1. DnD gods aren't omnipotent, all knowing deities. Some of them were mere human that tricked their way into the godly pantheon. Some died, some were punished, stripped of their power.
2. Developers make mistakes too. Remember KOTOR or Mass Effect discussion regarding moral choices ?
I was thinking simply of the concept of DnD alignment. I was thinking of omnipotent gods in the game's specific universe. I guess I missed the discussion on KOTOR and ME's moral choices.
Also : <link=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.339579.13740041>this
Maybe you missed my edit, i'll quote what I really think of the idea of a DnD alignment system in a game.
For the OP, even though a D&D style alignment system would be nice (assume you don't pick it from the start, but it develops and can be changed depending on your decisions) I personally think there shouldn't be an alignment system at all. You want moral choices? Give your character some morals. The game doesn't need to come up with them for you unless it wants to tell a specific story with a specific protagonist. The game doesn't need to come up with them for you. Moral conflicts only happen when you have morals.
I might as well expand a little bit on that while I am responding in fact.
Honestly, games that boast moral conflict without making a specific protagonist are using guesswork or common moral dilemmas. Moral choices are pretty one sided for the majority of people unless you RP your character in a way that makes the choices more meaningful.
Ugh. The D&D alignment axis is horrible. It falls apart if you put it under too much scrutiny, and any reasonably well-defined character can match half the axis with little trouble. Try googling for Batman's alignment. There's a chart somewhere where he matches every alignment, with reasonable excuses for each. Only follows own authority?
Chaotic. Personal code of morality? Lawful. Rescuing innocents? Good. Fighting crime as part of a personal vendetta? Neutral or Evil, depending on severity.
One of the most common complaints about the modern games industry is the moral choice system: "Why do I have to either take the cat out of the tree for free or burn the motherf**ker to the ground?" However, tabletop games have produced a much more nuanced moral system (in the form of D&D alignment from Advanced to 3rd edition), and the games industry should gleefully pillage it.
I wholeheartedly agree that a D&D style system would be awesome (I am Lawful Good with Chaotic Good streaks), but it would mean that the games would have to make so many more outcomes for your choices or feel like they are bluntly ignoring your moral choices. Just look at the math.
The Three Choice System.
We know what it is. Good, neutral, and bad. The Mass Effect and Dragon Age series are good examples, while they did change it to charm/ bold options in the second Mass Effect. Same idea though.
Granted some of these would have the same, or very similar, outcomes. This is why sometimes it seems that your character is doing something that they would do given your moral choices. The story must come first, but a game can do it one of two ways. Well, or poorly. Mass Effect does it well. It steers you toward saving the galaxy no matter if you are more holy than Raptor, Cyborg, Ninja, Pirate Jesus or "more eviler than Skeletor". Dragon Age 2 is just like, "Cool moral choices bro, but now you do this. Deal with it."
The reason this system works in D&D is because the Dungeon Master can change the story on the fly to make your moral choices make sense for your character throughout the game. A developer cannot. They have to sale a general story that will appeal to the widest audience.
The reason they don't use that? Truthfully? Time and money. Don't forget, making games is time consuming and expensive, so it's probably a lot faster to just throw in a binary morality system instead of having to program nine possible outcomes.
while using a 1 axis system isn't perfect by any means, it is about 200% easier than a 2 axis morality system. The amount of time it would take to make that ONE feature is insane compared to a 1 axis way like we do now. We would need another Ultima 4 before we see a complex moral choice system. That simply won't happen. Investors will not put down $100 million US to a game that hasn't already shown a good return.
I don't think a generalized moral system as the one in AD&D is very good. But I can see it work as a template for more specific systems.
I sometimes wonder why games don't use more numbers and more scales, in order to smooth out the one-dimensionality a bit. The rivalry-friendship system in DA2 didn't make any sense, but it might have made some sense by adding an extra scale. One scale to measure trust from an NPC, another scale to measure the level of agreement.
In pen and paper games rulesets needs to be simple enough to be handled manually. In software it's much easier to add extra numbers, formulas and scales. It may even be useful for writers to have more hooks to plug the narrative into.
Arluza said:
while using a 1 axis system isn't perfect by any means, it is about 200% easier than a 2 axis morality system. The amount of time it would take to make that ONE feature is insane compared to a 1 axis way like we do now. We would need another Ultima 4 before we see a complex moral choice system. That simply won't happen. Investors will not put down $100 million US to a game that hasn't already shown a good return.
Ultima IV was hardly a $100 million project. Thats the funny thing. Some of these old low-budget games had much more complex systems, because it is easy to add in some extra formulas. It's an inexpensive way to try to add some more depth to a setting, for instance compared to the work that goes into graphics.
While I do think that this would be a good thing to try, it'd take a lot of time, effort, and money to put in to the game. So I don't think we'd be seeing it unless a company firs took the large risk and showed that it can work in the first place.
Umm......Lawful/Decent, and.......Chaotic/Jerk face? Let's call it what it is, good and evil are not arbitrary terms, nor are they subjective. Good is good, you do something nice for the old lady down the street, it's good, you stab a puppy for laugh, it's evil.
I think they just need to add a fourth end of the good v.evil spectrum. Neutral is the arbitrary point. How do you determine a neutral character? Did he stab a puppy? Well obviously he's evil, did he help an old lady? Obviously he's good. They need something to encompass, impulsiveness.
A neutral person won't end the world, but could be in a gang of thieves of whatever. They're characterized by being selfish but not greedy to the point of being evil.
Yeah...the manic depressive sure has the element of surprise on his/ her side XD. All those poor NPCs with high intelligence and perception...it didn't help em one bit. Perceive THIS....BLAM!
Somewhere along the way, traditional D&D/P&P rules became untrendy in D&D RPG games, and they were quickly phased out.
See: Dragon Age, Mass Effect(?), WAR Online, Fallout 3, [any other modern RPGame].
Gamers today just don't have patience for that kind of stuff or rulesets.
Another problem is that the choices labelled 'good' and 'evil' are completely arbitrary. In The Old Republic for example, there's a side-quest involving a jedi master who suspects 2 of his students of being romantically involved and ultimately, when you go back to him, you have to decide whether to a) blow the whistle, the "good" option or b) keep their secret, the "evil" option, which is the wrong way round in my opinion because as much as romance makes me want to puke, revealing it to those who would only try to stamp it out like some sort of disease is the bigger dick move.
Because that's a lot more choices you're having to implement at every choice, and because you aren't solving the issue (namely, choices shouldn't really be 'moral' at all - see The Witcher 2), just appeasing it slightly.
Right. The problem is that "good" and "evil" as well as "rules-follower" and "rules-breaker" exist in the context of the character's home kingdom / tribe / whatever. A character who reads as "lawful good" in terms of, say, always acting in favor of the greater good and within the code of, say, pirates, is considered a chaotic neutral, at best, to the Spanish Main that he regularly plunders. You could argue the same thing about Batman--his actions are unilateral (chaotic) and violent (evil), yet he acts within his own code, which includes justice and law-enforcement.
The subtleties are beyond the capabilities of many game writers, who cast Batman as either a non-lethal, acrobatic version of a swat team, or the only sane man in a city hypnotized by evil.
I'm not a big fan of the D&D alignment system precisely because it fails to handle gray area properly and because it's subject to a determination by a higher power.
In D&D, it's usually the gods... who out of sheer coincidence, share similar value to a modern western society. It's pretty silly to think about it and all it really does is remove the gray area by making sure that the view the majority of player hold are the 'correct one'.
The whole system falls apart as soon as you try to use it in complex situation, or if you try to apply it to real life.
A good example of this is slavery... which wasn't abolished that long ago. To our modern sensibility, slavery is clearly evil. So it is in D&D as well... even thought most D&D settings fit in a time frame were slavery was a common fact of life. If we apply this to real life, are we to assume that pretty much every single culture that ever existed on this planet has evil roots?
I mean, it's extremely easy for me to look at the culture of society of other less fortunate country and decry them as lawful evil because they follow their ancient religious law to the letter and seems to have no respect for their women... but I'm pretty sure they look at me as being lawful evil (or maybe even chaotic evil) too. Who's right? Who's wrong? In real life, this is a complex matter. In D&D, it's not - because the gods have already called it.
It would be a lot of effort for the developers. there are 9 possibilities in the dnd alignment, even using a system like radiant story that would be a lot of effort to implement. Beyond that, it sounds like a great fucking idea. It covers most ways a person would want to play, which I love. Become a developer and make this happen
Let's say there's this Orc going by the name of "Bulg".
Bulg believes in strength, fire, blood and battle. He perceives civilization of Mankind as weak abomination that should be burned to the ground.
On the other hand he is a strict follower of the laws his little tribe.
Bulg is Neutral. He is using Chaotic means to satisfy the Laws of his tribe. If he was truly Lawful, he would recognize then respect that they have a code of conduct and use the laws of Mankind to take them over because they are so weak. If he was truly Chaotic, he would not care about the laws of his tribe, only that he is not strong enough in battle (two of his main beliefs) to defy them.
You could argue that he is lawful if Mankind has no laws and rules by might alone, in which case he would be following their laws. This is one way that paladins can operate in a system that emphasizes combat.
There is not enough evidence to determine whether he is evil (does he take advantage of his lessers in the tribe to the extent of the law?) or just neutral (takes care of his tribe, persecutes outsiders).
The D&D alignment system (at least until they simplified it in 4th ed) is great because moral ambiguity gets swept into the Neutral pile. What people generally get confused with is that there are 2 Neutrals - Law/Chaos neutrality and Good/Evil neutrality.
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