One issue I have had off and on in different campaigns has been and continues to be Alignment – a rare difficult concept for many players, and a frequent area of friction in a story. Although different games have attempted to define it more or less carefully, the traditional values of Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, or Neutral Evil (and other combinations) eventually lead to disagreement. With large groups (of which both of my current campaigns are), these issues are accentuated.
With the release of Paizo’s Gamemastery Guide (Archives of Nethys Reference), they have a couple of alternative options, some of which make sense in my mind. In particular, I am inclined towards the Moral Intentions system, rather than pre-defined alignment. This is modeled strongly after the Edict and Anathema system for religion, and is one that on the surface seems to work pretty well. Plus it has the advantage of being player defined, rather than an arbitrary game-system definition.
Fundamentally, the player defines three Edicts and three Anathema in broad terms for the character’s personality. It is thru this that their respective view of “good” or “evil” is then defined. Hopefully, this will also be a much more concrete personality definition for the various players.
With respect to Religious or Class-based guidelines, I view these character traits as higher commitment – a character would rather break a religious edict than a personality edict – which hopefully would keep players in line with the respect character choices that they otherwise make.
I will be rolling this out to both groups in the coming weeks – and will see if this is an improvement or a distraction.
