Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Please implement alignment in some form.

Total agreement to wynne

Yes, good/evil law/chaos exist in the DnD universe, but it is very hard to put an alignment label on each possible action that makes sense.
I agree with Vic that P:K was one of the better implementations of alignment, but there were still some times where I was confused why action a was considered as alignment b.

There are games that show interesting good/evil law/chaos stuff without having an alignment system.
The Witcher series is fantastic. There is lots of bad stuff happening and your actions have consequences, but the game does not put a good/evil label on it.
It is a world full of murder, incest, racism, torture and so on and every group is plotting against other groups.
Do you help a racist king who is burning heretics alive to fight criminals in order to establish law and order or do you help criminals to fight the king in order to end public executions, racism and high taxes and the criminals can finally sell drugs weapons and slaves without being stopped by the guards.
The game does not judge your actions by calling them good/evil law/chaos, it simply shows you the consequences of your actions and the player has to decide himself if it was the right choice.

I am playing Trails of cold Steel 3 at the moment.
One thing I like about the series is that your enemies are shown as people, not just monsters.
By DnD standarts your main char is lawful good and most of your enemies are evil. But sometimes your enemies are shown as having feelings, friends, motivations and conflicts just like every other person too.
I think its good when you can say to an enemy: "Listen, I know what you want to do, I can understand your motivation and from your point of view it makes some sense. But I still have to stop you because your actions cause harm to others or because my government has given me the order to stop you."

I like it when games can create some empathy for evil characters. You do not need to like them, it should only be shown that evil people are people too and they can have a motivation or a background that makes some sense, not just some freaks who kill and torture everyone just because evil.

I am soooo very sorry to make you discuss something on the internet, especially about a topic as important as this one. But for all your reluctance to reply you've put forth a truly impressive treatise. It's well written, thoughtful and clever -- it's everything but correct.

I don't think you can use alignment to understand the actions of real world people. The alignment girds people came up for Game of Thrones really demonstrated the shortcomings of the system. This is where I think we differ: You prefer when moral decisions in video games have the same complexities of moral decisions in real life. If I do horrible thing X but do it for a good reasons are my actions 'good'? Is the virtue of thing inherent in the act or the intent? Is 'goodness' about commitment to duty or proper application of a moral calculus? Other ways of thinking seem cartoonishly simple. But I like the cartoon, I like the D&D fantasy because it has elements that are not present in life.



Faerun's evil lords are not like the wall street banksters who cut off health insurance during a crisis. The bankster would tell you that without him the employees would have nothing at all and by pursing his individual interest he is serving the public interest. His actions, in long run, are a good because they create employment and give us products and services. Lord Darkheart is different -- he wants to stay in power, Shar will give him the power he needs to keep the serfs in line. Yes, by helping Shar he's bringing the world one step closer to destruction but he's not going to see that day and, besides, in Faerun you need to worship a god or you are transformed into brick in the afterlife. So why not Shar? She's more powerful that the others. These aren't things that real world political actors consider in their calculations.



Two things you lose when you substitute real world morality for fantasy morality. First, you lose the traditions that make a D&D game a D&D game and two, you lose the fantasy metaphysics that make fantasy games interesting. You are left with a simpler, two dimensional world. In D&D chaos is not acting crazy at party or making erratic life decisions (although a chaotic neutral character might do those things). Chaos is a metaphysical force.

If you are are in the plane of Limbo and you touch chaos your fingers will turn into tentacles, your fingernails into flowers and rabbits will make off with your pants. The Githzeri are an exception. They live a life of intense, monkish discipline so they can shape chaos. They can actually walk on top of the pure stuff of chaos by channeling the force of law. And this idea -- the two tribes of the Gith -- goes back to Gygax and his love of Moorcock. The realms of pure chaos are places of unbelievable beauty, creativity and of unspeakable atrocities. The realms of pure law are grey deserts where nothing is possible. The material world is the concrete expression of this cosmic battle. Oerth is middle ground and a battle ground between these forces and people aid one side or the other when they make decisions. Every lawful act strengthens the hand of law and moves us closer to a world without possibility, every chaotic act moves us closer to world without assurances.



The shadow weave was awesome and unfortunately gone from the world of 5th ed. Which is too bad because it's a great example, thanks for bringing it up. The shadow weave was a cancer on the weave. Every time someone accessed the shadow weave the blight on the weave grew and the shadow within the caster grew. Eventually the shadow weave caster would lose their ability to cast from the weave itself. Shar is both more complex and less so. Less complex because she is a demiurge, she is part of the primal force that gave birth to the world. She seeks to destroy because she is destruction. She wants to extinguish light because she is dark itself. She is like Darkness from the movie Legend. (dunno if you can post youtube so I'm holding off)

Which is to say that eeevol, the world of D&D is a corruption of the good. Which is what Tolkein believed and what D&D was based upon. Can you be a good orc in the world of middle earth? No. Orcs are elves that were corrupted by Morgoth. A good orc is an elf.

And yeah, people disagree with Tolkein's theology (and he was pretty explicit in saying it was theology). Again GRR Martin took aim at Tolkein: https://www.themarysue.com/aragorn-orc-genocide/

But in in Tolkein's world orc genocide is good. Evil is a corrupting force in the world and the elimination of that corruption is a good act. It's like cleaning up the world's spiritual pollution.

Of course this conflicts with your view and my view of what is good in real world. But nearly everything my murder hobo avatars do conflicts with my view of what is good in the real world. If I see someone walking around with a big back back and half a dozen weapons on their belt I'm calling the cops.

We have plenty of games without alignment -- Witcher, DOS2, PoE. They're fine but they aren't Baldurs Gate.

D&D is about alignment and alignment was a major part of the BG plot. Can you resist the evil inside? You, the Bhaalspawn, have an evil force inside of you, if you use it you become more powerful but you will eventually lose yourself. That's the plot, it makes much less sense if evil isn't a thing that sticks to souls.




You could just agree with me and the argument would be settled. Just sayin'




Hard to argue with that. But I would say that it's pretty hard to distinguish annoyance from interest Something about this topic captures your interest and makes your fingers move so quickly.

agree wth killer rabit, thanks for bringing up moorcock, sicne thats very much one of the sources of the law vs chaos axix (not just in DnD, also in warhammer and elderscrolls for that matter)

And yeah, about your escapism.
you know what isnt escapism for me? moral relativism.

i think a world wehre morality is real is pretty good escapism for me.
Makes me forget that in the real wolrd, moral relativists exist that come up with excuses for inexcuseable stuff

For me, DnD is a rule set, nothing more, nothing less.
BG3 will have some form of alignment because it is a DnD game.

Personally I do not like the alignment system.
You have to put every intelligent creature into one of 9 boxes, from lawful good to chaotic evil.
I think of fantasy stories as a mirror of the real world.
A fantasy story shows a conflict and the player (in case of a video game) can chose what this story means for the real world, or if it means anything at all.
In a fantasy story the conflict is often simplified or taken to the extreme in order to make a point.

Personally I do not like the Tolkien way.
Saying that orcs are evil and killing them is good makes as much sense as saying nazis are evil so its OK if I kill somebody just because he says something racist or he believes in a conspiracy theory that illuminati mind control us with chemtrails and they try to replace the population.
I am an individualist and consequentalist, so I believe it is only OK to punish a creature when this creature has caused harm to others. Killing others is only OK if you defend the life of yourself or others, else you are nothing but a murderer. Being evil is not a crime by itself.

As for DnD I like the games most that turn everything upside down.
PST is fantastic, you have nice demons, evil angels and chatty undead, all of this to discuss the question "What can change the nature of man?".
KotoR2 is fantastic. Kreia critizises you no matter what you do and she tells you not to believe her.
Thank you Chris Avellone.
Disco Elysium (not connected to DnD at all) is a great successor. Your main char is not a hero, but the ultimate catastrophy of a human (drunk, stoned, no memory, no money and a head full of insane ideas)

If I have to make a game the moral stuff would be similar to the witcher series.
There are tough choices and significant consequences, but the game does not put a label (good, evil, law, chaos) on them.
Radovid may be lawful evil by DnD standarts, but putting the lawful evil tag on him would not change anything.
In every DnD game the were options where I have asked myself why is this tagged good or evil and sometimes I disagreed with the tags of the game.
In the witcher series every result of my actions made sense in the game world, there was no need to tag them good or evil.

why does "X race is always chaotic evil" get ocnflated with Alignments in general ALL the time.

No. Beeing evil is a choice, but some cultures ae inherently evil, so those characters need to choose to be good.
Morality is always a choice

As stated before several times in the thread, in real life you have moral ambiguity, mostly subject to a particular society or religious belief in particular and it´s part an individual choice, of course, but in D&D you need tags because mechanically there are a lot of spells, abilities and weapon damages that target a particular alignment. Also the creatures in the bestiary are catalogued within their particular alignment.

As @Killer Rabbit pointed out, in D&D the alignment axis are laws of nature, like gravity. In real life, you cannot launch a missile that targets only cheating husbands, serial killers or selfless philanthropists and left anyone else unscathed, but in Faerun you can.
From a game mechanics perspective, it´s interesting because it allows you to target yet another specific attribute of a creature, and that gives you much more options.

So unless you want chaotic/lawful weapons, protection from evil/good/chaos/law, holy/unholy word, etc etc to lose their reason-to-be; you need those tags because it´s a game with rules. The connotations of what that rules meant while roleplaying or what those alignments meant are, like many other things in D&D, subject to interpretation.

If you want to create another game that has different rules and use grey-zone morals that would be an interesting setting (Most TT games and fantasy books go in that direction the past years, including 5e. The alignment axis has very little relevance in comparison with past versions); but if you want a game that follows the rules of D&D 5e you need the alignment tags the same as you need the HP points, base attack or save spells of the creatures.

Yep, alignment is really one of the key pillars of DnD; whether or not it is likeable or realistic or easy to implement in a computer game, it is embedded in the rules ( at least, the old rules that I knew). Bioware did away with it for their DragonAge games, but then immediately needed to replace those "binary" worldviews ( law/chaos, good/evil ) with their own binary worldviews ( templar/mage, human/non-human ), which are far from nuanced, and possibly more annoying than the more abstract concepts of good and evil.

That said, I generally prefer rules sets that are less inclined to push choices on your character the way DnD does; In many respects I enjoyed Runequest more.

The biggest thing I'd like to see is a change in dialogue where evil is always this violent "fuck you" kind of person.

You can absolutely be a pleasant individual and by wholly evil.

Hannibal Lecter, for example. "I find discourteousy to be unspeakable ugly."

Jon Irenucus was absolutely evil, and a complete bastard, but he also wasn't just a "fuck you rawr violence!" evil either. He was cold, calculating, and probably really good at dinner conversation.

The issue with alignment has ALWAYS been with writing and portrayal in media, and not with the mechanics of the system.

I always found the way the "evil" road portrayed in games like Tyranny, Kotor-kotor2 and Ps:T much more fun to play than the usual "Me destroy everything because I´m a bastard" way, indeed.
It´s all about power, not blind destruction.

"Direct action is not always the best way. It is a far greater victory to make another see through your eyes than to close theirs forever."

"Be careful of charity and kindness, lest you do more harm with open hands then a clenched fist."

"If you seek to aid everyone that suffers in the galaxy, you will only weaken yourself and weaken them. It is the internal struggles, when fought and won on their own, that yield the strongest rewards. You stole that struggle from them, cheapened it. If you care for others, then dispense with pity and sacrifice and recognize the value in letting them fight their own battles. And when they triumph, they will be even stronger for the victory." -Kreia

The conversation has taken interesting turns. I really like the "key pillars of DnD" phrasing, wish I'd thought of it. Hey Larian, listen to _Vic_ And, yeah, like @qhristoff I prefer Irenicus to Sarevok. In DOS2 I liked Ryker and the doctor. Polite, refined and eeevool.

I debated with myself whether or not to reply to this statement because I wouldn't want to bury @_Vic_ point. This isn't about real world morality but the moral system of a game. It would be nice if we could just throw a holy hand grenade and be done with evil but, well, that only happens in video games.

But I do think people find this topic so interesting because it invites us to think about real world morality. I found the alignment grid in 5th grade and it probably influenced my ethical thinking. So on this point



I think there is some real world value in understanding how different video game morality is from the muddle of real life. So you're right to say that we shouldn't apply this sort of thinking to real people. The mistake comes when someone starts talking about a group of people as if they are orcs. Orcs are evil. Orcs should be stabbed. With knives. Again and again. But our world doesn't have orcs and it's wrong to make anyone into an orc.

There is a great foreword to the Director's Cut edition of the JTHM collection (Jhonen Vasquez's first comic, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac), that discusses the importance of having orcs to stab, which I think is a very important point to make:

There´s a fundamental difference between sublimate the violent natural impulses we all have into harmless behaviours, like sports or works of fiction; and create a scapegoat of a particular minority, treating all their individuals as a mass that share the same traits (usually undesirable ones), like Orcs, and find reasons to justify the killing, maiming, pillaging, despising, etcetera so that doing very bad things to them makes you good because they are "Evil"
You know the saying, "if you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world remains the same"

That is why I do not particularly care about that kind of black-white morals even tho it could make a useful tool for worldbuilding. Saves you a lot of time.

"if you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world remains the same"

I like that one.



I like both. I like Star Wars with its the light and dark sides of the force and I like the Watchmen. The original idea and its dismantling.

You're right, there is a fundamental difference between fantasy and reality. I was only trying to say that I do find it interesting to understand the mechanisms we use in fantasy to make killing acceptable. Thinking back to the original Star Wars. We, the audience, cheer when the heroes shoot storm trooper after storm trooper. Why doesn't all this killing make the heroes villains? 1. We don't see the faces of the storm troopers 2. We have already seen the storm troopers kill people with faces 3. We think the other side initiated the violence 4. There is no other alternative available 5. The names and imagery invoke the nazis which is the closest thing we have to evil in the modern world. 6. The heroes are fully fleshed out with love interests, financial concerns etc

And I think we can use lists like this to understand why people support killing in the real world.

On the trend to move away from eeevol towards "grey" morality in fantasy I'm finding that as Tolkein's orcish evil is eliminated it's replaced with an equivalent. So now we've had one too many good orc stories, can we really believe that orcs are inherently evil? I mean how many people played orcs in WoW? So I'm seeing demons show up more often in fantasy because we can still believe that demons are inherently evil. And then, of course, writers will want to do the same thing with demons that they did with orcs -- the demons will become humanized. And then, slowly, they will become less interesting. Demons will become eventually just another visual template, demons characters have red skin, horns and fire resistance but are otherwise human. And then we will need to find a replacement for demons. Cue the corruptors. Or the void tainted. Or the deathlings.

And that's why I think there should be some fantasy settings that sets the standard. And does it really well -- the Lord of the Rings movies reminded us of how great Tolkein really was. In D&D, the demi human gods created followers, the monster gods created slaves. Gruumsh, the orc god, enslaved the souls of those he created to win his battle with Corellon and Gruumsh's slaves are all that is not good and all that is not elvish. Elves are refined, orcs are crude. Elves are lithe, orcs are stocky. Elves only kill when they must, orcs are born to do battle.

And of course this can be done with a sense of irony / humor / absurdity. "make way evil, hero coming through"!

The point is really that evil and good are just concepts. But in the game these concepts are used as actual mechanics for universal behaviour in the same way that our real world has physics to do the same thing.

Alignment is a metaphysical force in Forgotten Realms.

It is disheartening that Wizards is the one pushing to get rid of it.

Orcs are not a minority.

Thanks

I think that Kreia is one of the best written and most interesting evil characters in gaming history.
She also has a backstory so it makes sense why she acts this way.
I want to add that her alignment is hidden from the player in this game.


If game devs can make evil characters that are at least half as interesting as her it would be fantastic.

I think she is a good example of what it means to be evil.
Being evil means you have goals and you do whatever is needed to reach these goals while caring little about how this effects others.
Being evil does not mean you intentionally seek to harm others or to destroy stuff.
Evil characters can be very efficient and rational.
Good characters have also goals and they can be just as rational, they just consider how their actions influence others and they might accept not reaching some of their goals or taking a more difficult way to achieve it if the direct way would cause too much harm to others.
The law/chaos part is about how they try to reach their goals.
A completely selfless good char who wants to help everyone for the sake of goodness is just as dumb as an evil char who kills and destroys everything because evil.

Well, if you kill more than one killer, the number of killers get smaller.
Make the world a better place: Become a mass murderer! Just make sure most of your victims are killers.

You´ve got it:

"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill dozens and you´re a hero. Kill hundreds of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god" -> Every evil guy in almost every RPG, ever

I can't believe you're quoting Batman as some sort of trump card about alignment.