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

Sigh. Okay, let me dig into this if I truly must.

Real-world politician evil in the guise of good is in fact a perfect template for the politicians in D&D. Most politicians do think they are good while being at best neutral and at worst evil, but they drift back and forth between the two, and motives exist. "What? The peasants are fine, let them eat cake, I really need more gold though just to be safe! I deserve it, really." Meanwhile, peasants are starving. The politicians don't see this happening but they are allowing it. If I kill those politicians, is that an evil act? Or is it more evil to let innocent people starve while sociopaths giggle over their gourmet pheasant? What good does it do to argue about labels when the player is making decisions like that? Isn't the decision and its consequences more important than some label?

Evil creatures are a different ballpark because they will have alien motives. I'm talking about developers judging humanoid characters, not baatezu. Eeeevool can exist in this universe without it being applied to the player's actions when it isn't warranted--though it's pretty boring and stupid to be evil just for the evulz. Even vampires at least have unnatural hunger and a lust for domination as a means to satisfy that hunger regularly as motives, which makes sense, but isn't it more interesting if they're on the borderline between neutral and evil, or maybe even want to be good but keep screwing up? That whole tortured struggle is the basis for why Vampire: the Masquerade is so popular. And why should a god like Shar be less complex in her motivations than most adult humanoids? "Waaah, my sister was mean to me, stupid planet, everything should be dark." Congratulations, you're the deity of edgelord. It's far from the most interesting thing about Shar, even. Why not mention the Shadow Weave or something?

There's more to D&D than alignments, just as there is with Tolkien and such as well. Other things are more interesting. Mind flayers are more interesting. The Great Old One is more interesting. Hell, even Bhaal is more interesting--murder carries with it ideas of war and adrenaline, that is understandable. Him being the "Lord of Murder" says a lot without even mentioning that he's evil, you can figure it out easily. Then you've got Lolth, who was ambitious and treacherous; the want for power and to step out of someone else's shadow is understandable. Shar's kind of the worst. From everything I've seen of her, she's just the edgelord deity. She's less interesting precisely because of what can be reduced to sheer alignment. So you're kind of making my point right there.

Here's the thing. All of what you said about alignment does not require alignment tags. Clerics can be held to the tenets of their god without those tenets being labeled. The stuff with Sarevok and Viconia doesn't need alignment tags. That feedback can exist without the words "Chaotic Good" or whatever else. Personal journeys can be personal journeys. A dark character can come back to the light without ever being labeled "Chaotic Evil" or "Lawful Good". Astarion could re-develop his empathy and it's a pretty cheap reward if all it amounts to is two words on his character sheet changing--the cool part is not the words. The cool part is the character development. The cool part can exist without restrictive labels.

If it must exist at all, alignment should be clear. It should be easy for the player to know what they're doing and make deliberate choices for that reason. It shouldn't be as it has been in numerous games before, where the wording is ambiguous garbage and you have to roll your eyes and reload because someone decided that you killing a person who was very obviously going to go slaughter a town full of people was an evil action, as opposed to just letting that person go cut lots of throats. I got alignment points in NWN2 for telling the soldiers that I won't let them kill Neeshka in cold blood--what if my character is calculating and did it because they think Neeshka's hot and want her to be indebted to them? Then it's actually kind of neutral at best, maybe even evil. You can come up with more examples than that, but it's so easy to do it very wrong and interfere with roleplay.

Altruism and cruelty exist. But thinking about why someone is altruistic or cruel forces writers to evaluate characters in a more sophisticated manner than "okay, these guys are uh... evil and crazy, boxes ticked, Chaotic Evil, done." Viconia's cultural and religious propensity is far more meaty AND sympathetic. There's a reason why other evil characters were bit parts while she's a love interest/companion. Flat alignment is dull, and if it's not flat you don't need to spell it out so hard.

Writers at times depict insanity/evil in stupid ways. It's far more interesting and authentic when they know what disorders exist or they've studied serial killers and use those as inspiration. DA2 did this, for one example. None of the interesting possibilities required him to have an alignment spelled out anywhere. The outcomes were also more interesting because I didn't have to worry about getting alignment points. I wasn't taken out of the experience by thinking "oh, the developers decided I'm evil for killing this guy who murders elven children but will always get off scot free because his father has government power and continually covers up for him" or "oh, me bringing him in is lawful? Even though I know the law won't be followed because of who his dad is and he's about to break the law even more? Huh..." I was simply allowed to make the choice for myself, like an adult, rather than be chastised or judged for choosing one way or the other based on the character I was roleplaying at the time. I could just roleplay instead and judge for myself.

So what it boils down to is--I'm not against alignment as a framework under the hood. Yes, there should be consequences, yes, there should be character development, yes, there should be tenets. Hell, I would even go so far as to say I kind of believe in good and evil myself. What I'm against is jarring judgments of morality that don't reflect common sense and aren't nuanced, which take away from the experience, and I'd rather have no alignment than alignment that is stupid unsophisticated nonsense as I've seen in most games. Alignment limits options for developers as well as players.

I find stupid alignment arguments which never come to an end being forced on my escapism to be exactly what sucks about the real world, and to Hades with THAT.

You don't have to take good and evil or law and chaos out of Faerun. You can just take arbitrary judgments on the part of the developer out and make morality more nuanced. You can at least stick to delineating clear cases of those things and let the player worry about everything in between.

One of my favorite quests in a tabletop D&D game was when my party was presented with a group of goblins supposedly slaughtering the townsfolk. In fact, they were just defending themselves against attacks by the local soldiers intending to drive them out of their home, and all that was left were women, children, and the elderly because all the young adults had died trying to defend the cave they were sheltering in, their home, from being plundered. That very challenging of flat creature alignment expectations is what made the quest interesting and made it rewarding. A quest about evol goblinz being evol and then we kill them bc alignment=evol? Flat. Boring. The very subversion of expectation is why we had fun with that quest. If that DM had been a strict "goblins are evil creatures so they're evil, you cast detect evil, they are evil" type? Pure boredom. Yet if alignment hadn't existed as a structure and goblins were just considered evil by reputation, that quest is intact. It's fine. Strict alignment enforcement kills that quest. Soft alignment enforcement doesn't. No alignment doesn't harm it whatsoever, not even a little bit.

Alignment as a strict framework rather than a lax and forgiving guideline is a barrier to fun and to good writing and I will maintain that until my dying breath. You can disagree with me but I type 100wpm and I've been annoyed about this topic for about the past 20 years.

TL;DR: Labels are for cans, yo.