Author: Kobold Lord (---.tds.net)
Date: 08-07-2002 20:55
Alignment is not there to enrich your role-playing experience. It is a mechanic used to do a job that needs to be done, not a straightjacket that tells you what kind of motivations your character is allowed to have.
On a basic level, it tells you what stuff you can use without burning your hand. With no such aligned equipment, the reasons for having alignment are less influential. It's a way to give enemy NPCs a powerful item and not have to worry about the PCs obtaining it and using it for a twinkfest. They might kill the NPC Anti-Paladin with freakish luck, but his Keen Wounding Vorpal Scimitar of Life Stealing and Soul Trapping +13 won't be used to screw up your campaign if it gives them fifteen or so negative levels when they try to use it.
On another level, the choices of alignment made by players at the beginning of the game can help a GM that does not know those players well figure out what kind of game she should run. If they've chosen Lawful Good, they won't be happy if you stick them in a freedom fighter role, preferring instead to imagine that you've railroaded them into playing terrorists against their wishes. If they pick Chaotic Good, however, they're far more likely to be amenable to some sort of Robin-Hoodish sort of game. Similarly, if they all pick Chaotic Evil you'd best prepare your paper-and-pencil Quake Deathmatch for heavy use, whereas if they're Lawful Evil they probably want some heavy politics.
Perhaps the companies that use alignment systems could do a better job explaining this. But unfortunately they don't, so I'd recommend that anyone who has a problem with the alignment system play their character with whatever personality and moral code they like and use their alignment in the two ways listed above to help the GM direct the game. Complaining that your character doesn't fit into the listed alignments won't help; it isn't supposed to fit in.
|
|
