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Y'know when your character does something heinous and the DM tells you that your character has gone from Chaotic Neutral to Chaotic Evil?
Character Alignment hasn't been anything very strictly enforced in most games I've played in. I guess most of the time the moral standards of the player party are never really challenged, that is we rarely have to make difficult decisions
That said, in the Pathfinder game I'm playing in now our characters' moral standards get tested a lot. There have already been a few times where a difficult challenge could be made easier by doing something reprehensible, like necromancy, murder, kidnapping or what have you. So far I think everyone in the party has suffered at least one alignment drop, my character suffered two, (briefly.)
Now, mind I'm not complaining. In fact I think it's really cool that the DM is actually holding our characters to their ethics and we actually get to make these tough decisions. Also, none of us ever suffer alignment drops unless what we do is pretty unambiguously bad.
So how 'bout you, the rest of the Playground? Have you ever played in a game where alignment drops happened? What was your experience like?
I've often threatened my players with alignment drops, and it's always been enough. I've made both a Samurai and a Paladin fall (not the same thing as alignment drop, but related), the first for fleeing and letting another PC to be sacrificed for their sake, and the second for lying to save his life.
As a player, I've been in a few situations where I had to take ethically hard decisions, but I've never received an alignment change for them. However, I tend to take non-optimal decisions quite often if that's what the character would do: for example, my most recent character was a wizard who could not accept for knowledge to be destroyed, and would not let his teammates kill an enemy wizard before we found a way to gain all of his knowledge. Of course the enemy escaped and came back to hurt us, but... It was still preferable to my character for him to escape so the knowledge would not be destroyed.
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King of the Awfully Oversized Post
As a DM, big fan of Schrödinger's Room.
Spoiler
Schrödinger's Room: As long as the PCs haven't opened the door, the room could contain a gold-filled chest as much as 6 Beholders.
Also available in Schrödinger's NPC (as long as you haven't used Detect Evil, he could be the BBEG in hiding), Schrödinger's magic item (it could be a cursed sword, or a holy avenger) and Schrödinger's equipment list ("I swear he had a potion of remove blindness on him!")
I've never been in a game where alignment was a big deal. That's not to say ethics weren't significant, just that it wasn't tied to a metagame label of "lawful good" or "chaotic evil".
But there were external standards, sometimes. One of my DMs made a point of it, mainly with divine-powered characters. It was a feature of the setting that divine magic exclusively came from the gods, not from faith itself or abstract portfolios, and that the gods paid close attention to their chosen. So clerics, druids, and paladins had to be rather careful to follow the proper dogma and philosophies. Several times, characters were hit with warning dreams or visions urging them to "correct" their ways. One cleric character had a personal arc that involved him deciding to forsake his god and falling for a few days, before regaining his powers through alternate sources, so that was cool.
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Avatar by araveugnitsuga.
91% of DMs started their first campaign while wearing pants. If you're one of the 9% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.
As long as there's an understand that alignment is just a label for your actions, I'd have no problem with my alignment flying all over the place because of the system's weird views of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos. If I'm with a group that says "hey you're evil now, why aren't you killing that orphan?" I'd probably have problems with it.
I've never really been in a game where alignment has been more than something I've considered after working out my fluff and tossing up on my sheet, to never look at again (I haven't been hit by alignment-dependent stuff anytime recently, so it's not even consulted for that).
I've been a player in a game where the DM used alignments as a way to control the direction the players went. I've always believed that even within the same alignment a range of different choices are possible so that even two LG paladins to the same deity can have legitimate points of difference in ethical and moral discussions. This DM however used the alignments like one might see in a video game where you have the 1 NG choice, the 1 LG choice, the 1 LN choice, etc etc so that if you deviated from whatever that choice was at the moment you risked, if you were a divine character, the loss of class abilities (even for non paladins). The alignment system became a sort of straight jacket, I'm not in the game anymore, but I'm glad I was since it made me really think as a DM how I'd run an ethical/moral dilemma.
As long as there's an understand that alignment is just a label for your actions, I'd have no problem with my alignment flying all over the place because of the system's weird views of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos. If I'm with a group that says "hey you're evil now, why aren't you killing that orphan?" I'd probably have problems with it.
Oh yes, of course. Considering that if a character started out as a good guy they'd probably still have problems with killing orphans, even if they became evil. For my part I still think of my character is still more or less the same person despite any alignment drops, and the DM seems OK with that.
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Originally Posted by AntiTrust
I've been a player in a game where the DM used alignments as a way to control the direction the players went. I've always believed that even within the same alignment a range of different choices are possible so that even two LG paladins to the same deity can have legitimate points of difference in ethical and moral discussions. This DM however used the alignments like one might see in a video game where you have the 1 NG choice, the 1 LG choice, the 1 LN choice, etc etc so that if you deviated from whatever that choice was at the moment you risked, if you were a divine character, the loss of class abilities (even for non paladins). The alignment system became a sort of straight jacket, I'm not in the game anymore, but I'm glad I was since it made me really think as a DM how I'd run an ethical/moral dilemma.
Whoa. Yeah that sounds like a rough way of handling it. I'm glad you were able to get something out of it though. Though I got to wonder, if there was a set of solutions each corresponding to one of the alignments what happens if you come of with a solution that the DM didn't expect? Does that break the game or is it just called CN?
It helps to know how your GM (DM, most likely) runs alignment. The more restrictive they play it, the more you should favor Neutral alignments.
In the games I've played where it matters, alignment shifts typically come from the player (or are suggested by fellow players) - The way they are playing the character doesn't quite fit the alignment they picked (in their mind), or the other players think he's more X than Y. Getting the label to fit the character, rather than making the character fit the label.
Mind you, I don't end up in a lot of soul searching/ start of darkness/ let's screw with the paladin/ Snape hunt games, so alignment shifts aren't plot-relevant.
Though since we are on the topic, A quick question: If a character has significant impulse control/leap before they look tendencies, would this be justification for a Chaotic alignment tag, or would that be workable as Neutral?
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