Print This Post
Changing Your Game’s Alignment
Alignment is one of those tricky substances that can make or break a game, and I have yet to meet someone who feels about and defines the alignments the same way as the next person. Here are some house rules you can implement your game to help make alignment run a bit more smoothly and feel more meaningful when it comes into.
Detecting alignment does not detect the alignment of anything that does not have the Evil/Good/Lawful/Chaotic/Whatever descriptor on it. It is, however, able to detect current intentions and thoughts, so that a person contemplating an evil act would show up to Detect Evil. This solves the problem of a lawful good society declaring it illegal to be evil and simply executing everyone who glowed red when Detect Evil was cast. Additional story lines may-be weaved in involving sleeper agents, a la the Manchurian Alignment.
Alignment detection only detects the alignment relative to the person detecting it, so that the detection will only detect evil/good/law/chaos as defined by the character. This creates more roleplaying opportunities and allows characters to be blinded by their prejudices, while simultaneously reducing the concreteness and definitiveness of alignments.
Allow players to declare no-alignment, meaning that they do not gain any alignment based DR and they are unable to overcome alignment based DR, or be the subject of any alignment based spells. Doing this causes alignment to become special again, and someone with a Good alignment or Lawful Good alignment is someone special and someone who is especially dedicated to those beliefs. An added benefit is that when doing this, sorting out the proper alignment for a character is far easier - if it is clear, then the alignment choice is easy, but if not then Null Alignment seems the best choice.
An additional benefit from implementing the two rules above is that it stops players from engaging in combat simply because of alignment, which stops a lot of mindless slaughtering and encourages actual roleplaying.
What house rules have you introduced to deal with alignment in your game?
Comments
5 Responses to “Changing Your Game’s Alignment”
Leave a Reply
“What house rules have you introduced to deal with alignment in your game?”
Gotten ride of it, thrown it out the door like overstayed guest.
Which causes problems as so much of D&D is wrapped around it.
Current campaign world is based around culture/society more than race/alignment. If your from country A other people from country A are “good”, people from B and C are “neutral”, and those bastards from D are “evil”. So, detect evil, smiting, etc end up being against who your society views as enemies.
It’s also not necessarily reflexive. For example B & C can be related and view each other as Good and A & D as Evil
NJHarman,
Getting rid of alignment is something I’m always in favor of - if I do keep it in any DnD games of mine, it’s there only as a descriptor and not a mechanic, in addition to applying the mechanics above.
I like your idea of culture and society being the important factors instead of race and alignment. For one thing, I can’t think of a single story, even in the DnD novels I’ve read, where alignment came into play - but so many of them dealt with the society’s people came from. Being able to live out the stories I’ve read (or at least similar ones) is always a big thing. Throw in all the other concerns about practicality and realism and it’s definitely something to consider.
I don’t regularly run games with alignments. When I do, I generally ignore alignment totally. Especially if someone’s playing a paladin.
Basically, I let players use it as a roleplaying guide if they want such.
Tommi Brander’s last blog post..Good rules help to improvise
Paladins requiring Lawful Good is reason enough to start tweaking the Alignment system in DnD.
[…] December, 2007 at 10:43 am (rpg design, rpg theory) (alignment, D&D, rpg design, rpg theory) Omnius of Alephgaming talked about alignment. I have a bit something to say about it, […]