Yea...The priest of Shar has lots of enemies, and she seems a mess anyway..Oh and the Trickery Domain is sub-par, so she can sod off. (Evil and confused)
A vampire who may try to give me a hickey...no thank-you. (Evil)
A warlock who regrets his own decisions....sigh...just say no to self loathing drama...crossed his own line for power. (Evil and confused)
A Wizard who blows up his own peeps...naw...more drama. (Neutral and unreliable)
A Githyanki who doesn't hate herself or whine, but instead steps up to adversity...she's a winner! (Displays good qualities...although her race is traditionally or perhaps situationaly lawful evil)
See...they don't need tags. Evil is as evil does.
The vampire spawn is jaded. Not having tons of empathy after hundreds or even thousands of years of existence doesn't automatically make one a slavering rabid monster--he clearly hates his old master, to whom he was enslaved, and for all we know it's because of what he was forced to do to people. He also seems to be trying not to murder everyone around him with his bloodlust. This isn't 100% hardcore rules stickler territory;
"delve into an epic adventure that subverts the binary morality found in many RPGs" doesn't sound like all vampire spawns must be 100% infant-devouring evil. He could easily be neutral. He may even harbor some guilt over what he's directly responsible for, or harbor a secret desire for heroism that we haven't seen yet.
The cleric of Shar may be neutral as well; she seems bitter, cagey, and severely untrusting, not confused or pointlessly cruel. The warlock may be a good person who made a terrible deal for compelling reasons for all we know. The wizard--same deal, he may have done the best he could in a terrible situation; liking power doesn't automatically make one evil and maybe he took in that Netherese destruction orb in an attempt to neutralize it and save people. The Githyanki
seems about as good as a baatezu, not even neutral, let good far alone. You kinda repeatedly shanked your own argument until it was deceased there. Clearly it's not so obvious, at least before we've played the game and gotten to know the characters thoroughly.
Nevertheless, I agree with the idea that tags aren't needed. This is a perfect example of the fact that alignment is at least somewhat subjective and usually poorly enforced. Thinking as a character rather than trying to conform to rigid alignment standards makes so much more sense. In real life, people's alignment may vary from issue to issue thanks to cognitive dissonance or just nuanced views. The more restrictive one is, the more potential there is for frustration or annoyance or sheer disagreement on the part of the player. It's not constructive or fun for players to think about how they disagree with the developers rather than being drawn into the game world.
Feeling annoyed at alignment shifts that don't make sense is always going to take the player out of the experience. It's incredibly anti-immersive and even fourth wall breaking. If alignment is implemented in this game, I'd hope for it to be very forgiving on all ambiguous situations where you may have murdered that guy because you noticed a strong clue that he was the one keeping people in his basement, and harsher in clear and obvious cases like if you throw the neighborhood children in your oven like in Hansel and Gretel.
And those few characters who are alien entitites capable of only having one unchanging alignment (fiends, celestiels etc) will no doubt be written that way if and when they show up.
So why is it a problem that they are only writing the moralty of people instead of creating some limited video game mechanic? Every video game mechanic alignment system I've ever played has sucked. Making you choose whatever choice has the correct alignment system symbol on it to not miss out on rewards or roleplay properly and choose the "wrong" choice by choosing what you think your character would actually do.
Better to just let you role play freely, make the consequences story ones not mechancal ones, like a real roleplaying game.
Of course if a paladin violates their tenets or a cleric pisses off their god thats a different story. That's a story consequence that has a mechanical consequence aswell - You can have trigger reactions for that just like the companions react to your decisions and I hope they don't ignore that possibility.
I agree. The only hard alignment choices I want to see are really clear-cut violation of tenets of one's god or cases which are truly obvious, objective, basically a majority of smart players will agree beyond a reasonable doubt to be evil/good actions.
The most fair way to implement it would probably be conversations inside of your own head where you couldn't be lying to keep someone happy or piss them off; where you think to yourself about why you killed that guy and select "for the funsies because I hated his stupid face" (evil) or "because I needed his money to survive" (neutral) or "because I saw his murderbasement but knew as the Duke's son he would never be brought to justice." (good.) If you're a cleric, talking to your god like that might even make some sense.
I don't want it to feel like there are no consequences, I do want to feel like good and evil exist, but I don't want there to be some gimmicky mechanic that feels like your mom slapping your hand as you reach into the cookie jar. The player should be an active participant in the story, able to evolve their character without undue judgment.
