Level up your D&D alignments!

Though much maligned in certain circles, I like alignments in D&D and similar tabletop role-playing games. What if we implemented actual mechanics around them?

Transcript

What if we took alignments, made them opt in, gave them levels and progressions to those levels, and then abilities that unlock potentially at different levels? Sound intriguing?

I like D&D alignment systems, in theory...

I have always enjoyed alignment systems. I appreciate what they're trying to do. I will admit that alignment systems, as they are normally presented, don't necessarily do a great job of doing the things that I appreciate about them, but I did like that they were there. that they gave you some idea of where your character sits on the cosmic spectrum, if you will, and could provide a guidepost or guiding light to figuring out a little bit about what my character would do versus what a different character would do.

If you're a lawful, that sort of sets some guidelines. And if you are chaotic, that set some other guidelines. Once you get into the more complex systems with multiple axes, you even get a little more fine-grained either control or restriction on what you're supposed to do. But not all is sunny in alignment land. I think anyone who's played this game for any period of time has probably run into some of the problems that come up with conventional alignments almost across editions, regardless of what version of D&D or D&D-like game that you play.

Prescriptive vs Descriptive schools of alignment

There are two styles of alignment systems. One is the prescriptive style and one is the descriptive style. Maybe I should call them schools. In the prescriptive school, your alignments determine what you can do. If you are lawful and attempt to do something that's chaotic, you simply can't do it because you are lawful. That is a chaotic action. Therefore, that action is forbidden. That action is forbidden to you. Same thing if you're chaotic and you want to do something lawful. Doesn't scan. Can't do it. In the descriptive model, the alignment more or less follows your actions instead of determining your actions. So if you are lawful and you do something chaotic, you start to shift towards chaos. If you're chaotic and you start to do lawful things, you start to shift towards law.

In the prescriptive school, you are locked into a set of actions and locked out of another set of actions. And that's it. Depending on your referee, your dungeon master, there may be some latitude or less latitude. You may be able to argue your point or not argue your point. But either way, there is a restrictive action set that you are essentially signing into when you pick an alignment. This is why you end up with folks who just want to be neutral. And this is because they argue at least that well, if you're neutral, you can do anything you want. You're a fly in the wind. You're a flag in the breeze. You can go whichever way the wind is flowing.

The descriptive school doesn't have that particular problem, but it has a related issue, which is that as you may start to move between alignments, you may not know when that's happening or you may not have control of when you've shifted and your GM, your referee might just all of a sudden say, "Well, you're no longer lawful. You are chaotic because of X, Y, and Z." You as the player stand back and go, "What did I do? What do you mean I did this? I didn't I didn't deserve to do that. did X, Y, and Z and the GM says, "Well, you also did A, B, and C and those are clearly chaotic things and therefore you have shifted."

Often times, this is where those arguments can come up really in both schools as to what determines whether an action is lawful and chaos and how many actions does it take to start to move and what was worth a move or not or a restriction or not. And then of course, is it really lawful? Is it really chaotic? And those arguments ad nauseum. Because of these arguments and how it can pretty much shut down and take over a gaming session, a lot of folks just think, "Hey, you know what? This alignment system, it's not worth the noise. Let's just drop it." I'm not one of those people.

Playing in moral universes

I am not particularly a fan of the amoral universe. I feel like we live in basically an amoral universe and I'm not particularly interested in playing in a moral universes. I don't think that most gaming universes are actually amoral. If you've got good aligned deities or powers or forces in your world and you have evil deities or forces in your world, the fact that they may collide and end up with a net zero because they're essentially evenly balanced doesn't make your world amoral. It makes your world a moral world, just one that's in a balance. Neither the forces of law or good, if you want to call it that, or the forces of evil or chaos can get a permanent advantage. But the morality matters and I like this.

I like that your morality matters. I like that there is some sense in which taking the harder path may be more rewarding because you are making a stand against one side or the other. I don't usually go in for the evil because the evil, a lot like neutrality, is just this, "Oh, do whatever you want whenever you want or oh I can I can give the beggar coins cuz down the line I'm going to do something malevolent." I think it's too easy. I like to have limits.

I think those limits are good. I think they help with the brain and firing up your imaginations, but that's just me. But if you have a moral universe, then alignments should matter, right? Are you a force for good? Are you a force for evil? But we run into the arguments. Well, how are you going to determine these things? How are you going to judge them? And can you set up a system to have some sort of fair arbitration for these things? Well, my answer to those questions, which is not a perfect answer cuz you're still going to have to have some judgment and there's still going to be some arbitration. However, I think well, you can you can judge for yourself whether this is a worthwhile exercise or not is to have alignments effectively be opt-in.

Make your D&D alignments opt-in

Let's say you're starting out a game and you can normally choose between chaos, law, and neutral. Going back to say white box, BX, something like that. You just start off at first level or level zero, wherever you're starting out as neutral. And neutral, you basically have the book open to you in terms of what you can do. But doing certain things will have consequences. And those consequences will be opting into either being lawful or being chaotic. Now, this does demand that the referee or the DM or the GM be open and transparent about actions that are lawful or chaotic. You could make a short list. Of course, you're not going to be able to cover everything, but you could probably cover the basics.

Murder is chaos; poison is chaos; backstab is chaos; healing folks is lawful; justice and whatever else is lawful; keeping your word, making true bargains, being honest. You can come up with your own list, or you could pull a list from some other virtues, whatever you want to model in terms of what is virtuous behavior versus what is poor behavior. There's always going to be edge cases. So, you're always going to have moments where you're going to have to have a conversation with your players and say, "Hey, if you go through with that, that is definitely a lawful act and you know, you're chaos or you're a lawful, but man, you torturing and murdering this guy, that is definitely a chaotic act." You can have those discussions with your with your players. Some things you can make more or less cut and dry, depending on your world type.

What is the morality of your campaign setting?

For example, for me, because I do play in moral universes, the ends do not justify the means. I see this a lot in arguments about alignment. Well, if I'm torturing 50 people, when I'm saving a million people, the torturing is okay, and I can still be good and lawful and have a halo above my head cuz, you know, yeah, sure, I brutally tortured and killed 50 people, but I saved a million. Well, in my kind of universes, that's still evil. That don't fly. I think the first time that comes up would probably be the last time it comes up because I would say, "yeah, no, ends do not justify the means; that kind of behavior will not stand." So know that for the future but you may have to have those conversations.

You may have to figure out that stuff about your world. But that to me is cool. That is like an added bonus. Hey, I get to do some extra world building. Do some soularching about how I want my universe to be and then communicate that to the players. Once you kind of have that set up, you'll have this list more or less and the players will have in mind more or less what is sort of neutral or doesn't have an effect on the balance of their alignments and which stuff will try to shift them one way or shift them another. Why would you want to shift? Why wouldn't you just want to stay in neutral the whole time?

Why would a player opt into an alignment?

The reason is because once you opt in, you can start to level up and then potentially gain alignment-based abilities determined by the level you have in your alignment. I'm going to use a couple of very simple examples. I'm not saying you have to use these. You could probably come up with really cool exotic ones. But just to get the point across, what if we said, "Hey, look, instead of having clerics, or at least the way clerics appear in most games, anybody can turn undead. However, turning a dead is a lawful ability. And instead of looking at your level as a cleric would for turning, we will look at your level in law for your turning ability. So, you could basically take that same cleric turn undead table, however it looks like (I just made a post about a variant turn on dead table you can check out). Take that cleric level and replace it with your law alignment level. That is the power you have to turn undead. That's pretty cool in my book.

Alignments can unlock powers

It means one, you could probably ditch clerics in your game or do something different with them. Two, anybody can turn undead, but that is a lawful ability. Neutral folks, evil or chaotic folks, sorry, does not apply. But lawful folks, you can do that. And the more lawful you get, the better you will be at turning. For the evil folks, let's just say that we're going to remove backstab from thieves. Or if you don't like that, we could take poison, poison or backstab. I like backstab a little bit more because it has a scaling to it, whereas poisons don't have scaling, but you could have them both. Say, "Look, backstab and poison, those are chaotic abilities. Once you start leveling up in chaos, the amount of damage dice you would roll for a backstab is equal to your chaos level. And by the way, you can also use poison. So whether that perk is of equivalent value to turning undead, to me, I don't really care if it is or not. You can always add more perks and things like that if you want to. The fact is that yeah, you can use poisons and you can backstab people. That's part of team chaos. Or if you want to turn undead, that's part of team law.

Alignment powers become carrots and sticks for shaping player-character behavior

By taking some of these abilities and keying them to alignments, what we can do is not only can we make a carrot for a character that really wants to learn how to do that stuff or somebody who wants to be a paladin or a cleric, wants to have turn undead, so wants to be part of team law. Great. I have a reason to do that. Or I'm really playing a skulky thief-type or assassin, so I really want that backstab and poison. Great. There's a reason for me to go into the chaos path. It's also a little bit of a stick to keep you on those paths because if you start losing levels in Chaos or Law, you lose the effectiveness of those abilities. Well, I was chaos level three, so I was getting a nice sweet 3d6 extra or times three backstab damage. But now I started doing goody goody stuff. Now I've dropped down to chaos level one and now it's just one-times, which essentially is nothing. That's a bit of a bummer. So you get both a stick and a carrot, which I think is good.

Alignment powers offer benefits that conventional alignment systems rarely have

It does a little end turn around one of the problems with conventional alignments, the fact that there's really no benefits, only risks and the stakes are either nothing or they're incredibly high. You go from, if you're a fighter, if you're not using magic weapon alignment, and I do like magic weapon alignment also, but other than that, or magic item alignment overall, it doesn't really matter. You don't really gain or lose anything. Same thing with a thief. Chaos, law, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe, again, mostly in terms of your equipment. That's pretty much it. You can float around. It doesn't really matter. To the cleric, or somebody of that ilk, switching alignment could have really strong, cataclysmic stakes. Your god has thrown you out and you've lost all your powers. Or if you're a paladin, you have lost your paladinhood. These things are super major and there's really no in-between. Either it doesn't matter at all or it matters a ton. This gives you a nice middle ground because, in this system, we're mechanizing it. The players are going to be able to see. They're going to be able to track this a little bit. They're going to be able to say, "okay, if I'm doing these things, I'll get law. I'm going do these things goes towards chaos."

Mechanizing alignment enables players to make better decisions for their characters

On a moment to moment basis, if it isn't clear, the GM can say, "listen, I know what you guys are trying to decide, and by the way, if you do that-- yeah, you know there's one bad guy on board this super yacht, and you decide just blow the whole thing up-- that's chaos." We've established that the ends don't justify the means. "Killing 100 people to get that one guy, doesn't matter to me, I'm already on chaos. So, scoreboard, let's do it." The one who is on team law may be thinking, "well, maybe we should try to figure out another way." These, I think, are good tensions, and I think they're all above board. It becomes part of figuring out how you as a team, as a group of players, are going to come together. Like most things, there are risks if you're going to have half the party be chaos and half the party be law. You can also look at it as these are the stories that evolve.

Shifting alignments make for great stories

You start off with a a group of folks who are neutral and then as they have adventures. Some of them start to turn one way, some of them start to turn another way, and then you get to have those tensions in a way that I think can help push the stories that are unfolding this history as it's moving. This happens. People start off being aligned and they become less aligned. How do they deal with that? How do you deal with the fact that this person who you've known since birth, your best friend has started to drift away and take a different path and that path is almost opposite to yours? How do you deal with that?

These are the fun situations in role playing games and it's one that everybody is going to know from the jump. They're going to know those stakes. They're going to know those things coming in. It's not all of a sudden going to be, "haha," and their world's turned upside down because you, as the GM, decided that they had done enough, but you hadn't shared that with anybody. There was no scorecard, so nobody knew what enough was until you suddenly said, "That's it. Now you're chaos." That's probably bad, just poor GMing. Whether you take this system that I'm thinking about or something else, you should probably be more transparent with your players about alignments.

A described system is currently in development, but you can DIY your own version

I don't have the particular details set up yet. I'm thinking of something where you would have levels and then as you do things, you might roll dice. Let's just say at the end of a session or you could say at the end of a season you might take a number of tick marks. Maybe you just track tick marks and then on a holiday do an end of year, yule time, ceremony: you roll those dice and, depending on what you roll, you might go up or down and the amount of that up or down. The higher you get up on those the rungs, it obviously takes more effort to try to move down.

I think we can figure out some kind of math. I probably would just go with occurrences. Maybe I would have a modifier. Small occurrence might be half a tick or, if it was a really serious occurrence, two ticks; murdering 100 people is two ticks; murdering one guy is one tick; stealing candy from a baby might be half a tick. You can figure that out yourself. I will probably write something up. Let me know if you're interested in this. I might just pursue it for myself because I think it is a neat idea and I want to investigate it more, but let me know if this interests you.

You can come up with the system. It can be as easy and simple or as complicated as you like. The progression what you get when you're going of law or chaos can also be as easy and simple or complicated as you like. I would definitely encourage you that, if you have a setting that has important factions of law and chaos or good and evil and they have particular domains that are attached to both, use those. Whatever I come up with is going to be super generic; is going to be a lot less fun than something you come up with that fits the mythology and the world that you're operating in.

What are the downsides of this sort of alignment system?

The only thing that's left is just to put it put it in action and see what happens. I don't think there's much to lose because either alignments are treated like they don't mean much again other than maybe getting zapped by magic items which was at least in the white box. I don't remember if that made it out into BX and Holmes and other ones, but originally if you were a lawful character and you picked up a chaos magic item, you would actually get damaged and if you're a lower enough level, it could actually kill you. Other than that and the alignment languages, there wasn't much to it. I think that it's kind of a net win. It's not a lot more tracking. I don't think I would make it complicated. I wouldn't use thousands and thousands of experience points. I think something like just some tick marks and then rolling dice at some moment would work fine enough. I don't know what I would do with how powerful I'd want the effects to be. I kind of like turn undead being a lawful thing. Not saying it would be the only one, but I like that one. I definitely like things that I think are really evil. Putting it on the chaos path, like backstab, like poison. There's probably some other ones. Breaking oaths would definitely be something that would turn you towards the evil path. I think sacrifice, actions like that, would definitely be on the lawful path.

Use alignment levels as class prerequisites

You can use these levels as if you want to call them gates or prerequisites for specialized classes. For example, let's say you like the idea of turned into being lawful. Maybe you think, "I don't really need a cleric class." All the spells can bbe magic user spells. If you are a lawful magic user, or spellcaster type, whatever that is, then you have access, like everyone does, to turning. Of course, if you're evil, you don't. Maybe you want to have some kind of paladin holy warrior type thing, and you want to give them something else. It can be a class, a prestige class or some other kind of specialized class that you can only pick up when you reach certain levels of law. Maybe you're a fighter or fighter type, then you can have, "hey, by the way, you're level four law and you're a fighter, well, you can become a paladin and you can unlock some special paladin abilities!" You don't have to worry about the anti-paladin-ship or when do you turn because it'll be obvious. You can say, "Listen, if you're going to be a paladin, you must at least be, or at least remain, at law level four. If you drop to law level three, you've lost palenhood. You might be able to get it back, and that's up to you, but until you get it back, you've lost it." The mechanic's already there. You don't have to sus anything out about, "have they done enough?" You'll know because you'll have the progression set. I will put together my own progression that I think might make sense or be a good starting point, but you can obviously make your own and once you have those, we can use them.

The same thing, you can have assassins, anti-paladins, evil priests, necromancers all on the chaos side. "Oh, you want to be a necromancer?" Great. You got to be level four chaos or level three or level five or level 10, doesn't matter, the numbers are all arbitrary. You could figure out how easy or hard you want to make it, then you can become a necromancer. And the the only things would be, "you have to have this level of chaos and you have to be a magic user." Bam. You want to be a necromancer, you can do it. You have this power to deal with the dead and create undead because of your chaos and your magic combined. If you lose that connection to chaos, because your chaos dips below that minimum number, well, the dead are no longer going to listen to you. You better get that level of chaos back.

Like this idea? Let me know!

I think it's a neat idea. It wasn't at all what I thought I would do with this video. I have another class video to make, but this took over my brain, so I just went with it. This originally started because I had watched a video that was talking about punishing characters. They were talking about in novels and fiction, basically punishing your evil, bad characters. That's really where this started was me thinking about that being that I like to play in moral worlds that we should have more of punishing characters that break that morality or or that go against the morality of your world. That just morphed into looking at two sides of the coin because, unlike in other mediums, we tend to give equal weight to chaos and law in our games. Granted, in some settings, like Lord of the Rings, where there is an ultimately lawful moral spin to the universe and only the internal world, because the way it's set up, seems to be in balance, that would skew one way. When thinking about, the lawful part of the universe does want to punish you, but then there's that chaos part of the universe that probably wants to reward you. How do you work that out? I came upon this idea: why don't we just take our alignments, mechanize them, offer them progressions, and see where that goes?

Let me know if you like this idea. I will work up some kind of example progression. If you're like me and you like alignments and you want to see more done with alignments, but in a different way-- we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past as much as we're able to-- I don't know that this solves everything ,and there will always be arguments and discussions about edge cases and this or that, but I think making it transparent and essentially player facing will go a long way towards eliminating a lot of those arguments. The progression and the abilities that these alignments unlock will then offer some carrot and sticks to people. If you're wondering where the abilities are, for neutral, there aren't any. Sitting on the fence nets you nothing in my world. But you can do something different in your world. And if you do, let me know.

Game on, everybody! I will talk to you later. Bye now!