Reto Post: Alignment

[I don’t like alignment personally. It’s lazy role-playing and lazy Ref’ing. So why not pointlessly rant about it?]

“Low abilities are an opportunity to role-play.” The funny thing is that there are players who actually take that line seriously. There are players who think alignment is somehow a dictum on their character’s behavior. Okay, you might be able to classify the people in your life by alignment, but none of them stick to it all the time. Certainly people will take actions against their own stated alignment. So why should characters act in a dogmatic fashion? “It’s what my character would do.”

I have problems with D&D and succeeding versions have often perpetuating those problems, rather than fix them. I put alignment right up there with things that never should have been in the game. 1e characters are totally disposable and their only goal is to level up. Where does alignment fit into this scenario? It’s there, but there’s no rules or incentives for playing to it. The closest thing is that there are penalties for Paladins and Clerics for violating their codes (no rewards beyond your basic powers), but what about the other classes? Are codes of conduct even the same as alignment?

At best, alignment could be considered a sort of shorthand for DM’s as to how to play certain monsters and NPC’s. Even then, does it really make a difference in motivation between a band of Chaotic Evil Orcs or Lawful Evil Hobgoblins when they see the characters tramping around their lairs? This stuff should have never been applied to player characters. They can make up their own minds as to how they’re going to behave based on the situation. Character personalities will come about, like it or not, based on class abilities, past die rolls, and experience.

So what we have is this odd rule, tossed in for little apparent reason, with no mechanics to support it. Regrettably, unlike the weapon speed versus armor table, the story doesn’t end there. While power gamers ignored alignment since it didn’t pay XP, some players choose an alignment and decided to play it. Thus begins the role-play in RPG’s.

So?

Well, this is where RPG’s cease to be a free-form game and now become an activity considered alarming by parents. You see, up to the point of “my character,” this was just an odd war game with the pieces named (or perhaps even lacking the board). Sure there’s talking to NPC’s and other character-like bits, but there’s nothing in game to make you get in character. Even though Paladins and Clerics need to obey certain restrictions, it’s game related with game related consequences. But without alignment, there’s no esoteric, vague behavior system guiding your character play.

Simply, you wouldn’t get in character except for alignment. It wouldn’t occur to you to play to your ability scores, if there hadn’t been alignment rules. Your class would have been a function, not an imperative to ham it up. This is just supposition. I could be totally wrong about this. We’ll never know. All I can say is that somewhere between wargame and RPG is where the concept of “my character” was invented, where it had not existed before.

No alignment. No role play. Oh, but this would have been a terrible loss to the future of RPG’s! Oh, the hand-wringing humanity! Other games would have come along later, perhaps quickly, that would have filled that gap. Frustrated actors would have found their outlet at the gaming table. Unfortunately, D&D was the first game, the pioneer, and the template for everything that followed. Thus when parents watched a young Tom Hanks in the TV movie adaptation of “Mazes and Monsters,” the whole of RPG’s was painted with the same brush and there was a freak out.

Was it for the best in the short run? In the long run? Who knows? What we’re left with now is a game where players either play the game as something to beat, or players trying to be a character in a story.