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beccaelizabethI kind of hate the idea that a spell can just see your alignment.
Good is a thing you do, not a thing you are.
But Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign has a page where you can work out your alignment
from the thing you did
which is clearly an improvement
(the naughty list at least requires evidence)
Thing is why you did it matters
along with a very sliding scale for what you did.
So there's a scale of Conflict Points and where you end up on the Law-Chaos and Good-Evil alignments depends on how many Conflict Points you have. If you have only 2 you are Lawful Good. Betwee 2 and 6 in fact, still Lawful Good. To get into Chaotic Evil territory at all takes at least 14. And that means the average person, the hypothetical random Neutral person, has between 8 and 12 points of Conflict.
Already I have objections here, because it defines Chaos in terms of failure to Law, rather than prioritising the person over the community.
Motivation can start with 1CP for Justice or Love, 3 CP for Family, all the way up to 5 CP for Pleasure, Amusement or Entertainment.
I mean, I guess this is how they define Lawful Good murder? Sure it's 8 CP for killing someone, but only 1 more if it was for Justice!
... actually that adds up to a little more than Lawful Good can manage. But there's no line about killing someone except Murder, so guess what system leaves no room for most actual adventurers to be Lawful?
I mean I'm agreeing in principle that killing is a Bad thing, but it do make it difficult to use their table for their characters.
ANYway
Examples of how this might feel to characters:
Mick Rory believes what everyone said about him after the fire that killed his family: he believes he did Mass Murder for Amusement, because he loves the fire and loves to watch it. That's a solid 17 points, with an extra point if some of the victims were children (which I think is not clear in canon, if more than his parents died).
(there's nothing on the table about the character being a child. indeed since it's part of character generation it's rather assuming they would be.)
If he did that for those reasons, he's Chaotic Evil, as far over on the grid as the system can go, no options, no alternatives.
And he grows up believing that. And believes it when he first becomes a Legend.
But.
Destruction of property is only 6 CP. If he only meant to burn things, not people, it could be argued he's only working with 12 CP, and that's a very flexible number, with potential for Lawful Evil, true Neutral, and potentially Chaotic Good, even if he still did it for fun.
But he probably didn't set out to burn the property either. He just lit a fire and got distracted.
Negligence is only 2 CP.
Even if he lit that fire for fun, even if children died, Negligence is only going to add up to 8.
8 could stretch to Lawful Evil. Just. 1 in Law and 7 in Evil.
But if he's Chaotic then he's Good. That's just how the points work.
Except so far I haven't factored in how he feels about it
the Resolution.
It's the trickiest part to know from the outside, because he might *say* he has No Guilt (+2) or even he Enjoyed It (+3) but everything we've seen of him says that's not so simple. Mixed Feelings is the easiest to pin it at, and that's a plain 0.
... but we can also see his whole time with the Legends after season one as a big Regret and Penance arc, and that's a -3.
So if he did Negligence for Entertainment, his family died, but he will tell other people what he did, regret it and try and do good now?
5 CP
He couldn't make it to Evil if he tried, with that.
He can barely make it out of Lawful.
And that is assuming that Amusement was his only motive, which we know wasn't so.
It is a weird to me fact of the motivation table that if he did things out of Hatred or Malice it's actually going to score him fewer Conflict Points and push him less of the way to chaotic evil. Yes, doing things because hate is less chaotic evil than doing them for funsies. Joker out CEs everyone so I can see where they're coming from but still. Odd.
Negligence, because he hated his father, with mixed feelings? 6 or 7. Somewhere in the Lawful neutral good corner that.
So right after that fire, what his Alignment was? Comes down to definitions, motives, and intent.
But believing he was Chaotic Evil surely explains a bunch of what he did later.
And that all pushed him along that way.
Alignment is bunk.
And, also, this system has weird consequences
(if I'm doing it right)
Because I think with these Motivations
Orcs can't be chaotic evil
if they're poor.
Even Mass Murder done for money is only 15. Might be Chaotic Evil, might be Chaotic Neutral. But if they're only doing violent crime for money that's a 10 and if you have Mixed Feelings about it could be solidly Neutral.
Does this system honestly reckon that orcs as a race are doing mass murder with no regrets? Because if any of them are just doing armed robbery for money that's all the way chaotic but might be Good.
... if it's a one off. alignment drift throughout life is in a later chapter.
Captain Cold has to be Chaotic Evil though. He has killed plural people, and whether he did it for family or for money makes no difference to the points, plus the way he tells it he has no guilt about it. That's a 17 out of 18, almost in the Joker corner.
... but if he then does Regret and Oenance, he can drop it back to Chaotic Neutral.
Wonder what the system actually says about that...
... it says mostly that a single evil act gets you a warning if it's small or a full on alignment change if it's huge, and everything else slides a little.
But being mildly good won't make you Good. It's harder to rise than fall, to stop players gaming their alignment by seeing a life saved as a murder earned.
well that's depressing.
changing alignment also has negative in game effects whenever you cross a border in any direction, because then you feel weird about your whole life up to that point, and it's distracting. This is to encourage play within alignment instead of wobbling over borders.
So a change of heart would throw off your game for a character week.
... that doesn't seem like much, but a Lot happens in a game week.
I can see what they're doing. All the wiggle room in interpretation is because the player gets to decide things.
But where it goes Unfortunate is when other characters in world act like alignment is a thing you can know about someone else.
And not by their works or history or results.
Just with a spell.
That's like having a spell to detect the elect and I object.
Except
there are gods who believe in redemption
and the capacity to change
and the Atonement spell makes it just as easy to switch your alignment and be officially making up for your old one.
Also the book agrees with me about forced alignment changes and why your GM should not do them.
... I realise we were all in high school but I still have Feelings about that one and believe quitting the game was a perfectly reasonable response to 'you can only continue if you're Lawful Good'.
Chaotic is not a flawed version of Lawful unless the definitions are themselves flawed.
I Do Not Play Lawful.
... Opinions, I has them.
These alignment rules in Ultimate Campaigns are useful and helpful for playing alignment the way the rule system assumes alignment works.
Unfortunately for the book I have been objecting to alignment in definition and concept since I first picked up the game and this book isn't about to change my mind.
Gives me more tools to argue with though.
Good is a thing you do, not a thing you are.
But Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign has a page where you can work out your alignment
from the thing you did
which is clearly an improvement
(the naughty list at least requires evidence)
Thing is why you did it matters
along with a very sliding scale for what you did.
So there's a scale of Conflict Points and where you end up on the Law-Chaos and Good-Evil alignments depends on how many Conflict Points you have. If you have only 2 you are Lawful Good. Betwee 2 and 6 in fact, still Lawful Good. To get into Chaotic Evil territory at all takes at least 14. And that means the average person, the hypothetical random Neutral person, has between 8 and 12 points of Conflict.
Already I have objections here, because it defines Chaos in terms of failure to Law, rather than prioritising the person over the community.
Motivation can start with 1CP for Justice or Love, 3 CP for Family, all the way up to 5 CP for Pleasure, Amusement or Entertainment.
I mean, I guess this is how they define Lawful Good murder? Sure it's 8 CP for killing someone, but only 1 more if it was for Justice!
... actually that adds up to a little more than Lawful Good can manage. But there's no line about killing someone except Murder, so guess what system leaves no room for most actual adventurers to be Lawful?
I mean I'm agreeing in principle that killing is a Bad thing, but it do make it difficult to use their table for their characters.
ANYway
Examples of how this might feel to characters:
Mick Rory believes what everyone said about him after the fire that killed his family: he believes he did Mass Murder for Amusement, because he loves the fire and loves to watch it. That's a solid 17 points, with an extra point if some of the victims were children (which I think is not clear in canon, if more than his parents died).
(there's nothing on the table about the character being a child. indeed since it's part of character generation it's rather assuming they would be.)
If he did that for those reasons, he's Chaotic Evil, as far over on the grid as the system can go, no options, no alternatives.
And he grows up believing that. And believes it when he first becomes a Legend.
But.
Destruction of property is only 6 CP. If he only meant to burn things, not people, it could be argued he's only working with 12 CP, and that's a very flexible number, with potential for Lawful Evil, true Neutral, and potentially Chaotic Good, even if he still did it for fun.
But he probably didn't set out to burn the property either. He just lit a fire and got distracted.
Negligence is only 2 CP.
Even if he lit that fire for fun, even if children died, Negligence is only going to add up to 8.
8 could stretch to Lawful Evil. Just. 1 in Law and 7 in Evil.
But if he's Chaotic then he's Good. That's just how the points work.
Except so far I haven't factored in how he feels about it
the Resolution.
It's the trickiest part to know from the outside, because he might *say* he has No Guilt (+2) or even he Enjoyed It (+3) but everything we've seen of him says that's not so simple. Mixed Feelings is the easiest to pin it at, and that's a plain 0.
... but we can also see his whole time with the Legends after season one as a big Regret and Penance arc, and that's a -3.
So if he did Negligence for Entertainment, his family died, but he will tell other people what he did, regret it and try and do good now?
5 CP
He couldn't make it to Evil if he tried, with that.
He can barely make it out of Lawful.
And that is assuming that Amusement was his only motive, which we know wasn't so.
It is a weird to me fact of the motivation table that if he did things out of Hatred or Malice it's actually going to score him fewer Conflict Points and push him less of the way to chaotic evil. Yes, doing things because hate is less chaotic evil than doing them for funsies. Joker out CEs everyone so I can see where they're coming from but still. Odd.
Negligence, because he hated his father, with mixed feelings? 6 or 7. Somewhere in the Lawful neutral good corner that.
So right after that fire, what his Alignment was? Comes down to definitions, motives, and intent.
But believing he was Chaotic Evil surely explains a bunch of what he did later.
And that all pushed him along that way.
Alignment is bunk.
And, also, this system has weird consequences
(if I'm doing it right)
Because I think with these Motivations
Orcs can't be chaotic evil
if they're poor.
Even Mass Murder done for money is only 15. Might be Chaotic Evil, might be Chaotic Neutral. But if they're only doing violent crime for money that's a 10 and if you have Mixed Feelings about it could be solidly Neutral.
Does this system honestly reckon that orcs as a race are doing mass murder with no regrets? Because if any of them are just doing armed robbery for money that's all the way chaotic but might be Good.
... if it's a one off. alignment drift throughout life is in a later chapter.
Captain Cold has to be Chaotic Evil though. He has killed plural people, and whether he did it for family or for money makes no difference to the points, plus the way he tells it he has no guilt about it. That's a 17 out of 18, almost in the Joker corner.
... but if he then does Regret and Oenance, he can drop it back to Chaotic Neutral.
Wonder what the system actually says about that...
... it says mostly that a single evil act gets you a warning if it's small or a full on alignment change if it's huge, and everything else slides a little.
But being mildly good won't make you Good. It's harder to rise than fall, to stop players gaming their alignment by seeing a life saved as a murder earned.
well that's depressing.
changing alignment also has negative in game effects whenever you cross a border in any direction, because then you feel weird about your whole life up to that point, and it's distracting. This is to encourage play within alignment instead of wobbling over borders.
So a change of heart would throw off your game for a character week.
... that doesn't seem like much, but a Lot happens in a game week.
I can see what they're doing. All the wiggle room in interpretation is because the player gets to decide things.
But where it goes Unfortunate is when other characters in world act like alignment is a thing you can know about someone else.
And not by their works or history or results.
Just with a spell.
That's like having a spell to detect the elect and I object.
Except
there are gods who believe in redemption
and the capacity to change
and the Atonement spell makes it just as easy to switch your alignment and be officially making up for your old one.
Also the book agrees with me about forced alignment changes and why your GM should not do them.
... I realise we were all in high school but I still have Feelings about that one and believe quitting the game was a perfectly reasonable response to 'you can only continue if you're Lawful Good'.
Chaotic is not a flawed version of Lawful unless the definitions are themselves flawed.
I Do Not Play Lawful.
... Opinions, I has them.
These alignment rules in Ultimate Campaigns are useful and helpful for playing alignment the way the rule system assumes alignment works.
Unfortunately for the book I have been objecting to alignment in definition and concept since I first picked up the game and this book isn't about to change my mind.
Gives me more tools to argue with though.