Alignments II: Son of Alignment

I got a fair amount of feedback from my latest post, the one about alignment. In particular, I heard a lot about how the system I gave had severe limitations and did not work for many campaign worlds.

This is true. My motivation in building that system was to fit it to a specific campaign world. But it is not the only system. I'm going to present some more, in varying levels of wackiness, as well as the worlds that they imply. I'll start with last week's as a template and go from there.

What: Alignment is a philosophy. LG people aspire to be LG, though they may fall short. An alternative way to think about this system is that  people have "true" alignments which reflect their active morality and "philosophical" alignments which reflect their ideal moralities.
Why: This system allows alignment to be absolute without making morality absolute without making mistakes impossible. A Neutral Good priest who is an absolute jerk but still personally aspires to be Neutral Good will still show up as NG for an alignment check. It essentially removes action from alignment.
Where: This system works in a world that, for various reasons, requires absolute alignments. A planar-based campaign with heavy Celestial/Fiendish (D&D speak for "Angelic/Demonic") influence would use this alignment (indeed, that is the world it was developed for), which allows for Paladins to track down and kill followers of fiends without the world saying that the paladins are Right for doing so.
Why Not: By decoupling alignment from action, alignment loses a lot of its significance. It still has some bearing on morals (a person who truly believes the best way to live is by controlling everyone around him and taking what he wants could not be CG), but alignment loses its essential link to the soul; a DM with this system would never say "If you stab that baby, you're going to lose your Good alignment" (a situation that comes up far more often than you might expect), which is always a nice expression of character tension.

 Yes, it's still evil to stab this baby.

Build A Better Alignment

I like the Dungeons and Dragons rules. Usually. The thing is, nearly every good rule has just ooooone little piece that doesn't work quite right.

In fact, one of my favorite parts is the Alignment section, where character morality is defined and codified. Alignment is defined along two axes: Law vs Chaos and Good vs Evil, with Neutral in the middle for both. You take one of either Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic and one of either Good/Neutral/Evil, so a character can be, for example, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, or Neutral Evil. There are nine in total, and they can be laid out in a chart like this:

It's kinda boring, and you often see the rows and columns switched, but that's basically it. (It's got blank white boxes because you're supposed to fill in characters that match it. If you google "dungeons and dragons alignment chart," you will find literally thousands of versions, most of them not very accurate or funny.)

There are a lot of ways to define these nine alignments, and the different ways are enough to fill an article on their own, but basically Lawful respects and Chaotic disrespects order, tradition, authority, and laws, and Good respects and Evil disrespects innocent life. Neutral can be undecided, uncommitted/unconcerned, or specifically devoted to a balance of both.

Pirates & Plunder

I've got a couple of hobbies. Longtime followers of this blog (always wanted to say that, especially ironically) will know that I play Dungeons and Dragons, and longtime followers of me know that my favorite TV show is the anime One Piece.

If you watch the opening, you'll get a pretty good sense of it

Because of these two facts and because I am a nerd, I wanted to put together a ruleset of D&D that would work for this anime. Sort of the precursor to a Darths and Droids or DM of the Rings treatment (which I will never do, but anybody who does needs to send me a link).

Fair warning: if neither D&D nor One Piece interest you, this might not be your post. It's not gonna be quite as... accessible as the Batman one. Also, not as many pictures.

But here's a duck!

Batman and the War Against Everything

I read a very interesting article this morning on Pop Matters about why Superman is a great hero. I agree with everything it said; like I said in my Ke$ha post, I think Supes has the potential to be awesome, though he often isn't.

The article talked about Superman much better than I can, but it had an undercurrent running through it that interested me. It used Batman as its primary point of comparison for Superman and was not very nice to him. Batman has "basic hedonistic flaws (as we all do)", he's faux-"deep," he's right too often, he only nods at humanness without taking any of the penalties, he's crazy and militaristic, Batman OP nerf Batman, etc.

Not as a response but inspired by the article (the point wasn't "Batman is boring," it was "Superman is interesting," and making comparisons to Batman as a face for other "popular heroes" [switch Ironman for Batman and it's the same article] was just the means), I would like to speak, personally, about why Batman is my favorite hero, and my favorite character in comics in general.

Godlands: Characters and First Session

One of the ways I'm looking forward to using this here blog is to record the sessions of my Godlands D&D game. We've had three so far, my five players and I, and hope to continue every Sunday or so. The game is Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 with some significant modifications, and we started at level 5. It's a very high-powered game, so we went with 36 point buy, two flaws, and a feat every other level instead of every third. Considering that they'll start gaining (modified) Divine Ranks pretty soon, a few ability points one way or the other seems pretty tame.

Song of the Moment: Die Young - Ke$ha

I have a confession to make:

I really like Ke$ha. Like, I listen to her songs, unironically, for fun. I'm... I'm not even sorry.

Ke$ha, I think, is cleverer than people give her credit for; look at how self-aware the Tik Tok video is (beat up cars, back-alley parties, a guy who doesn't exactly look like Mick Jagger). This one is almost frighteningly intense in its portrayal of party culture (notably the shouted repetition of "We're gonna die young"; the full line includes a like before it, but then she shouts as direct fact that "we are GOING to die young"). The video takes it in a really interesting direction, with ridiculously strong religious/occult/illuminati imagery. She's being incredibly in-your-face and it gets almost uncomfortable to watch at times, notably the group of people being directly compared to a pack of wolves in heat. The video is so intense, but it also takes itself 100% seriously. Coming from the same person as the "kittens and fursuits" C'Mon video, it's clearly self-aware and intentional, but it still sits just this side of literal insanity.

Worldbuilding: Plus or Minus

Hey everybody, let's do some worldbuilding. I came up with an idea for a fantasy/D&D world recently that I thought was kind of interesting, so I'll share the process that I came to it, the considerations that I made, how I would adapt it to a game setting, and whatever else pops into my head.