Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [Suggestion] Alignment Gauge

I think it would be pretty cool to implement an alignment gauge based on your character's actions throughout the game - similar to the GOG Arcanum. I would assume you start out true neutral and your choices adjust your alignment accordingly. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but sometimes I wonder, "was that lawful? Or was I just a dick?"

There is a difference between what you do and why you do it. I think alignment speaks more to the why, which would probably be difficult to pin down. I can kill a bunch of goblins because I enjoy murder or I can do it because they are a threat to civilization - both would probably look the same to the game.

1. I love the alignments.
2. Looking too deeply leads to logical breakdowns.

They are just a guide.

I also love the alignments. Yes it breaks down under examination but so many things about Faerun. I mean how do the economics work in that world?

People will disagree of course but discussing the disagreements is fun.

Thinking about the alignment grid led me to read moral philosophy . . . fun stuff.

Optional only. Something like that would make a lot of people stop playing naturally and play to only be a certain alignment. Also many things are situational. I would hate the game to tell me something I did was one alignment when it could easily be explained as another.

This.

I personally think if alignment is to be added it should be something picked at character creation and is not referenced that much. Maybe it can open up dialogue choices like other tags or be affected by or detected by items and spells but otherwise doesn't have a large gameplay impact.
You can play a chaotic evil person doing good actions if you rationalize them. Maybe they take the quest to save those innocent people from goblins because now he has a social excuse to slaughter something and inflict pain and while laws were not constraining them the threat of being hunted was. And you can roleplay a lawful good character doing something evil, perhaps he buys a slave off of a slaver because he rationalizes that freeing them this way is better than freeing them by force but all he is doing is rewarding the bad deed of the slaver even if it is legal in that city.
Therefor I think it'd be difficult for the game to track morality per actions without just boiling them down to good and evil when a large part of dnd morality is Intent. By such a system it would flag a devil doing something generous as good even though the intent is to eventually trap someone into a deal for example.

Why would that be a bad thing? Sounds like you've just described role playing. Not playing as yourself but as a someone who adheres to a particular moral code.

You know what would be an interesting aspect of a game? If someone designed a game that could take such rationales into account.

Clerics can cast the atonement spell -- Shadowheart references it if you ask her if your romance will upset Shar. What if the alignment slider slid but you could offer your rationale to a priest and slide it back? So if you killed all the kids in the grove -- slide towards evil -- but has some reaaallly compelling reason why that was a good idea you could mention it as part of the atonement spell? Since the game has telemetry in it Larian could even have "type in other" and could collect the 'other' responses and revise the game accordingly.

There are certain actions that are very neutrally gray, when you put alignment into it, it turns into right and wrong, good and evil. Some of the actions I did mainly because it benefits me personally, not because it's good or evil. On top of that, the idea that NPCs know your reputation even though they have never talked to you before seem a bit off. It's one thing if big actions would carry weights like slaughtering the entire settlement could lead to another group noticing it through the grapevines since there could be survivors, but everyone knows I mug an old lady in the middle of nowhere and add to my alignment is a bit off. If the gauge is only for your own personal benefits then there really isn't a need for that and developers should not dictate the morality of certain decisions since evil could do certain actions for their own benefits.

I would consider role playing more that you develop a character and then do what they would do in a situation. Having an alignment gauge would cause player bias. If the character does an action that they would consider good but the game considers it neutral or evil, that seems to bother a lot of people and they would replay that part doing what the game considers good even if it is not what their character would do.

I have never tried to play a character with such a rigid moral code that they only follow that, and don't care if the best and possibly necessary thing to do in a given situation is what "should" be done. I would expect that if I did try this that any DM would throw situations at me until my character grew up and realized things did not fit into neat little boxes.

This would be interesting but sadly probably too much work to cover all the possibilities.

One of the groups I played with had paladin in the party who refused too commit the sin of cowardice by running from battle and we would need to grab him and pull him with us when we ran. It was fun.

This is also to @Hilarian -- I tend to think that the position that moral codes cannot deal with the complexity of situational dynamics is itself a moral that prefers not to been as such. Just like when people say "let's not be political -- whether a statement is identified as 'political' or not is itself a political act informed by a political world view. See:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/situation-ethics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/situation_1.shtml

Situation ethics is a moral code that opposes Kantian ethics, virtue ethics and rule utilitarianism. It's adherents often don't want to be seen as adherents because they prefer to see their thinking an expression of natural action and not an identifiable moral code. But they're wrong ;p


All possibilities, sure, yes. But I bet we could get a top 10 I think it would be fun, you could even throw in some silly ones

I think alignment was just an expedient way to tell the dungeon master what to do with you. Its only interesting if the DM (or in this case the developers) choose to do something interesting with it.

If its something we choose at character creation, then that should have clear impacts on what happens to the character in game. Like the kind of game dilemmas they are presented with, since its basically inviting the DM to test you along those lines.

A dynamic alignment scheme might be fun, where the game tracked what the character was doing, and showed where they fall along either alignment axis based on what they actually did at any given point, especially if it then opened up different avenues of play as a result.

The lightside/darkside meter coming out of Kotor might be interesting to see done up in a D&D game, where instead of just one meter you'd have 2, a second axis for Law/Chaos. But they'd have to find a way to make it engaging for people who aren't already invested in the idea of alignment as a core part of the game. If its not fun or gameful in its implementation, but just a background thing running in the mind's eye, that's a tougher sell.

One approach used by other games is where you can puppet master certain companions one way or the other, based on gameplay with breakpoint decisions. That's pretty easy to work out in a Star Wars game, where there are apprentices to turn or whatever, but to work in a game like this they'd have to do more in the set up.

Another angle is the "darkside grows stronger" butterfly type effect, where actions weighted to one extreme or the other, start to effect the gameworld at large. The idea being that the character is just that important, so that what they do shapes the character of the world itself in ripple effects.

Or there's also the simple aesthetic/cosmetic thing, where pushing one direction or the other opens up various looks not available otherwise. Which is on the level of window dressing, top lit vs bottom lit in the portrait, or different colored lighting or whatever.

But something to connect it to the actual game, otherwise it barely registers.

"Know Alignment" was like the most useless spell in Baldur's Gate 1/2. "Detect Evil" got a little love at least with a couple questlines, but it was mostly irrelevant too. The hidden alignment feature that sometimes made for some fun on the table top, doesn't work as well in a game where you're controlling the whole party and can see everyone else's character sheet anyway. Most of the class based alignment restrictions have been ditched in recent editions, and there were only a few of those to begin with. Fallen Paladin or Ranger tropes aside, its hard to see where they really go with it. Other than throwing a Nietzsche quote at us on the initial load, BG didn't really delve too terribly deep on the Good and Evil front. Reactions were based mainly on reputation, which could be altered pretty easily by temple donations or slaying random villagers. The most serious consequence was usually just a character leaving the party if the rep went too extreme in whatever direction. It didn't have a very lasting impact, except maybe for Good playthroughs on team paladin.

I like the, puppet master, KOTOR and portrait recommendations! I'm hoping the game has a puppet master element otherwise it was a mistake not to develop these tadpole powers.

True, alignment is only as fun as the DM makes it. I like stories that focus on a moral code -- can you keep to a moral in the face of challenges. Unfortunately, I don't think we've seen any fantasy / sci fi movies or show really embrace that premise since Star Trek the Next Generation. The lack of media interest and representation makes people assume that it's not a good premise to build upon.


Bit of trivia --having alignment hidden on the character sheet was another feature that was removed from BG2 in the last moment. If you root around in the code you will see that Yoshimo was originally a Lawful Evil, Bhaal worshiping assassin. I think it was originally intended to bring a "which party members can you trust" element to the game that never really made it in. I don't know this but I also think Viconia was supposed to have a moment where she could betray you in the underdark as part of the axed House DeVir side quest.