Revision as of 05:22, 31 March 2009

D&D alignment is silly.

But having some idea of a character's values is a useful thing to have around. Thus we're going to talk about that...

Ethos

Terms like "good" and "evil" shouldn't really be bandied about as much as they are. These are hardcore metaphysical philosophical terms, and they've got some hefty connotations. Not only that, but dividing the world into two colors seems ridiculous: goblins might be evil, sure, but are they as evil as Sauron? Is Sauron as evil as Melkor? How do we define those differences?

Some folks might want to say that it doesn't matter: evil is evil. Or we start getting into discussions regarding differences between "regular" evil and what I've started calling "cosmic" evil - regular being gobbos and mortals and such, cosmic being demons and devils and whatnot.

In Journey, we've had the idea of personality come up; the idea is that personality will play a role in social combat, somehow, as well as possibly playing a role in motivation and doing some character-building stuff. So far we've been dealing with the Myers-Briggs type indicator, but that seems a little excessive and not exactly the easiest thing to understand. We need something a little more basic, without resorting to D&D's Cartesian plane of alignments.

How do we do this? Well, there is a game that does this sort of thing...

Enter: The Color Wheel

Magic's color wheel is already philosophically divided, which makes it an easy-to-use philosophical model when attempting to understand an individual's goals and motivations.

In general, the values held by a given color tend to be rather connected - that is, it's easy to see how one belief in a color could readily lead to the others in it. Of course, this is not necessarily the case, which leads us into hybrid philosophies, but the game we're modeling our ethos system on already handles that, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal to import that here.

Just in case we get a bit lost here, linkage to the article that this image is taken from, which also happens to contain some nifty short descriptions of the colors. Also, some more articles on specific colors: white, blue, black, red, and green. If you didn't have a good feel for each color's philosophies before reading this page and checking those links, you will now.

Color Philosophies

In general, it seems that each color consists of two predominant beliefs. In turn, each color has a "at its best" and "at its worst." Even if the colors as written themselves don't have these conveniently divided into a grid, it could easily be arranged as such.

So each color will have two virtues, which are then either "light" or "dark," with light corresponding to "at its best" and dark to "at its worst." This then leads us to each color having four possible interpretations, so we're already at 20 possible, reasonable alignments.

Alternatively, we could simply divide the colors into light and dark, saving us the headache of having to divide the color's philosophies in half. That would allow us to keep the ethos system somewhat simple, while allowing for reasonable variety - if we just go light/dark, we get 10 standard philosophies.

I feel rather confident that you could reliably group most individuals you meet into one of those ten.

We could also turn the color wheel itself into a sliding scale, with each color having three slices for its part - one firmly in its ethos, and the two other side wedges representing parts of the ethos closer to the ally on that side. The further from the center is one direction in light or dark, and towards the center is the other. Multidimensional ethos, woo!

Other Colors? Hybrids?

What about adding another color? What about hybrids?

These are both reasonable things to consider. I'm not sure if you could reasonably fit another color in via this model, though - with some reshuffling of concepts - it might be possible. Personally I enjoy the idea that each philosophy has two allies and two enemies; if it were at six, you would have one direct enemy, two neutrals, and two allies. That might be too much to handle, though it might also make the philosophies a touch less polar.

In terms of another color, it would also be sensible to add a color in the center, an undecided color that isn't really sure of where it's going; let's call it brown. Brown would be the color of children and animals, things that don't really think about their personal goals and motivations too much, or are simply still sorting things out.

Hybrids are relatively easy, at least for allies. For enemies, it's a bit tougher, but they made it work in Ravnica, so I'm sure we can make it work here.

Implications

There is no good, no evil, no lawful, no chaotic. We remove the idea of objective morality and throw it into subjectivity.

Alignment-based damage is gone, alignment detection is now useless (since alignment is subjective). Each color could be given their own particular kind of damage, which might reinforce stereotypes (ie, white gets holy, black gets shadow).

Certain creatures would have alignments. Angels, for instance, would generally be white; demons would tend towards black. I would strongly argue against these beings absolutes (ie, all angels are white), and encourage such creatures to oftentimes have hybrid philosophies.

We'll also need to avoid the possibility of ethos being a straight-jacket. I have no interest in characters being slaves to their ethos, nor of upholding every single aspect of it. While characters of such a nature can be neat and interesting, not everyone should need to behave in that manner.

In general, this seems a lot more organic and useful than D&D alignment. We can use ethos as both a probable-action-indicator as well as a possible motivation-indicator. We can also use it extensively in social combat, which would rock all kinds of awesome. I think that this vision of alignment holds a lot of promise, and could be a much more useful tool for a system that encourages a "shades of grey" world.