Lawfully Stupid While Walking into the Dungeon

The inclusion and use of alignments in defining how our characters are supposed to act is one of those great issues in the role-playing enthusiasts community. There are countless posts on blogs and forums where people are vehemently arguing about how to properly play a given alignment and how others are doing it wrong. More often than not it seems like most of these discussions are really just people arguing against things they don't like in their home games and have projected onto these alignments as a result.

I recently ran across this very phenomenon when I went over to the Lifetime Loser Lounge. A friend of mine had invited three teenage players into his game. The three players decided to play characters with different alignments. The first decides to play Lawful Evil, the second elects to become Lawful Neutral, and the third chooses to become Lawful Good. The trio then send their characters into the dungeon where the Good and Evil player begin to push themselves to the extremes of their alignments which soon sends them into exasperated fits with each other. Their bickering gets so bad that the Neutral player finally shouts, "God, I'm so tired of playing with the Lawful Stupid!" Now, none of them are talking to each other but they're telling anyone who will listen about why the other players' alignment choice is the reason why the game fell apart. As one of the young ladies playing told me, "Playing my alignment correctly is what broke the game and it's why I fucking hate alignments to begin with!"

After listening to her describe what happened in the game I'm fairly certain that the actual problem isn't that she was playing her alignment correctly, or that anyone else was playing it incorrectly, but rather that the Good and Evil players were pushing their characters to act in a way that their mental caricatures of how those alignments would act. To put it another way, they wanted the "Good" or "Evil" descriptor of their alignment to stand out so they pushed their characters to act in a way that left no room for question about where they stood on that spectrum. They left themselves no room for common ground because they allowed themselves to be fooled into believing that their alignments dictated their actions.

That isn't how role-playing games are supposed to work.

Alignments aren't supposed to be the thing that dictates how you play; rather they're supposed to inform how you play. That's a complicated way of saying that an alignment is there to help you pick which choice you want your character to make and not to force you to make that choice. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of players treat their alignments as this constrictive thing that will force their character to make a set choice every time and it causes them to forget that role-playing games aren't choose-your-own-adventures. We have the freedom to chose what our characters care about and what gets under their skin and what the repercussions for such things have for our characters.

Unless we're playing Cavilers. Then we must fight, and fight, and fight until we die.

Larry Elmore, title unknown

A Few Thoughts on Making Alignments a Meaningful Part of the Game

The School of Athens by Raphael

In order to make alignments a meaningful part of any role-playing game there has to be a real consequence to the actions that the players choose during the course of play that goes beyond the immediate reaction of the non-player characters close at hand. If a player decides to have the character be an awful mess of murder and predation on weak non-player characters then the world should react to her as such. But how do we avoid blanket responses that end up feeling like all evil characters are treated this way, while neutral characters are treated this way, and good characters treated yet another?

Nuanced reactions within the game world are generally not hard to accomplish over the short term as both the player and Game Master can easily keep in mind what has recently been done in the free city of Kimber but there is a mythologizing that occurs as time goes on around the characters previous actions. They become larger than life, so to speak, with the character's acts taking on a life of their own that often becomes far worse or better than what actually happened. For example, over time the story about killing of a town's sheriff expands to include his deputies and perhaps a few innocent bystanders.

Stopping the process of exaggeration within the average game (i.e. one not filmed or recorded) appears to be impossible. In truth it probably shouldn't be attempted as there is a natural enlargement of individual deeds through rumor and the retelling. Still, your non-player characters shouldn't know every misdemeanor and off-color joke the player's character has told in their lifetime; nor should they know every cleverly hidden away theft and undiscovered murder. How then do we keep the players' characters accurately assessed while still providing the room for rumor and exaggeration to take effect?

There is an additional problem that occurs to me at this point: how do we account for the differences between individual characters of the same alignment but who act in vastly different manners? For example, two characters of the chaotic evil alignment are being played. The first is a psychopathic killer who delights in acting out the worst aspects of human nature. By contrast the second player selfishly acts out her whims, often at the expense of everyone else at the table, but in general acts in a reasonable manner. Both characters are clearly chaotic in their actions and evil in their intent but there is a marked difference between them. How do we account for this difference in play?

In my experience such differences are hand waved with a look at a character's alignment and a dismissal of the actions as appropriate under that heading. Then the game goes on without any substantive difference in how the two characters are treated by the surrounding world (though that clearly isn't the case within the group). This sort of dismissal is a by product of the false equivalency produced by both characters being labeled as "chaotic evil." In our minds we equate all the vile actions of these players because of that descriptor with the end result being that all actions are treated as equals. The murder of a gigolo and the theft of a gambler's winnings are treated as the same even though they have very different consequences for all involved.

The problem of a false moral equivalent has been bothering me for a while when it comes to my own games. To help alleviate the discomfort I feel I have created a barometer to distinguish between the levels of evil and how others would perceive them in my game worlds.

This is the simplified version of the one I use in my home games. At the ends of the spectrum you have the Angelic and Diabolic ideals. These extremes represent the absolutes; the most extreme examples of good and evil that I can imagine. In between those two extremes there are four levels that I use to break up the levels of moral actions my players make. At the center of the barometer is the Neely Position which is the position of true neutrality on the moral scale. 

I've left the four positions between the end and the Neely Position blank for you guys to ascribe your own actions for each step. This should make it easier for people who want to use the scale to customize it for the morality of their game worlds with each position representing the actions of increasing magnitude (for example, in my games petty theft would be at the first position while genocide would be at the fourth position on the evil side of the barometer). This should make it easier to distinguish between characters of a similar alignment disposition without making the life of the game master into one of spreadsheets and hate.

When It Doesn't Matter and Yet Does.

When I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons the only consequence for doing an evil act was the empty threat of an alignment shift that would never come - and on the few occasions that it actually happened there was no meaningful change in the game for me or my character. Non-player characters didn't become more adverse to dealing with me. Magic didn't stop working for me. There was literally no reason, other than my own personal preference, for me to worry about being a terrible bastard in the game world. 

The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix

The alignments that we were playing, and the actions that we performed in the game worlds that impacted those alignments and the game's denizens, held no meaning. We may as well have played without the alignments and just simply gone through the game without them - yet that would have been a mistake because we agonized over what alignment we were going to play. And when the threat of an alignment shift was made it often resulted in a change in the player's behavior to avoid the shift.

Clearly the alignments mattered to us in a meaningful way but it was how they were reflected in the game world that was causing the problem. So how do we fix that? How do we make our actions have a meaningful response in the game that not only rewards the choices of a character in the game but that provides them with consequences that feel appropriate to their actions?