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more about alignment, D&D and game fluff
Apr. 25th, 2011 10:59 amPrompted by thinking about several different things.
Alignment seems to be a clear holdover of D&D's wargame heritage, to me. Compare whatever Gygax and his buddies must've used as Chainmail rules, to the duality in GW's current LotR game, and it's a pretty consistent mechanic. Gygax said he wasn't much influenced by Tolkien, but I think he was a lot more captured by the Battle of Five Armies or the Pelennor Fields (and all the big battles in the Elric stories which Moorcock wrote as reaction to Tolkien) than by the idea of the Nine Walkers making their way through Moria. This fits in with the big battles in Howard, which Gygax definitely was into; I think you can see in the level-based rules, Gygax really liking the idea that Conan goes from penniless nobody from the boonies, to experienced all-'round mercenary, to king of Aquilonia. Stuff like that.
Goodness, neutrality and evil exist as army creation constructs; the same way a good army can include knights, dwarf axemen, halfling slingers and the like, an evil army can include goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, and so on, and a neutral army can enlist neutral knight and good-aligned dwarf or evil-aligned gnoll alike. So far so good. That simplication carries through into the metamorphosis of battlefield commanders into dungeon-delving adventurers. Alignment is a useful if chunky rules thing; paladins make up for the cost in good alignment through sword-cast circles of protection and by having a constant passive scan for villains, and you know that the gnolls you're trying to hire will respond better to an approach from the neutral rogue than the lawful good dwarf. Old D&D and AD&D had endgames basically involving player characters becoming Chainmail army/navy/fortress commanders. So far, so good.
At this point, alignment becomes weirder and chunkier because the game's passed out of its original hands into people from 4e and Paizo designers all the way down to the average dweeb playing on the weekend. In my experience, the average player character is kinda-sorta-good; not quite as mercenary as a Conan type, more than happy to join in the fight against evil, but not as committed as a paladin or some clerics. In my experience, most campaigns are an epic fight between good and evil, since it's a lot more compelling as a reason for adventurers to stay together and do things than Picaresque fortune-hunting.
"If I ran WotC" I'd revamp alignment, though only slightly. Either I'd throw it out or basically make good and evil the real extremes, with most people assumed to be some vaguely aligned flavor of neutral - contrary to the 4e assumption that PCs are never evil and always either heroes or HEROES! F'rex, assassins are kinda-sorta-evil because their whole livelihood is based on killing total strangers, a mercenary human baron or a gnoll chieftain are kinda-sorta-evil, but that's not quite career slaver, rampaging dragon, or demon-summoning necromancer territory. Similarly the average elf is kinda-sorta-good, which doesn't mean they don't display prejudice towards dwarves or will gladly fill trespassers in the woods full of arrows; or the average adventurer is kinda-sorta-good, but that's not quite paladin or pacifist cleric territory. Doing that would eliminate a lot of the good/evil themed spells, though there'd still be some use for it. And here, I'd apply the 3e splatbook format to that general grouping; you'd have The Book of Exalted Deeds, which would be full of useful junk for the few actually committed good individuals, The Book of Vile Darkness as largely a gamemaster tool, and The Complete Adventurer as a resource for pretty much everyone else. (Maybe I'd throw in a Complete Monster book largely as a GM tool.)
The campaign-against-evil-format also gets me into weird problems in pacing, basically. Compare and contrast the fight against evil in Peter Jackson's movie adaptations with Tolkien's original books. In the LotR movies, the world is going downhill quick; Osgiliath is already an evacuated ruin, the elves are packing out of Rivendell almost immediately after the Fellowship leaves, angry Dunlendings are starting to pour into Rohan. It's a great epic backdrop, but not exactly the sort of place where player characters can spend hours arguing over the costs of tents with vendors in big, peaceful, well-supplied cities. Tolkien's original - where Frodo spends 14 years reading up on elf poetry while Aragorn and Faramir are out there doing vague black ops missions, and where there's plenty of time for a wandering group of hobbits to run into threats like Old Man Willow or the barrow-wights - seems like a good match for most D&D games. Characters clonk around at low levels, vaguely aware of the greater threat looming on the horizon, and the situation goes south in a big way after they've leveled up enough to actually be major players in it. I think that's much more the standard campaign pacing, but then I haven't quite figured out how to make that "and then suddenly the world goes downhill real fast" part click.
Alignment seems to be a clear holdover of D&D's wargame heritage, to me. Compare whatever Gygax and his buddies must've used as Chainmail rules, to the duality in GW's current LotR game, and it's a pretty consistent mechanic. Gygax said he wasn't much influenced by Tolkien, but I think he was a lot more captured by the Battle of Five Armies or the Pelennor Fields (and all the big battles in the Elric stories which Moorcock wrote as reaction to Tolkien) than by the idea of the Nine Walkers making their way through Moria. This fits in with the big battles in Howard, which Gygax definitely was into; I think you can see in the level-based rules, Gygax really liking the idea that Conan goes from penniless nobody from the boonies, to experienced all-'round mercenary, to king of Aquilonia. Stuff like that.
Goodness, neutrality and evil exist as army creation constructs; the same way a good army can include knights, dwarf axemen, halfling slingers and the like, an evil army can include goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, and so on, and a neutral army can enlist neutral knight and good-aligned dwarf or evil-aligned gnoll alike. So far so good. That simplication carries through into the metamorphosis of battlefield commanders into dungeon-delving adventurers. Alignment is a useful if chunky rules thing; paladins make up for the cost in good alignment through sword-cast circles of protection and by having a constant passive scan for villains, and you know that the gnolls you're trying to hire will respond better to an approach from the neutral rogue than the lawful good dwarf. Old D&D and AD&D had endgames basically involving player characters becoming Chainmail army/navy/fortress commanders. So far, so good.
At this point, alignment becomes weirder and chunkier because the game's passed out of its original hands into people from 4e and Paizo designers all the way down to the average dweeb playing on the weekend. In my experience, the average player character is kinda-sorta-good; not quite as mercenary as a Conan type, more than happy to join in the fight against evil, but not as committed as a paladin or some clerics. In my experience, most campaigns are an epic fight between good and evil, since it's a lot more compelling as a reason for adventurers to stay together and do things than Picaresque fortune-hunting.
"If I ran WotC" I'd revamp alignment, though only slightly. Either I'd throw it out or basically make good and evil the real extremes, with most people assumed to be some vaguely aligned flavor of neutral - contrary to the 4e assumption that PCs are never evil and always either heroes or HEROES! F'rex, assassins are kinda-sorta-evil because their whole livelihood is based on killing total strangers, a mercenary human baron or a gnoll chieftain are kinda-sorta-evil, but that's not quite career slaver, rampaging dragon, or demon-summoning necromancer territory. Similarly the average elf is kinda-sorta-good, which doesn't mean they don't display prejudice towards dwarves or will gladly fill trespassers in the woods full of arrows; or the average adventurer is kinda-sorta-good, but that's not quite paladin or pacifist cleric territory. Doing that would eliminate a lot of the good/evil themed spells, though there'd still be some use for it. And here, I'd apply the 3e splatbook format to that general grouping; you'd have The Book of Exalted Deeds, which would be full of useful junk for the few actually committed good individuals, The Book of Vile Darkness as largely a gamemaster tool, and The Complete Adventurer as a resource for pretty much everyone else. (Maybe I'd throw in a Complete Monster book largely as a GM tool.)
The campaign-against-evil-format also gets me into weird problems in pacing, basically. Compare and contrast the fight against evil in Peter Jackson's movie adaptations with Tolkien's original books. In the LotR movies, the world is going downhill quick; Osgiliath is already an evacuated ruin, the elves are packing out of Rivendell almost immediately after the Fellowship leaves, angry Dunlendings are starting to pour into Rohan. It's a great epic backdrop, but not exactly the sort of place where player characters can spend hours arguing over the costs of tents with vendors in big, peaceful, well-supplied cities. Tolkien's original - where Frodo spends 14 years reading up on elf poetry while Aragorn and Faramir are out there doing vague black ops missions, and where there's plenty of time for a wandering group of hobbits to run into threats like Old Man Willow or the barrow-wights - seems like a good match for most D&D games. Characters clonk around at low levels, vaguely aware of the greater threat looming on the horizon, and the situation goes south in a big way after they've leveled up enough to actually be major players in it. I think that's much more the standard campaign pacing, but then I haven't quite figured out how to make that "and then suddenly the world goes downhill real fast" part click.