Continued from part 1: Alignments

In the previous portion of this discussion, I explained, with a number of tangents, how the alignment system in most games really just boils down to rationalized genocidal bigotry. Before I get into my proposed alternative, there's a few more examples I'd like to take a look at.

First I'd like to take a look at Ogre Battle's alignment system. One would figure that a squad based Tactical RPG with some mild RTS leanings would follow our standard pattern of unit types getting split arbitrarily into good and evil based on how cute they are, but surprisingly enough, this isn't the case. Sure, you need your alignment to shift to the extremes to promote a given unit to a cuter or uglier form, and alignment is affected by the alignment of what you kill, but there's another factor at play I find quite intriguing. After any given battle, the alignment of your units will shift based on how fairly they fought. Focus on killing the weakest members, have an edge in levels, or just plain wipe out the opposing force, and you shift evil. To shift good, you need to play the underdog, spread your attacks out to the ones who can take the hits, and focus more on just healing yourself and pushing the enemy back than killing them. Not only is this a much more enlightened take on things, but it makes it extremely challenging to maintain high level squads of good characters, and adds challenge to the game.

Here's another one. Dungeons & Dragons has a two-axis alignment system. First we have the good-evil axis, which generally speaking is awful for all the reasons we covered in part 1. Then we have the law-chaos axis, which represents the respect one has for law and order regardless of where they stand in the battle between good and evil. Some interpretations just turn this into a way to add more levels to the scale, saying that lawful good is "more good" than chaotic good for instance. Better interpretations however keep things separate and more interesting. Let's say we have a respected judge in a city, who always passes sound judgement in his court, maintaining the peace and tranquility of his town, but on the weekends, he heads down to the underground temple to pray at the hidden altar to the evil god of the evil pig people the party is trying to bring down. He's not sacrificing people to it or anything, just praying. So he's lawful evil. Meanwhile, one of our PCs is a chaotic good thief. He's totally out to bring down those nasty pig dudes and their evil gods, but he's more than willing to lie, cheat, steal, and backstab his way to do it. He decides to break into the judge's house, ransack the place, and try and find proof that he's secretly in the piggy camp. Now suppose a lawful good cop catches him in the act. On the one hand, this guy is clearly breaking the law and should be brought to justice, on the other hand, he might be acting to the betterment of society... and he can't even take the tack of locking up our hero and lecturing him about proper procedure with a clear conscience because he'd effectively be turning our hero over to what's effectively his evil boss. This whole thing falls apart some in context when we observe that with this sort of team based good and evil, the judge hasn't really done anything wrong, and our PC is just oppressing some poor guy's religion while breaking and entering. Switch out our good-evil axis for something more concrete (maybe our judge is instead sneaking around putting mind control drugs in the water supply, no law against that and it sure keeps people in line) and things get much more interesting. We're now much more focused on where the cop stands on the issue of mind control than anything else.

So really, the common ground of these two examples is that black and white absolute morality tends to make the "good" guys come off as monsters if we look at things objectively, and you get much more interesting interplay when you have someone being put in situations where they have two conflicting personal goals they must occasionally choose between (in the Ogre Battle example, the conflict is shooting for the high alignment ending and giving ourselves an easier time of getting through the game).

What, then, am I proposing? That the designers of RPGs skip the good/evil alignment field and instead have a high/neutral/low scale for every individual ethical situation they can think of, forcing players to decide at creation where their character stands on everything from whether it's OK to steal bread to feed a starving family to abortion rights to whether flesh eating ghouls deserve all the rights of the average citizen, possibly with extra clauses on when and under which circumstances they can feast on the living? No. That would potentially make for an interesting basis for a game as an odd gimmick, but most of these things won't likely come up, and even if they do, their attitudes will generally be much more believable if they're extended from the personality they've worked up over the course of the campaign, rather than an arbitrary call made when first forming their character concept.

Let's instead focus on the difficult choice angle of things. If we're properly developing characters as people, we don't need to slap a label on them like "Good" or "Law-Abiding." They'll just act that way. We also really won't ever need to check what it says on such a blank under most circumstances. So let's leave it off, and get into these things when those exceptions come up.

Take for instance one of the classes from my in-progress RPG Legends of Ardeas. Honorblades, essentially, are some sort of samurai/knight sort of class available to orcs. Orcish society is generally based around a bunch of bloodthirsty nomadic raiders charging into towns, killing everyone, taking their stuff, and moving on. So obviously, protecting the weak and upholding the dignity of the nobles have nothing to do with how they operate. They do however have a code of conduct they must strictly adhere to to advance in their class. They may never fight anyone who isn't at least as well-armed as they are. Granted, they're pretty easy going about this, so one could, say, carry around a pair of massive swords most people can barely lift, toss the spare to some poor sap who can't do squat with it, then hack them apart with the other, but it's still a personal code that can lead to problems. If our same Honorblade comes across, say, a massive troll that could easily crush him with his bare hands, he still has to pass him that massive sword, or possibly try and tackle him barehanded. If one really wants to be exemplary, they could even follow the spirit of the law here, always allowing their opponent the choice of weapons for them to use. Makes life even harder for him, but it's also clearly going to increase the respect his community (and possibly his enemies) are going to have for him.

Also from Ardeas, I have a number of special classes restricted by the character's sense of humor. There's a lot of fun to be had with this sort of concept once you spin it off on its own.

Magical restrictions are another great way to bring personal moral codes to the forefront without a traditional alignment system. There's the ever-popular magic ritual that can only be performed by a virgin, the armor that can only be worn by one who has never taken the life of another, or if you want to get dark, the incredible sword that can't be wielded by anyone who hasn't murdered a member of their immediate family.

Here's hoping this sort of concept leads to your games being more interesting.