character or from outside forces to change their alignment. A demon or devil can rise, as much as a celestial can fall. But BOTH those examples are extremely rare and only happen in extreme circumstances. And really, why are you allowing your PCs to play such characters in the first place? Do you LIKE headaches?

I love stretching alignments.  I usually play a fairly brutal character, but as I play monks, paladins, and samurai-type characters, they tend to be lawful-good.  I simply use rationalization.  In the orc baby dilemma, it’s simple: the children are innocents, the men cannot be trusted, and the women are helpless.  In that view, my lawful-good character says “Cage them up, leave them plenty of food, and send someone to collect them.”  Now, my brother on the other hand, he plays chaotic-good.  He’d take them as prisoners and let them die in an “accident” sort of thing, such as we wake up to find the women and children gone and the men dead.  None of us would be able to say who killed them, but the players all know it was my brother.  When he plays paladins, which he has done, he always goes with the “convert and kill” method.  He ties them up, demands they convert to good, and no matter what they answer, he kills them afterward.  If they convert, they will have no chance to relapse, so their souls are saved.  If they don’t, then they’re evil and must be destroyed.  As far as the alignment change system works, I use points.  Basically, you give a point value to alignments to say how strictly you adhere to them, like a lawful-good character who really doesn’t love the law, but follows it because it keeps him out of trouble.  He’s still lawful because he won’t break the law, but he doesn’t force others to adhere to them if they choose not to, and he’s accepting if there’s no other way.  As for the chaotic-neutral, I hate that alignment for one reason: assassins.  I DM’d a game where two players both designed ruthless cut-throats, one modeled after Riddick, the other after Artemis Entriri.  As they couldn’t join the party as evil, they chose chaotic-neutral, and proceeded to do whatever they wanted, when they wanted, just for the sake of they wanted to.  While they never burned any buildings down, they did murder city guardsmen to see how long it would take to discover he was missing.  They had a mission to do that required knowing the response time, though, so I couldn’t say it was an evil act, it was just an uncaring one.

I’ve never played tabletop RPGs so I don’t know how it goes there, but when it comes to video games, all I have to say is: chaotic neutral FTW.

Oh, I just remembered about the “Knights of the Old Republic”-series.
They had a pretty cool System of Alignments too, where you could either turn to the Good or to the bad side, later you could influence your partymembers too.
I HAD to play a Jedi there, because the cruel actions I had to take to become a Sith almost broke my heart sometimes.

There are those who consider themselves evil but put all good things under that category.
Also there are people who think they are evil inherently (origional sin).
Or those who feel they’re evil because they don’t think being good is impossible in reality (some extreme altruists).

After watching your other Counter Monkey videos I got my old RP-group back together and we started to play again (we lost 1 guy, since he moved away 10 years ago, but the rest of us were still good friends). In the first adventure, before the group even met, two of my players started to kill each other :) It could have been worked out, but the Drow (I told him, that he had to come up with a good reason/backstory on why he is going on adventures weeks before the game startet, if he wanted to be a Drow, but he didn’t) didn’t listen to anything I said about the situation in the game and so he acted just stupid and the other player didn’t want to back down either. (I made a mistake to, but it was not the main reason why it didn’t work out) Following that “epic” start it ended with the Drow getting brought to justice for being a Drow later in the adventure and a week of “Who’s to blame” in Skype while we played World of Tanks.
I agree on most of the things you said about alignments but there is another thing that came up during my planning of the campaign: It’s basicly the about the role of the DM:
Does the GM have to forge the group together or does he “only” have to provide the world and circumstances the charactes meet and let them go from there? It’s the simple Gameflow by pushing the players vs. getting your campaign fucked up by people who are allowed to do almost anything.

Why can’t the adventurers just take the food from the orc village, and use it to feed the prisoners? Surely there is enough to feed everyone, now that most of the orcs are dead.

The problem is poeple thinking Aligment too strictly. It is a pointer. Goal, aspiration. Guideline. NOT a hard, fixed rule. This seriously bugs me with people who have such a rigid view of it:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0490.html

Well it’s easy to say that true evil does not live among us, but there are cereal killers rapists people who put their children in a microwave. Some people are sick twisted and cruel, and it’s naive to say that they do not exist. They have always existed, and they will always exist. Some people are just fucked up.  Not every soul can be saved and not every soul is a good one. It’s easy to say everyone is good from the comfort of your chair in your living room, but there are some sick fucks out there who do just get a thrill out of killing someone or raping someone.

Anyways I submit that a Neutral good character is just a template. Like you said it’s just a guideline. In my mind most Soldiers are Neutral good. Unless Soldiers also act as city guards, then it’s more lawful good, but then they can be really fucked up. If it’s law that the soldiers go out into the city and rape women, or kill any infants that don’t stop crying when they pass by. They might not be inherently evil, that’s just the law. The law might have been written by someone who was evil, but that does not make everyone under them evil by association. Now the difference is a Lawful good guard of this regime would kill and rape without question. The Neutral good solider/guard is more likely to recognize that the law is not really good, and might pass up some opertunites to murder infants and rape women. Now the trick is, if that guard is put on the spot, AKA a bunch of his buddies are out having a good time, and decide to hit up a house to rape and murder babies, generally they’d probably do it to save face, and not turn their friends against them. Chaotic good would recognize the law as the evil it is, and attempt to stop it. Most of your super heroes are actually more chaotic good than lawful good if you stop and think about it. Goku for example is EXTREMELY chaotic Good. In my perspective Chaotic good characters are the “most” good. Doing good regardless of the law.

If I am playing a good character I usually go for Neutral Good. Someone who recognizes right and wrong beyond the extend of the law, but generally will try to obey the rules as long as they are not too obstructive. A Solder that gets orders and bends them around to acomplish the mission without compromising his own set of morals is kind of how I view it and play it. In regards to the prisoner dilemma, this hypothetical soldier would kill each and every one of the orcs and slaughter the babies. This is someone who fights in wars. To destroy all the enemies, and even children will grow up to fight against them. So Zero tolerance among even the most stalwart and “good” soldiers is kind of how I envision that era of time.

But I digress. I actually don’t really dig the whole alinement system. Having a complex personality shoehorned into a very specific “thing” really screws with the experience epically if you’ve got some hard ass saying “Good characters can not kill anyone who surrenders!”. So I use them as general guidelines, but mostly I just ignore it. I also HATE the arguments over it. This is just my perspective on it.

i think PC aligment is stupid and mostly only to be used for clerics and paladins and again at that point it is to merely guide your char in a general fasion. but for NPC aligments is a great tool for the DM to remeber who this charcater is meant to act and how he would respond in some situations

Alignment is great for a general “how is this character,” But, yeah, specifics can change.

I always felt that it was a good way to build a general feel for various characters/classes.

Take the bard for example (using 2nd ed rules stating that in some way they have to be neutral, since that made sense.)

A Lawful Neutral bard would be the Propagandist.  Songs and such would be about how great the king is, how virginal the queen is and all sorts.

A Neutral Good bard would be more of the “Motivational speaker” type.  All about telling people about how to be good and great and realize your potential and the like.

A Chaotic Neutral bard would be the Rockstar.  It’s all about the life style, the cheers of thousands, sleeping with groupies not matter gender or race.  Live hard, die pretty.

A Neutral Evil bard is the Sell-out.  They build songs that most people like, being able to get as much gold in the taverns and palaces as mortally possible.

The True Neutral bard is the Artist.  They’re the smarmy, beret wearing hipster jerks who write because of their tortured soul or whatnot.

Now, doesn’t mean that the Rockstar can’t write some love-song, or the sell-out might write some ballad about the queen, but, just their general repertoire.

Other classes can work on this.  A lawful evil fighter would be a mercenary, whereas a lawful neutral fighter might be a soldier or man-at-arms.  Doesn’t mean they can’t have side projects, but just their general activities.

I don’t really have much against alignements, or at least the “old” ones. You know where there were 3 main tiers and than 3 separations of that (Lawfull, -standard-, chaotic). I believed it gave people enough room while actually giving those less “capable” of rp’ing some directions as to how to act. The new system (v.good, good, unaligned, evil, v.evli) not so much. It suffers from the opposite effect, it doesn’t grant helpful direction and to be honest is basically useless at this point. 
But that’s just my oppinion :).

As to the prisoner dilemma itself… Hmmm… I don’t think I’ve ever had it with any of my parties, mainly cause we’re mostly balanced on terms of what we’re doing (apart from an insane warforged cleric O_o) with and to people. If we ever encountered such an issue I think we just breezed through it for that very reason.
The issue I encounter and that bugs me greatly is the situation where a DM is kind of enforcing certain alignment on the players by his vision of the world. Let me explain that, I play a thief in one of my games. While he’s usually a good guy he IS a thief, that means that whenever he sees an opportunity to make some money, he will lie, steal and cheat his way into it. Now I’m perfectly ok with punishment if my rolls blow, it just happens happens I tried to pickpocket and rolled a botch “oops”. Too bad.

Issue starts when I want to perform some complex con and the DM just stands “in the way” openly stating that whatever my rolls will be it won’t matter “because the people you’re trying to con are just too high level” etc.
This can get really annoying because it doesn’t allow me to play my character the way I would want to. If I get caught and punished, so be it! As long as it was my rolls getting me down OR the fact that I did something SO DUMB that the DC is simply too high for anything but a crit.
But don’t put a player in a position where you just outright say “no” to any of his ideas that involve doing something morally questionable for his personal gain.

As a final explanation I’ll tell you a story. my thief and his party visited a city of mages so we decided to spend some of our money and get our stuff enchanted. To get a new armor I decided to sell my dagger (since I got a new one in a dungeon just a session earlier) to the enchanter. I got a receipt for the armor and was told to arrive next day to pick it up.
Instantly an idea popped up into my head. I have mages in my party and I’m a skilled forger, I got the proper paper (very specific type) and created a nigh perfect forgery (rolled something around a 36 my char had a +17 to thievery) and than bluffed my fellow mage, evil as that might be, into casting some magic on the forged document that is similar to the one on the original that I got for the armor. Mage rolled something good (24ish) and I was pretty much ready to do this thing when the DM just outright stated that he won’t allow it no matter the roll. Not wanting to start a pointless discussion with the dm (who is god after all) about that kind of thing and keeping in mind that the preparation itself took 20 or so minutes, I asked a different party member who was trained in a arcana to look at the receipt and determine the quality of his buddy’s enchantment. As the DM stated it was not good enough (and it never would be).
While I understand why he did it it still kinda bugs me. Plus it wasn’t the only time.

Anyway good show Spoony :) hope you got more stories to tell us.

But…animals almost never fight to the death. Not unless they’re given literally no other choice. Animals that aren’t crazy with rabies or some other sickness will always prioritize survival above all else, and avoid fights where they’re clearly outmatched, and flee if they are surprised or fail at their own ambush. Wolves that attack people who aren’t either sick, young or elderly are very hungry wolves indeed, for example. 

I must say, you’ve given me a lot to think about.  I’m working on a Pathfinder conversion of the Elsewhere Incorporate Universe, which has a slightly different alignment system.  How would a Void Monk react in comparison to a Chaos Gadgeteer?  Did the Glyche Corruption change the alignment of the Rimstakkens who suffered the most through it?  I had written it off before, but now I see alignment is definitely something I need to consider going forward.

You really should consider putting all of the Counter Monkey stories into a book, Spoons.  Not only would it serve as an entertaining read, it would also be a handy reference and instruction book for new players and people wanting to DM.

My roleplaying group has had many arguments because of alignment. Now that some of us have played for about 20 years we know to avoid the alignment battles. For instance, my friend has a dnd character who is a paladin and my character is a neutral good rogue/wizard. When my character spots an opportunity to gain wealth or magical items through not so legal means, he weaves a lie about going scouting or preparing for the next adventure and when the paladin says “ok, you go do that” I sneak and steal to my hearts content. Even though the paladin might suspect something, he does not have any proof against my character and he knows that my skills are quite useful so he lets it slide. Noone gets hurt, everybody stays friends and all is good. Though sometimes the arguments cannot be avoided. This always ends up in a fight that leads to the death of one or more characters.

Anyway, love you Spoony! Never stop counter monkeying!

This is quite similar to The Lamia Father.

 Ok talking about alignment totally reminds me of the Pyro-Kynetesis/Inquisiter I drew up once. He would use the Exhalted feat that turns spell like abilitys into alignment based attack. SO the Bolt of fire that is the Pyros Bread and butter substituted for the paladins detect evil ability……BY BURNING PEOPLE IN THE FACE! If they were good they recived no damage. If they were not good then they were obviously evil and deserve what they get.

   I never played this character for obvious reasons.

I remember a scenario being given to a paladin in Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide: Where she had a test that involved her dealing with an orc child. And she felt it was unfair that her test involved that kind of dilemma.

As I played a paladin in that scenario, I actively questioned her alignment and she expected me to go the same route as her, treating them like inherently “evil” creatures.

Did it not even cross her mind that, a show of mercy might change the child’s alignment, its viewpoint? To try to encourage other orcs to form more peaceful tribes?

What do you do? This is what I would do.

Half the classes I play, be it a Chaotic Neutral Rogue or a Chaotic Good Fighter or Lawful Good Paladin: I would show mercy to their lives. They surrendered, so get the weapons away from them, and anything after that is up to the party, but honorable fighters wouldn’t kill a surrendered foe. I mean, we DID slaughter over half their tribe and looted them…

Honor, Mercy, or just plain “balanced dickery” of a rogue. You got the exp, you weakened their tribe enough to not be a threat to others, you got the loot, there’s no real need to slaughter the kids.

Unless there’s an evil character in the party.

But the whole dilemma is this: “They tried to kill us”. But I would shake my head at that, because “We DID kill them. A LOT of them.” Without actually knowing the history of the tribe itself and its relations with neighboring areas (this could be a 500 year old blood feud thats lost all meaning and has just become “the way things are”), I couldn’t be honest in my reasoning there.

Hell, all it could take is one band of really good half orcs to fix this situation.

And this whole situation gets kind of awkward if there is a half-orc in the party, or someone in the party has bad past history with orcs (or worse, with this particular troop)….

Alignment can be argued for hours, but thats because they’re always relative to the group, the characters and their own personal alignment and histories.

I pity the old paladins, in a way.  Looking back, the entire class seems like such an elaborate trap.  They get awesome evil-smiting powers that anybody would envy, and all the player had to do in return was be an obnoxious prick.  Make one wrong move with a harsh DM, and the paladin suddenly becomes a substandard fighter for the rest of his life. I’m pretty sure Keldorn in Baldur’s Gate 2 was meant expressly to remind players and DMs alike that you could be a righteous champion of justice without having a stick up your butt about it.

Meanwhile, I don’t have an alignment story, but a similar tale of DM railroading…  A rather large Dragonlance group I played with in high school had a guest DM step in one week while our regular one decided to relax and be “just a player” for the night.  The very FIRST thing he did after learning about our characters was demand our elven bladesinger and dwarven battlerager fight to the death over irreconcilable racial hatred.  Unable to be dissuaded (claiming that the rulebooks stated characters of those kits were especially proud members of their respective races), and unwilling to let anyone else try to break it up (claiming that they should have tried to kill each other when they first met), we could only sit and watch while our two best fighters threw dice until the battlerager was dead and the bladesinger an inch away from following suit.

Then fifty draconians break into the tavern where this impromptu bloodsport was happening.  In the middle of Palanthus.  We spent the rest of the night throwing dice while things died, and our DM spent the next night calling us all up and apologizing, telling us to pretend none of it happened for next week.

Interesting thing about alignments and assassins in particular, in my 4th edition group there is a new character who’s a Drow Assassin and worships Vecna, but is technically neutral/unaligned (although he does lean more towards the evil side) my group nearly outright refused having him in because the others are some form of good, and they view assassins and also Drow as irredeemably evil (no, they haven’t heard of Drizzt Do’Urden, yet). Now I have something to direct them towards to not be so picky about alignments.

“These are people who have no conscience, who do not care about how much
damage they do, how much they hurt people, they only care about their
own self-gratification; pure selfishness.”
These people usually are in fact brain damaged or sociopathic. Psychology may not be a hard science, but there are some truths within it.

There was this one time in my game where we attacked a lizardfolk settlement.  In our case, our party agreed to disagree.  The paladin actually left, refusing to have any part in what was going on.  My cleric was unwilling to abandon the party, but saved as many civilians from the other party members as possible.  Our ranger, whose backstory included a special hatred for lizardfolk, went on a killing spree.  And our barbarian, who had taken some damage, took his vampiric sword and proceeded to use every civilian he could find as a healing potion.

How am I only the second dude to notice the Zero Punctuation Yahtzee Imps are to Spoony’s left on the book shelf.

I didn’t know that some games punish your changing alignment. Most characters that I have changed via interacting with other player’s characters and enemy characters.  

Honestly, like you said in the “story”, alignment can be a fascinating tool… I kind of find that the more interesting situations is when you corrupt the ideals of the stereotypical alignment… as in making characters who are indeed “lawful good” as the villian and still remaining within their alignment.

Here’s a great example – the Soulcalibur game series…

Everyone is fighting over these two swords – Soul Edge (which represents pure chaos and evil) and Soul Calibur (which represents pure justice and good). The thing is, however, that commonly, nature demands balance… if evil is destroyed, another evil must take it’s place or the world is destroyed… and vice versa…

…and that’s exactly what can happen in Soulcalibur. If Soul Edge “wins”, it will destroy every life form and consume it’s soul as nourishment, as it’s pretty much the harbringer of death and destruction. So, you’d think “well, Soul Calibur represents justice, so it should win”, right? Wrong. Soul Calibur is ABSOLUTE justice. You wonder what that means? What could possibly be ultimate, absolute order and justice?

Silence.

If Soul Calibur “wins”, it will freeze the world, crystalizing every life form so it can’t rebel and potentially bring upon a new chaos. Despite Soul Calibur being essentially the embodiment of “Lawful good”, it’s just as dangerous to the world as the “Chaotic evil” Soul Edge… and, in the most recent game, it ends up being the true final boss, manipulating and corrupting it’s wielder to do it’s duty. When the wielder rebels, it fights the host for control of his body.

Having good and evil take legitimate roll reversal can be absolutely genius if done right. The absolute good’s plan to bring order to the world (thus ending it) being thwarted by evil, which inadvertedly saves everyone. Pretty awesome when done right =3

Isn’t James Bond lawful neutral?
“I’m just a professional doing a job.”
“So am I”
*BANG*

My goooood, Spoony. Not to be offensive, but you talkkk sooo muuuuch. If your voice wasn’t amazing, this would be a pretty horrid video. But MAAAAN.

A friend of mine and I were trying to get into this Pathfinder game with this guy from work, and we did this Paladin/Thief friendship thing. Do you think that may have been wrong, or is it sometimes acceptable for two different classes and character types to be friends, if given the right reason or circumstance?

I wish I could find people who didn’t take the game so serious that they kicked me out because of school meh.

Yep, definitely had alignment arguments. In fact, we had several game sessions that revolved around it happening in game. My favorite was when my character (neutral drow wild-magic sorcerer) with goals of becoming good, and my friends lawful evil wizard had a duel over it. The other characters in the group were a true neutral barbarian (low INT/CHA and easily influenced) and a true neutral druid. The campaign revolved around his wizard attempting to cause the party to fall and become evil, while my drow was trying to form them into a force for good. After the barbarian was driven to murder an innocent by the wizard, I decided to step in, and we had an epic battle over the soul of the group. I won the duel (thanks to a bit of timely healing from the druid, who the wizard was being a dick to earlier) and earned the wizard’s grudging respect. Eventually this caused him to selflessly endanger himself to save me from a deathtrap and got him converted to neutral.

there have been games where the dm banned evil characters that I’ve been in, and there was one game where everyone had to be an evil alignment, but general rule of thumb for me and several of my friends who make quite good dms, you have to EARN the right to be Chaotic Evil

 Is Alignment the way character view themselves? Or some measure of objective judgment? Is your antagonist paladin “Lawful Good” because he thinks he acts for good in the boundaries of the law? Or because Fighting against nature gods and their unholy servants is Good no matter why you are doing it?
Because Spoony seems to describe it once this way and once that way.

The thing that always bothers me about Robin Hood being the Chaotic Good cliche, is that in the story, he was a law abiding man under the old King.  Which means he was Lawful Good before, and will be again.  Does the difference of Chaotic and Lawful change with the laws of the region you are in?

This reminds me of a time I was taking part in a Pathfinder campaign. Kingmaker to be exact. We did have a prisoner scenario of sorts. We had fought these bandits raiding the trading post we were staying at, killed their leader, and the rest surrendered. Now, we had thought of simply killing them, but one of our party members, a lawful good Cavalier, said they should face trial. So, we agreed, and set up a sort of fake trial for them, with me (the half fiend) as the judge.

Now, this was essentially a fixed trial. We were planning on offing these guys anyway, and were only doing it to appease the Cavalier, who by the way had taken on the role as their defence. Over the course of the trial, the prosecution changed three times, and the defence managed to convince me to sentance them to community service, working at the trading post, in exchange for not brutally murdering them. I then fined the prosecution (all three of them) for somehow losing a trial fixed in their favour.

While it did stop the campaign for a bit, it was fun to do. It ended up being one of the most memerable parts of the campaign. Sure, we could have killed them and then gotten back to exploring, but sometimes the prisoner scenario can result in some pretty funny stuff.

Listening to this, it’s kind of a good thing alignment wasn’t prevalent in the Thieves’ world setting. Else that game would probably have suffered. I don’t recall personally encountering that dillema, mostly because my crew is pretty much hack’n'slash all the way but I do recall that one DM trying to screw me over because of alignment. But that was that one guy. Really depends on how “By the book” your group tends to be.

At the ten-minute mark, I mentally compare and contrast orcs to Daleks.  Both sentient, both hellbent on your destruction; though Daleks aren’t born (indoctrination is like an upload from a hivemind), orcs are indoctrinated.  And yet…isn’t it obvious, in this light, that they are both oversimplifications of real-life intelligent beings?

You point at the book, and you realize the book is laying out the guidelines of that oversimplification for you.  As an oversimplification, you end up finding contradictions at the seams–the Newtonian physics equivalent of ethics.

I’d say my trouble with the roleplaying concept is how that oversimplification alone lets you objectively justify social dominance when you can’t do that in the real world.  We have that oversimplification because the next-best choice is to present both the genetic disposition and upbringing of every single NPC worth having a conversation with to determine their moral druthers.  That’s more than a lot of role-players can handle or keep track of.

Suppose you accept the alignment rule. Can there be exceptions to the alignment rule? Should there be? Maybe one should take a liberty or two from the book. But then…if there is one exception, why aren’t there many? In real life, this argument shares a tangent with wondering how a benevolent God can let children starve and rot of natural causes in Africa.

My suggestion?  Accept that resident gods are hardening the hearts of everyone in the game universe, or don’t play.

Another suggestion: I took a political survey once that placed me on the dimensions of ‘left/right’ (‘nobody left behind/right to what’s ours’) and pragmatic/idealistic.  I thought it described how I made decisions in a far more functional way than ‘good/evil’ ever could.  Also, I think my answers and my alignment could shift considerably over a period of months, not decades.  I guess that’s not a very fun system, though.

Keep on the Borderlands, Spoonyone.   Kobold commandos and Orc babies.

i was watching this with my friend last night and i said to him
i dare you to put us in a situation with the prisoner dilemma (as a joke for our dnd group)
but i thought it would be an interesting way to see how people in our social group act in dnd games

Guess the main problem is the very simplistic model that is alignments. It first of all assumes there is just one moral code for the entire world you’re playing, calling the extremes of that good and evil. This is convenient and easy in most cases, but it brings up the heathen vs paladin problem. I’d go for a different approach: 1. Primary moral code (specific religion, guild’s code etc.), 2. Sense of morality (how strongly they care about their primary moral code, which also conincides with intolerance towards different moral alignments), and (optionally), adherence to general/civil law. I think you could do a lot more with that sort of “alignment”. An extremely devilish character would in this case be something like “Satanist (however you want to call it), strongly moral, not caring about civil law at all.” Result in game: People will have to think about the different moral codes of the characters in their game, which is a lot more fun (and applies more to actual life) than talking about “chaotic good vs lawful good”.

There’s a way to get around the Chaotic Neutral (Do whatever you want for whatever reason) cop-out. Tell the player upfront that if they are playing a Chaotic Neutral player that every 5-6 turns you, the DM, gets to decide what that player’s actions are, whatever they may be, or however detrimental that action may be to the group. 

And make a 1D8 chart to help you. 1 to 4, the action is somewhere between slightly beneficial to the player and something that’s incredibly beneficial to the group and 5 to 8 the action is detrimental to the player alone or incredibly stupid that puts either players or the mission in immediate jeopardy.

I agree with your points and I think using alignments as a guide while expecting players to explain action that may lie outside a character’s alignment is a great way to go.

I’d say, keep alignment out of the game world, it’s not that hard. Spells like detect evil don’t pick up alignment but evil deeds instead, as in, a character who is technically lawful evil but hasn’t really done much bad won’t register. Or throw it out altogether since it’s a plot breaker.

Same with class names. He wants to be an assassin but the class that would fit isn’t called that? Guess what, nobody goes around and says “Hello, my name is Baldrick, I’m a neutral good fighter!”. Doesn’t matter what’s on your character sheet, call yourself what you want IG.

You are in my way sir, you are lawful good.

I created a situation similar to the prisoner dilemma in a Old White Wolf game I ran once.

The PCs were playing OWoD Mages, and had come across a young teen Marauder who had turned the Anime and JRPGs he enjoyed as a child into his own personal reality.  For those who don’t know, a Marauder in OWoD is a mage who unconsciously forces their vision of reality on the world around them.  They are often considered wildly insane, and are declared by the book to be hopeless irredeemable.  While my Marauder was not intentionally destructive (he saw himself as a typical JRPG hero), his realities often caused significant collateral damage to the areas around him.

While caught up in the Marauder’s world, the PCs eventually came across a Technocracy team who were hunting the Marauder.  Technocracy are basically a collection of technocratic mages who try to force reality to adhere to the laws of science and nature.  The Technocracy threatened the PCs to assist in killing the Marauder, else they would turn their resources against the PCs. 

It is at this point where my group splintered.  Two PCs who were more familiar with the OWoD meta decided it was best to kill the Marauder, because they believed (as the books state) he was irredeemable, and that the Technocracy was too dangerous to slight.  Two other PCs (those new to OWoD) sympathized with the Marauder, claimimg he wasn’t too different from themselves, and would not be bullied into murdering a child who might just need some guidance by some mysterious organization.

The argument lasted for at least two hours, with neither side willing to give ground.  Eventually, the group began secretly conspiring with me on how they were going to either protect or assassinate the Marauder.  At the end of the story, the PCs had become so disillusioned with each other that all party cohesion vanished and the campaign ended shortly afterwards.

I know people always blame t he Paladin but that can sometime be fun. My friend who got me into D&D is vocal that a Paladin does not have to be ‘lawful anal’. We had fun when he get to play in a campaign once; I had a Neutral Good Rogue with skills in slight of hand, and a huge dex and cha. He was a pacifist in a way; He would prefer to talk people out of fighting because he wanted to be the words best thief, and to quote a book ‘A really good thief should not have to kill’. He COULD kill, and not be sad, but he tried not too (made for fun combat).
Anyways, part of the party dynamic was how the Paladin insisted I could stop stealing since we were making money adventuring, but I liked to keep in practice. He never turned me in, because I always targeted rich people, who had money to spare, never poor people, but he’d try to find my ill-gotten gains and return them. My devil-may-care attitude also rubbed him the wrong way.

Then again, this probably worked because he looked at my rogue, asked about his personality, and decided to make a foil for my antics. :)

My friend and i are planning to start a new campaign entirely based around having extremely conflicting personalities in the group, to see what will come out of it. It started when one day i said i wanted to play as a chaotic evil witch as my next character, so she decided to go as a fanatical paladin just to put these two characters together in a group.
Until now i have played a chaotic neutral rogue and i guess i did choose this alignment because i could justify pretty much any action. You might call it a cop-out but then i wouldn’t be able to choose an alignment because his behaviour is all over the place and he doesn’t really have a motivation or purpose. In this sense i prefer the 4e system, so you’re entitled to choose “unaligned” if you don’t think your character is strongly inclined either way. 

Personally I’ve never had a issue with Alignment. Like you said it’s best with the extreme situation that things can be forgiven. I only have a problem if a paladin is walking down the road and burning downing houses that don’t open for him but not in the case of Orc babies.

Again I’ve never really ran into any issues. The only time I did was when the group were fighting Wererats and when the leader died the others surrendered. Basically the guy was an extremeist and convinced the others to start a war with the surface and one of the characters wanted ot kill the rest, but the others said for him to leave them, he agreed and there wererats caused no harm.

In fact when ever they come across them, they are reminded that allowing those to leave alive made them respect the group and no plans for revenge. Eitherway, I have seen threads where they argue over it though.

Funniest discussion about alignment was in my first D&D game, me and a bunch of other first timers were playing and one of the guys had rolled a LG Dwarf Cleric.  So the first thing he decides to do is try and pick-pocket somebody the conversation went as follows

DM: Um your character wouldn’t really do that.
LG: What do you mean?
DM: Well you’re lawful good which means you’re a good guy and you uphold the law, you generally wouldn’t steal from people.
LG: Aww so I can’t steal?
DM: Well you can but you’re going to lose favour with your god (Moradin I think), you’re going to lose your magic.
LG: Well that blows, but I’m using loot to further my work in my god’s name so wouldn’t he be ok with that?
DM: Not really he, he just doesn’t work like that he’s very strict.
LG: Well are there any Dwarven gods that would be ok with stealing?
DM: Not in any of the books I’ve read.
LG: Ok so say I steal from this guy what would I have to do to get my magic back?
DM: Well you’d have to attone either by making a donation to the church or completing a quest.
LG: Ok then I’ll just rob this guy and then deal with it later.

Sadly he failed to pick the pocket, got caught, beaten, and imprisoned by the guards, and had half his money taken as a fine.

This same character later bound and decapitated one of mine (my fourth with that group) because I was playing a kind of prankster illusionist and he didn’t find it funny.  Yeah he didn’t stay lawful good for long; in fact by the end of the campaign the DM had adjusted his alignment so much to better line up with how he played his character that he was now Chaotic Evil.

d

In this same campaign we have a true neutral rouge that has been acting very evil. In my opinion, true neutral is the most cop-out choice, because you don’t care for either good, evil, law, chaos. Your just there doing what ever you want. The rouge in our party is doing alot of evil stuff. I’m actually surprise our DM has not made him change alignment yet. We just ran into the prisoner dilemma last session. We captured the leader of the Kobold raiding parties that had been plaguing a small city for months. He was koed in the fight, but not killed. Our ranger and rouge then got in an argument about what to do. When we made camp, that night the Kobold died from having his throat slit. We all know it was the rouge but we can’t prove it. Our Lawful good Monk has been waiting for him to slip up because he is also Half Vampire for some reason. So basically we have an alignment battle and my C. Neutral Bard is stuck in the middle of it.

The best solution is to have NPCs or henchmen with the group, that way the players can leave them to babysit the captives until they’ve got time to deal with it. After that, it’s out of their hands and if the henchmen kill them, that becomes a story hook unto itself.

 Considering that the nature of this video struck something of a chord with me, since I have recently remembered a particular event in one of my older sessions I played in, I decided to share something of it.  Of course, any story worth telling has some degree of background information required.  The game was a fairly high-powered 3.5 session, with a fairly new (and far too permissive) GM which I think may have been Gestalt.  The party consisted of a Half-Fae sorceress (yours truly), a paladin of some race or another, a wizard who completely stole my planned PrCs that I’d discussed with the GM, and a cleric who loved him some Divine Metamagics.  Then there was a fifth character who was introduced later, self-described as a necromancer with a “different moral system”, none of which we actually came to see, given the result this character’s actions had on the game.

Further description into my sorceress is as follows: during one part of the campaign, she grew tired of all those crazy adventurers she found herself traveling with and left them because, well, some of them were jerks and the GM had proposed an idea for a hook involving her getting kidnapped and used as a reagent (bled to death into a spring) in a ritual in which to taint a dryad’s grove along with a delightful pile of NPCs who hadn’t survived.  So after the rescue, she was the only one who prayed for the souls of those dead in such a traumatic matter, and saw to burying them herself, to the chagrin of the paladin and cleric (both good), who didn’t care in the least because they were NPCs.

We were doing typical heroics: fighting baddies, taking all their stuff, and solving puzzles when we started fighting devils.  Cool, I thought, as I hadn’t before been in a 3.5 game that actually reached the point of fighting devils on an even standing.  Plus, there was a good amount of fun loot to be had, although the Helm of Opposite Alignment was something odd to find in a random trove.  But it was all good ’til we came to some succubi.  At this point, the cleric and wizard realized that succubi had good components for crafting so started harvesting from the dead and, if I remember correctly, the living.  Hell, they took a succubi prisoner for this very reason. Then the necromancer came into the game.  To the best of my knowledge, the party had captured a castle or fortress or some sort of large stone fortification in the countryside and the cleric (through Leadership) was forming a trading organization from it, it was weird.  But either way, before embarking on an adventure we were all standing in front of it waiting on the necromancer, before they arrived with the Succubus… turned Deva through the HoOA which was forced onto her while she was bound helplessly… and someone prevented from teleporting I know that there was a reason because I pointed out that she could just do that at-will even bound to the GM behind the scenes.

The result of which was a two-week argument on alignment, as myself and others felt that using the HoOA on a sapient being which is the embodiment of their very alignment and has no choice into their alignment is an evil act.  The other half disagreed, as Succubi are evil so it doesn’t matter what you do to them and anyway it was okay because the Deva liked it better that way and it totally isn’t in the enchantment of the helm to do that.  Nevermind the mechanics of devils turning into deva because their alignment changed being something terribly convoluted and stupid, it was great that the entire party was party to this through the other characters (the cleric had been in on it, out-of-character, I believe) deciding such a thing was undeserving of mention.  It would have been less of an argument if they had kept the tone civil, instead of declaring that anyone who disagreed with them was an idiot and needed to just shut up about it.

In the aftermath, the necromancer self-retconned himself out of the game, and made a wizard who traveled around in a Colossal golem that served as an APC and, for lack of a better term, mecha (pulverizing combat encounters single-handed, whilst the character had the casting of a full wizard), and who had a sapient golem follower.  For free.  The game did not last for very long.

Personally, I like alignments, but not as hard and fast rules. And actually one of my favorite characters was Chaotic Neutral barbarian, but he wasn’t psycho. He actually had a strong personal moral code. Mind you, that code was very simple and mostly came down to believing very strongly in freedom to the point where he would fight to the death in order to ensure the freedom of others. Generally speaking, he was a pretty nice guy, fiercely loyal and protective… however there were a few times where he’d do things like not only snap a prisoner’s neck (evil priestess who’d held him completely immobile for an entire battle) but twisted it off, and another time where he actually initiated diplomatic relations with a group of illithids to defeat a group of aboleth. Long story. Come to think of it… he did also kind of help wipe out the spawning pools for some Kuotoa… and the rest of their city… Okay, he had his moments, but in all fairness, he was a part of a pirate crew. And he did make some blindingly stupid but ultimately very effective moves from time to time. I’m… really not helping my case. Still! That diplomacy with the illithids made the final battle infinitely easier. Squads of mind flayers using coordinated mind blasts to paralyze -your- enemies can really break a fight with an enemy champion. 

Anyone know if Spoony is planning to record the campaign he’s running?

ahh, that’s not what “The Prisoners dilemma” usually refers too.

I’d argue the everyone does what they think is right. There are people who do bad things purely out of greed or lust for power. The Party in 1984 would be a good example.

 Hi just wanted to add a story. So me and a few friends where playing D and D and we where fighting thou a dungeon and it was in a tower we got to the top of the tower and the antagonist was there and he refused to fight. he was talking with us and talking with us and trying to settle a way where we would let him go freely and finally the chaotic-evil person of the group say ed you know what fuck this im ending this right now right here and grabbed him by the shirt and lunged himself outside the window with the ultimant bad guy but killing himself to. and everyone stooped and starred at the guy and said why in the hell did you do that his response was “it’s what my character would do. and he was right but that started an augment and that’s how that campaign ended. so it was fun and a funny ending with the hero that gave his life to save the world ya ta ya ta ya ta. 

easyest way to resolve The Prisoner Dilemma is to let the prisiers go
reasons good and evil
good reasons – it is ageist all moral laws to kill prisoners. so if you can not get them in town better to let them go. if they try to kill you again you will defend yourself and then kill them
evil reason – let them live to hate you, let them revenge you one day. and even if they find you one day it will be off the time line (and over all off this campine)
all in all you can let them go and make everyone agree :>

Honestly, I never had to deal with the alignment problems at all. My DM would tell me that we are playing a certain game in a certain way and we run with it. I remember playing a game set in Dark Sun we were playing evil supposedly, but it really felt like we were enforcing the law more than being downright evil.

Then I realized that it was probably the group of people I was with because these people ended up playing themselves in this situation and that’s it. 

When I was given a chance to play a paladin, I tended to pick things that are easier to play in a party of adventurers. For my chosen deity, I never picked things like rulership, or kinship, the law, the city, beasts, balance, or anything that would come in conflict with the party. I tended to pick things like Strength, Poetry, Metalwork, Nature, or Vegetation. 

The time I played the Paladin of a vegetation god was fun. I was the defacto healer for the party because I had knowledge of herbal medicines, which made me really tolerated by everyone else. I would spread stories to the party and people in the taverns of the dangers that existed in the wilderness and why its best to stay in the city. 

To that end, I would encourage dangerous animals to relocate next to the city because it reinforced the notion that wilderness is dangerous, but at the same time I never got mad at people that killed said animals because all I cared about was keeping wilderness roughly intact. Because of my particular god dictates, I had no problems with the party and their adventures because they understood the wilderness as much as I did. 

As for Planescape, I never played because it it was never my thing. I had some of the books and I wanted to play it in some cases, I really did, but I never got a group that was mature enough to handle it. 
Alignment comes in play whenever I played Ravenloft a lot more often than in other settings. While in other settings you can play the prisoners dilemma, it generally does not work in Ravenloft. You can generally assume that everyone in Ravenloft deserves to be there for being evil fuckers, but even then, you are forced into a powers check on occasion if you are not careful. 

I’ll chime in as well to tell you that you’re misusing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, not as a “haha, I’m so smart”, but because the actual Prisoner’s Dilemma can be a useful tool for roleplaying as well.

Firstly, let me state that what you’re mentioning is closer to the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, but only slightly. I’ll also state that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is not a topic in psychology as someone mentioned (though it is related). The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theory concept.

In the Prisoner’s Dilemma you have a situation where two players will choose not to work together, despite the fact that cooperation would be beneficial to both of them. The reason they will refuse to work together and will instead conspire against one another is because if both players are following game theory, the most advantageous solution to their problem would be, paradoxically, at odds with what they want.

There are several game theory thought experiments around this line, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the most famous. Here’s a very simple rundown of the experiment:

Two criminals are brought in for questioning by the police. Both are questioned by the police separately, in separate rooms, etc.

The police them each of them that the maximum sentence for their crime is 10 years. However, if they rat out their friend the rat will get a reduced sentence of 5 years, and the person they fingered as a culprit will gain a higher, 15 year sentence. If neither rats the other out they will both go free.

Now, logically you would think that both sides would chose not to rat the other out, but consider this… That would mean you would be trusting a criminal, a fellow criminal who, for all you know, may consider you as untrustworthy as you are considering him untrustworthy. He may think that all criminals will rat him out in the end for a reduced sentence, and if you don’t rat him out you’re possible sentence will be triple what his will be. So, if you’re both perfect game theorists, statistically (in a situation where you cannot guess what the other party will pick), ratting him out (and he you) is the best solution. Despite the fact that now both of you will face 15 years prison time, the exact opposite of what both of you desire.

Look up game theory, it actually has a bevy of interesting ethical dilemmas juxtaposed against mathematics and logic.

I disagree on the idea that no one ever considers themselves evil in real life. I think there are in fact people that know they’re evil but the problem is that they just don’t care that they’re evil because they’re only interested in their selves. A lot of true evil in the world seems to me to come about mostly due to an idea of only looking out for #1.

So when I was in middle school I played D&D with my step-dad and his friends. During the first adventure I played a chaotic neutral fighter that had been created for me since I’d never made a character and never played before. We came across a nest very early on with a mother owlbear protecting her nest. Now she attacked us first, and before we knew that there was a baby, so we killed her. When our DM mentioned that there was a baby owlbear in the nest one of the others (who’s alignment I can’t remember) tried to stomp on it and kill it. I protested, because it was a baby, and I was told that my character wouldn’t do that. I protested that my character would never kill a baby, because a baby is completely defenseless. My step-dad pulled me aside and explained that chaotic neutral characters wouldn’t care about that.

I was not happy, and the next week I rolled up a neutral good character, but I have not forgiven my step-dad for telling me that I had to rip the head off of a baby animal because I’m chaotic neutral and that’s what we do. Now I realize that if I had made the protest ‘killing the defenseless is an evil act, and I’m not evil I’m neutral’ I might have gotten to keep that character.

On the up side, the DM was really cool about it, and he let me insert my character directly into the place of the old one since we had just started playing that night. He let me keep the owlbear, and I ended up being almost a ranger by the end.  

i have come across a situation very similar to this one, in second life there is this star wars themed community we roleplay in and being star wars of course we have jedi and sith and all that, the argument comes up in that people will all the time be trying to fight or attack the sith and their huge empires because they figure “oh well they’re the sith, by definition they are evil for this setting”

the sith themselves however (or at least the people playing these particular sith) do not at all seem evil, in fact they come up for a number of compelling arguments for how not only the sith are NOT evil but the jedi in fact ARE and the sith almost never do any of these things they were well known to do throughout the history of the setting and have done in canon, the sith are not fighting each other or arguing to try and gain more power, they dont torture people or kill them needlessly and they arent enslaving people

the jedi on the other hand are doing all these things which by some definitions either are evil or dont fit the setting, they will abandon people in their hour of need (often on their very doorsteps), they will attack the sith needlessly and so on.

so essentially we have this scenario in which we dont really have anyone who is bad OR good because the sith never engage in the evil practices they did in the books and movies and the jedi, in trying to be GOOD are being the evil ones.

similar situation with the hutts and various criminals in that they never rob people, rob banks, have anyone assassinated and so on and they dont really sell drugs (or spice as is the case) since it isnt really illegal anymore, there are no police who are trying to stop them and all the criminal factions more or less get along (strangely enough)

which in itself isnt BAD per se but this means the story doesnt really go anywhere or ever get started, every now and then you NEED someone to be the bad guys or the antagonists and someone to be opposing those guys for whatever reason and it just doesnt work out here

I always play true neutral or neutral good & tend not to attack unless attacked first. Single player RPG games would certainly be more interesting if they all had morality checks.

I’m all for the DM changing your alliance based on your actions.

One argument I can see against alignment is that in the real world, you wouldn’t even party with people who weren’t the same alignment as you; jocks, nerds, goths, preppies, bankers, hobos, conservatives, & liberals walking hand in hand without constant bickering, can you see it?

I’m not a big fan of Alignment, I like to play neutral when I do though. Just sorta something where my character will help if it benefits them, they aren’t in if for the glory and the fame usually just the treasure.

If you want to really burn a Chaotic Neutral character, MAKE them act insanely, even when it would be REALLY inconvenient.

While I do agree that the alignment system is the fulcrum on which many arguments have hinged in my days as a DM, I think having it there as a color in the palette for the portrait of the character’s life.  However, it is not the only factor that should determine the actions of a character.  It should serve a guide, like a compass, showing you the general direction towards a particular goal.  A lawful good paladin who serves in an army will be part of, or at least witness to, some fairly heinous acts that are associated with medieval warfare.  Commonly the spoils of war in ancient times until the middle medieval period were women of the defeated.  What makes the paladin still lawful good in those circumstances would be not taking part in such practices himself, and perhaps mentioning his moral disagreement with them.  And assassins are ‘never good’.  That is not to say an assassin can’t champion a noble and just cause, but when the point of your life is to take money for the brutal and often time convenient death of a living being who is more than likely helpless at the moment of their demise.  A good example of a ‘good’ assassin is the Operative from Serenity, and he knows he is not good, he views himself as a necessary evil.  Altair is also not a good person, maybe lawful neutral ((follows the code of assassins, disciplined life style, etc etc)), but his cause is good, not the man.

My main thought is that I don’t understand the vilification of ‘argument’.

This kind of reminded me of what happened playing the Legend of the Five Rings RPG (Japanese/Asian fantasy sort of setting).  Doesn’t necessarily have the standard alignment system that DnD does but there are issues about honor and different groups having different outlooks about things.  It was towards the beginning of our first session and this guard was leading from town to his lord’s castle that we were supposed to be going to, and he leads us into an ambush where him and a bunch of bandits attack us.  The bandits were defeated, but after that the guard surrendered, and no one was sure what to do.  Some of us wanted to kill him, and we probably would have been justified in it, but some people wanted to take him back to his lord (since we were going there anyways) and let him deal with it.  Ultimately, we decided because of his treachery he would have to die, but since he did surrender we had some mercy and let him commit seppuku, so he was able to die with honor and we returned his sword to his lord to indicate his honorable death rather than just taking it.

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=740

Just reminded me of this…

I hate when this happens, but when its done right its some great role-playing. I was a cleric of a lawful good god and i worked in a prison that was under a riot. The other players were outsiders hired to squash the riot. There was a point when we realized that the true reason for the riot was that the upper staff of the prison were doing strange experiments on the prisoner and they had been capturing innocent people from nearby villages. My cleric, who had been a desk clerk, had no idea that this had been going on and he started to try and save the people, but our knight was so blinded by duty that he just kept killing every prisoner we came across. At one point my cleric was so mad at this knight that we were mere seconds from all out fighting I think i actually threatened to start the fight if he killed one more innocent. Me and this guy were at each others throats, but the thing was the second we were done we were high five’in and congratulating each other on great role playing. The best thing though was that this was the first time i had played with these guys and i didn’t really even know this guy yet. Me and him knew what we were doing was in game only but the looks on the rest of the groups faces were priceless.

My D&D party’s solution: Got a prisoner? Turn ‘em into a party member!

can you be a half vampire in d&d?

I’m with you a lot on alignment that it’s a good guideline, but the problem I have with the system is the in-game mechanics around it. Like you said, no one is going to come up to you and ask you your alignment, so what the hell is “Sense Evil”? How does that make sense?
I always, as a WoD player in general, preferred White Wolf’s way of doing it as a sliding scale of morality which really exemplifies how well you act in society and related to people, so it’s not so much good to evil, but saint to sinner.
Also, what the hell is with 4th Ed. alignment? They took out Lawful Evil? But that’s the coolest alignment. Sigh.

These videos are fantastic. I’ve never played around a table, but have played all the Baldur’s Gate games, KOTOR, NWN etc so I can follow all the terminology at least.

One thing has been really puzzling me though – how private are your actions in a real table game? When you talk about the Paladin catching the Thief stealing, is this theft visible to everyone? If you want to play a Thief but disguise yourself as a Fighter, can others not see you stealing and disarming traps or how does that work? Sorry for the noobish questions but this aspect is hard for me to grasp!

I think the main thing is the DM shouldnt be drawn into a debate on the rules, at all. Masking a challenge to the rules with philisophy doesnt change the nature of what their doing, trying to change the rules in their favour. It is ultimately a game, if you apply that philisophical realism to class and alignment, then why not damage ? Being stabbed through the chest and still got 20 HP so your fine, I think no! One hit kill from now on if its over a certain damage etc etc. Adventuring is deemed illegal due to its essentially cultural theft from other races. Etc etc.

Line has to be drawn in the sand that the game is the way the game is, for a good reason. Its not open to debate on the rules under whatever guise. If the DM says no… then its a no. Alot of these issues can be solved by a DM handling them before they turn into huge arguments.

“Chaotic neurtral does not equal insane. If you can’t understand that, there’s no point in discussing the issue.”

In other words, you can’t defend the issue. My rule doesn’t stifle creativity. It stiffles apathy. Not my problem if you too self-centered to tell the difference.

“And I know as soon as I put this video up you’re all going to start arguing alignments and it’s never gonna stop…”

… okay, you bought this on yourself now hehehe (insert evil laugh here). Your begging has gone unheaded Spoony!

“Asassins for a religion.” … THAT IS THE WORST IDEA EVER! In reality terms, not gaming terms.

There are only two acts that humans can commit that I consider truly evil, without interpretation, relativity or excuse: torture for no purpose beyond the act itself; and rape. Both are just pleasure in someone else’s pain or just violating someone to give yourself pleasure with no thought of the cost to them. No justification. None. Evil act. End of story. I do not consider anyone fundamentally evil, considering their multi-faceted nature, but there are absolutely evil acts.

Now that said. Alignments.

I agree with Spoony.

D&D’s a game with certain rules. Accept it and move on or compromise realistically.

I’ll say this once: the only philosophy on life that should exist in D&D is existentialism (hehe). Good and evil are settings that you play on or move between. 

This is the reason why i made the following creatures common townsfolk in my campaign: Goblins, Hobgoblins, Trolls, Orcs, Kobolds, Ogres, Minotaurs, Drow, pretty much anything that if you would take an infant of that kind of race and raise them right, then you can turn them from savage creatures into peaceful hard working townsfolk. :3

oh and Rahkshas too.

Doing the right thing is not the easy way. Yes, you take them back to town. You raise the kids yourself, because as a good person you give them the oportunity. If at 5 years of age they’re obviously genetically evil, well, cut out some hearts. Pregnant women…. I got nothing for that. Adult Orc – evil. But baby…. But doing the right, as the Jedi say, is not always the easy path. Yes, you take them back to town to face trial, even if the town is two days away. You break their fucking hands and knees and carry them if you’re afraid they’ll try to run. With Orcs though is it’s been established that they’re NOT black and white evil, and certainly not genetically. Thank you Manny Arrows Keep. They might still be JERKS. Basically think the Klingons They’re still kinda jerks. But they’re not bad people.

WHOMB WHOMB WHOMB WHOMB WHOMB my only thoughts are now WHOMB WHOMB WHOMB WHOMB

the cowardly leader : kill him outright … he made alot of people die for his cause, and now he is being lame, kill him, … like samurai? would kill themselves if their subordinates lost.

most helpless: let them go, you are being just… if they turn you in, or be hostile at you, they are not being just … justice is on your side, justice will help you out automatically …. …you gotta have faith in that justice is on your side, and it will help you. … this is sage advice, its said something like this in the tao te ching :) :)

You know Spoony, with all that mention of “it’s always the Paladin” that’s probably why in 4th edition they changed it so Paladins could be any alignment depending on what god they follow. Probably one of the better bits of 4th ed. Although if you think that goes against how a Paladin should be, well I guess you can enjoy it constantly instigating arguments of how to deal with these situations you’re presenting.

Idk, the prisoner dilemma was always an easy one for me.

step 1.
Suggest the group rests a night and leaves a guard on the prisoners.

step 2.
Take a break for 15 minutes or (ideally) for a day/week/’till next time.

step 3.
Set up an encounter with a monster that is relatively easy for the group to kill,
but set it up for the 3rd guard post (between 02:00 and 04:00 at night).

step 4.
Have the monster butcher the prisoners in one round, while the guard alerts the group.

step 5.
You just got rid of the prisoner dilemma, and you also have a deep-in-the-night surprise encounter.

Hey uh, would like to say about Paladins: I played a Paladin in DnD before who A: wasn’t a Zealous butt face and B: Didn’t just go “I’m good, you’re evil so KABLAM”. He was understanding that not every person in the world believed or acted like he would and NEVER killed unless they attacked first or it was defending the innocent.

You can complain about Paladins, but know They aren’t all bad :)

And that there’s more than one way to play one (I’m looking at you, Stubborn killjoy Paladins…..)

Generally, the biggest argument I ever had about alignment was with a player who was a Lawful Evil Drow Monk. Shit got bad.

At one point, these guards were arresting these kids for a crime they didn’t commit. We realized it, but the guards didn’t. Her character, having realized the kids were telling the truth about their innocence, decided that these guards were breaking the law and that she wanted to talk to the kids because we needed to hunt down the people who committed the evil and kill them. Thusly, she went to punch the guards. Being a Monk, she must remain lawful. We all pretty much immediately went,
“Umm, that’s not Lawful.” We argued for like a half an hour with her until she finally agreed not to attack them, but she felt until the very end that she would’ve been within her right as an Evil character to attack them.

I argued with her a lot, but that was just for picking an Evil character. She would always be like, “I’m playing in alignment!” and I would be like, “Yeah, and you chose to be an evil character who ACTIVELY doesn’t do what we want! That’s just annoying and you chose it, so I’m annoyed!” It got bad.

One COULD concievably, if looking at the worry of them giving posision and “letting them go” satisfies find some way to knock them unconscious for a long enough period to leave. Leave a cage with a length of rope that will burn through in about a day as the release (though you’d have to have someone with the skills to build a cage that would hold them, if I remember there’s a wizard spell called forcecage, there’s a Permanency spell, surely it wouldn’t be tough to work out (if there’s no such thing) an “extention” spell that makes the cage last 10 minutes per level and flash out.

Down side here is those spells aren’t little spells, I think you need to be 10 or 11 in level to know them. Frankly, I’ve found that if an argument with more voting one way it should be an unspoken from the beginning, majority rules in such cases…a democratic approach. If it’s completely even I’ve seen parties start making roles in either int/cha whichever is higher each time an argument is made and best out of 5 has had success in convincing the characters through the sheer force of the argument in terms of INT, and the sheer force of their charismatic will (bards would have a hell of an advantage here with their diplomacy skills). But then I’ve only seen that approach once, it worked but the group was generally reasonable, they wouldn’t kill each other or break up the group over that.

Hell, you could even just say “alright, this is getting idiotic, you all engage in rock paper scissors in two’s, the winner does so with the other winner and so on…whoever comes out on top, their decision will be instituded due to his arguments overcoming the other. *shrug* random ideas…probably wouldn’t solve it all, but it worked well in the group I saw use it.

I would think in the right kind of group this would be a very memorable encounter, especially if it came to inter party combat.

So, here’s my alignment adventure, and the reason I refuse to play with paladins. Ever.:
A couple of months ago, I finished a campaign run by my buddy. My party has a CG bard, a NN druid, a CN rogue, a LG paladin, a CG fighter, and then me, a neutral evil wizard. Of course, I keep my alignment secret, to the point where I managed to convince the DM to give me a cloak of conceal alignment, because the Paladin is clearly starting to get suspicious, and eventually he’s going to try using Detect Evil around me. The only thing that’s managed to hide it, prior to that, was I agreed with him a couple sessions prior to that one about not killing a group of sorcerors who surrendered, because they belonged to the same secret society bent on world domination as I. They “mysteriously escaped” the same night. Now, the campaign is D&D 3.X, and it has a few homebrew rules – namely, I have a spell that’s essentially a more effective, scaling Mirror Image spell given to me by my God. This spell creates copies of me, and enemies have to pass a will check when I use it. If they fail, not only do they believe that the copies are real, but the copies can actually hurt them. Experience is divided up based on who contributed most to the fight. So, as would be expected, I level up considerably faster than the rest of the party. By the end of the campaign, I’m about 30 levels higher than anyone else. Of course, this presents a wonderful opportunity for the DM – he makes ME his final boss. Now, there have been hints throughout the game that I’m NE. My character takes pleasure in killing, thirsts for power, and doesn’t really pay much heed to the law/chaos binary. And, you know, spent the entire campaign lying through his teeth in order to get ahead.

Now, the Paladin has been a jerk the whole way through the campaign. His backstory was that it was his destiny to fight some supreme evil that threatened the world, so right off the bat, he’s an egotist(and a Luke Skywalker clone). Plus, the guy who plays him is a jerk to begin with, hating spellcasters, so he makes a point to voice his biases through his character. He’s turned the rogue in to the authorities four times for stealing, harassed everyone for not worshipping his God, and he even killed off the fighter for a quip about it (citing blasphemy) By the end of the campaign, the rest of the group is fed up with him, so, at the point of the grand reveal, the druid and the rogue defect to my side, and we wipe him. The guy who played the Paladin won’t play any campaigns with me, the DM, or the guy who played the rogue ever again.

I think that it might be interesting to look at clerics from two different lawful good deities from Greyhawk and how they would handle the Prisoner Dilemma:

Pholtus: They are evil, and their very existence is an insult to Pholtus! Smite to the head!

Heironeus: Killing women and children? People who have surrendered? ARE YOU INSANE?

And yeah, I can totally see the Heironean defending the Orcish women to the death. Because it’s what’s right to do. And if it costs him his life, then so be it. It’s just the price you pay for doing the right thing.

I can also totally see the Pholtian killing his allied priest, the women the children, and then burning them while singing about what a glorious deed he’s done.

I can’t quite see the roles reversed, but a Pholtian doesn’t HAVE to kill them of course. (A Cleric of Heironeus cannot kill women, children and prisoners and expect to not be hit for his hp + 11 lightning damage though. That’s in the Player’s Handbook even. You would at that point violate all the three main clauses of the church.)

I’ve been designing a system of alignment based on a character’s actions. A karma system, but both sides have perks and penalties associated with both of them.

I always used to treat Alignment as kind of reputation. When group was out doing their adventures, etc. and were absolutly free to change alignments however they wish, without ANY kind of punishment. But! When they became more and more famous and recognized, higher with levels, etc. And did a lot of evil shit, the next time they came back to town guards were waiting for them saying “We won’t let you in… We don’t want the types like you in our city…” What you gonna do? Fight them? Nope. You’re done. that’s the punishment for doing stupid shit, killing everyone just like that and switching Alignments too easily. Now on the scale of lawfull and chaotic, they had their rep too. If chaotic, they weren’t trusted, if lawfull, they were treated more like Mafia. You can’t enter Neverwinter anymore, but when you find yourself in some cutthroat city of crime? You got a rep there and people all of a sudden respect you.

While watching this video and talking with my roleplaying friend, I was struck with an idea for my next campaign:

I will have every player choose 2 alignments. The first is how their character has chosen to live their life and how they will act on a day-to-day basis. The second represents their reaction to extreme situations, such as the threat of imminent death. For example, a paladin who believes he must live to fight another day, sacrificing the moment for a lifetime of good can have neutral or even evil as his secondary, while another paladin may have the same dedication underneath as he does on the surface and will gladly give his life if it is required of him, trusting another to carry on his work.

With this system, it could actually be fun to enforce alignment more strictly, since it’s still within the player’s decision. That’s what I consider to be the bright side of alignment: it encourages players to make a plan and stick to it. By forcing them to respect their character’s wishes even when it’s tough, it makes the character more tangible, like they exist in their own right separate from the player.

There are two approaches to every broken system: either try to replace it, or try to fix it. I’m a fixer sort of GM, most of my campaigns feature house-rules, sometimes significantly altering the flow of the game.

Player: What if we raise these orcs and then use them as suicide-bombers, Spoony?
Spoony: Ahm… check your morality and see if you can do that according to your question.
Player: Mmm… Lawful Good.
Spoony: Of course you can´t!. You´re a paladin!
Player: … What´s a paladin?

easy way to kill the orcs LG character just says “I AM THE LAW” and kills them before they say anything else.

I personally prefer the alignment/morality system you get from Dragon Age Origins the best. There is none. Granted I don’t like plays doing whatever whenever for no good reason (as Spoony mentioned with Chaotic Neutral), but since I tend to play with friends I trust them not to do that and it is just personally a pet peeve of mine to be put under a label, be given or docked points for acting a certain way etc.

In the end each person and character looks at a situation differently, they have different outlook on it, they have different values, priorities and motivations for what they do and I personally do not like trying to lump such open issues into categories. In fact I personally like such philosophical questioning, even in d&d as long as players know not to let it turn into a giant argument.

But to be perfectly honest, the group I’m currently in actually pokes fun at alignment conflicts and benefits from it. For example I was a Chaotic Evil Barbarian/Fighter Orc. Another person was a Lawful Good Cleric, the first thing we did when meeting was fight. Our characters have fought countless times in the adventure, but we are on the same quest and work together because in the end we share a common goal and we honestly took our alignment clash and turned it into more of a rivalry which has provided us with many amusing situations and tales to tell. So really, I’ve found it’s best to just not to deep into alignments and just have fun with it, like Spoony was largely saying in this video.

I’ve gotta say that while I’ve been watching Counter Monkey, Spoony has seemed like one of the best DMs I’ve seen/heard of. I love the fact that he doesn’t hold the PCs’ hands too much but still acts fairly. I also love how he sees valid points in every alignment. So many DMs I know just either reaaally frown upon anything that might stray away from good _or_ they quite explicitly endorse evil and just basic douchebaggery. Personally, I don’t believe in such as thing as good or evil but they’re useful tools for describing very basic levels of self-interest in RPGs.

this happened today with me except it was over paying a toll to a group of wolves led by a worg. one of our players wanted to fight straight away because he was roleplaying and thats when the bard who was trying to talk down the worg started to throw the retard insult and then the argument starts. that argument caused the DM to punish us by not giving us a choice by saying that the baddies got impatient and moved into attack position. which pissed off the bard i was really getting annoyed at the bard who was just being an ass to the roleplayer who then went off at the bard for continuosly calling him a retard

I’ve got to disagree with the whole “Chaotic Neutral” thing.

I know the AD&D PHB tells us that it’s the alignment of madmen, but honestly, it doesn’t have to be like that.

Take Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly, for instance. At the beginning of the series he’s hardened and doesn’t particularly care about other people outside of his crew. He’s lost his faith, he’s on the run from the law and he’s only happy when people leave him alone – which is rare. The only people in the ‘verse he cares about are his crew – the people closest to him. Mal sees rules and regulations as being constraints and tries to run from them, and he’s got no problems kicking a helpless prisoner into a jet turbine if the prisoner is acting like a jerk or threatens him and his. Mal’s got a conscience and a sense of honor, but it’s all very personal and it doesn’t involve playing by another man’s set of rules. It’s only by the end of the movie that he’s willing to sacrifice for those who aren’t a part of his group, and die for what he believes in, which is freedom.

What we see throughout the series and the movie is a transformation of a character from Chaotic Neutral to Chaotic Good.

My DM (Old dm) BS’ed me. He changed my alignment because I saved my team mate, & I was Neutral evil. Heres what happened.
We were on a mission to kill this homedude named Richker Blays. He was a lord. So he calls up a meeting because SOMEBODY (Me) burned down a hospital. So we attack him there & he is about to kill one of our squad. I protected her. The DM is like STOP!
Me: What?
DM: You saved Steph.
Me: So?
DM: Your Neutral evil.
Me: I refer you to my previous question…So?
DM: You’re character wouldn’t do that.
Me: Umm yes he would.
DM: He is evil, he wouldn’t risk his life to save anyone.
Me: In game, my character is infactuated with Steph’s. Besides, she has a huge bluff, & barter skill, there by saving him money. Money is all my thief cares about. (Let the ‘not that kind of thief jokes begin.) Therefore, he would protect her.
DM: I’m changing you Neutral good.
Me: That’s bullshit! I have a good reason to save her.
(So, idk, you guys tell me if I’m right or wrong.)

In all editions but 4th (so far) paladins were lawful good, and only lawful good. Any other alignment causes them to lose all powers, as does willfully allowing, or committing evil or dishonorable acts.