I like alignment

[hamishspence]

I tend to agree with the notion of keeping alignment but cutting mechanical restrictions.

Maybe keep unaligned as the name for neutral though- it's more accurate in the context of most 3.5 neutral creatures and characters.

Edit- interestingly, one version of basic D&D (Eric Holmes version) also had 5 alignments- but those were the corner alignments and Neutral. So LG, Chaotic Good, N, CE, and Lawful Evil, but LN, CN, NG, and NE were not present.

[Lady Serpentine]

So, since the last character to be proposed as an arguing point was rather extreme, what about someone who sincerely tries to help people, is a completely devoted friend/lover, and tolerant of others, but will cheerfully torture someone, healing them as needed to prevent death, if they badly harm someone she loves?

Or someone who, if she doesn't want to die of starvation, must kill a human or something similar at least once a month or so, depending on how long they would have had left to live before she did so, but is otherwise actively good?

[hamishspence]

Might depend how often it happens.

A vigilante who regards everyone in their city as "loved ones" and seeks out and tortures horribly those who initiate harm to them- I'd say they cross the line into Evil. A bit like a more loving and affectionate version of The Punisher, or Dexter, or Night Haunter from 40k.

"murder to survive" is quite common in fictional vampires- while some only need a small sip, in other settings the vampire may need a full drain, or be unable to stop drinking once they start. If the vamp relies entirely on killing the truly vile, after catching them at or shortly after villainy, and does so as swiftly and painlessly as they can, a Neutral alignment may be feasible- even a Good one if the DM is exceptionally generous.

[Lady Serpentine]

Might depend how often it happens.

A vigilante who regards everyone in their city as "loved ones" and seeks out and tortures horribly those who initiate harm to them- I'd say they cross the line into Evil. A bit like a more loving and affectionate version of The Punisher, or Dexter, or Night Haunter from 40k.

Just close friends and/or lovers. And she is somewhat scaled, hence the 'badly' bit. She won't, say, track you down and flay you for punching someone she cares about, provided that said punch doesn't kill them or otherwise do them serious harm, and someone's intent plays a role in things too.

"murder to survive" is quite common in fictional vampires- while some only need a small sip, in other settings the vampire may need a full drain, or be unable to stop drinking once they start. If the vamp relies entirely on killing the truly vile, after catching them at or shortly after villainy, and does so as swiftly and painlessly as they can, a Neutral alignment may be feasible- even a Good one if the DM is exceptionally generous.

A vampire is similar to her, but not quite right - one could always argue, with a vampire, that they could have human servants prepare the required amount of blood from more than one person, etc.. She quite literally has no choice but to kill because she feeds on the life that her victim would have had to live had they died of natural causes or an accident.

[hamishspence]

D&D vampires, according to Libris Mortis- have two dependencies, one on blood (fail to feed and vampire eventually becomes immobile) and one on life (fail to energy drain and the vampire goes insane- and few NPCs can survive two points of energy drain).

Torture- at least according to FC2 and BoED, is basically an evil act (FC2 gives a scaling for it- the severest torture is equivalent to Murder For Pleasure, morally).

So, if the character, on discovering that their family had all been killed, say, by an invading army or a criminal gang, and set out to torture to death everyone involved in the killing, eventually one would expect their alignment to change.

Now it must be said that "vengeance" is not inherently evil according to BoVD- but it becomes evil when the character starts committing specifically evil acts as part of it.

[TheGeckoKing]

So, since the last character to be proposed as an arguing point was rather extreme, what about someone who sincerely tries to help people, is a completely devoted friend/lover, and tolerant of others, but will cheerfully torture someone, healing them as needed to prevent death, if they badly harm someone she loves?

Considering I don't see how torturing the person helps your injured family member/friend in any way, they're on the border between Neutral and Evil there, and that Neutral part is there only because your usage of torture could just be an illustration of an extreme rather than a common occurrence.

Or someone who, if she doesn't want to die of starvation, must kill a human or something similar at least once a month or so, depending on how long they would have had left to live before she did so, but is otherwise actively good?

Eh, depends on how the person tries to limit this; going the minimum of one person a month, paying off families of the deceased anonymously, pitching in for/paying for a Raise Dead from the local Cleric and so on would suggest a Neutral character. I don't think the whole "Feeding on people to stay alive" would let them be Good though, because you're effectively saying that your existence is more important than the people you're feeding from.

[Taelas]

Incorrect. If you have compunctions, prickings of conscience, then that means that you subconsciously realize that these lives do have value. If you honestly thought that there were nothing about humans that was worthwhile, then it wouldn't bother you for them to be destroyed. It would be like taking an antibiotic to kill an infection.

No. This does not automatically follow.

Feelings are not logical. It is possible for someone to feel an entire race is worthless and still feel compunctions about killing them.

I never said that they would have a desire to do it. It simply wouldn't factor into their moral considerations, since the human lives are valueless. You can think that you believe a group's lives have no value, and still be horrified by their extermination, but that just means that you didn't actually believe that. If you did, it would not affect you.

Racism does not work the way you seem to think it does.

It is possible to be a fundamentally good person and still believe wholeheartedly that a group of people is worthless. They don't particularly care if those people die. That does not mean they wouldn't feel compunctions about killing them. Being the instrument of someone's death, and not caring if they die, are not at all the same thing.

It may be due to ignorance, and they may change their minds after examining their own beliefs more critically, but that does not mean they "didn't actually believe that". It is possible to have a change of heart, and it is possible to have extremely firm beliefs without ever having examined them critically.

The way you seem to equate hatred with murderous wroth is honestly disturbing. It is far more likely to be expressed via oppression than genocide. Oppression is absolutely evil, but it is not murder.

It is possible to think that you believe human lives are valueless, and still, despite your bigoted attitude, be a good enough person to not be considered Evil. If you don't allow your bigotry to affect your dealings with the humans all that much, you might even manage to be Good.

But actually believing that said lives are valueless is simply sociopathy. Which is evil enough to overshadow any other personality traits.

'Sociopathy' is an extremely poorly defined term, because we don't actually fully understand the condition. People with antisocial personality disorder, which covers most of the aspects of sociopathy, can be fully functional members of society who never commits an evil act. They are more likely to, as they do not generally feel guilt for their actions, and they have few things that inhibit such behavior... but it is far from certain.

Simply believing that all human life is worthless does not make the person who believes that evil.

I consider deeds more important than "the rest of the personality"

A person who consistantly does evil deeds against a particular group, is Evil, even if the majority of their deeds, since they rarely encounter that particular group, are Good.
And even if they're not completely consistant about that group- the fact that they're consistantly doing evil deeds at all, outweighs any Good deeds.

Inconsistently doing evil deeds, in time of crisis- that's reasonable for Neutral and Good- they can be "driven to Evil from time to time".

You are arguing for your interpretation of the rules, not what they actually say. It is entirely reasonable to have a character who is Good yet who normally treats people as if they are disposable. In fact, it is a very common trope: the jerk with a heart of gold.

[Callista]

I tend to agree with the notion of keeping alignment but cutting mechanical restrictions.

That does seem to be one of the major issues that makes alignment into such a point of contention. If paladins didn't lose their powers for shifting away from LG, there wouldn't be so many paladin debates... but paladins would also lose much of their uniqueness and flavor. The trouble here is that the flavor comes at the expense of giving dickish DMs a way to penalize players for role-playing in a certain way.

The player isn't blameless either, of course. If you create a character whose personality is compatible with being a paladin, they would not be the sort of person to willingly and lightly go against their LG beliefs. If you create a character without a personality, or with an incompatible one, though, you can run into a lot of trouble. If you do that you're playing D&D like it's a video game and you may forget your character's code in the quest of making him more powerful. Or you may be playing a perfectly realistic character, but one that should never have been called as a paladin because he's incompatible with it to begin with.

So how do we handle that problem without having to get rid of that very interesting idea--that a paladin's powers come from his faith, his morality, and/or his deity, and that if he loses them it's a big red flag to him that he's done something very wrong? I like it. It's got so much storytelling potential and it would be such a pity to discard it for no good reason.

The trouble seems to be that the paladin is actually losing his powers--that the character becomes weaker, and that this is something many players don't like. What if there were a way to make sure that the paladin could change his beliefs without losing his powers? Obviously he can't keep his old source of power; so there should be a fall from grace; but there should be some extremely easy alternatives that he can go into.

So here's my thoughts about it: What if, in your particular world, paladins are as special as they are in any world; but not just LG deities and planes recognize that? What if, instead, when a paladin falls from grace, s/he immediately receives offers from other powers?

There's the classic blackguard route, of course, and I like that; but it forces the paladin to completely abandon everything he's ever believed in, and most of the time it's not like that. Plus, you have to have prerequisites. So that's not a full solution.

We do have other paladin variants though, one for each of the four alignment extremes. Those are a good start. Say that, when a LG paladin decides that order is doing more harm than good and it's time to start tearing down the tyrants that are hurting the people she loves--well, she's gone CG, and could easily switch to Paladin of Freedom. Rebuild the character, level for level. The power level hasn't changed.

It would be a fairly simple matter--just a house rule that says, "If your character's alignment makes him ineligible for his class, you may rebuild using a similar class which fits his new alignment." And that would stop people from being afraid to let their paladins and other alignment-restricted characters change to the point that they change alignments, because it would no longer mean a sharp drop in power.

[Larkas]

Actually, if you consider Dragon Magazines to be worthy rules sources, you have a Paladin for each alignment; IIRC, the relevant issues are #310 and #312.

In my games, I actually let Paladins fall in a similar way. Let's say a character became so absorbed with laws and regulations that he actually became LN. He can either make a pact with LN powers, and become a LN Paladin (Enforcer, I think it was called), trading all his LG Paladin levels to LN Paladin levels, or atone and go back to being a LG Paladin. If, after going LN and not atoning, he starts being LG again, he can get his LG Paladin status back -- but the powers that be will only go so far. If he falls again and fails to atone, he can make pacts with other powers, maybe NG, LN or even farther than that, but the LG powers will never trust him again.

Well, at least that's how it works in my games

[Lady Serpentine]

D&D vampires, according to Libris Mortis- have two dependencies, one on blood (fail to feed and vampire eventually becomes immobile) and one on life (fail to energy drain and the vampire goes insane- and few NPCs can survive two points of energy drain).

Torture- at least according to FC2 and BoED, is basically an evil act (FC2 gives a scaling for it- the severest torture is equivalent to Murder For Pleasure, morally).

So, if the character, on discovering that their family had all been killed, say, by an invading army or a criminal gang, and set out to torture to death everyone involved in the killing, eventually one would expect their alignment to change.

Now it must be said that "vengeance" is not inherently evil according to BoVD- but it becomes evil when the character starts committing specifically evil acts as part of it.

Ah. Haven't got Libris Mortis. I'll have to look into that at some point...

With an army, she'd probably only go for the person who'd directly killed her friend, or possibly the one who specifically ordered the particular attack, since she gets that the generals, ruler, and most of the invading force, didn't even know of the person's existence.

Considering I don't see how torturing the person helps your injured family member/friend in any way, they're on the border between Neutral and Evil there, and that Neutral part is there only because your usage of torture could just be an illustration of an extreme rather than a common occurrence.

Mainly it's used to deter others from doing the same; if word gets around that messing with her family/friends results in dying horribly, fewer people are likely to consider doing so. Perhaps not the best method, admittedly, but it's the one she uses, so...

And yes, it's not exactly a common occurrence; as noted, she scales her reaction according to the circumstances, so things that she considers to actually warrant such things are reasonably uncommon.

Eh, depends on how the person tries to limit this; going the minimum of one person a month, paying off families of the deceased anonymously, pitching in for/paying for a Raise Dead from the local Cleric and so on would suggest a Neutral character. I don't think the whole "Feeding on people to stay alive" would let them be Good though, because you're effectively saying that your existence is more important than the people you're feeding from.

What if it is more important than that of the people she's killing, though? She's a nigh-immortal healer, and a good one. If, drawing on that experience and her magic, she's able to cure otherwise lethal/debilitating diseases that no-one else knows how to stop, and save people lethally or cripplingly injured, and does so for a considerably greater number of people than she kills, isn't her continued existence more important than that of, say, an innkeeper?

[Starbuck_II]

That does seem to be one of the major issues that makes alignment into such a point of contention. If paladins didn't lose their powers for shifting away from LG, there wouldn't be so many paladin debates... but paladins would also lose much of their uniqueness and flavor. The trouble here is that the flavor comes at the expense of giving dickish DMs a way to penalize players for role-playing in a certain way.
.

Paladins would still have a code even if you got rid of alignment. So I don't think you'd lose anything.
They'd still act with honor, help the innocent, etc.

How would allowing them to act how they wish while within the code change things?

[Scowling Dragon]

Paladins would still have a code even if you got rid of alignment. So I don't think you'd lose anything.
They'd still act with honor, help the innocent, etc.

How would allowing them to act how they wish while within the code change things?

I don't think the code has anything to do with LG actually as much as it has to do with the law against being evil and stuff. If you do, your stripped of your powers. Its a nice fluff/ rule interaction.

[Callista]

Paladins would still have a code even if you got rid of alignment. So I don't think you'd lose anything.
They'd still act with honor, help the innocent, etc.

How would allowing them to act how they wish while within the code change things?

It wouldn't solve any problems. You'd be replacing "Did my paladin do something evil?" with "Did my paladin break his code of conduct?" If you replace "stay Lawful and don't do anything Evil" with a longer, more complex code in order to do away with alignment, that's just adding complications you don't need. There are many possible codes of conduct that stay within the limits of LG. If you limit them all to one particular code because you've gotten rid of alignment and can no longer say "Any code, as long as it's LG", then you're limiting the possibilities for the players. There might as well be only one order of paladins, if they all believe exactly the same things. In a realistic world, there are many ways to be LG and many ways to go about being a paladin. Alignment keeps that flexible.

[Lady Serpentine]

Something that really needs to be remembered for this sort of thing is that they're not 'LG' as such. Rather, they're 'L' as well as 'G', and the two parts are separate but interact. Being a Lawful Good character doesn't mean that one has a devotion to the laws of the region, simply that they're Good and have an ordered (non-Chaotic) temperament; a paladin who picks through the legal code of the area to find any loopholes, etc., possible to get their friends out of trouble (provided that it wouldn't conflict with the Good part of their) is just as valid as a more 'traditional' one.

[Venger]

(scrubbed)

[sonofzeal]

{self-scrubbed by Venger

Let's get off the [real world figure] issue. It was a mistake for me to bring it up, because it skirts too closely to board issues and because there's a lot of disinformation and rumours out there. People seem to delight in "revealing" the depravity of supposedly good people, even if that depravity is invented wholecloth. See the previous accusation about him supporting [real world politician]; the closest he came to that was letters begging [real world politician] to choose a nonviolent path.

{self-scrubbed by sonofzeal}

[Dr.Epic]

Okay? There are people who don't like the alignment system?

[Venger]

valid points regarding board policy

you're probably right, I'll get rid of my post, in retrospect, I don't see how much productive can come of it

[Lord_Gareth]

Okay? There are people who don't like the alignment system?

I don't. I prefer systems that encourage players to examine their characters' motivations and beliefs rather than attempting to weigh actions against one another and come out with some kind of moral weight at the end. The D20 Modern system is really good in this regard, actually; conversely, the Star Wars system is pretty much The Worst Thing.

[Callista]

The benefit of sticking an alignment on a character you create is that you know everything about that character, unless you've done something fancy with amnesia and have an evil DM. You can safely label him. You can't label a real-life person near as easily because you can never know everything about them, and last I checked, the Detect spells were still fictional!

We don't need to worry about real-life people, though. Just the characters we've created ourselves.

There are the cases where characters are complex enough that it's hard to place them--a disciplined soldier in a rebellion might seem to be both chaotic and lawful, for example. But in those cases, you can just default to Neutral--it's just a more spread-out neutral than usual. There's a point beyond which the character's personality becomes too inconsistent to put an alignment on him at all, but that's more of a sign of bad storytelling (or multiple interpretations by multiple authors).

If you find yourself with a character that has strong traits of opposing alignments, the best thing to do is make him tentatively Neutral, define his personality and motivations carefully, and let his alignment shift (or not) naturally as his character develops and he makes choices within the game world.

If only we could get people to stop being afraid of changing their characters' alignment!

[Fatebreaker]

The benefit of sticking an alignment on a character you create is that you know everything about that character, unless you've done something fancy with amnesia and have an evil DM. You can safely label him. You can't label a real-life person near as easily because you can never know everything about them, and last I checked, the Detect spells were still fictional!

We don't need to worry about real-life people, though. Just the characters we've created ourselves.

There are the cases where characters are complex enough that it's hard to place them--a disciplined soldier in a rebellion might seem to be both chaotic and lawful, for example. But in those cases, you can just default to Neutral--it's just a more spread-out neutral than usual. There's a point beyond which the character's personality becomes too inconsistent to put an alignment on him at all, but that's more of a sign of bad storytelling (or multiple interpretations by multiple authors).

If you find yourself with a character that has strong traits of opposing alignments, the best thing to do is make him tentatively Neutral, define his personality and motivations carefully, and let his alignment shift (or not) naturally as his character develops and he makes choices within the game world.

If only we could get people to stop being afraid of changing their characters' alignment!

The problem is that alignment in the game is not just a concept to help you gauge the actions of your character. It's also a mechanic with very real penalties and benefits.

Johnny isn't afraid of changing his alignment; he's afraid of losing his class abilities. He's afraid of taking extra damage because the DM has a different opinion about good and evil and law and chaos.

If you have some requirement to be lawful, then it suddenly matters whether that disciplined rebel is lawful, neutral, or chaotic. So alignment becomes a destination rather than an origin. "What would my character do?" becomes "What must my character do?"

[sonofzeal]

you're probably right, I'll get rid of my post, in retrospect, I don't see how much productive can come of it

Actually, I think an important point came out of it.

Our society positively delights at flinging mud at any figure praised as morally worthy. I seriously cannot think of anyone praised as a hero or a saint in the popular media, whose name was not almost immediately dragged through the mud by somebody or other, often with completely unsupported allegations.

This unfortunate tendency of our culture might explain some of the difficulty we have with "Good" characters. Our cultural tendency is to question and distrust any claim of goodness, so we tend to examine it with a fine toothed comb looking for anything we can point to and say "see, they're actually a horrible person under the facade". This results in situations where good characters can't do any amount of evil without the morality being challenged, but evil characters can do large amounts of good without anyone caring.

Unfortunately, the only real solution is to be aware of this tendency and consciously choose to balance it out when we find ourselves slipping into that (very seductive) mode of thought.

[Shadowknight12]

Actually, I think an important point came out of it.

Our society positively delights at flinging mud at any figure praised as morally worthy. I seriously cannot think of anyone praised as a hero or a saint in the popular media, whose name was not almost immediately dragged through the mud by somebody or other, often with completely unsupported allegations.

This unfortunate tendency of our culture might explain some of the difficulty we have with "Good" characters. Our cultural tendency is to question and distrust any claim of goodness, so we tend to examine it with a fine toothed comb looking for anything we can point to and say "see, they're actually a horrible person under the facade". This results in situations where good characters can't do any amount of evil without the morality being challenged, but evil characters can do large amounts of good without anyone caring.

Unfortunately, the only real solution is to be aware of this tendency and consciously choose to balance it out when we find ourselves slipping into that (very seductive) mode of thought.

Hence why I prefer a strictly mathematical system for morality. It doesn't matter what that morality is. We don't actually need Good, Evil, Law and Chaos. We could have a three-dimensional chassis with Freedom vs. Duty, Honour vs. Pragmatism and Logic vs. Emotion. All which are, theoretically, positive values when taken in moderation (though some would argue that a certain extreme is better than its opposite, of course).

The entire point of a formal, structured alignment system is that the only way it makes sense from a cosmological point of view (without any Author Intrusion) is that all the scales are balanced with precise mathematical certainty.

EDIT: And the reason it connects to your post is that a mathematical alignment system prevents the old "...yet you kill one bad guy..." problem with good characters having to be prohibitively inhuman in order to retain their Good alignment.

[Lord_Gareth]

If only we could get people to stop being afraid of changing their characters' alignment!

I'm not actually afraid to do so, especially since I don't often play characters where it matters re: my class abilities, but right now I'm at a stage in my roleplaying (not to imply some kind of 'roleplaying advancement' or Pokemon-style evolution) where I want to explore complex moral choices and motivations. Sometimes I do this with very morally simple characters that have a striking contrast; a crusader of Pelor that despises half-breeds, or a serial killer construct with a soft spot for others of his 'kind'. Sometimes, though, I do this with concepts that can be difficult to peg in an alignment system with the understanding that I don't really know everything about my character, and the point is to explore where their motivations take them and at what point they draw the line in the sand.

Let us take two very different characters of mine as an example, one of whom ended up having a problem with my fellow players and the other which didn't. The first, which created no problems, is a man named Jason, who grew up in a poor house in Sharn with no surname and no one but his brother. When the two of them got out they went their separate ways for a few years; Jason joined a succession of gangs until he got a feel for the streets and then mustered into the military for a year, while his brother apprenticed to a Beguiler. Both got into politics together, or, rather, Jason's brother got into politics. See, his brother was the public face of the two, campaigning for better treatment of the poor, for education, for measures to fight starvation and neglect. Jason, on the other hand, serves as his hidden weapon; when a politician is being particularly stubborn, recalcitrant, or malevolent, Jason steps in and kills him. He does so quietly, without fuss, and in their sleep with a single quick blow, but the fact remains that he murders these men and women in cold blood, leaving behind grieving families caught up in a vendetta that had nothing to do with them. Jason feels no guilt about what he does, because it is for the best of reasons. What alignment should he be?

The other is Kyllan Hammerson, and he did cause problems in a game. See, Kyllan is a pretty simple guy. The son of a blacksmith (hence the surname), Kyllan signed on with a mercenary company known as Highwind in a no-ressurection campaign setting in order to escape small town life and retire with a degree of respectability. At the start of the game, Kyllan was characterized and written down as LN, with a deep and abiding respect for the law (both on and off the battlefield and chain of command), a general compunction against harming the weak and helpless, and personal discipline. He was also a racist and a bigot in the low-level sense of lacking respect for 'uncivilized' beings and an ignorance of cultures outside of his own. As the game progressed and the campaign got more and more serious, he discovered a love for other cultures that blossomed in him, and he took to protecting those that were being illegally abused and mistreated and campaigning for the fair treatment of those that were being taken advantage of by technically legal means. However, as the commander of his mission (of literally world-saving importance), Kyllan has also personally tortured prisoners for information (and would do so again if given the chance), ordered assaults with a high chance of harming noncombatants (though admittedly as a very last resort), caused wanton destruction of property in pursuit of his enemies (including crashing a dragon into an evacuated village, destroying dozens of homes) and is more than prepared to take even more extreme action in order to, as he has been told, actually save the world from an honest-to-goodness apocalypse. I'd thought Kyllan was slipping towards evil. Imagine my surprise when my fellow players called BS on him being less affected by a spell that targets Good characters because at the time the DM and I agreed that he was still LN rather than LE. Is Kyllan Good because of his motivations? Evil because of his actions? Do his current actions outweigh his history of selflessly defending the weak, and does it matter that he did so because their torment was contrary to maintaining order rather than justice? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but there would be under a different system.

[Callista]

EDIT: And the reason it connects to your post is that a mathematical alignment system prevents the old "...yet you kill one bad guy..." problem with good characters having to be prohibitively inhuman in order to retain their Good alignment.

It brings in its own problems, though, doesn't it? You could, for example, kill one orphan and rescue another orphan and balance out at neutral, if you used math for it. But that doesn't take personality into account: Someone who'd willingly murder a child doesn't have a Good-aligned outlook on the world, no matter how many people they rescue. Or, on the other hand, you could play someone who's trying to redeem himself from having done lots of horrible things before--his personality could have changed to the point that he's now willing to die to save the orphan and would never consider murdering him, but because of all his past misdeeds he's still way in the negatives and considered "evil".

No, I think it has to be a label put on a character's personality and values--otherwise, it would be like the character alignment we find in computer RPGs, which is fine for a program but hasn't got much to do with role-playing. Let's take advantage of the fact that we're not computers, and are therefore flexible enough to create realistic characters and understand their motivations and personalities instead of just tallying up karma points.

[Lord_Gareth]

*Points at his post above*

Yoooou mean like that?

[JadePhoenix]

Let us take two very different characters of mine as an example, one of whom ended up having a problem with my fellow players and the other which didn't. The first, which created no problems, is a man named Jason, who grew up in a poor house in Sharn with no surname and no one but his brother. When the two of them got out they went their separate ways for a few years; Jason joined a succession of gangs until he got a feel for the streets and then mustered into the military for a year, while his brother apprenticed to a Beguiler. Both got into politics together, or, rather, Jason's brother got into politics. See, his brother was the public face of the two, campaigning for better treatment of the poor, for education, for measures to fight starvation and neglect. Jason, on the other hand, serves as his hidden weapon; when a politician is being particularly stubborn, recalcitrant, or malevolent, Jason steps in and kills him. He does so quietly, without fuss, and in their sleep with a single quick blow, but the fact remains that he murders these men and women in cold blood, leaving behind grieving families caught up in a vendetta that had nothing to do with them. Jason feels no guilt about what he does, because it is for the best of reasons. What alignment should he be?

From what you described, this character is evil. I see no moral ambiguity here, even.

The other is Kyllan Hammerson, and he did cause problems in a game. See, Kyllan is a pretty simple guy. The son of a blacksmith (hence the surname), Kyllan signed on with a mercenary company known as Highwind in a no-ressurection campaign setting in order to escape small town life and retire with a degree of respectability. At the start of the game, Kyllan was characterized and written down as LN, with a deep and abiding respect for the law (both on and off the battlefield and chain of command), a general compunction against harming the weak and helpless, and personal discipline. He was also a racist and a bigot in the low-level sense of lacking respect for 'uncivilized' beings and an ignorance of cultures outside of his own. As the game progressed and the campaign got more and more serious, he discovered a love for other cultures that blossomed in him, and he took to protecting those that were being illegally abused and mistreated and campaigning for the fair treatment of those that were being taken advantage of by technically legal means. However, as the commander of his mission (of literally world-saving importance), Kyllan has also personally tortured prisoners for information (and would do so again if given the chance), ordered assaults with a high chance of harming noncombatants (though admittedly as a very last resort), caused wanton destruction of property in pursuit of his enemies (including crashing a dragon into an evacuated village, destroying dozens of homes) and is more than prepared to take even more extreme action in order to, as he has been told, actually save the world from an honest-to-goodness apocalypse. I'd thought Kyllan was slipping towards evil. Imagine my surprise when my fellow players called BS on him being less affected by a spell that targets Good characters because at the time the DM and I agreed that he was still LN rather than LE. Is Kyllan Good because of his motivations? Evil because of his actions? Do his current actions outweigh his history of selflessly defending the weak, and does it matter that he did so because their torment was contrary to maintaining order rather than justice? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but there would be under a different system.

He looks clearly neutral to me. Some Good traits, some Evil traits. Thus, Neutral.

[TuggyNE]

Hence why I prefer a strictly mathematical system for morality. It doesn't matter what that morality is. We don't actually need Good, Evil, Law and Chaos. We could have a three-dimensional chassis with Freedom vs. Duty, Honour vs. Pragmatism and Logic vs. Emotion. All which are, theoretically, positive values when taken in moderation (though some would argue that a certain extreme is better than its opposite, of course).

This idea intrigues me, and I wish to hear more. (It's the first replacement alignment system I've looked into so far that I think I could stand; sorry, but, say, the Color Wheel, just doesn't do it for me.)

[Lord_Gareth]

This idea intrigues me, and I wish to hear more. (It's the first replacement alignment system I've looked into so far that I think I could stand; sorry, but, say, the Color Wheel, just doesn't do it for me.)

I made it more or less on a whim. You don't have to apologize - I'm not about to get offended.

That being said, have you checked into D20 Modern's system?

[Shadowknight12]

It brings in its own problems, though, doesn't it? You could, for example, kill one orphan and rescue another orphan and balance out at neutral, if you used math for it. But that doesn't take personality into account: Someone who'd willingly murder a child doesn't have a Good-aligned outlook on the world, no matter how many people they rescue. Or, on the other hand, you could play someone who's trying to redeem himself from having done lots of horrible things before--his personality could have changed to the point that he's now willing to die to save the orphan and would never consider murdering him, but because of all his past misdeeds he's still way in the negatives and considered "evil".

No, I think it has to be a label put on a character's personality and values--otherwise, it would be like the character alignment we find in computer RPGs, which is fine for a program but hasn't got much to do with role-playing. Let's take advantage of the fact that we're not computers, and are therefore flexible enough to create realistic characters and understand their motivations and personalities instead of just tallying up karma points.

What if the killed orphan was going to grow up to be a genocidal dictator or had already displayed psychopathic tendencies by murdering small animals and other orphans? And what if the saved orphan was going to grow up to be a saint or already displayed the qualities of being the vessel of a good-aligned god?

You are entirely right; it's not that easy. Which is precisely why we must reduce it to impartial, impersonal mathematics. Situations have already an inherent complexity, so our goal, as game designers or houserulers, should be to minimise the complexity to avoid arguments at the table. Obviously, the best solution is to do away with alignment altogether, since that's the least complex option, but if we must keep alignment, we must make everything surrounding it as simplified as possible precisely because the real world situations it attempts to analyse and codify are already inherently complex. We must choose a system that is as impersonal and unemotional as possible to dissuade arguments and facilitate common ground.

This idea intrigues me, and I wish to hear more. (It's the first replacement alignment system I've looked into so far that I think I could stand; sorry, but, say, the Color Wheel, just doesn't do it for me.)

Well, Freedom versus Duty is the conflict between sacrificing one's own freedom to obey a higher authority (duty) versus disorganisation and libertine tendencies (freedom). The main conflict here is whether personal freedoms are more important than social obligations or viceversa. Note that this does not necessarily involve the law, since duty is one's own personal measure of how much obedience they owe society, not how much one is willing to follow the law. When the military stages a coup, a soldier will have to choose between his duty to the chain of command and his duty to the current power. Regardless of what he chooses, he will still be Dutiful (if he chooses to take a third option and run away, that's not Dutiful at all).

Emotion versus Logic is fairly self-explanatory. Do you put your feelings aside and make cold, logical decisions at the risk of forsaking what makes you human (or whatever race applies) or do you choose to follow your heart and potentially make catastrophic decisions, such as sacrificing an entire village to save an endangered loved one?

Honour versus Pragmatism is purely internal and does not relate to society, regardless of what might seem at first glance. Everyone (save very few exceptions) have some sort of moral code. Pragmatic people are the ones willing to compromise their own moral code to achieve their goals, or to modify their moral code as situations change. Honourable people adhere to their code of conduct regardless of how difficult circumstances become and sacrifice advantages for their own peace of mind.

It could be argued that the ideal position is True Neutral, a balance of all three, and that excess of any virtue can be dangerous and severely unbalance the subject. However, the other side of the coin is that a non-committal person also lacks a reason to fight or take a stand. One could argue that a lack of strong convictions is highly unhealthy in a world where masses can be manipulated to suit the charismatic, or even just trusted to ignore any shady dealings.