Out of Alignment

Jay ‘Rampant Coyote’ Barnson, the man behind the old-school indie dungeon crawling romp Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, has penned a relatively lengthy blog post on an object of fairly heated debates in the role-playing, both virtual and tabletop, community: the handling of morality, or, to use the Dungeons & Dragons’ term, “alignments”. As always he has plenty of personal experience to provide to flesh out his opinions, which makes for a fairly good read. Here’s a snip:

Anyway, the point is I always considered the D&D alignment system to be a valuable tool, while I guess some folks saw it more as a straitjacket. As a DM, I’ve always been pretty flexible with letting players play their own interpretation of alignment, only rarely stepping in to warn about serious deviations. And even that is more often a call for the player to roleplay an appropriate justification.

But does this apply to computer games? Particularly single-player RPGs is it of any value to designate a player-character’s personality along an alignment system? Does it work at all?

I think it can. I’m just not fond of how it’s usually implemented. The Bioware approach doesn’t appeal to me very much, where a few actions get ‘˜flagged’ as being automatically good or evil (or lawful vs. chaotic) and sliding your character’s path in that direction. I’m not sure what’s more annoying getting dinged evil for doing something that (from my vantage point) seemed perfectly justifiable if you have a slightly different interpretation of the events than the scenario designer, or NOT getting awarded appropriate (points) for going out of your way to do something heroically (or anti-heroically) good / evil. The arbitrariness of both the timing and type of reward gets frustrating.