Alignment issues

[Gregor]

You can always be like me and go with the "What If?" type of ideal. Where it doesn't matter what anything is your char will react to it in a certain way because of all the different possibilities. Such as, Landir would happily slay for money! What if the person who hired them was evil? He'd slay the contractor and take the money from the contractor's body. What if it was a good person? Landir would expose their dishonest ways. What if they were neutral? Landir would happily slay for money!

Not good, not evil, and not neutral. Merely a "What If?" type of setting. Kinda like what would you do if you found a wallet with no name and a hundred dollars in it? What if it had a name and the hundred dollars? What if it was only ten? "What if?"

Morality is black and white, then grey, then light grey, then dark grey, and then it's sometimes purple. Why? Hell if I know, but that's just how things are in this world. Characters should be just like that.

You can't fit real people in aligments.

How could you fit your roleplay characters into clear alignments?

 

[The Courier]

You can't fit real people in aligments.

How could you fit your roleplay characters into clear alignments?

That's essentially what my post was saying.

 

[Gaby]

see the reason the "way too frakking complicated" system appealed most to me was because it didn't claim to be more than it was.

it was simply a way of graphing a general sense of what your character values most. no questions of morality, what's "good", what's "evil", simply values, presented as plainly as possible.

so it's no longer "is this character good or evil?," it's "is this character self-centered, or self-denying?"
which grants a lot of freedom, because now you can have "evil" alignments be played by good characters. you're suddenly not afraid to call a character evil because "well, they're nice to some people...", and there's no compulsion to be "good," as in, a self-sacrificing hero type.

and all it really was was renaming the alignments, and exploring their underlying motivations. it really works for me, because I feel a lot more comfortable saying "this character is a hedonist" than "this character is chaotic evil."
see, nobody wants to be the bad guy. that system completely removes bad guys from the equation while still giving you the tools to make a bad guy.

but I fear the psychological stuff makes that essay seem too academic for people to understand, so we're arguing Sankera's "moral/social/impure/rebel" system, which basically is only adding half-steps to the existing system. which helps, admittedly, in narrowing it down more.