Which alignments do you play? How do you play them?

[oldgrayrogue]

Alignment factors heavily into how I play my characters and how I design the character concept. The characters life experiences in their backstory usually shape their alignment. If playing an evil PC I generally go with Neutral Evil -- I typically portray NE as that organized crime, selfish, no morals type of person. When playing a good PC I generally go for Chaotic Good as I like the flexibility, unless playing a Paladin of course. I play Chaotic Neutral the most by far because it allows me to roleplay with many other different types of PCs without any real restriction, and I enjoy playing a "free spirit" type persona. I think alignment is very important to roleplay, and as a DM I often enjoyed presenting PCs with tough moral choices.

With any alignment I play, however, I always play it GRAY. Even the most evil of persons can have moments when they do good -- and even those who have always lived a good life can commit acts of unspeakable evil. I find these to be the most interesting events to play, by far.

[puny]

I try to not think about alignments. Alignments generally makes me second guess my own rp, i dont really like that. So. I do my hardest to not think about them.

[Ithildur]

I gave an alignment shift to a PC last night.

[danielmn]

I rarely find myself concerned over alignment at all. I've played the range, good to evil, lawful to chaotic. However, I don't think alignment dictates action at all, action dictates alignment. Therefore, my good pc may do something evil. My evil may do something good. Just depends on the motivation of the action. I've never been bothered by alignment shifts. I've never been bothered by loosing class powers due to alignment shifts. I welcome those kinds of challenges. Otherwise, you are merely setting yourself up (and I mean, really making a concerted effort to get your vision instead of letting the world dictate your path...I've seen a lot of "great rpers" whom continually pride themselves on just how "great" they are fall into this trap) for a singular, non-branching path in which you've already determined how you will react in any given situation, how your character will look 10 levels from now, 20 levels from now. Gag me. Not how life works.

[trentfrompunchy83]

I feel that most of our 'good' characters lack the depth of moral inquiry I possess as a human being necessary to be cognizant of the actual moral implications of their beliefs. My perception has been that it's enough for most players of good PCs to assume that because they are a Paladin or faithful servant of a good deity that their moral judgments automatically consist of unquestionably 'goodness' which is, to me, hopelessly childish.

+ everything else

Well said.

[Veilan]

In my opinion alignment should follow roleplay, not the other way around.

[Rumple C]

I think of a characters personality, and then attach a suitable alignment after.

Plenty of wiggle room in amongst most of the axis

[boombrakh]

Alignment should reflect my character. Over time, if things change then so should the alignment. Alignment should never be shackles for your character.

[thinkpig]

I rarely find myself concerned over alignment at all. I've played the range, good to evil, lawful to chaotic. However, I don't think alignment dictates action at all, action dictates alignment. Therefore, my good pc may do something evil. My evil may do something good. Just depends on the motivation of the action. I've never been bothered by alignment shifts. I've never been bothered by loosing class powers due to alignment shifts. I welcome those kinds of challenges. Otherwise, you are merely setting yourself up (and I mean, really making a concerted effort to get your vision instead of letting the world dictate your path...I've seen a lot of "great rpers" whom continually pride themselves on just how "great" they are fall into this trap) for a singular, non-branching path in which you've already determined how you will react in any given situation, how your character will look 10 levels from now, 20 levels from now. Gag me. Not how life works.

+1

Along the same lines, I dislike planned changes; planned alignment shifts. for example rolling a paladin and planning his or her fall, etc.

[kmj2587]

Generally I just work through whatever moral system I decide my character is going to buy into and then figure where that lands in the D&D system later. That being said, I tend heavily toward good alignments. I usually pick some philosophical idea to work around, like Kant's idea that doing the right thing for the wrong reason (and almost all of them are wrong) eliminates any moral value the action had. There's also the Benthamite utilitarian style CG that seems much more commonplace among adventurers (for which there should be a real Utility Monster). So yeah, I generally pick something I find interesting from moral philosophy and try to spin it into an entire moral worldview with whatever adjustments I need to make for FR being drastically different from the real world.

In general I dislike "smite first and ask questions later" type goods (excepting evil outsiders and undead, which are evil by definition), and I think violence should generally be Plan B, if not further down the alphabet, for most good characters. This isn't to say that a good character has to walk into the orc camp and talk to them to find out if they're evil before killing them, but it should be acknowledged that killing them without bothering to find out is not a moral high ground. Good characters cannot be expected to make the good choice every single time or they will fail to seem like characters to which people can relate.

I like the ideas that being good should be hard and that doing what is right and doing what you want should come into conflict. Having an extremely good party member should be almost as difficult as having an extremely evil one, but for very different reasons. I don't think most adventurers would want someone with them constantly reminding them that violence is a failure state regardless of the outcome and constantly empathizing with everything they're trying to kill and/or loot.

So in short, I like good and try to keep it interesting by coming up with consistent moral systems for my characters and pushing it away from the normal, violent behavior of most D&D campaigns.

[DarkHin]

I had a really interesting (or at least I think it's interesting) idea for a paladin, who is melancholy-prone and struggles to lives up to his god's (Ilmatar) dicta, which he defines as the ultimate good. The characters morality is bast on the first Noble Truth in Buddhism: Life is Dukkha, which is roughly (very roughly one of my professors has told me) translated as "suffering", "anxiety." The term also connotes "unsatisfactoriness." The paladin believes the goodness in life is ameliorate this suffering, which isn't a selfless goal at all. He suffers from intense melancholy, and his quest to address suffering is an unconscious attempt to remedy his own mystery. Ironically his melancholy distracts him in his pursuit to sooth suffering because it saps him of his energy, his will to do much of anything, although he makes great psychic effort against his own inertia.

The Lawful aspect is a great deal simpler: he follows the code of the Paladin as much as he is able.

What's really interesting about this build, I think, is that I've defined Lawful Good as an ideal, something often not achieved, but always strived for. [I didn't see Kmj's post before posting this, but it's basically the same idea]

I acknowledge the argument that, if you're not acting Lawful Good, then you're a fallen paladin, but I think that no interesting character with any amount depth could fit into that box.

Anyways, thats my attempt to try and make LG interesting.

… now I want to play this PC.

[Mikayla]

I have spent most of my playing years in ALFA (as opposed to DMing years) playing Chaotic Evil characters, namely Sheyreiza in NWN1 and more recently, Aliyah in NWN2. As between the two proposed methods of choosing an alignment, it depends – when I made Shey I knew she was going to be CE because she was a drow priestess in the Underdark and I wanted a more-or-less classic drow experience. With Aliyah, she started CN but fell in with a bad crowd (the Calishites) who brought out the worst in Aliyah – not that the worst in Aliyah was all that far from the surface, indeed, it was barely contained. She was a character whose personality and background I made first, before writing down the alignment. Vellya, in NWN2, was a PC whose alignment I chose at the outset just to be different from my past PC. As for Lotus, also in NWN2, I cannot even remember her alignment – for her, alignment was superflous in light of the personality and background I had come up with for her. She was about her own demons and past and they did not fit easily into any alignment box. So, I would have to say how I choose alignment differs from PC to PC.

As for how I play them, once I set a PC in motion, I play the character, not the alignment … mostly. Sometimes a PC might be trying hard to fit in with a particular group (like Shey trying to fit in with the Eilistraee worshippers at the Promenade, or more tragically, return to Lolth later on) in which case then the character makes the choice to take certain actions which more rigidly follow alignment guidelines, though that’s really more about following dogma than a specific alignment.

As for why I have spent 90%+ of my time in ALFA playing CE … well … I guess I just find it more interesting. I find the “good” characters boring – Vellya was (and is – she never died) perfectly good character, but I found playing a NG/CG character was … well … dull.

The CE characters on the other hand I’ve LOVED. Playing Shey was my best role-playing experience ever, in my life, though admittedly part of that was because she did NOT stick to one alignment but went through a whole range of different lifestyles before returning to Lolth to stay (ala Halistra Melarn actually).

Galadorn:
"CE anyone? lets go murder someone for a cheese sandwich. Yay. No real jail for me even if i do get caught."

This. Sort of. As many know, Aliyah did, in fact, murder someone (a couple someones actually) for virtualy no reason – hell, a cheese sammich would have been a better reason then what Aliyah had – and its really fun and liberating (and scary) to be able to do that in a fantasy setting. Not that ALFA is without consequences – within minutes of the murder my PC was fleeing for her life and after escaping the city, was never able to return to TSM (and in fact, lived under the threat of the bounty for quite awhile) – but … THAT WAS FUN! If Aliyah had murdered those people and there were no half-way realistic consequences, ALFA would not have been any fun for me. I loved the fact that she got run out of town, and went on to get run out of Baldur’s Gate (though that incident cost Aliyah all her friends – so it goes with CE!).

At the same time, while Aliyah will kill a man and his wife for just annoying her at a tavern, and Sheyreiza put her own best “friends” to death (not too mention a few family members), I tried to play them as 3-dimensional people as best I could. Shey was lying, murderous, manipulative megalomaniac, but she was also absolutely dedicated, body and soul, to the protection and preservation of the drow race. And she loved fashion and music. And really kinky sex with demons. OK, maybe that last one was more about me ...

Aliyah was an out of control, murderous psychopath hell-bent for revenge, but she DID care about her friends (as best she knew how), and while she couldn’t give two-shits for her “people” (Calishites) she did absolutely love their poetry (and in fact, held all artists in high esteem) and she passionately loved the ocean and sailing.

Kurt Sutter, creator of “The Shield” and “Sons of Anarchy” gave us two anti-heroes, Macky and Jax Teller, one a murderous crooked cop and the other a murderous outlaw biker, but Sutter’s genius was in making both of these nut-bags relatable, or at least watchable and there is no denying that they are INTERESTING. That is what I TRY to do with my CE characters – yeah, their generally dishonest, treacherous, selfish, manipulative and murderous, but they have a human side too, or at least I try to give them one – if they didn’t have one, I’d would lose interest and wouldn’t want to play them.

Ultimately, the evil-but-still-human characters are the ones I find the most interesting, and the ones I relate to the best – not that I am evil, but I am certainly flawed as are my PCs.

Oh, and lets cut to the chase here: Adventuring in D&D is, at its core, about going out and killing people/creatures and taking their stuff so you can buy better stuff with which to go out and kill people/creatures and take their stuff - thats some pretty evil sh*t right there, no matter what religion or righteous cause you dress it up in!

[Analogkid]

Just want to point out the aspect that evil doesn't always know its evil. With Drake for example, if another were to ask him directly if he was evil he would likely answer "of course not." Though, he would at times struggle with methods after the fact.

The killer might try to justify in his own mind why he's killing, lying or hurting others. He might feel he's doing it for the greater good, or that other people just don't know whats best for them and its his/her job to set things straight any way he can.

I have played an actual honest to god, good PC before, but I feel that that with a PC like Drake, the constant inner turmoil, the desire to take short cuts, the need to be something else all make him more interesting to play.

[Twin Axes]

It seems to me that the concept of goodness is something that only applies within a given circle of compassion (however ever widening it may be). It would be perfectly conformable to his beliefs for a lawful good paladin to march in and slaughter a camp of orcs without parleying to them first, simply because they do not fall within his and his culture's circle of compassion. In the same way most cultures do not find it an evil act to slaughter soldiers from an enemy culture in a war, since the victims have been relegated (possibly temporarily) outside that same circle. In eleventh-twelfth century Europe the massacre of the muslim population of Jerusalem in 1099 generally seemed commendable, but some time later people were not so sure. Today we do not approve of people killing pets, or even livestock in some cases, while few feel bad about squashing a fly. Who knows, one day we might seem like barbarians for extinguishing the shining souls of poor flies.

Maybe one could see the D&D concept of Good as related to the relative size of one's circle of compassion when compared to the surrounding norm. An person of Evil alignment might have quite a narrow such circle (only including him/herself!). I always seem to play good characters, and I do experience an interesting and challenging tension when my PC who inhabits a more primitive moral universe (in my eyes) crosses lines that I personally wouldn't, while he sees himself as trying to be good to the same extent that I personally see myself try to be good.

[thinkpig]

Just want to point out the aspect that evil doesn't always know its evil. With Drake for example, if another were to ask him directly if he was evil he would likely answer "of course not." Though, he would at times struggle with methods after the fact.

The killer might try to justify in his own mind why he's killing, lying or hurting others. He might feel he's doing it for the greater good, or that other people just don't know whats best for them and its his/her job to set things straight any way he can.

+1

IRL, I believe that nearly everyone basically believe they are good. An addict steals an old lady's purse because he thinks that's what he needs to do. He's not *willfully* evil, just able to rationalize the necessity for an evil act. Where each of us draws this line will be different. Some people, for instance, are perfectly comfortable with violence if it can be *justified*, ie; someone would kill you and the only way you think you can stop them is to kill them first--to me, killing someone before they can kill you is immoral, because it consists in giving up on the idea of solving the problem some other way and seeking reconciliation without killing. Not saying it's ethical to let them kill you, but I think anything can be rationalized and once you start rationalizing violence I think the tendency is to get carried away.

When I was a kid my father was the sheriff of Bayfield county in Northern Wisconsin. When he went to work in the morning one time when I was like four years old, I asked him if he was going to go and get the bad guys. He told me there are no bad people, only good people who make bad decisions. Most of my life I thought he had that backwards but I think my father was a very wise man, and that his attitude enabled him to empathize with 'criminals' when another law man may have just 'put the scumbags away' remorselessly.

These days I try to avoid thinking of people as good or bad but if I must work within the paradigm, I think that *real* goodness consists in the desire to find and build common ground between people, the desire to understand people we don't understand, and to find a way to get along with them. Most of us can't stand this battle. We go, "that guy is an asshole," and we forget it and go on with our lives, because we just don't have time etc.

So good-aligned characters, in my opinion, should be building common ground with anyone they meet, or trying to. Evil characters separate others out, see them as 'other' and disconnected. Else, could they commit evil acts upon those 'others'?