Idea: New, One-Axis Alignment System

[Amaril]

So, here's what I'm thinking--instead of Good-Evil, Law-Chaos, an alignment system based on the sole axis of Love and Hatred. Don't mistake these for Good-Evil substitutes, though--the way I see it, people who lie on either side of the system can still commit incredibly heroic acts, or incredibly horrific ones. The difference would lie primarily in the motivations behind each.

Let me explain with a couple of examples.

First--a heroic Paladin is caught in the middle of a brutal orcish attack on an innocent village. Being a righteous, upstanding individual, the Paladin fights back against the orcs and attempts to drive them off. However, this action could just as easily lie on either side of the Love-Hatred axis. If the Paladin was motivated by Love, their desire to fight the orcs would stem from their determination to protect the innocent villagers and keep them all safe. Hatred, on the other hand, would inspire the Paladin to fight out of anger at the orcs for threatening the innocents, and the desire to see them punished for their actions.

A contrasting example--an diabolical mastermind bent on world domination. Just as easily, they could be motivated by Love or Hatred--Love for themselves and the people they want to put on top of their empire, or Hatred for all their enemies who they want to oppress.

So, what do you think of this idea? Would it be something one could use in a game? And is it any better than a Good-Evil system?

[Wargamer]

Love and Hate doesn't really make for a good overall alignment, since your position on the axis shift for each and every person you deal with.

Perhaps what you'd like is something like... Selflessness and Selfishness.

As with your idea, these are not tied to Good and Evil. Good is often selfless, but by the same token you could have a character who does Evil because they genuinely believe it will further the greater good. On the other end is a Good character who looks out for himself rather than others because he knows that he can achieve things lesser men cannot; if he dies, then the Dread Lich will take over the world, so it is better to sacrifice the odd village now than the whole world later.

[Eldan]

What would be the purpose of it, in rules terms? I mean, it's a nice description, sure, but what else would it do? I can't really imagine a Paladin walking around with Smite Hatred, or Detect Hatred.

[Amaril]

No real purpose, I guess--it just popped into my head, and I thought I'd see what people thought of it. I have no immediate plans to use it for anything (the game I'm currently DMing is grey morality).

[scarmiglionne4]

I can't help but think of Donnie Darko.

"There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else."

I kind of like the old basic D&D Law, Neutral, Chaos alignments. Just get rid of good and evil. That's what I plan to do with my game.

[urkthegurk]

... I can't really imagine a Paladin walking around with Smite Hatred, or Detect Hatred.

No, that would be the Jedi...

[tbok1992]

So, here's what I'm thinking--instead of Good-Evil, Law-Chaos, an alignment system based on the sole axis of Love and Hatred. Don't mistake these for Good-Evil substitutes, though--the way I see it, people who lie on either side of the system can still commit incredibly heroic acts, or incredibly horrific ones. The difference would lie primarily in the motivations behind each.

Let me explain with a couple of examples.

First--a heroic Paladin is caught in the middle of a brutal orcish attack on an innocent village. Being a righteous, upstanding individual, the Paladin fights back against the orcs and attempts to drive them off. However, this action could just as easily lie on either side of the Love-Hatred axis. If the Paladin was motivated by Love, their desire to fight the orcs would stem from their determination to protect the innocent villagers and keep them all safe. Hatred, on the other hand, would inspire the Paladin to fight out of anger at the orcs for threatening the innocents, and the desire to see them punished for their actions.

A contrasting example--an diabolical mastermind bent on world domination. Just as easily, they could be motivated by Love or Hatred--Love for themselves and the people they want to put on top of their empire, or Hatred for all their enemies who they want to oppress.

So, what do you think of this idea? Would it be something one could use in a game? And is it any better than a Good-Evil system?

Well, one thing's for sure, it certainly makes me think of Night of The Hunter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X20XIg38GcE).

[Durazno]

Actually, I think that Detect Hatred would be an incredibly useful spell, and Smite Hatred would be a handy feature for Half-Orcs and other marginalized species.

[Morph Bark]

What would be the purpose of it, in rules terms? I mean, it's a nice description, sure, but what else would it do? I can't really imagine a Paladin walking around with Smite Hatred, or Detect Hatred.

...would that make Paladin's bronies?

Bad idea. Very bad.

[Devils_Advocate]

Well, you seem to be talking about classifying deeds based on the motivations behind them. That isn't directly useful for most of the things that D&D rules do with alignment, which is based on the classification of creatures.

On the other hand, the D&D alignment system isn't so useful for the classification of individual actions. 3rd Edition, for example, tells us "A creature’s general moral and personal attitudes are represented by its alignment". It doesn't tell us what it means for an act to be aligned, and thus acts having alignments isn't really part of the system as described. But then rules outside of the description of alignment invoke the concepts of "evil acts" and "good acts". Problematic!

So maybe your system would be a workable replacement for those parts of the rules. For example, instead of saying that Paladins fall when they commit "evil acts", one could say that they fall when they allow hatred to determine their actions. And instead of saying that channeling positive energy is good and channeling negative energy is evil, one could say that that statement is just bad and whoever wrote it should feel bad.


No, that would be the Jedi...
So I'm not the only one who got a Light Side / Dark Side sorta vibe from this thing.


Paladin's
http://www.angryflower.com/aposter3.jpg

[Amaril]

@Devils_Advocate: The way I imagined this system, it wouldn't require players to pick an alignment right from the beginning. Instead, they would all start unaligned, and then possibly gain alignments later based on their actions via some sort of point system (a la Mass Effect). I like that way of doing things better--although I might give them the opportunity to give themselves a few points on either axis before they start the game, to represent their actions in the past.

This is all, of course, assuming that I ever actually use this system, which, again, I am not planning to.