How important is alignment? Does it serve a practical purpose in D&D , or does it just take up room on the character sheet? The alignment mechanic underwent significant changes when 4e D&D was launched. The traditional or classic view of alignment was turned on its head. Nine alignments were pared down to only five; and two of the remaining alignments are, for the most part, off limits to players. So with only three real choices remaining does alignment even matter? Is this just a carryover from previous editions that no longer has a place in D&D?
As a player and a DM I believe that alignment is a vitally important part of every character sheet and that it doesn’t get nearly enough attention. In fact I’m extremely dissatisfied with how alignment is handled in 4e D&D.
In the early editions of D&D alignment was a big deal. You choose an alignment and were expected to play to those ideals. Some classes offered very little flexibility (like the old-school Paladin who had to be lawful good or else) while others had choices curtailed with some restrictions (Rogues had to be of non-good alignment). Now players can choose any alignment, regardless of class or race. It’s unfortunate that as the reigns loosened the choices disappeared.
Missing Alignment
Until D&D 4e we had nine alignments: lawful good, lawful neutral, lawful evil, neutral good, neutral, neutral evil, chaotic good, chaotic neutral, and chaotic evil. Now we only have five alignments: lawful good, good, neutral (now called unaligned), chaotic evil and evil. So what happened? Are there no more good characters with chaotic tendencies? Are their no more evil characters who believe in order?
In a system that provides more choices for feats, classes, races and powers than any previous editions of D&D they’ve eliminated choices for alignment. I think this is a powerful (albeit subtle) statement from Wizards of the Coast that alignment isn’t as important in 4e as it once was in previous editions.
These simplified alignments now cover so much ground that it’s nearly impossible for a player to stray outside of the boundaries of his chosen alignment. Good and evil are so all-encompassing that you’d have to do something pretty extreme to be called for not playing your alignment.
Changing Alignment
When you create your character you choose an alignment. The alignment is intended to be a guide and not a straight-jacket. It’s a moral compass that should help you when role-playing your PC. That’s not to say that you can’t act outside of the boundaries of your chosen alignment, but these instances should be the rare exceptions and not the norm.
Choosing an alignment isn’t as permanent as choosing a race or a class, but it’s pretty close. The alignment you choose represents the accumulated experiences of your PC before you begin running him at level 1. In most cases this represents 20 or more years in this character’s life. Beliefs and morals learned and developed over a lifetime aren’t usually changed lightly or quickly. But sometimes alignments do change. Here are the three most common ways for a character to change alignment.
By Force
This is the most extreme method of change. Donning a cursed item, being dominated by an evil creature or inadvertently taking part in a ritual are all examples of how an unwitting PC could have his alignment changed forcefully and against his will. It’s rare, but it happens.
By Choice
After choosing a starting alignment, the player intentionally decided to change his PC’s alignment by playing the character differently. This isn’t something that usually happens right off the bat. It’s a gradual shift based on this PC’s experiences during the campaign. The things they’ve seen, the people they’ve met or the deeds they’ve done have opened their eyes to a new way of looking at the world around them.
By Accident
Although you’ve chosen a particular alignment for your PC, the way you’ve chosen to role-play the PC is more in keeping with a different alignment. This is usually due to carelessness by the player. They either don’t realize they’re acting outside of their alignments comfort zone or they just don’t care. After crossing the line one too many times the DM informs the player that his character must change his alignment to match his actions.
Repercussions
In 4e D&D there are no in-game repressions for changing your alignment. Whether your alignment has changed because you want it to or whether it’s changed because you haven’t been playing the one listed on your character sheet, there is no down side.
In previous editions of D&D there was a substantial penalty if your alignment changed by choice or by accident. A PC who changed alignment in AD&D 2e needed to earn twice the normal amount of XP before he could advance to the next level. In the original AD&D 1e you lost a level and were reduced to the minimum number of XP of that lower level. Until recently it was a huge deal if you didn’t stick to your alignment. Now it’s not even worth noting.
The idea of penalizing PCs for changing their alignment seems pretty harsh given the say yes mentality of 4e D&D. Rather than punishing players who don’t play to their alignment I prefer to reward players who do. For example, those who play within the framework of their alignment and work it into the role-playing gain significant bonuses to relevant skill checks during skill challenges. On rare occasions I’ll even award additional XP for making tough decisions and playing your alignment despite pressure not to.
Alignment in Your Game
Even though alignment has been diluted in 4e D&D, it’s still a part of every character. It may not resonate as all that important to players, especially newer players, but it should. When you’re creating a new character his alignment should be the first place you look when figuring out how to play this PC. Obviously there’s a lot of flexibility within a given alignment, but a PC that’s lawful good and a PC that’s unaligned (neutral) should look at the world differently. They don’t have to be at odds, but there should be some opposing view points.
The importance of alignment needs to be emphasized by the DM. Remind players that they have an alignment (many forget, believe it or not) and be sure that they play within the boundaries that alignment represents. Ensure that your NPCs havean alignment and be sure to work within that framework as they interact with the PCs. Not every NPC need be evil, but even those that are will behave very differently if they’re chaotic evil or just plain evil.
What are your thoughts on alignment? How important is alignment is your game? What rewards do you think are appropriate for role-playing your alignment correctly? What about suitable penalties for not playing your alignment correctly? Do we even need alignment beyond just good and evil in D&D?
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1 2 3 4 Next »I don't regret the seeming demise of alignment in 4e at all. For my group, alignment was nothing but an excuse for characters to meta-mistrust one another. To quote a player, "Since he's playing a (non-good) character, now my character has to watch his back all the time." It never came up in the mechanics of our 3.5 games, nor has it in our 4e games.
If a character behaves inconsistently or steps out of the party-line, it's a good chance for the rest of the party to roleplay their reactions.
I think there was a conscious shift away from alignments because they are viewed as too restrictive to role-playing. At times some players find they can not do things with their character they want to do.
Personally, I think they are a bit arbitrary and slightly unrealistic.
I am running two 4E campaigns. One has limited alignments since, in effect, the theme of the campaign is exploring good vs evil, nature vs nurture. It is all about seeing if the characters, who are half-demon, can overcome their evil parenthood. For this campaign, alignments are an abstract generalization. The only time it will matter is when they have committed enough evil acts to have shifted over to Chaotic Evil at which point their PC becomes an NPC (I have a tracking system in place to measure their level of "evil"). [I posted an article dealing with this called Temptation] However, their actions are not restricted by their alignment, rather their alignment is a reflection of their actions.
In the second campaign, the characters have picked alignments, but other than a guideline it will mean nothing.
I would agree with you that alignments have no real meaning in 4E. There is no consequence for "breaking alignment". In previous editions simply being of an alignment meant certain spells affected you differently, certain monsters reacted differently and certain items worked differently. There are no such things in 4E. 4E PCs have a freedom of action unlike previous editions.
Alignments inspire role-playing in that characters are restricted by what actions they can take and that can foster RPing.
Alignments hinder role-playing because it takes away from creative freedom.
Both statements can be true depending on the type of players you have. Again, I think this might boil down to what the players and DM are looking for.
As a DM, I miss the structure of the 9 alignments. Without each player taking a personality psyche profile in character, it gave the DM as well as fellow players a feel for how a particular character would react. And for monsters, it also help to structure some of their behaviors - i.e. you know that you can depend upon the Lawful Evil bad guy to not go back on his word, although he might push the envelope of your agreement to the max.
And it's pushing the boundaries of one's alignment that actually added to role-playing. So that when someone was forced to do something "out of bounds", it was a huge event in the campaign, leading to possible alignment changes and atonement to make up for the transgression. I'm bummed the current alignments are so broad in scope, and I feel it makes for a less edgy experience.
> I think this is a powerful (albeit subtle) statement from Wizards of the Coast that alignment isn’t as important in 4e as it once was in previous editions.
I'd go further: I think it's one of many hints that the fiction isn't as important in 4e as it was in previous editions. In all the 4e materials I've read and run, the role of fiction in the game is to provide connective tissue between a series of challenges, rather than a meaningful pursuit in itself.
I'm currently running Keep on the Borderlands at my game shop, which provides almost no scope for player characters to interact with the fiction, much less influence it-- the whole adventure would fall apart if the character's "alignment" deviated from the script. In this case, what I mean by "alignment" is whom the players choose to ally themselves with.
I was never a great fan of D&D's alignment system, but 4e allignment feels like a vestigial tail or something, for a game in which the fiction mattered, and the players could make meaningful choices that affected the fiction.
Alignments have never been a huge deal to me, even in 3rd. My players have to come up with a back-story which includes personality details, which become their moral compass and guide. I do hold my players too it, so they need to think ahead on how their character would make certain decision. When they make a decision outside of what their character would normally do or how they would act, they have to explain why and we quickly discuss how this action would affect the character in the future. This usually takes all of two or three minutes, so it is not a show stopper.
The most dramatic shift we had definitely went beyond the two minute change. We once we had a paladin go on a murderous rampage when he found out his child was murdered. This wasn’t justice, but revenge. This called for a definite alignment change, but it made sense in game. For the next session, he wrote up a brief synopsis on his new moral compass, and we changed all of his levels to cleric. Definitely drastic, but we all had fun and that is what is important. The story was much better off, but we never assigned him a new alignment, just a consequence on his actions. He was still part of the same church and worshiped the same god, but was no longer a paladin. Towns folk reacted differently, many shunned him for his actions, others were more sympathetic. That is hard to wrap up in a title. We could change him to neutral good (from lawful good), but why hinder him as a character? The actions just have to make sense and the world around them will follow.
Speaking of paladins, in my games, paladins never had to be lawful good (despite the above example, that is what he chose). In my opinion, every god would have their version of a paladin, so a paladin could be any alignment. The big difference is the paladin had to play strictly to their gods code of actions, and there was much less leeway in a slight bending of the gods rules.
With this in mind, alignment in 4th isn't a huge departure from any other edition. I see too many shades of gray in a good character to fit neatly in one alignment, though for the most part consistent personalities do fall within one of the categories.
I do place an out of game shackle on the players so they cannot directly or intentionally hurt to the group, I guess this is my way of blocking chaotic evil type characters. Think Raistlin from DragonLance. Raistlin was a black robe and definitely out for himself, but he didn’t harm the group.
Let me start of by asking based on the old 9 slot alignment chart where would you put a character like "Tony Soprano"? Depending on which episode you watched there are probably arguments that he could fall into all 9.
Society labels a person with an alignment. It is very rare that an individual will see themselves as "Evil", even those that are deemed so by the larger society will have justifications for their evil acts.
The sooner D&D distances itself from alignments the better. Judge players on their Roleplay and characters on their actions.
> Judge players on their Roleplay and characters on their actions.
+1. The moral choices of characters are more meaningful and create richer fiction when they emerge from actual play instead of being pre-ordained by her "alignment".
Switching to the 9-box alignment is easy in 4e. Just write "chaotic good" on your character sheet. Viola. This lets you make alignment as important or unimportant as you want. I think one of the reasons alignment was made less important in terms of rules is that it caused problems. If you have a whodunnit mystery, you just have the paladin point out the evil guy. Even if they hide their alignment, then there are other spells that affect people of different alignment. Magic circles, holy words, etc. See how he reacts when you have him hold a holy weapon.
I also love that they now have unaligned. Some characters aren't adventuring because of strong ethical convictions. They're looking for thrills or treasure or just because their friend decided to do it. I see Han Solo as unaligned with occasional forays into CG.
I think WotC is trying to delude alignment. I recall numerous times in 3E trying to explain to ppl what each alignment meant. I think WotC doesn't even really know. My case study is Drow. Love or Hate them they are an interesting antagonist in the D&D world. The MM says they are Chaotic Evil. When I think of CE, I think rape, piliage, and burn all that is in my path. The drow have a very structured framework that they abide by. Be it that it promotes chaos there is a certain sense of order (lawfulness) about it. All of this is based on my understanding of the alignments. BTW a very good source that I think explains alignments of Third Ed very well is the Book of Erotic Fantasy. Have your opinions about the general concept of the book and you aren't far off but the alignment and sex section is really well done.
I think that really the Linear Alignment system is a compromise between OD&D (where you had just three alignment, Lawful, Chaos, and Neutral), and way alignment really was seen under 3E, with the Paladins being the epitome of good on one end, and the Blackguard being the Epitome of Evil on the other end.
While I still like Alignment as a Tool for Expectations of a Game and as a tool for theme in the game, I don't think they've ever really exceptionally changed anything for me. I want to play good guys, and I want to tell stories, as a DM, about good guys defeating bad guys. I'm probably very basic this way, but that's what I play D&D for.