Out of Alignment

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 17, 2011

A lot of hate has been directed at the D&D alignment system since… well, since the beginning. The two-axis graph mapping someone’s personality with respect to good vs. evil and law vs. chaos has been a source of confusion, concern, and venom for over three decades now.

Personally, I think part of it is because some people get mad because they find their own personality traits described as “evil.” 🙂

(And I’m only mostly joking on that. While they are thankfully not the norm, I’ve met a few gamers in my time – especially back in the high school days – with a lack of social skills or empathy that bordered on sociopathy.)

Any system that you use to try and categorize behavior is going to have some broad flaws, tons of corner-cases, and outright exceptions. People are just not that easy to lump into boxes. They are wonderfully, quirkily complex. Almost nobody fits perfectly in a single category: Chaotic good, conservative, liberal, “blue,” INTP, “Type A,” Socializer, Achiever, etc.  Sometimes people will deliberately modify their behavior to “fit in” with a particular label that they prefer, and tend to project a black-and-white strict categorization upon others, but I think most people have some sort of a blend of most if not all aspects of any categorization in their personality.

Yes, even Chaotic Evil. I’m not sure it’s possible to drive in traffic without feeling a hint of temptation for what you’d do if you could use the dark side of the force.

Me, I always liked the alignment system in D&D. I felt it provided as adequate a framework as any, if treated in a flexible manner. And even in high school, I enjoyed playing with (and twisting) the stereotypes. While I admit I showed a bit more favoritism towards “Good,” I was fascinated by some of the source materials that described NPCs and communities as being evil which were not listed as antagonists. What did this mean? How did this work? If anything, these little ideas helped encourage me to flesh out more interesting characters in my adventures.

How does a “chaotic evil” community work? If you read some of the stories of some of the towns in the “Wild West” of U.S. history in the late 1800s, you may get an idea. They weren’t necessarily a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” like Moss Eisley Spaceport, and they weren’t necessarily even “lawless.” But the law and legal proceedings could be capricious, and fear of consequences only barely kept the baser of human instincts in check… and often not even then. While most members of the community might not be evil and might be quite law-abiding, the nastier elements had control over the local culture, if not political power. Chaotic Evil? I don’t know if you’d call them that, but it wouldn’t take much to tweak that model for fictional purposes.

So I had fun with the alignment system. Sure, I had plenty of evil villains who fit the evil villain stereotype. But I also had the players a little dumbfounded when they discovered that the funny, fun-to-be-around NPC was really pretty dang Chaotic Evil. If you were on his good side – easy enough to do – he was great to be around. But he thought nothing of doing terrible things to those on his bad side.

And lawful evil – that’s plenty of fun to play with as well. Like the pretty-boy “dark lord” who was polite and soft-spoken, had plans and dreams that could actually be somewhat tempting to anyone, but who adhered to a philosophy that the ends justified the means, and his ends weren’t particularly altruistic and virtuous in the first place. This didn’t make the players hesitate for a second (to my recollection) trying to defeat him, as he was still quite clearly The Big Bad, but putting a human (and almost likeable) face on the Foozle made for a much more interesting story.

Likewise, the paladin who is clearly not “lawful stupid” nor blind to reality, who does his best (but occasional fails) to adhere to a higher law out of principle even though he knows the short-term consequences may not be favorable (or even unjust) can be a fascinating character.

Anyway, the point is – I always considered the D&D alignment system to be a valuable tool, while I guess some folks saw it more as a straitjacket.  As a DM, I’ve always been pretty flexible with letting players play their own interpretation of alignment, only rarely stepping in to warn about serious deviations. And even that is more often a call for the player to roleplay an appropriate justification.

But does this apply to computer games? Particularly single-player RPGs – is it of any value to designate a player-character’s personality along an alignment system? Does it work at all?

I think it can. I’m just not fond of how it’s usually implemented. The Bioware approach doesn’t appeal to me very much, where a few actions get ‘flagged’ as being automatically good or evil (or lawful vs. chaotic) and sliding your character’s path in that direction. I’m not sure what’s more annoying – getting dinged evil for doing something that (from my vantage point) seemed perfectly justifiable if you have a slightly different interpretation of the events than the scenario designer, or NOT getting awarded appropriate “points” for going out of your way to do something heroically (or anti-heroically) good / evil. The arbitrariness of both the timing and type of reward gets frustrating.

In Ultima IV, however, I thought it worked well.  Far from perfect, but well enough. In that game the awards were pretty consistent for common actions, and there was generally an understanding (if you checked with Hawkmoon often enough, but certainly implied from the initial character generation questions) that most actions had a give-and-take among the virtues. There was rarely (if ever?) a single “virtuous” path versus a “non-virtuous” path.  It was predictable, controllable, and the power was in the hands of the player to strike the right balance or decide where to focus their efforts. While still obviously mechanical (and felt incorrect in some spots), it seemed to represent the nuances of the real world better than some of the more recent efforts.

So is there still a place for alignment (or something like it) in single-player RPGs? I think so. If done right, I think it could provide a much richer game experience.  But handled poorly, or as an afterthought, it still sucks.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



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