One thing that's disappointed me in several NWN role-playing mods is how irrelevant the alignment system is. Sure, your decisions have an impact on your alignment, and certainly there are good vs. evil decisions, but your alignment seems to rarely be referenced. If your evil, shouldn't certain NPC's be a bit intimidated and submissive towards you? Likewise, if you're good, shouldn't they be more friendly and assertive? Obviously, a character's reputation plays a part in this. After all, NPC's must know some of the protagonist's good or evil deeds before they can decide how to behave around them. This means, early in the story, it's okay to dismiss the protagonist's alignment, but later, your alignment should mean something! The issue is it's hard for a developer to gauge the magnitude of a player's overall deeds when a player locks himself into Chaotic Evil or Lawful Good to start a game! It's made worse when the player commits an evil decision when they're already Chaotic Evil -- your alignment can't be any more evil than that, so the impact of your decision feels a bit negated.Onto my point: I'm considering adopting a Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic approach where the player is locked into a true neutral alignment. Decisions will impact their alignment over the course of their story. A starting alignment provides me a base-line, so I can better direct some of the content.
This alignment restriction also makes sense from my story's perspective. Your character is a young woman who has lived a fairly sheltered life under her father's roof. As she exits her final year of home-schooling, she's uncertain about her future as her father pressures her into joining the Church of Knox. She knows very little about what lies beyond her city's walls. Many of her adventures were spent inside the pages of fictional story novels. Due to her inherently benefiting from her father's wealth and prestige, she lacks a morale compass regarding concepts of money and power. Basically, it's impossible for her to be Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil, because she doesn't know what good or evil really means.
I find the protagonist's lack of understanding interesting from a character-study perspective, as she will be tested by various authoritative figures, most notably her Church's instructor, Malakai Varus, who isn't shy about taking advantage of her. Several more opportunistic characters will await the protagonist. How you confront them will shape the kind of woman she becomes.
Anyways, I'm aware some people hate being forced into a starting alignment, so I'm open to your thoughts. Of course, it's your decisions that will matter the most and not necessarily your alignment. Your alignment will simply be one of the consequences reflected by your decisions.
I'm ambivalent about alignment in D&D. Especially in most NWN mods. I can only think of a few that bothered to do anything with it.
ReplyDeleteOne of the nice touches about ADWR was that things you did could shift your alignment. I've had run-throughs where I started as LG, finished the first part as CE, then finished the 2nd as NG. Granted you could argue that the shifts were too big for some actions, but I liked the attention to detail.
I don't think you necessarily need to restrict the starting alignment. I think of it more as a starting personality. If you're setting up the alignment changes based on actions, you should be able to set the values to make the shifts significant enough to make a difference. On the other hand, starting as true neutral doesn't bother me, either. It sets you up with a blank slate that you can change. Actually, it'd probably easier for you because it would start everyone at the same level and make it simpler to gauge the values to set shifts to, to make them meaningful.
Doesn't bother me any. Especially when you are starting with a character already from that world of yours. That character has already had a history of sorts. So I have no trouble starting with that alignment and then playing it out from there.
ReplyDeleteSo the forced neutral thing won't trouble me a bit.
Personally I've always found that alignment has very little worth as anything but a personal guideline for roleplaying because of how abstract an idea it is, aside the cases where it's relevant mechanically (some classes in D&D, force powers in KotOR), in which case it is still arbitrary and nonsensical. That said, the idea that your decisions should affect how the other characters of the story view your main character is something I absolutely agree with. That's why I found the reputation system in Pillars of Eternity to be absolutely brilliant, as it made the world react to your personal conversation choices beyond singular conversations, while avoiding the pitfall of making things too complicated by writing around too many specific choices. I'm just sad that that system did not get used for more than it did, as it has such great potential.
ReplyDeleteAs to how that relates to a solution: In the way you have described you want to use the alignment system as a mechanic, it would essentially be a more rudimentary version of the reputation system in PoE. As such, I think it's absolutely fair to start the character of as true neutral, that is to say an unknown to the other characters, especially in the starting scenario you have described. As long as the options to act as 'good' or 'evil' as the player wants are there from the start, this does not in fact limit the player's roleplaying. It simply replaces an arbitrary designation of the player that has no real purpose with a more practical system that shows the world's perception of the player character's personality.
I feel as though alignment-based dialogue outside of major story events should be a luxury and taken on only if you're sure you can handle it, as it only adds more variables for you to track later on.
ReplyDeleteI often see many content creators griping about how stressful everything gets because of how many things they need to track later on in the game zz
I am entirely unconcerned by the idea of starting in neutral alignment, it seems to fit the background. I am much more interested in what you plan to do with alignment and its changes!
ReplyDeleteThe original DnD alignment system and especially the KotOR / ME single slider was a polarising design choice: it locks players into a certain mode for every single decision in order to maximise expected utility - in other words, if I can only devastate everything at will with biotic lightning and I need to maximise renegade side points to get it, I feel forced to be sociopathic at any and every turn, which means I'm not playing an RPG and making decisions based on my character's judgement and outlook anymore, I'm following one of two linear stories with diametrically opposite protagonists. In that light, I don't know if this was your plan but I am particularly against systems that lock players out of choices based on previous actions for two major reasons: it greatly diminishes the weight of every choice, and it actually prevents rather than encourage character development. It isn't so much that players lock themselves into good or evil, the very existence of exclusive rewards tailored to the extremes forces them into one or the other, so they will race to achieve one of those two states. Rewards could mean anything including new content, even terrible consequences as long as they can only ever be achieved by following one of two narrow paths.
I think for the purpose of development you should be clear about what that slider is measuring, and what you're going to do with that measurement. For instance, if it's just about reputation then you could track that, as anon said; or, do you really need an ending for each alignment, or would it not be better to have a handful of epilogue elements based on individual choices that show the consequences of those specific choices, and let the player decide what it means to them? In other words, do you even really need alignment at all? It may even be less work to track significant individual choices than to add +- alignment to everything, try to keep it all balanced, and then have to figure out what it all means at the end.
I don't mind being forced into a neutral alignment at start, it's the most natural beginning I believe. We, as a player, come to a world we don't know yet, with it's own history and perception of morals. What I don't like is being forced into a role I don't want - there is a fine line between linear storytelling and lack of conversation choices. I hate it when all my character can say is "Oh, of course I will help you!" or "Aaahh! Me smash you!". Even if all conversation options lead the same way I want to have different options - that is what helps me create an "alignment" for my character, it should be up to the player or otherwise the creator of the mod should point out that his/her module is only designed for a goody-two-shoes character or only a murderous sociopath.
ReplyDelete