NeoGrognard

During the development of 4e, there were few arguments as heated as those about alignment. There were those on the team who wanted to keep the 9 spoke system. There were those who wanted to throw it all out. There were those who wanted to do something different.

For the few of you who don’t know, the final solution was to largely tear it out of the rules system, and create a good-neutral-evil axis with two hangers-on: lawful good and chaotic evil. Why keep those? They had cachet, or at least that was the argument. I also think chaotic good and lawful evil have cachet, but I guess if you allow those in, you may as well let the whole tribe come out and play. While I talked to people who liked the 4e solution, most of the comments I’ve had about the new alignment mix are bewildered and incredulous. There seems to be a large number of people (not scientific mind you, just within my circle of friends, students, and acquaintances) that think the new alignment system smacks of the proverbial horse created by committee.

RPG players are smart folks—sometimes prone to sectarian flibberdy-floo and wild corporate conspiracies that give too much credit to the antagonist organization, but very smart. They can at least recognize a camel when they see it.

Personally, I think alignment is one of those things in D&D where one size does not fit all. This is where the conflict of corporate brandwidth and the needs of the actual player base come into conflict. At its heart, D&D is a tool that allows individual DMs to craft and create stories within a genre—a genre where dragons are real; inexplicable dungeons hide dangers, treasures, and fiends; spells are slung and magic blades sing with each and every swing. It’s a popular genre. The combat rules of D&D work because they are active, exciting, and engaging. They don’t map every bit of fantasy fiction out there, but they get close enough to the cultural mean of fantasy fiction. And that mean changes over time. Over the years our fiction, though wire-fu and CGI has become more incredible and far-fetched, but also fucking awesome. What we thought was possible and plausible in fantasy combat has shifted.

Relativist fiction has made its way into mainstream fantasy. Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 started it (okay, maybe some British SciFi shows really started it), True Blood continues it, I think the Game of Thrones series, soon to be released on HBO, will only expand that further. That doesn’t mean that the old paradigm of Tolkienesque good vs. evil, or Moorcockian law vs. chaos will die outright, but it will mean that the large and aging D&D fanbase will want to create worlds where evil can largely go unpunished and where good must struggle for every foothold it gets, sometimes by picking the lesser of two evils (Midnight, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Dark Heresy). I’m fascinated with good, easy, but still robust system that can handle this; giving players the ability to focus their characters in meaningful ways, and giving the DM tools to recognize it and design around it.

There was an idea I pitched back during the development of 4e D&D that I thought it might be interesting to pursue, but boy it did not gain an iota of traction among the rest of the team. The idea started with the proposition that every player character in D&D starts out as unaligned.

Small problems in heroic tier may be the reflection of the greater conflicts that exists between the forces of good and evil, law and chaos—or maybe the conflict that exists between the Elemental Chaos, the Astral Sea, and Far Realm, and (the later introduced) primal spirits—but they were a testing ground. Over the course of the adventure, the DM could create alignment awards. Based on your character’s actions, they might get points in any of the alignments of the system. By the time the character was paragon, as long as they had enough points in a particular alignment, they could take alignment boons—feat-like rules objects that had both benefits and restrictions. I called them vows. Usually the restrictions were prohibitions against actions or associations. If prohibitions are flaunted, bad things happen. They are conceptually more akin to the instincts in The Burning Wheel. Those bad things can be mechanical or story-side. You could choose one of these vows at paragon (or maybe twice in paragon) and twice in epic.

A year or so later, when I read The Burning Wheel, I found a model for a structure that could make that system far more playable and usable—or at least better ways to categorize it. At heroic you create a set of convictions. Those convictions create a baseline for the character and a way for a DM to create stories that have the possibility of alignment conflict.

Bavairus the Sly

Convictions

On Strangers: I trust only in myself. The problems of other people can only wear you down.

On Belief: The church of Pelor has stolen from my family; it is only fair if I steal from them.

On Family: Don’t ever say anything bad about my sister.

On Friends: I trust only in myself. When friends stop being a benefit, they are a liability.

The categories could be pruned, but here is why I picked them. In D&D you are always meeting strangers. Sure, you kill and rob most of them (only because they’re bad) but for all those other strangers the DM has a good baseline on how you will act and why. With that knowledge, it is easier to create skill challenges that deal with strangers, and figure out how to give out alignment awards.

Both belief and family are just fun story hooks, and this information gives the DM something to cling on to. If you are running a dungeon crawl campaign, you can probably jettison the family conviction. You may want to keep belief, but focus it more on what kind of creatures you hate. Simple things like “All demons must be destroyed.”

Friends, of course, deal with the other PCs and ally NPCs. Beer and pretzel games might be able to prune this out as well, and go with a single sentence conviction. If you run your game like Diablo, your characters don’t need a whole lot of convictions.

To be honest there is nothing stopping any DM from adding convictions. In Dark Sun you may want to add convictions about the Sorcerer King, arcane magic, or slavery; maybe all three.

Over the course of Bavairus the Sly’s adventuring career, the DM can expect that if he is aligning himself with anything, it’s evil. Now here is a little trick about evil. People choose evil by bargaining with evil. This is why the story of Faust is so powerful. The DM could place temptation in front of Bavairius—a possible infernal patron, a boon for a later favor, a flat-out bribe. How Bavairius deals with these temptations awards alignment points. I would like to think that over time Bavairius resists temptations and rethinks his path, so by later paragon or epic he can actually align himself with good, but it’s just as possible for the opposite to happen, and that can create an interesting story also. Whether he chooses good or evil he can take vows, which grant power and prohibitions. Or a character can always decide to stay unaligned, trading away alignment power for the power of choice.

Instead you could have an alignment system that’s not based on conflicting ethical or conceptual poles, and have one that deals with power groups. In this ways those alignment points become something more akin to reputation, and you could have a more complicated vow system. There would have to, of course be a mechanical balance on whatever boon you gain from multiple vows. Maybe you had a choice, but could only use one a day, though you gain all the prohibitions.

It’s probably not a system for everyone, it lacks the straightforward single decision point of the traditional alignment system, which is why it did not gain traction in 4e design and development, but just as D&D combat has become more robust over the years because combat in the fiction has become more evocative, I think there are people out there wanting to create richer story in their D&D and are looking for better tools to use. There are better tools out there, and we can develop those tools in the same way that we develop combat rules—for our audience and for our individual creative purpose.