[muse] role-playing theory: alignment

[coronaviridae]

Most people are familiar with the d20/D&D system of alignment for characters--you have your morality (good, neutral, evil) axis, and your lawfulness (lawful, neutral, chaotic) axis. These linearly combine to give you the nine alignments. It's been often lamented, though, that simply saying a character is 'Chaotic Good' does no service to the person's actual morality. I'll agree--the D&D system is extremely limited and really best kept to very black and white games of D&D.

So I'd like to propose a change for MUSH roleplayers trying to determine an alignment for their characters--keep good, neutral, and evil, but instead of the lawful-chaotic axis, use instead Hedonistic and Self-Restraining, with Neutral for the midpoint between the two.

In essence, Hedonistic characters are those who focus on having fun--at the expense of their 'duties', in the case of good characters, and at the expense of others, in the case of evil characters. Self-Restraining characters have an internal set of (arbitrary or not) rules on their behavior. A Hedonist wants to have fun; a Self-Restrainer would rather be miserable than have the wrong kind of fun, but gets some satisfaction out of the misery.

Law vs. Chaos:
Note that not all Hedonists are Chaotic, and not all Self-Restrainers are lawful. To use a Videoland example, the GMs are:

Captain N: Lawful Good (Self-Restraining Good)
Lady A: Neutral Good (Self-Restraining Good)
Station: True Neutral shift Neutral Good (Self-Restraining Neutral/Good)
Dreamcaster: Neutral Good (Hedonistic Good)

Captain X: Neutral Evil (Neutral Evil)
Dual: Lawful Evil shift Lawful Neutral (Hedonistic Evil/Neutral)
Gameshark: Chaotic Evil (Hedonistic Evil)
Agent 3D0: Lawful Evil (Self-Restraining Evil)


Evil vs. Good:
Yes, there will be more Hedonists who are also Evil than Good, and fewer Neutrals than you might see in a D&D game. And, it can be amorphous as well--as another example, Albedo is a Chaotic Evil character who behaves like Hedonistic Evil a lot of the time but is actually Self-Restraining Evil--he has several arbitrary laws on his own behavior and what he will and will not do. This is not to imply that Hedonism is by default bad or Self-Restraint is by default good--simply that the character traits that describe a Hedonist vs. a Self-Restrainer tend to fall along the morality axis, too.

It's not enough to say that Hedonists have no internal rules, they just make them for different reasons. Both Hedonists and Self-Restrainers have lines they will not cross. As with the above example, a Self-Restraining Evil character (Albedo) can be a lot more nasty and gruesome than a Hedonistic Evil character (Dual). However, the Hedonist's lines are where they are mostly because he or she would not have fun crossing those lines. A Self-Restrainer would have fun, but makes the rules anyway.

I don't think this is a perfect fix, however. Hedonistic and Self-Restraining still don't quite nail the archetypes (neither do Good and Evil, really, due to the amorphousness of the terms in casual conversation), but do, I think, describe them better than Law and Chaos. It gets the morality designation closer to what I think is important about a character--his motivations, his internal rules, and his desires.

More later.

muse

Comments

[arin-gustav.livejournal.com]

as I mentioned before, I'm not sure what you mean by 'wrong kind of fun' :D

[wondergecko.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends from person to person. :D Self-Restrainers can be anything from your traditional Christian (no sex outside of marriage, et al) to an extreme example like Albedo (whose rules are a lot more esoteric, and involve things like 'no drinking of blood, no cannibalism'). The point is that Self-Restrainers SEE there being a 'wrong kind' and a 'right kind' of fun, while Hedonists see 'fun' and 'not fun'.

--Murky

Ahh!

[arin-gustav.livejournal.com]

I thought you were saying Self Restrainers go for 'the wrong kind of fun' whereas Hedonists just have fun. And I was like 'omg, that makes no sense' and so I figured you meant something like that, but I wasn't sure :D

Thanks!

[litagemini.livejournal.com]

Interesting theory.

I'm not sure it totally works...completely...as long as you use the Gamemasters as an example, anyway. Knowing Lita the way I do, it would be wrong to say she does not enjoy herself quite a bit... and I think you'd find that of anyone. The alignment system isn't quite perfect at least in the sense that it implies you either enjoy life or enjoy not enjoying life. Maybe I'm not quite getting it. ^^;;

[wondergecko.livejournal.com]

I think it's my failure to explain. X) Self-Restrainers DON'T not enjoy life--they enjoy it very much. They just have limitations on what they'll do. It's sorta hard to put into proper terms how I see it, but, there you go.

--Murky