[MUD-Dev] Alignment

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 07:50 PM 8/24/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:
>I discarded alignment and all concepts thereof from my D&D games back in
>about 1980. No one ever missed it. No one ever complained. And it didn't

Well,  I don't use it in my games much.  I do keep it in mind as to help
understand how a character class should be played.  Rather then saying this
character is X alignment" I generally went "hmm... druids should be
neutral.. what does that mean and is this player being appropriately
netural?" when it came time to hand out exp.  I guess for me the question
is not "is this character within alingment" but "is this player within
character?"

BUT I need to hastily add that I do NOT judge for evils, never have and
never will (unelss you count the provisions for evil players that are going
into my current OLRPG product.)  I firmly believe that stories are about
heros... the stories I'm interested in anyway.

So for me the issue was never "are you good" but "are you heroic"?  Heroism
take s a wide variety of forms and can be found in very unexpected places
and manifest in unexpected ways...

The one thing alignment DOES do in the AD&D system is serve as a rather
brute force balancing agent.  If you are going to allow evil PCs (as our
OLRPG does) then alignment becomes an issue because the strongest character
types in the game are NOT evil types.  I consider this necessary to keep
the world from disintegrating as well as to overcome the basic advantage
ruthlessness has...


JK

Jeff Kesselman
Snr. Game Integration Engineer
TEN -- The Total Entertainment Network -- www.ten.net

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