Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Alignment - None/Static/Dynamic

I'm obviously in the minority here. I would prefer to select a dynamic alignment chosen by myself. I like to roleplay and slowly moving towards something as I make choices fits that. I got frustrated with WotR because I was a paladin for a chaotic good diety, but was punished for NOT being lawful good. That annoyed me to no end. Having no alignment makes everything just grey, muddy, like Larian games usually are, and I don't like that.

2nd choice would be dynamic alignment chosen by the game, and 3rd is static. No alignment is boring to me.

Oh, and I'm not touching religion on a video game forum.

As it is now, it is perfectly adequate for me. If an additional system were introduced now, it would be very subjective and would certainly have the annoying consequences mentioned above. I always hated in the prequels having a fallen Pala or Ranger whose status (loss of all class abilities) could not be restored, even if he got a better reputation.... Alignment should be left to our subjective imagination with the options currently available. That is the greatest freedom right now, and it should not be lost by trying to squeeze it into a template imposed by an additional alignment system.

As indicated, I think the current options with [Druid], [Intimitade], [Baldurian], [Tiefling], etc. are well thought out by Larian and very flexible. Further complicating this system with an "artifact" of game mechanic that results in "shifting alignment" or the like will only lead to further delays, complications, and in the worst case, "degradation of improvements". Don't forget about the promised multiclassing. If I later create a universal caster (LVL 1 Druid + LVL 1 Bard +++++), then I have more dialogue options (representing my alignment). For example, I can give a typical [Paladin]-like answer for good alignment, or just choose one of the other remaining answers, which can also be the complete opposite of good. Right now, I'm overcome with the urge to give a somewhat nasty answer Larian better hurry up and release the game before we post more threads out of sheer boredom that can (but don't have to) be "game-delaying", because I want to play this game and not wait forever by only being able to participate in the forums or a non-playable patch version. I can feel myself getting salty. Best I end my statement and let Edwin speak for me with the words he once said, mutatis mutandis:

"Stupid Sim****! If I have to stand around here any longer, BOOOM Fireball!"

As far as i know, as long as *you* made your decisions based on own rules ... its Neutral aligment.

If you want Lawfull its set of rules, that apply on you, but were not created by you ... you were thought them.

Basicaly i feel like i should say that she is True Neutral ...
But she isnt, since she is willing to sacrifice herself for others (as long as they are Tieflings, so she is also not exactly Good either) ...

Personaly i simply believe that characters like Zyraela are main reason why WotC stops using aligment ... its usefull guide, but its also quite limiting if you want to create something complex.

No one wants to touch it, so I will.

You are applying your real world believes (which I think to at least some degree I share) to a fictional universe. DnD has bunch of gods, each with their own alignment - so it's less about good or evil, but whose favour you are trying to gain. I am not terribly well versed in DnD, but I am pretty especially Lawful vs Evil has less to do with being "good or bad" in moral sense, but more of "control vs impulses". Laws can be good or bad. It's more about your character wanting to follow rules, or him doing whatever feels good at the moment.

That said I do agree that alignments as they are are rather troublesome and too open to interpretation. That's why I would prefer a different reputation system, if such was ever implemented.

I voted none

I don't see the benefit and feel that any attempt to implement one would likely just cause more problems with the story/dialogue options.

We've already had it out on alignment a few times here, one that I recall Astarion and Sebille
and also about the evil path The evil path needs a lot of work which hasn't gone through any major revisions since this discussion, I don't think.

I'm sure there's more if anyone else remembers.

Another good one Does 5e have alignment

It's also funny how we have another topic about killing children in the game because of Killing Goblin Kids ok but not Tieflings but maybe the less said of that one the better

That's why there are two separate axes. Good vs Evil and Law vs Chaos. There is no "Law vs Evil" axis; you can easily be both, just one, or neither.

Capital G-Good and capital E-Evil are fairly well defined in the D&D universe. Good is, practically by definition, what the Good Gods espouse and represent. Selflessness, kindness, benevolence, mercy. There are entire planes of existence of Good creatures, and if they don't act like they should, they literally turn into different creatures to reflect their alignments. Good creatures can still cause harm (e.g., LG creatures working towards "The Greater Good"), but their intention is to help others. Same for Evil: selfishness, cruelty, hatred, and all that.

Similar to how @GM4Him is saying "God's Law is Good and Right," in D&D "The Good Gods' Patheon is [by definition] Good" There's just nuance in how exactly each of those Gods goes about achieving Good; which method is Right (e.g., helping others via charity vs killing evildoers to prevent future harm).

I'm fully aware that my beliefs are real world and D&D is not. I'm actually quite glad for that. If they tried to make D&D align with the Bible, I'd probably have some real issues with it.

Yeah. I know that there are lots of gods, but like mrfuji said, "Good is, practically by definition, what the Good Gods espouse and represent. Selfishness, kindness, benevolence, mercy." I brought up my real beliefs because as I'm playing a game where moral dillemmas come into play, my own personal beliefs do have a tendency to alter my decisions. If I'm playing a Lawful Good Paladin, and I read that the Goddess is Lawful Good, I'd expect that my dialogue options that are Good aren't going to make me suddenly Neutral Good if I pick Good too many times instead of Lawful.

But that's what happened in Pathfinder. The more I chose Good instead of Lawful, because Lawful was more often harsh and cold and frankly NOT good, the more I shifted towards Neutral Good. And so, my alignment shifted and I lost my ability to use certain swords and my paladin powers and such. It severely hindered me for being Good instead of Lawful.

I wouldn't mind a system of alignment that auto-shifts your alignment if it is done as mrfuji has kind of implied. If you make a Good choice, you shift more towards the extreme Good alignment. If you make an Evil choice, you shift more towards Evil alignment. Major Evil choices shift you towards Evil faster, and likewise major Good choices make you shift towards Good faster.

The problem is that what constitutes Good versus Evil may not be translated the same by me, you, mrfuji, RagnarokCzD, etc., and there are different flavors of Good and Evil, which is why there are Neutral and Chaotic versions of both.

So, you can't just shift alignments on people because my action may SEEM like it is Evil in BG3, but it may actually just be smart. I'm SAYING I'm joining Minthara when I'm really pretending to join her to lure her into a more advantageous position for myself. Instead of 4 party members fighting Minthara in her home court, I'm luring her to a well-defendable gate with allies like Zevlor to help me wipe out her forces. So how is Larian going to judge my action of "Yes, Minthara, I'm going to help you"? Are they going to call that evil?

Now, if I kill Zevlor, and I throw open the gate and let Minthara in, then THAT is a pretty major evil event. But does that shift you from Good to Evil, or just Good to Neutral? I mean, it truly depends on what? Your heart. What is the motivation and the heart of the character? My Drow Sorcerer might be doing it because he hates everyone in the grove and he sees this as a totally advantageous move to join Minthara and manipulate her and the Absolute to get what he wants. So, for him, it should be considerably evil and his alignment, if Neutral previously, should shift to Evil. Absolutely. But how would the game know that his motive and heart is evil? It can't.

But what if my character is reluctantly joining Minthara because he/she sees Minthara's path as the only REAL solution to the problem? "I can't defeat the goblins. There are too many. Nettie was clueless, and she didn't give me warm and fuzzy feelings that Halsin would actually help either. The gith nearly killed us, and the hag freaked out because it was Netherese magic. Everyone is after us! The druids are morons and the tieflings are useless. I mean, that's cruel to say, but it's true. So, what choice do I have? If I turn into a mind flayer, many MORE people will die, especially if I'm some freaky, more powerful variant of them." And so, though the Neutral character doesn't really WANT to butcher everyone in the grove, they do so because they feel trapped with little way out. For what they perceive is the greater good, they are temporarily siding with Minthara and the Absolute in the hopes of gaining valuable information that will help them find a cure.

Should that Neutral character then shift towards evil?

In the context of a game though (in this case D&D) wouldn't what constitutes Good / Neutral / Evil be determined by the game rules, not anyone's personal interpretation?

Okay, I ballsed up my voting but I meant to select (1) None, (2) Dynamic, (3) Static.

I think the order->chaos/good->evil matrix is a pretty good stab at a simple framework that can help understand our characters and NPCs, and also appreciate its heritage within D&D. I’ll continue to use it to help get a handle on how to roleplay my characters, and think Larian can usefully bear it in mind when considering what options to give players and how NPCs and factions behave.

But I hope this will continue to sit invisibly in the background rather than being something explicitly recognised and responded to in the game because:
- it avoids the sort of frustration already mentioned in this thread where we disagree with the game where an action would sit in the nine-box matrix,
- it makes no sense to me that NPCs will know and respond to my alignment rather than specific things that I’ve done that they might reasonably have heard about (I might do lots of evil, but only when I’m sure no one will live to tell the tale),
- it makes no sense to me that I can only (try to) do certain things because of my current alignment,
- it’s an average or a tendency rather than reflecting nuance, for example I enjoy playing characters that would probably sit in the chaotic neutral box, but can swing between good and evil acts, potentially according to some internal logic or maybe just as the whim takes them, and I’d find it unsatisfying for such a character to be treated in the same way as one who consistently avoids either good or evil.

My second choice would be for the game to show its workings and play back to me the alignment it thought my character was displaying. I’d find that quite fun if it weren’t for the possibility of disagreement. Larian would have to be very careful, eg, not to make the mistake that I’ve observed when playing Kingmaker recently of confusing actions that are agnostic between good and evil or order and chaos and therefore shouldn’t move the dial on those axes, with actions that are trying to strike a balance between them and therefore should move us towards neutral. (Sounds like GM4Him has the same issue with the Pathfinder games.) The game would also need to let us express our intentions and motivations much more, which I think is highly desirable anyway so don’t see that as a problem in itself, but it would also open itself up to the sorts of disagreement about when and how far those intentions change the moral implications of an act that GM4Him again identifies above.

My third choice is to give a sort of statement of intent for my character in the form of a static alignment. Yes, I could then go on to play totally against it but that wouldn’t hurt anyone but myself. I don’t favour it because it doesn’t let me reflect how my character might change over the course of the adventure, so I can see that there might be an advantage in being able to redescribe your alignment at a small number of key points, but I have absolutely no interest in engaging with an ongoing debate with the game about where each of my actions sit in the nine-box matrix. I would find that really intrusive, particularly because as I’ve said I don’t think it should be mechanically significant.

I can see that not having alignment explicit in the game would rule out items or abilities that were tied to it, but I think that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

As for class progression, my admittedly limited understanding of 5e is that classes aren’t tied to specific alignments any more and that paladins for example are no longer required to be Lawful Good but rather to adhere to the oaths they take at level 3. So the game will presumably have to take a view for them on which options broke those oaths, and have a mechanism for dealing with paladins who don’t keep their oaths, but I don’t think that needs to have anything to do with alignment. (As an aside, it might be fun, though asking too much, to have similar responsiveness to clerics or other divine types acting in accordance or not with the tenets of their god or order.)

Well, lying is evil, no? On top of that you endanger grove and tieflings out of concern for you own safety. Minsc and Boo wouldn't stand for that!

That is unfortunately common problem whenever RPG tries to "judge" players actions. As it is I am everyonce in a while irritated that companions take at face value stuff I say as a PC.

I think in D&D ethics, lying is considered chaotic (or at least non-lawful) but not necessarily evil. But definitely I agree both that if the game was going to recognise and respond to your alignment then it would be essential for it to allow us to make clear when we were lying or not, and that that’s something it really should do anyway.

To be honest, I never like the alignment system in D&D. I did like the Karma in the original BG games. It was tacked on to support a story narrative that effected alignment, but I think with a few modifications it could work in the game.

Are you talking about reputation there, or some other system that I don’t recall?

Not necessarily evil. No. This is a common misconception among those who translate scripture. Bearing false witness is evil because you are lying and therefore causing an individual to be convicted for a crime they did not commit. Lying is also not good in most circumstances. But again, lying might be the best option when people's lives are on the line. Again what is right outweighs the rule or law for those who are good.

Again I use the example of The midwives and pharaoh. Those midwives lied through their teeth to save the Hebrew boys from being butchered. God bless them with families of their own and made them prosperous for lying to pharaoh. They did what was good and right in that they saved lives which was way more important than committing an act of lying.

So lying is not necessarily always evil. You see? Alignment is not so black and white.

The same concept could be applied to the situation with the Grove. Which is best? Is it best for me and my companions to die trying to fight these goblins and their leaders in the heart of their den just the four of us? What will happen if we die? Will they not then eventually raid the Grove and kill everyone in it? However, if I lure said leader and a bunch of her goblins too The Grove and help them defend it, now I have more defenders and a better defendable position and we might all survive. This is intelligent and wise tactics, and therefore might be considered actually more good.

The meaning of "Alignment," and especially how it connects to the FR Pantheon and the Planes of Existence won't be immediately clear to players who are less familiar with D&D or this game's particular setting. The older PHB/ BG style cliffnotes describing Alignment via a couple brief one liner examples also leaves a lot to be desired. Still, I think it's an interesting part of the D&D framework, so I have a few ideas for how it might present in a game like BG3.

First would be to do it up a bit like Clash of the Titans or Jason and the Argonauts, where the player occasionally gets to eavesdrop on a divine council of some sort, or a divine bickering session. Or provide opportunities where the player actually gets to interract with the gods somehow, and then they present as exemplars. See the Harryhausen films or read Books 4 and 5 of the Iliad for classic examples how that might work, then just sub out the Olympian Pantheon for the FR one.

The second idea would be to riff on Jiminy Cricket basically, or Alexander the Great's Daemon, or the Angel vs Devil on the shoulder conceit. But instead of just 1 or 2, there are 4 daemons of conscience. So we'd have the Daemons of Law and Chaos as well as the Daemons of Good and Evil. That way they can argue or team up and try to pull Tav to one side or the other with grudging compromises. This is something they could run with a couple times if it wasn't over used, but which I think would be amusing. Everyone has seen how the Angel vs Devil thing looks in cartoons, so it would be funny if it started like that, but then poof! another pair shows up, with really solid counterpoints to whatever the Good/Evil daemons just said, but along the Law/Chaos divide instead. That way the Character's shoulders get all crowded, and the player is brought in on the joke like that.

Obviously that'd be a fair bit of work to suss out, but I think it could fit as a nod, especially with what they already have going in BG3. Sure it's a bit fantastical for people who might prefer a more mundane conceptualization of Alignment, but I think something like that could be instructive and pretty entertaining.

I love Alignment: not only does it smoothen the experience and challenge you to think differently, but it also helps to push back against a glut of moral ambiguity. There are those who will bellyache about "sacred cows", but, in this case, the divine bovine is part of the game.

Well, it is you who gives Minthara location of the grove, endangering everyone in it, and slaughter a big chunk of local Goblin population, and possible cause few tiefling deaths in the process. I mean, the whole ordeal is that goblins might find the grove, and you go and tell them where it is.

If Goblin extermination is your goal, then that probably is the most efficient way (though personally I find grove defence far harder the killing entire goblin village by myself - not to mention you can take Helsin with you, who is trained in combat, offers to fight goblins and will make the entire encounter rather easy).

If I were to rate it, I would see it as pragmatic solution - neutral? You are willing to help, but not endanger yourself more the necessary for the sake of others. It is a path that leads to a lot of bloodshed that could be avoided, if one would just remove just the leaders and perhaps their immediate guards. And even if you deep goblins as evil that needs to be remove, going it with Helsin doesn’t put civilians in danger.

Hindsight decisions though. Its much less clear what to do on someone's first playthrough.

I had to check I’d not opened the evil path thread by mistake!

Though I think that this one has got side-tracked into talking about the specific moralit(ies) of that option brings to life nicely the challenges and possible frustrations of a “dynamic” option that took Larian’s weightings of how chaotic or evil (or otherwise) an action was and played it back to us.

EDIT


By the way, thanks for the links @Sozz, the one on 5e alignment is particularly relevant and I don’t remember having read through it before. Some great points made (as well as, perhaps predictably, some bickering round in circles )!