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!