Alignment and Premise in D&D

[M. J. Young]

I feel silly doing this, but over in Ben Lehman's http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10857">Gamism and Narrativism thread a side issue emerged regarding whether D&D had within it the possibility of addressing premise in a narrativist manner, and I just wanted to say that I Reverend Daegmorgan that there was a lot of room for premise in older versions of D&D as writ--but Ben asked that it be taken to another thread. I hope I have enough to say about it to warrant its own thread.

I do a lot of writing about alignment, and in the games I ran it was always very important in character actions. Even for "ordinary" fighters, magic-users, and thieves, consideration of your alignment was critical to play (not to say for clerics and paladins, samurai and monks, and so many other classes in which it did matter specifically). In the end, you could act in a manner that was surprising, given your alignment, provided you did so in a manner which persuaded me that you had considered the issue and determined that your alignment demanded this choice.

I particularly find the "corner" alignments very challenging from a premise standpoint. To contrast these with the "side" alignments, if you're neutral good, you're a fanatic--you believe that everything you do has to be framed in accord with the single value of providing the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. What that means in application can be very challenging (that is, the player has to explore what actually does bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people), but at least we know the objective. Similarly, if you're chaotic neutral, your single overriding value is that people must be free. It doesn't matter if they want to be free; it doesn't matter whether their living conditions would be better or worse if they were free--freedom is the thing that matters, and one way or another that's what we defend.

By contrast, if you're chaotic good, you have two values--the freedom of individuals and general well-being of the greatest number. Now you've got a problem. If someone is a slave, but he's a well-treated and well-tended slave whose needs are met in abundance, who does not have the ability to care for himself and would surely die inside a month left on his own, is it more important that he be free to die a free man, or that he live a long and happy life as a slave? Similarly, if there are thousands of slaves, all reasonably well tended, whose labors are the backbone of the nation such that their freedom would mean economic collapse, starvation, and suffering not only for the freed slaves but also for thousands more who are neither slaves nor masters but are dependent on the system, is the enslavement of those people too great a price to pay for the stability of the world? These corner boxes are filled with conflict, places where questions must be asked and answered in the course of a campaign, as players define their characters as closer to one or the other of their values. The paladin is particularly difficult in this regard, as every choice he makes must be both good and lawful, and in some situations there will not be an obvious option which fits those criteria, so some creative thinking may be required.

Meanwhile, if you know that the referee is going to require of you that you act in a manner which appears to him to be within your alignment, or you're going to suffer in game penalties (ranging from longer more expensive training time to lost experience points to trouble with your god), you've got to play this in a way that not only shows what you're doing, but shows why you're doing it. I'm sure my players are tired of hearing me say, It is not enough for good to oppose evil; it must do so while remaining good. Yet it forces them to consider their acts and seek ways to accomplish their goals without stepping outside that which they maintain to be their characters' beliefs. I never once said, "Your character wouldn't do that because of his alignment;" but I'm sure my players have said it of their own characters.

I certainly agree that this aspect of the game, which I have always seen as raising moral issues to be addressed in play, is strongly at odds with the core advancement mechanic. I'll even buy that the game in its earlier forms was incoherent because of this (do you play the alignment as an obstacle for the gamist to overcome in reaching his objective, or do you play the advancement system as a secondary backdrop which improves characters whose existence is really about the address of those core values?). I still think that premise is built into those alignment concepts, and usually just overlooked or run over roughshod by players.

Well, Raven, how close are you on that point?

--M. J. Young

[Ben Lehman]

Thanks for the spin-off!  Sorry to make you feel silly, I just didn't want everything in one thread to hinge on D&D, because (as this thread is going to show, I'm sure) everyone has totally different ideas about what D&D means, and I think its important to hash those out before talking about it in other theoretical contexts.

I think that your points about alignment are well-taken -- the thing is designed to produce nasty premise-driven conflicts within a PC group.  However (this is a big however), it is out of place with D&D as a social construct (not as a system, necessarily, but a social construct), in which it is a game about decapitating things with a different skin color than you.  (more on this later.)

Some more thoughts on alignment -- I think that this system is meant to engender moral thought about the game, although whether that is in terms of premise or theme is pretty muddled.  The rules as written seem to be strongly written towards a preset theme: act this way or be punished!  But, at the same time, they are very easily shifted towards a premise sort of viewpoint, both in the way that MJ described, and in another.  The second method is through generating inter-party conflict (and it may be useful, at this point, to think of the party as a big multi-headed party character).  Because, even if you don't seperate the axes and (gygax style) give each alignment type a clear directive, you still have a group with different ethics/morals who needs to either learn to get along or die.  There's a great premise for you:  Is survival worth overcoming moral differences?

I was one of those gamers who ditched alignment, by and large, or rather often used it as a shorthand for a much more complicated belief system.  (One of the my characters, who got denoted "chaotic evil," was actually not such a bad guy, he was just a gypsy "fortune teller" and thus made his living by swindling people.  Another character, who got designated "lawful good," spend most of the game fighting against the government, because his "lawful" meant "honest."  So on and so forth.)

But, I also never played hack-and-slash D&D, except when forced to by group circumstances.  Oddly, I was indoctrinated into this style of play, I just moved away from it *without ever realizing what I was doing*    Very helpful in this was, I think, was the "blue and teal books" of the late 80s D&D box sets, which explicitly described the process of the character growing out of dungeon crawling by about third level, and getting involved with geo-politics, trade, settlement, and society.  By the time I was about 6 years old, I decided that this "later" part of the game was more fun anyway, and started characters doing it from level 1.

(I'd like the note that this is not, explicitly, linked to a GNS mode.  It's just not what people often consider D&D.)

D&D, as a system, is complex and contains multitudes.  Ron rightly points out in his "a hard look at D&D" essay that it wasn't standardized, really, ever.  I will go on to say that even standardization attempts (like 2nd Ed AD&D) are broad, and contain techniques and system bits that run the full spectrum of GNS.  (A short few thoughts: 2nd ed's proficiencies are simmy, levels are gamey, and alignment is narry, roughly.)

So everyone is playing a different D&D, even today, after the most successful standardization attempt in the game's history (3rd Edition, initial version), there is still a wildly diverse playerbase full of house rules, ignored sections of rules text, and carry-overs from at least 7 earlier rules editions.

Now, this is totally different from what D&D means in a social context, both amongst gamers and in society at large, which is why there is so much resistance to people talking about "Narrativist D&D" and "Alignment as Premise basis."

See, I think "playing D&D" is, in the terms of this context, an entirely different animal than sitting down and playing a role-playing game with some or all of the rules in a D&D rulebook.  "Playing D&D" is the *bad* role-playing, or the *good* roleplaying -- it is an avatar, a symbol, without semantic content but with an enormous emotive weight -- it is symbolic of the hobby as a whole, although whether it is cast in the role of deity or adversary is largely a matter of context.

This "playing D&D" is all about mucking about in underground catacombs, beheading the local fauna (and sometimes flora), getting treasure, *and nothing else.*

I would like to propose that this is silly, and then talk about D&D in a theoretical context.

yrs--
--Ben[/i]

[NN]

M. J. Young - what level of "raising moral issues" are you after? The Players playing Characters dealing with complicated moral issues in the D&D moral world, with its objective, measurable, undeniable primal forces of Alignment, or the Players themselves dealing with moral issues?

I think that the power - (or is it the duty?) - of the DM to label the players alignment - precludes the players from really dealing with moral issues. Of course, you can still have plenty fun controlling characters acting within the moral framework of the D&D world.

And, of course, the Law-Chaos axis of D&D is complete rubbish, but maybe thats my NG bias (incidentally, I have never interpreted NG as "fanatic" or Utilitarian, but as "pragmatic" and "flexible")

Ps. Which article has the info on Stance?

[contracycle]

Alignment is among one of those things that is mandated by biology, or certainly is by default for the enemy races; their alignemtn or alignment range is one of the things that appears in their statblock.  From my perspective, then, its indistinguishable from a Friend/Foe transponder.  Like targets in a computer game, these characters carry little tags that tell us whether we can slay them and feel good about it, or not.

[BPetroff93]

I don't think alignment by itself can constitute premise.  There is no hard question here, just am attempt at simulating either metaphysics or ethics.  

However, I agree with M.J. that originally alignment in D&D held alot of possibilities.  It factored into play often, and seemed to be a defining characteristic of the game, good vs evil and law vs chaos.  I think the move away from alignment emphasis in D&D, or the tendancy towards a mechanically metaphysical interpretation as opposed to a personal ethics interpretation was inevitable.  The system does not take such "soft factors" into consideration in it's reward system.   Compare with TROS which makes a solid connecting line from creation to reward system thereby cementing it's narritivist premise.  Mechanically the only way the D&D system encouraged the use of alignment was, and is, a very metaphysical and artifical manner.  IE: I am NG, therefore I cannot pick up this blade which is CE.  

However, there seemed to be much encouragement, at least early on, to use alignment for determining ethical issues.  With a lack of mechanic to encourage it, the play group had to drift like mad.  The only way for the dirft to work was for the group to stay homogenous and for there to be some degree of force utilized to maintain the drift.

[Callan S.]

Strange. MJ both highlights to me the potential for alignments to be narrativist, and also reminds me why I hate alignments so bad (to be precise, the heavy enforcement of alignment).

I think it reveals the 'THIS is your premise' power the GM has, in saying something like neutral good means so and so (wow, does neutral good mean such a different thing to me as a GM).

I mean, if it was TROS and you had a lady love passion, and the GM then said 'Unless you go right over here and do X (read: what I want) your bad and will suffer consequences, as X could affect your lady love', it would suck. Clearly if I have a lady love, I want to be chasing after her and not the GM's pet story.

Alignments are just fuzzy enough to ensure the kidnapping of players personal premise selection by the GM is as plausable and unargueable as possible. After all, neutral good is one mans X and another mans Y. And the GM can calvinball such a fuzzy term so as to tell the player they already agreed in advance to anything the GM said.

Regardless, I do think hard premise questions can be extracted from alignment. Extracted rather than read directly.

[myripad]

I never used alignment in D&D after I moved away from gamist play (note that I didn't call it that, just in retrospect I know that it was) as I basically considered it a gamist obstacle. Fairly often, though, my players would use alignment as a narrativist tool (premise?) almost unconcsiously.

Although I'm not enough of a GNS buff to really contribute to this discussion, I'm glad to read through it, as I can identify my own experiences with many of the posts. Neat.