Game Ideas Un limited: Beliefs

  It strikes me as odd that in nigh on two and a half years of weekly columns I have never written one on this subject, a subject in which I am something of a recognized authority, which has been part of role playing games from the beginning, and is a source of great contention among gamers.  For some, it is the central motivation for their characters, absolutely vital to any serious approach to play; for others, it is superfluous, there for color, and not well executed as it is.  I am not, in fact, talking about religion.  Although I am recognized as one of the most visible Christian gamers, I have actually addressed that long ago in the article entitled Faith, and on the forums I do point people to the Faith and Gaming series at the Christian Gamers Guild site.  No, I'm talking about that old Dungeons & Dragons™ concept of what it is that determines what side you're on in any conflict:  alignment.

  I say I'm a recognized authority on the subject; to that, my web pages addressing the subject of alignment as it appeared in the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ books were recognized by the game's best known creator, E. Gary Gygax, as useful and accurate explanations of the concepts entailed in it.  When he was running his web site at Gygax.com (no longer active), he had exactly two links on the page to D&D-related pages, and both of these were mine, and both were about alignment.  One, my alignment quiz, provided a great deal of insight into the application of alignment to questions that arise in fantasy game play; it was reproduced in a self-scoring Javascript version which you can take online, as well as translated into German by Xemaris.de, in a CGI-driven self-scoring version originally done in English by an MIT student, Wei Hwa Hwang.  The other was from my character creation site, an explanation of alignment to assist in choosing the right one for your character.  I've always used alignment in D&D games, and always found it useful.

  I'm not here to argue the merits of alignment, though; I'm here to use the concept as a way of helping you improve whatever games you play.

  I said a moment ago that I wasn't talking about religion; yet in a sense I am.  D&D gets a lot of flack for all the deities and demigods it contains, the polytheism it promotes, the pagan concepts it provides; but in the end, those are just color.  The real religions of the game are the nine alignment slots.  These are the things the characters actually believe, the ideas that drive who they are and what they do.  In explaining the concept of alignment language, the rules draw the analogy to the Latin of the Christian church, a language which refined the meanings of words to express concepts that were peculiar to a shared belief structure.  In that context, we see that whether your character worshipped Amaterasu Omikami, Athena, Bahamut, Diancecht, Heimdall, Moradin, or Vishnu, if you were lawful good your real beliefs were similar enough that they were explained and discussed in the same words.

  I have elsewhere written my Parable of the Boiler.  It is a simple story whose moral is something I was saying long before I thought of that example, long before I knew anything about alignment:  what you believe will control what you do.  It is a very simple notion.  It is not what you assert that you believe, but what you actually do believe, that controls your actions.  If you believe that the boiler in the basement is going to explode, you will turn down the thermostat and leave the building.  If you really do believe that it is better for you to help others, you will help others; if you really do believe that it is best to look out for number one, you will act in a selfish manner most of the time.  Whatever you really do believe will control your choices, and thus your actions.

  D&D characters really do believe their alignments; they just have doubts once in a while, and that's when they act out of their alignments.

  It is this concept of knowing what your character believes, and letting that control his actions, that you want to draw from this column.  Back in Flirting we talked about how playing your character well can help you understand how others think and feel, and to discover who you are and who you might become.  Similarly, to begin from what the character thinks, feels, and believes, and work out his actions from that, can help us better play that character because what he does springs from understanding why.

  Most role playing games don't include alignment as one of the characteristics.  Even those games TSR published at about the same time as Original AD&D™ did not have it.  In Dungeons & Dragons™ alignment was part of the heroic setting, defining who was wearing the white hat and who was really the villain.  Multiverser™ keeps a bit of this in its concept of affiliation; affiliation, though, is only mandatory for gods and worlds--player and non-player characters don't need it unless they establish a connection between themselves and some deity.  A few other games have characteristics and aspects that emulate some of what alignment did, but in the main this has dropped into the background.

  Even in the background, though, it continues to have impact.  Every player knows whether he's playing a hero or a villain or something between the two.  Every player needs to know what his character believes, values, hopes, and dreams.  It is by grasping these concepts that we can follow through to knowing how they will act.  Certainly you can't always reduce the complex psychology of a human being to a few core principles; yet for most characters, and even most people, you can derive a few core principles that control a great deal of their choices, and deal with the exceptions separately.  The concept of alignment is quite useful to this end, even if the details may require tweaking for any particular character.

  This will be the first of several articles addressing the subject of alignment; but they will not be in sequence.  We'll probably get around to good, evil, law, and chaos, and deal with the rather odd concept of neutrality.  I probably have something to say about edge alignments and corner alignments that will prove useful to understanding characters in all games.  It's a rich area, filled with great game ideas.  They'll be spread out over the rest of the year or so; we won't do it next week.  After all, there are too many game ideas left to do to get locked into one subject for more than one column.

  So, next week, something different.

-----

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.