Impulsiveness

I'm not sure if I'll get around to recounting the latest misadventure of the Muleteers, but there's a couple of posts to be had reflecting about the last session.

Huizinga, in The Waning of the Middle Ages, calls to attention "The Violent Tenor of Life"; the ease with which harsh and tender passions in alternation were unleashed, the revelling in cruelty. Although controversial as historiography, this description perhaps tells us more about what we moderns seek in the medieval, the archaic, the Renaissance or the Regency or the Wild West, when these are presented as times where life was cheap, morals were loose.


The role-playing game in its imaginative detachment allows the same vicarious pleasure in the impulsive act of grisly consequence. Vicarious? No, the direct pleasure of being able to say "I waste him with my crossbow" and having it happen as easily as saying it; of watching, horrified and grinning, in the mind's eye as a series of critical and fatal hits makes Peckinpah work of the enemy. The pleasure of being such a fearsome character and choosing to exert a brash and self-serving virtue; of hoisting sacks of coppers to urchins, the equivalent of Nino Brown serving up turkeys. The pleasure, even for mild-mannered character players, of being the monk hiding from the Vikings, the Wild West schoolmarm, the scholar who can live a little shady and still look a saint by comparison.

The roleplaying scenario strips away nervous inhibition and allows action as transgressive and pointless as that of the pictured fellow under the terrier crest who is spit-roasting a man for the crime of wearing a rebec on his head. Dealing out violence under these circumstances acquires a palatable irony because these are people long since dead, or better yet, who never could have lived.

One final pleasure, to the player, is finding out the boundaries of the world of action and joy. Does having a handful of hit points above the norm means that world is your arena whose inhabitants are merely bled and bowed bulls for the matador? Or rather, is it a place where crime is abhorred, vengeance is meted, and the arm of punishment is long if not swift?  Hurrah, for the scales are tipped in the favor of the latter option, the morality of the Hays Code, where we see every murder and blasphemy dealt out by the arch-hoodlum before the coppers surround him and fill him full of lead. Because to deal out the rough justice of consequences is the particular pleasure of the gamemaster. And the truly dispassionate gamemaster knows to make the delay or denial of justice, as unlikely as it may seem, a possible adventure in itself, if one of the hardest.

Think of the Former Children

Thankfully most examples of people saying "Childhood ... ruined" are in a jokey, double-entendre-finding, Captain Pugwash kind of vein.

But there are enough people who say it with a tone of outrage (usually about remakes) to get College Humor to produce a point-stretching, heavy-handed video about the phenomenon.

Travis Pitts: Childhood ... improved, actually

As someone who studies moralization I often ask myself why and how the hell people pour outrage into fiction, movies, music or games. I think I can explain this one.

"Think of the children" is the emotional trump card in moral arguments, right? Now, you can't plausibly say that the remakes and reboots and prequels are ruining a generation that never knew the original and may even prefer the new stuff. So by some convoluted twist of psychology and time, you argue that this entertainment product retroactively harms the child that you once were.

I don't know. Maybe you have to accept your own love of imaginative works, here and now, in order to start taking your juvenile enjoyments seriously and critically? In order to break them out of the shrinkwrapped exile where you might consign childhood to eternal nostalgia?

Because if you accept that as an adult you can still enjoy some of the things you enjoyed as a child, you should also give your maturity its due, and accept that you might no longer enjoy some of those things, and value coming to understand why.

UFO stands the test of time (plot and character, not costumes, natch).

The Planet of the Apes cartoon does not.

So I can take remakes on their merits (for example, the current Apes arc, which updates everything nicely while keeping just enough of the preposterousness and Heavy Lessons of the original). I'm happy to have parts of my "childhood ruined," if that means that I can have other parts of it validated.

Does Clerical Magic Mean You Know God?

When writers put on their brainy caps and work out the naturalistic consequences of a world built around the

D&D game rules, one common assumption is that the metaphysical world is known and familiar. You can tell who is really Lawful Good, at least if they're clerics or paladins, because they have their special spells. They can talk to their god and summon angels, and from this people gain tangible evidence of the world after death and the consequences of moral acts. As a result, everyone believes in religion; bad guys just pick a different team. And everyone can trust "working" clerics and paladins to be morally good. If they were corrupted somehow, they would lose their mojo. Oh yeah, all this and ... alignment detection too. Or better yet, alignment language.

The more I think about such a world, the more profoundly unsatisfying it appears, as a place to imagine and adventure in. I'm not even talking about limitations on the cleric player's actions, which I criticized last post.

I'm talking about a world that lacks:

• Dissension on moral issues within a religion
• Venal, self-interested priests
• Bad priests hiding within a good religion
• Outsider prophets who are persecuted by their own religion's conventions
• Uncertainty and debate about the ultimate nature of the universe
• People who act immorally in the here and now because there may not be an ultimate reward or punishment. 

Because of the oppressive obviousness of Truth in such a world, faith is not really faith, any more than believing in maple trees is faith.  Evil now needs an extra sales pitch - a devil convincing you that if you sin really flamboyantly, you'll get in on the ground floor of Hell's Fun Times.

You may as well cut these passages out from the scriptures of a less transparent world:

• Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 1:11)
• But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils. (Matthew 9:34)
• And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation. (Mark 8:12)

On the contrary, in my world, clerical magic is a mystery. It uses the standard invocations and rites of religion, but not every ordained minister who uses those invocations and rites will get the magical effect, and not every time - it is prophetic, not priestly. Regardless of whether the magic is reliable or ineffable, though, it ultimately does not depend on keeping up a certain standard of behavior. This is because:

1. The Mind of (a) God is vast, and contains many contradictions. A certain level of dissension in the Church reflects this, and reflects nothing more than the divine totality weighing arguments and coming to decisions. Almost all acts that are not inherently unholy - merciful or strict, generous or stingy - can be justified as a reflection of the Divine. Sufficient will, and the belief that one is holy, are enough to fuel prophetic magic.

2. A prophet sometimes has to break with conventional morality in order to send a lesson to the flock. What appears to be sin, violence, looting, lust ... can instead be a rebuke to a world consumed by these sins on a much higher level.

3. The above justifications come handily to those who cross the line into the foul and unholy. The Devil is a great deceiver; he will gladly step in to duplicate the healing miracles and exorcisms of one who has strayed from the path. If the player keeps their in-game benefits, what matter where they come from? Any discomfort at the slight stench of sulfur attending those miracle cures is entirely a matter of role-playing. Live for today, for there is no game after your character dies!

Monte Cook, as usual, can't be satisfied with a pat answer either. In the middle of Ptolus - a setting where clerics, by the book, dwell in every temple, and magic and the gods appear obvious and real - he leaves open this possibility:

The people here have come to listen to a new elf philosopher named Waeven Iosanil (male expert8), who is telling everyone who will listen that the gods are not truly divine, but only powerful entities, not unlike great wyrm dragons or powerful angels. The only true divine being is the world itself, this radical speaker claims. (p. 337)

Even if this elf is completely in the wrong, he opens up a strong breeze of freedom in the metaphysics of the setting. He allows for the possibility that the self-evident is actually false - and with this come the free will and uncertainty that makes for an interesting and complex game.

The Antisocial Nice Player

Here is one thing I have learned since turning my hand to active DMing as an adult:

Rule number one is: fun ...

and this applies to antisocial behavior, too. Many, many bytes have flown across the internet concerning the scourge of the player who backstabs and steals from the party, or the lout with poor social skills. Many suggestions have been made about how to deal with these people. But I say rule number one is fun.

We almost never see the following situation brought up. I'm not sure how common it is, but consider it as a thought experiment.

Five people and a GM get together to play a game. Four of the five players have fun playing a freewheeling, treasure-filching, underhanded bastard. The fifth wants to play cooperatively and do great and heroic things.  This causes friction at the table.

Yes, this is a conflict of fun, too. As much so as when the numbers are the other way around. The way to resolve this is the same - alert the out-of-step player that they are out of step and give them the choice to either play differently or leave the group. Or, maybe you as GM don't think you have the skills to referee a four-way intrigue hurlyburly, so the right thing to do is confess: "I can't produce fun for you guys." And not put it on the players.

But why is this situation never recognized? Even if it never happens, even as a thought experiment, it has the value of focusing you on what is really right and wrong about the situation. Thinking about it makes you realize that a lot of this "behavior advice" is actually moralization of one kind of fun over another. A lot of this advice, consciously or not, is taking the kind of behavioral modeling you might apply to a classroom of schoolchildren and trying to apply it to adults who choose to play a game together.

To give my personal odyssey: Running my first old-school campaign, I was exaggeratedly afraid of the hazards of backstabbing, even though its players were three of the nicest and most cooperative people I've seen. I required them to swear an oath of mutual support to the folk-saint of adventurers on the skull of a dragon, which was completely unnecessary. The current campaign group flies very well without such artifice. Even more so, DMing pickup sessions for the university game club has given me a renewed appreciation for the sneaky player, how to handle them and let them contribute to the fun. It may be that I put them on best behavior (I did get addressed as "sir" a few times when I first started showing up), but at the same time I've managed to have good times DMing the high-flown as well as venal, the socially skilled and the more unfortunate.

Yes, there are hard cases and horror stories. And those, as in all things, tend to circulate because they make good campfire tales. But those situations should be judged and handled the same way you would handle any other social situations. Letting go of the need to implement some kind of maturity lesson into your rules and play, I think, is the sign of true maturity.

The Final Four Sins

Continuing the account of diabolic temptation ...

4. Gluttony.

The concept: Six imp chefs, cooks and butlers throw dangerous and tasty food at the party and the penitent, trying to get everyone to succumb to gluttony, using their powers of suggestion (once per day).
The execution: Three "courses" were served.

• The first was stew, siphoned through a hose from the imp's cauldron to the party's convenient defensive ditch. If you gave in and ate the stew, you were incapacitated for a round, then make a Body save in order to vomit or be further incapacitated while the stew was in you. 
• This was followed by the imps hurling animated cuts of meat - serpentine sausages, geese and fowl, legs and hams, racks and roasts and livers and a nasty haggis. The meat tried to get in your mouth and choke you, or make its way past you to tempt the by now two-days-fasting penitent. 
• The dessert was brought over the party on a huge tray by invisible imps. Breaking the fourth wall, I described just about every sweet and piece of junk food the Band of Iron's players had consumed over the past year. There was nothing sinister about the dish; the imps were just trying to upend it over the penitent for more gluttony temptation.

The verdict: This was a funny episode but I didn't feel that the party was that threatened by it. In hindsight this should have been mostly about throwing suggestions on the hungry penitent and trying to get the food past the wall of bodyguards. The imps went down quickly in combat.

5. Lust. 
The concept: This was a lone succubus. Hell didn't throw their all into this one because the penitent had pretty much had it with women.

We got gonzo here.

The execution: I worked the epicene incubus/ succubus for camp, having it deliver cruel Freudian analyses of the player characters - who had mostly been lustless in the campaign, turning down opportunities for romance - before settling on the henchwoman Lintilla, who, shall we say, had not been without lust in the campaign. The party quickly shielded her from the succubus' charm ability and engaged it with missiles and melee before it could use its suggestion spell. A mighty lightning bolt from the cleric's magic amulet sent it reeling, and swords and silver arrows did the rest. On being sent hellwards, the creature briefly showed its true form: rather than a fabulous Aubrey Beardsley androgynous fashion model, the succubus was just an ordinary, plump, bright red Coop hot rod devil girl.
The verdict: Probably, getting hit shouldn't forestall monsters' spell-like abilities. Could have been tougher.

6. Sloth.
The concept: Three wraiths attack. Instead of draining levels, they drain movement points equal to the damage caused (d6). At less than 3 move, you cannot attack and at 0 move, you fall asleep.
The execution: Pretty straightforward, slug-em-out.
The verdict: This one created some tension, with party members dropping out in rough proportion to the wraiths dispatched. I put it last - a move the players anticipated - following the setting logic that people would be more tired at the end of the last night, rather than doing what was strategically right, and putting them in the lineup at a position where they could take out party members in preparation for other sins.

7. Pride.

As drawn by Crumb.

The concept: The temptation is not over with the cock's crow. The morning comes and the Son of the Morning sends his last best hope from another dimension - a certain blues musician who sold his soul to the Devil, at the crossroads, at midnight, so he could play guitar and sing like nobody else.
The execution: A strangely dressed, dark-skinned man with an odd musical instrument comes down the road from the west, singing this song (which I actually put on in the session). He is not unholy, or magical, or a devil; just a mortal trying to pay off the mortgage on his soul, and there will surely be trouble if he is struck or killed. The musician humbly approaches and congratulates the party on their victory, asking them what kinds of rewards they expect. He is really aiming at the NPC penitent, suggesting that some kind of acclaim and sainthood are in the offing for having resisted the three nights. This is entirely a psychological challenge, and the party must show humility and encourage the penitent to do the same, or all is lost at the last moment.
The verdict: One of my players fell for it, mainly out of wanting the blues singer to be the good guy. Another nailed the challenge, and all it took was one. This wise fellow denied all credit, offering praise instead to the saints and Creator. Everyone else followed suit, and Mr. Johnson graciously took his leave, marking the true end of the ordeal.

Anyway ... wait until May and you'll hopefully see if I can pack all of this into one page.

The Devil's Acre: Temptation

How do you represent spiritual temptation in an adventure game?

Well, you could play Pendragon RPG, a system that explicitly rates each character's vulnerability to different character flaws and passions. A Pendragon knight beset by an unearthly vision of lust would roll a 20-sided die, check his character sheet, and either succeed or succumb. In service of a more picaresque story, a Dying Earth RPG character might be overcome by a persuasive flourish and be compelled sit down at the gambling table with a known master swindler.

Temptation is part of those games' moral mechanics. It's not part of most other games, though. You may have alignment, or resistance to mental influence, but nothing stops the characters from making choices like perfect Puritanical optimizers, every day of the week. Except maybe under "carousing for experience" rules, which kind of proves the point.

As I threw wave after wave of diabolical tempters at the party on the last two nights of their ordeal, defending the praying penitent in the Devil's Acre, a number of options arose:

1. Have the tempters target the NPC penitent; the PCs have to stop them from getting into range and distracting the penitent, and the tempters will fight to get close. If the blockade fails, then being an NPC, the penitent has to make some kind of save or check against the temptation.

Um, yeah, just like that.

2. Have the tempters target the PCs, trying to pull them away from the penitent or claim them as prizes in their own right. "You succumb to lust unless you save" doesn't seem quite right, but magical temptation does lie with in the rules of the traditional adventure game, as a spell-like effect. And, what do you know, quite a few devils as written come with charm and suggestion effects.

3. Note the past behavior of the PCs and their allies, and use this to direct the efforts and outcome of strategy #2. It's not a matter of rolling a die, but of having raided a merchant ship for its treasure four sessions ago, so Avarice already has its claws in you. This makes the most sense if sin pays in your campaign, at least temporarily; for example, if spending gold on carousing nets you more experience points than donating it safely to a church does.

4. Target the players. I need to explain this some.

In the past here, I've argued for drawing on the concerns and tendencies of the players themselves to stand in for such traits in their characters as alignment and morale. Obviously, this won't always work. Some of these theological sins refer to the satiation of bodily needs: lust and gluttony in particular. All right, there were some pretty delicious chocolate and banana cakes on the table at our session, and I could have worked them in somehow ... but yeah, and then lust, no, yeah, forget it.

Other of the theological sins, however, serve the needs of the ego, the little character we all build for ourselves. I don't care if you don't play D&D. You are still walking around with a "character sheet" in your head, with some idea of your skills and abilities, where you fit in the hierarchy of things (level) and what road you walk in life is (class). It's part of the undying psychological appeal of role-playing - to create a character on paper more free, more disciplined, more interesting, more dramatic, than the one in your skin. But when you role-play, the two egos become one, as you defend the interests and dignity of your character.

With these other sins, to attack the character is to attack the player, whose ego is the character's ego. Wrath? Touch upon the player's need to avenge harm done. Avarice? Throw loot at the player - or better yet, threaten to take it away. Envy? Make the player feel unfairly disadvantaged; take away some experience points and give it to the next guy. Pride? It's what makes them go "Let me tell you about my character..." Work with it.

All right. In the actual Devil's Acre session, some of these ploys worked better than other. Next post: a play-by-play of the seven-round knockout the Band of Iron dealt the Prince of Darkness.

Gaming the Atrocity

When we play games that imagine conflict, violence and history, a reasonable question to ask is how  sensitive we need to be. I'm thinking about this because of Joe Bloch's recent outraged post about a Kickstarter game of the Salem witch trials, which he considers an offensive treatment of historical genocide against pagans.

Assuming for a moment that everyone agrees (as Joe does) that people have the right to publish whatever games they want, and also that they have the right to express their moral sentiments over said games, where can we draw the line? Are some topics just completely unacceptable in gaming - or can the right approach make a sensitive game about North American chattel slavery, the Holocaust, or genocidal campaigning against Native Americans?

In this question, perspective definitely matters. I remember that my father, who had lived through the Spanish Civil War, been imprisoned by the Fascists and lost many friends in the conflict, had a lot of misgivings about getting me a wargame on the topic when I was a teen, and absolutely refused to play it with me. Having a pagan perspective on a game about witch trials, or a Christian perspective on a game that takes a cynical approach to the politics surrounding the Council of Nicaea, certainly makes one appreciate more the serious issues in play with that historical topic.

Simulation gamers are caught in a catch-22 when the general public regards our doings. On the one hand, we are accused of taking our games too seriously; dressing up in costume to play D&D, learning real magic spells, becoming Walter Mitty-style armchair generals, disappearing into character like Tom Hanks in Mazes & Monsters. On the other hand, people associate a game with fun, lightheartedness and a certain Machiavellian approach to moving pawns around. So when war, murder and other awful topics crop up in a simulation game, the suspicion arises that at best we are callous and insensitive, and at worst we are taking a perverse glee in simulating slaughter and suffering.

These latter misgivings mean that topics that are seen as perfectly acceptable to treat in a novel or a film suddenly become more offensive when proposed in a game. Some examples of controversy:

• Video games that involve killing members of identifiable groups - Africans, Americans, Arabs, etc.
• A board wargame that deals with the vicious early warfare between settlers and natives in New England, King Philip's War.
• The "host a murder" genre of games, which have come under attack from an advocacy group for families of murder victims. (Mysteriously, "Clue" remains untouched in their long list of boycotts.)

It's individual and collective sensibilities that draw this map of offense; the dead in the Spanish Civil War, combatant and civilian, are just as dead as the Natives in King Philip's War, but no Spaniards are protesting the numerous games on that topic. The sad fact is that many intellectual puzzles - military strategies, detective work - come from life-and-death situations, and gain added interest value when tied in to those situations.

It's in this light that I take a larger view of the Salem game. Actually, I feel toward it much the same as I do toward the classic Avalon Hill game of paranoia and betrayal, Kremlin. Both deal with a horrific period of history in which "games" of suspicion and accusation had life-and-death costs. Kremlin in fact takes a lighter tone with its made-up, Boris Badenov-style names; Salem at least goes this far toward a respectful approach:

While the story surrounding the Salem witch trials has become something of a legend, every character in this game is based on a real person whose life was directly touched and in some cases torn apart or taken away by the events surrounding the Salem witch trials.

A solemnity somewhat undercut by the gleeful offering of add-ons and goodies that Kickstarter encourages: colorful Pilgrim tokens, a gallows card, etc. But the overall tone, as with Kremlin, Guillotine, Credo and similar games, is to satirize the morbid absurdity of a system that lets bribery, showmanship and venal accusation influence life-or-death decisions.

I see it as perhaps more advisable to take a serious approach to painful historical topics in a game, in a way that sides unambiguously with the oppressed. Some posters in Joe's thread mentioned the Holocaust game Trains, which I don't like. But this is largely because it recycles received notions about the "banality of evil" that Holocaust scholarship has by now discredited. We now know that the architects and bricklayers of the Holocaust, far from mindless, saw their work as a difficult but morally mandated task, aided by seeing their victims as not really human. The way to simulate the Holocaust from within the minds of its supporters is to set up a scenario, familiar from much Cold-War era science fiction, where the enemy are aliens living among us, superficially sympathetic but actually parasitic. But that's not to discredit the tone or ambition of Trains, or of other efforts, dealing with enslaved Africans in the New World (the comments on that article are also diverse and interesting).

As always, your thoughtful comments and reactions are welcome.

Hodgson's Old School Gaming Appeal

In my last post, I promised to explain why William Hope Hodgson's works have such appeal in old-school gaming circles. And it's not just because of small coincidences like pig-faced orcs or the "Keep on the Borderlands/House on the Borderland" thing.

Illustration by Philippe Druillet

First, as I explained last time, the morality of Hodgson's writing is based on contagion, resistance and disgust. Evil does not consist in things you choose to do, even less so in your motives for doing them. It is a thing you catch, or are overwhelmed by. This is obviously closer to the "pick a team" alignment of original and basic D&D, than the meticulous graphing of alignment as a consequence of character behaviors encouraged by AD&D.

But it's even more primal than Team Law vs. Team Chaos. It is quite simply a morality of physical and psychic survival against forces of evil with purely destructive intent. You never meet people who have gone over to the dark side and make the case for corruption in Hodgson's tales. The closest you get is seeing wretches who have become half-assimilated, who lacked the pluck to resist. Chaos is insidious, relentless, but ultimately voiceless if not completely mindless. It is closer to games where the number one concern is not sticking to alignment, but simple physical survival, and avoidance of such curses and level draining as would render the character useless even if still technically alive.

In these stories, the Enemy is so visibly inhuman that its side is never a temptation. Indeed, as soon as humans recognize each other in these bleak and desolate landscapes of the soul, there is an immediate urge to mutual aid which never falters. Betrayal is not an issue in Hodgson. There are no politics, no clash of vested interests or cultural worldviews; the largest issues between humans concern the tactics of fighting the visible evil. The enemy has no babies whose fate can be debated.

I know that many game tables have involved inter-player intrigue, and even more (including my own) mix up their straightforward adventuring with embroilments in the world of politics and religion. Certainly, allowing players to steal, backstab and otherwise compete with each other smacks of a freewheeling, juvenile style that many players quickly abandon. But there's also something of innocence lost when erstwhile adventurers find themselves in the thick of things with guilds, courtiers, and ambassadors. A more mature subject, maybe, but there's a reason Conan the Barbarian pined on the throne of Aquilonia for his freebooting younger days.

Hodgson's stories appeal to this straightforward spirit of adventure; a band set against inhuman evil, pledged to help each other. They may be working to save the village or the world, but there's no grubby running after the errands of some duke. It also helps that the evil enemies and landscapes are, with only a few exceptions, described so inventively and compellingly (I still think he could have done a better job with "The Hog" but the horrors of the other Carnacki stories, and their constant suspense between supernatural and rational explanations, are first rate). It is this same spirit, I'm convinced, that leads people steeped in intrigue-heavy social campaigns back to the raw experience of adventure, whether within the same campaign or between campaigns.

Speaking of which ... there's an issue I want to raise soon, which deals with the role of the town or city in adventure gaming. It has to do with a recent session in my own game. Stay tuned.

Fungi and Swine: William Hope Hodgson's Disgust Morality

William Hope Hodgson was an early 20th century imaginative writer whose fictions often show up on old-school gamers' "Appendix N" lists of inspirational material (here, here and here for example). I've been trying to come to grips with Hodgson's appeal and limitations ever since I discovered his works, most of which are in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg.

Two themes in Hodgson's work deserve attention, both using physical contagion to achieve horror. One is found in his sea-stories, the best of which is the oft-cited "The Voice in the Night," and the longest of which is "The Boats of the Glen Carrig." In these and others, the sea and its shores, islands, sargassoes and ships adrift teems with biological menace. Whether fungoid, lignic, or cephalopod, there horrors all have a certain flabby and spongy quality. They promise death or worse by assimilating, by being assimilated, by infecting, by crawling on the flesh in the night and leaving slime and sucker marks. I consider "The Voice in the Night" the best of these tales because of its excellent framing, its focus on a single monstrosity, and most of all, the way in which the physical threat merges with a moral struggle.

This element leads us to the next theme - the strange moral cosmos of The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, and the Carnacki the Ghost Hunter stories, of which the most revelatory is "The Hog."  In this shared universe, humanity is menaced by dark forces of evil which lie outside a protective barrier but sometimes break through. The postscript of "The Hog" explains this in terms of a "defense" around the Earth that is energized by the Sun's rays and weakest at night. In the far future world of the Night Land, set after the sun has gone out, the barrier is rather smaller - a circle of white "Earth Current" that protects the great pyramid of the last known city on earth.

The evil forces are tangibly corrupting, with a very physical sense of contagion. Their most usual visual and auditory signature is porcine, in "The Hog" of course, but also in the house-besieging pig-men of Borderland, the strange swine-phantom of the later visions, and in certain of the ab-humans in the Night Land. The image of the abyss or pit also stands for this evil, and its colors are sickly greens and yellows. It is difficult to read Tolkien's description of Minas Morgul and Mordor without seeing an echo of Hodgson's infernal visions published thirty years earlier.

What fights against this evil? The most ordinary struggle involves the individual with courage to resist the darkness, physically and mentally. When people find each other in these tales they almost invariably band together, the stronger helping the weaker. Technology sometimes helps, whether the electric apparatus of Carnacki or the far-future devices in The Night Land. But less often, when it is most needed, there is a mysterious supernatural intervention that almost certainly symbolizes the theological grace of God - as when, at the climax of "The Hog" when the foul entity is about to break through, a green-banded blue barrier manifests itself to dispel the evil.

Interestingly, there is no human moral dimension to this evil. People do not come to it by their deeds, at least not against each other; but they can be infected or possessed by mere contact with it. There is no hint of the strong theme, running through Tolkien, that lust for riches and power is the root of evil, nor even the glimpse of a possibility that evil might tempt people to use expedient but morally corrupt means to fight it. Hodgson's evil is one of contagion, one of disease, one of disgust - man against the Other, having nothing to do with man against man.

This, I believe, explains why Hodgson's vision is only partly compelling in the modern day. In our everyday experience, what stands in for the Other, the ab-human? We cannot really hate nature that way any more, nor can we hate people of other races, cultures, and social strata just for what they are with a clean conscience. After the hundred horrible years that began with World War I - in which Hodgson lost his life, and Tolkien survived - most of us now understand that the Enemy is not the inhuman, but the all-too-human, our normal lusts to level, exalt, defend or attack magnified into systems of slavery and genocide. Disgust is no longer enough; anger at injustice must fuel our outrage for it to be justifiable.

I also think Hodgson put a wrong foot down in choosing the pig as his symbol of Otherly evil. This became evident this weekend as I performed a dramatic reading of "The Hog" to my wife. I am afraid to say that we couldn't help laughing at passages like this:

A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealings and shot through with pig howls. I've sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it; for every now and again there comes a gargantuan GRUNT, breaking through the million pig-voiced roaring - a stupendous GRUNT that comes in with a beat. [...]

'And as I gazed I saw it grow bigger. A seemingly motionless, pallid swine-face rising upward out of the depth. And suddenly I realised that I was actually looking at the Hog.'

Or in Hodgson's Mythos-tome equivalent, the "Sigsand Manuscript," where the following passage occurs:

If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle.

I guess in an era when very few people have heard the cries of slaughtered pigs in the city or countryside, the pig has become a figure of fun, a cozy barnyard animal, bdee-bdee-bdee-that's-all-folks. As Lovecraft, a big fan of Hodgson, realized to good effect - it's the invertebrate Horrors from Outside that have real staying power, the tentacled and flabby and chitinous things. If Hodgson had used his marine horrors for his metaphysical threats we would indeed have something very close to Lovecraft.

Instead, the pig's enduring horror is that it is too close to human, close enough to transplant organs, as smart as a dog, and its fate is uniformly horrible - of all the animals of the farm it alone has no purpose except to be slaughtered for meat. William Golding understood this when he called the doomed boy in Lord of the Flies Piggy, and had the marooned boys erect a pig's head totem. Margaret Atwood's abnormally intelligent pigoons in Oryx and Crake are disturbing because they are us - engineered to carry human genes and twice the normal complement of organs for transplant purposes. I guess the pig as metaphysical unclean evil might fly better with a Muslim or devout Jewish audience, but for those that eat swine, the pig's potential for horror is that it is us; within, not outside.

Next: Why is Hodgson's fiction so appealing to the old-school style of adventure gamers?

Moral Disgust III: The Perverse

There's one last feature of moral disgust that might be worth exploring. It has to do with desire.

An up-and-coming theory in moral psychology says that we can make three morally relevant judgments on any behavior: the desire of the actor, the action he or she actually took, and what the consequences are. For example, someone might want to do something that hurts someone (bad desire), nonetheless carries out an action to help them (good action), but without meaning it, that helpful action actually backfires and hurts the person (bad consequences).

What this research tends to find, with a few exceptions and glitches, is that people tend to base recommendations about punishment and reward on consequences; base judgments of the action on what the action did; and base judgments of the person's character on his or her desire.

WHH: big in Japan

I want to focus on this link between character and desires because disgust, responding to people as "things" rather than actors, seems to have a link to desire. Those who are aficionados of weird literature know of William Hope Hodgson, and maybe have read what I consider his best story, The Voice in the Night. Without giving away too much, at one point one of the characters in the story gives in to a physical need that he knows will doom his humanity. What is particularly horrifying about this is the desire with which he succumbs to this temptation - "immediately filled with an inhuman desire" in Hodgson's words - and his struggle and self-loathing.

Meanwhile, on the social science side, some colleagues and I have been running a study that, if it works out, will back up some ideas we had about they way people can be seenless than fully human based on the emotions they feel ... well, now that the corpus callosum between the gamer and psych sides of my brain has fully fused, I can present this to you guys as a fully fledged villain-ology.

There is the Misguided Villain, who has the full range of human emotions - including the ability to feel disgust, remorse, hope. This one may be doing the wrong thing, but has the right desires.

There's the Animalistic Villain, with none of the higher emotions, only the bestial ones - lust, anger, fear, pleasure.

There's the Mechanistic Villain, with no emotions at all. Perfectly rational, with cruelty only as a side effect.

Finally, and most relevant, there's the Perverse Villain. This one has all the emotions but feels them at the wrong times: joy at people's suffering, disappointment at their success. This is the classic stage villain, and the one who most forcefully reveals the wrong desires that I suspect lead to moral disgust.

Horror - fear and disgust - both these emotions compel someone to flee. The more distance you put between yourself and the scary or disgusting thing, the more the emotion subsides. The horror of desire - of sweet-smelling corruption, of the desirable body with the skeleton face - is that you willingly bring yourself closer to the vile thing. But the vile thing is not so disturbing as what your self-conscious mind reveals about you. You are perverse. Your desire is corrupt. Like Hodgson's castaway, you yourself are the monster.

Do I use this in my campaign? Well, my players may remember an amorphous thing with mouths in the cellar of the millhouse ... a thing that radiated a smell of honey and fresh meat.

Moral Disgust II: Purism

In the last disgust post I went over some of our research showing that moral disgust mostly protects moral codes concerning the body. But I don't think that's all to disgust. I just haven't figured out the experiments to prove it.

See, there's a grab bag of other things from various other published studies out there that elicit disgust. One study of the role of emotions in attitudes toward various social groups found that disgust was predicted by two things. One is kind of obvious: the perception that a group threatens physical health (so, HIV patients, for example). The other is less obvious: the perception that a group threatens important values (gay men score high on this as well as, via the HIV perception, the disease kind of threat).

And then there's esthetic disgust, or I guess esthetic-moral disgust. This is not the esthetic disgust from a painting of rotting meat, but the disgust that comes from seeing something as "contaminating" a moralized esthetic category. And what sets apart a moralized esthetic category from the usual kind? Fortunately, Zak has just drawn a cartoon that explains this very point.

It's the disgust face that fans of black doom grindcore metal make when confronted with symphonic black doom grindcore. It's the disgust face that fans of the game with clerics and no thieves make when they come across the game with thieves and no clerics.

The second most subdivided form of entertainment there is.

Values, moralized preferences, cultural norms about sex and food and body decoration ... I suspect that what binds these all together, what throws those who violate them on the midden of disgust, is that these are learned primary associations to the concepts of "good" or "bad" that are hard to justify.

After all, it's hard to articulate why freedom is good or why your country is or why the greatest band in the world is that way or why exactly men get circumcised in your culture. There's always some after-the-fact reason like "it's just good" or "it's more healthy." But the truth is, you probably learned all these things as a primary, Pavlovian link between whatever it is - the flag, the band, the physically weird - and the concept of "good" or "bad." And you probably prefer to associate with people who share the same associations.

This is why, in our studies, people specifically have a hard time explaining their disgust at sexual transgressions, apart from self-referential concepts like "it's just disgusting" or "they're just evil." Other studies show that people also have a hard time explaining why their core values, like freedom, equality or tradition, should be followed.

Extending this to all kinds of values, it then stands to reason that you're less likely to be disgusted with someone who who agrees with you that racial equality is good, but thinks that school vouchers (or whatever solution you prefer) are not the way to get there; you're likely to feel anger, because that person is at least in your community and just being frustrating. But if the person comes out and says that racial equality is not a highly valuable thing, not even good - they're an outright racist - that's more likely to feel disgusting. That person has shown themselves to be outside your true community.

Would you rather people play XBox?

One thing I find interesting about this moral-preferences-esthetics-values disgust is that it has a very weird reaction profile. If my esthetics are pragmatic, then (let's say) I love strawberry ice cream, will make do with raspberry cause it's kind of like strawberry only raspier, and just loathe chocolate. But if they're moralized, I will actually love strawberry, hate raspberry because it's a pathetic imitation and mockery of what strawberry is supposed to be, and be indifferent to chocolate. I think this is a vestige of contagion fear that comes from applying disgust to these moralized preferences. But this has abolutely nothing to do with nerds, fans, and gamers right?

All this is because the disgust reaction forms the boundary of the community. (I don't set these posts up, I swear...) So I won't give suggestions for working today's lesson into your game, because really, it applies more to your life as a gamer.

Moral Disgust I: The Body

One theme of my lab's research that is smashing into print in a esoteric, university-library-only journal near you this year (4 papers out or in press, 3 more under review) is the distinction between moral anger and moral disgust.

Two of Paul Ekman's research faces.

The first thing to recognize is that anger and disgust correlate highly across moral situations. So, if someone sees something and says they're "disgusted" they're also likely to say they're "angry." A less finicky language might just call both emotions of moral condemnation something like "outrage" and leave it like that.

Except what people call "disgust" also seems different for different kinds of outrage. What our research tends to find, using carefully varied scenarios, is that moral violations that involve harm or unfairness attract high levels of anger, and a kind of "disgust" that's very highly related to anger. But when you factor out the effects of anger, disgust really stands on its own mainly as a visceral response to moral codes about the use of the body.

In other words:

• I tell you about greedy corrupt politicians - and you may say you are disgusted, but go "grrr".
• I tell you about someone who has cloned his or her own muscle cells in order to eat a consensual, harmless, ethically sourced human steak - now you say you're disgusted, and go "yuck" - nobody is harmed, so you only go "grrr" a little - but importantly, most people (not all) feel there's something morally wrong about this technical cannibalism.

Jack Chick's "Gay Blade"

We came up with examples like the human steak to test, even for the most liberal of our respondents, the true limit of moral tolerance. If you're liberal and you want to know how conservative people feel about sexual immodesty or same-sex marriage, think about your own reaction to the human steak. Nobody's rights are violated, but there's a sense of wrong about it.

Back to imaginative literature and gaming. There's a tendency, most pronounced in works that aspire to  "epic" or "traditional" storytelling, to stack the deck with both moral anger and moral disgust - and to help that along with liberal lashings of physical disgust. Think of Frank Herbert's Baron Harkonnen, with his boils (physical disgust), catamites (moral disgust) and underhanded cruelty (moral anger/disgust/outrage). That works, if the reader plays along with the assumptions of the work. If the reader doesn't, this all-in-one moral universe becomes a nagging flaw. I mean, I love me some Jack Vance and in particular Lyonesse, but damn if "queer = villain" doesn't get tiresome in that series.

The body is often also moralized, and overlaid with disease and deformity arguments, to feed a dehumanizing and xenophobic political agenda. Just one very obvious example: the Nazi caricature of Jews encompassed disgust at alleged physical uncleanliness, strange dietary practices, physical abnormality, and sexual licentiousness. All this came to a sharp and pointed end with the final accusation to justify the Holocaust; Jews were not just gross but dangerous and malicious. Indeed, some of our recent unpublished studies implicate fear and moral anger, as well as disgust, in the tendency to dehumanize members of other social groups.

Yeah, yeah, so fantasy heroes are little Nazis slaughtering orcs. We've all heard that before, so that even the counter-cliche itself is at risk to get worn out. In my creations, I'd prefer to keep to hand the power of bodily-moral disgust, avoiding both cliches, letting the audience draw its own conclusions. These strange customs, they are weird and gross; the high priest marries his sister, ritual scars are salted to a fine purple hue, here's a feast to which everyone contributes a slice of their own flesh. Are these marks of villainy, or of mere strangeness? Our explorers of the unknown have signed up for encounters with both, in any event, and the interpretation is up to them.

Pantheon World

The Universe

Pantheon World lies suspended in a ring of planes and demi-planes representing the various combinations of alignments. It is there that the gods and demons dwell, and conduct their ceaseless, shifting struggles, with the nations and heroes of the World as pawns. Scholars can also muster evidence for a near infinity of other planes and gods, but the anchor points of the cosmos for all are the eternal truths of Alignment: Good and Evil, Law and Chaos.

The World

Kingdoms and empires, cities, races and fiefdoms, each take their side in the great struggle. The main war is between Good and Evil, but if the other side presents no seeming threat, the Lawful and Chaotic tendencies tend to fight within each alignment. Forbidden to enter this plane, the Gods work through magical powers they grant to their human servants, and through lesser planar beings that can pass the gates of the world.

Alignment

Unaligned people live by the morality of natural law. The first duty is to help, treat fairly, and not harm those you have personal bonds with – as a member of a village, warband, family, or adventuring party. The second duty is to respect the inherent authority of the leaders and traditions you are bonded with.

The two dimensions of alignment – Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic – reflect moral thought beyond natural law. A being might have one alignment (for example, Lawful, or Evil), or two compatible alignments (for example, Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil). Mortals and supernatural creatures can have alignment, but only the latter (including undead) can be holy or unholy.

Good: This alignment extends the duties of care and justice from one’s personal associates to all living beings. It is forbidden to harm or steal from peaceful beings; to kill or torture a surrendered foe, except in certain justice for an individual crime; and to fail to fight Evil when you can win.

Evil: This alignment disdains the first duty of natural law, believing that each individual should look out for themselves. Any mutual aid is at best a temporary arrangement, oaths are to be broken, and bonds of passion and ambition are rightly stronger than the family or friendship. As an adventurer, Evil is not a recommended alignment to have in an adventuring party; you can play that way, but sooner or later, you will end up dead or on your own after one betrayal too many.

Lawful: This alignment requires its character to obey and respect, in this order: his or her own religion; his or her own political leader, if not opposite in Good or Evil; then any Lawful religion, and any Lawful political leader, if not opposite in Good or Evil. Lawful Good beings also have a duty to care for weaker beings who are Lawful and not Evil.

Chaotic: This alignment believes that individuals are to be judged by their acts, not their position in some social hierarchy. The king is only respected if he is competent; the elder only if she is wise; and by the same token, the poor and outcast are not to be despised. A Chaotic person only follows orders if they conform with his or her moral code, or with self-interest if Chaotic Evil. 

A player whose character is about to act against alignment, including the natural law of the unaligned, should be warned first by the DM. If the action is carried through, the character is in a state of doubt, and cannot advance in levels until he or she either carries out an act of atonement, or changes alignment. Atonement can be had with a donation of gold pieces equal to at least 10% of one's current experience points, a service done to reverse the original action, or an arduous pilgrimage or quest as required by the religion or leader offended. Any alignment change after the first carries an unrestorable loss of 10% of current experience points.

Spellcaster Classes

Magic-users, including specialist mages, function as in Sorcery World, but work from a spell list from which Black, White, Gold and Brown spells are excluded, and cannot learn those spells. Some non-player character magic-users, however, study Black sorceries, or otherwise bend the rules.

The priest class uses magic differently. Restricted by the same table of spells per day per level as the magic-user, those spells are not memorized ahead of time, but cast at will from a list of allowed spells according to one's religion, requiring a holy symbol. Each spell by name may still only be cast once a day. A good night's sleep preceded and followed by an hour of prayers is enough to restore full spell capacity to a priest. Exceptional Wisdom gives bonus spells to the priest in the same manner as exceptional Intelligence to the magic-user.

A priest must take on and maintain the alignment of his or her religion. A priest in a state of alignment doubt cannot use magic until he or she has atoned, or set out in good faith on a quest of atonement.

The colors of magic available to a priesthood range between one and three, balanced by differences in allowed weapons and armor. Priests may not learn the major first-level spells from the magic-user table.

Each DM will no doubt enjoy creating or adapting a particular pantheon for their campaign world, and each deity within that pantheon can have a priesthood - or multiple orders of priesthood. The following table gives a small sample pantheon based on some of the Greek gods. Note also that classes such as "paladins" and "druids" can be simulated in this system by variations on the priesthoods.

Next: The priests and pantheon of Pantheon World.

Player Alignment

Here's part of one of the great comments from poster limpey, that had me rethinking my last post:

> If it were ME (not my fantasy character), I would tend to want to show mercy, but maybe that's just my 'real world' morality intruding into fantasy world ethics.

See, limpey had earlier described a system where players get bonus xp for fulfilling their character's alignment particularly well, and lose xp for breaking alignment. I had an initial allergic reaction - hadn't I posted not long ago that I don't like xp rewards for role-playing?

But then I remembered my own take on moral psychology. According to one book that's been very influential on my own thinking, emotions like guilt, sympathy or shame are hard to control for a reason. These feelings are morality enforcers. They provide an incentive to act in a way that helps other people and most times will only pay off in the long term. After all, why doesn't the first level magic-user cast sleep on all his colleagues in camp after their first big haul, slit their throats, and make off with the loot? Fear of punishment can't be the only reason. The real reason most people don't try stuff like that, sleep spell or no, is that they like these people and they would feel bad even contemplating doing it.

It then occurred to me that in a character-driven game there is no system, other than alignment or something similar, to take the role of these emotions. After all, there is nothing in the game to reward real-life pleasures like getting drunk or getting laid, which is why house-rules for carousing are ever-popular. Without these rules, a perfectly rational player of D&D, seeking to maximize his or her character's gain, should never drink enough to lose control. So wouldn't the same rational player need the punishment-reward structure of alignment rules in order to behave morally through their character?

This reflects a long-standing cultural anxiety about games, drama, fiction: that by entering an imaginary space, people will learn to let go their moral hang-ups about sex, gore, violence, witchcraft ... and then take their new-learned immorality back to the real world. An early illustration expressing this concern is, in fact, the header of this blog.

Gamers who are religious believers, secular ethicists, or just trying to run a group including kids they're trying to raise right, have obviously gotten over moral anxieties about the act of gaming. But they might very well wonder - "how do I make my game a positive moral force?" How can the game be a sounding chamber for morality, and not its opposite?

Now, I'm not sure that alignment rules for all are the answer to this. When alignment rules are vague, antisocial players will bend them to their own will, playing a paladin in a holier-than-thou way that is as surefire a way to annoy other players as if they were playing a party-robbing thief. And when alignment rules are specific, loopholes will be found, and morality becomes just another set of rules to exploit.

But with all the Old School recovery of "player skills" why not take a look at "player morality"? Unlike boozing or debauchery, the player can feel what the character does in the game, when it has moral consequences. This is most likely to happen when players are immersed in the game, rather than taking a cynical, manipulative approach. What's more, veteran gamers keenly appreciate the need to avoid players who run their characters completely amorally. This suggests that players in a good game will have some kind of moral sense that carries through to the running of their characters - will flinch from playing out torture just as they would flinch from actually doing it.

I'm not super happy with the system I outlined last time, where neutral players still have to live by a couple of scraps of the Good and Lawful codes. It seems clunky and at odds with the idea that neutral players should be free and unaligned. I thought at the time that only Evil players could be completely free - without reckoning with player morality. Now, I offer this view of Neutrality:

A Neutral character is not constrained by codes of alignment. His or her moral judgments and feelings are supplied by the player. The Neutral's intuition and personality can range from kind and honest to sneaky and self-promoting. But the Neutral has enough concern for others to stay in a group without being kicked out - something that Evil characters lack, and therefore something that makes them unsuitable as player characters.

Those who are familiar with Christian theology might recognize something of the virtuous pagan in this Neutral - a person who follows his or her view of natural law (read "player morality"), which might turn out well or poorly. The Christian in this scheme, however, is saved through knowledge of God's laws (read "the principles of Law and especially Good"). Now eternal salvation doesn't really figure in to the D&D game. But more pragmatically, remaining true to a Lawful and/or Good alignment should be especially important to those receiving benefits directly from heaven - clerics and paladins, if they exist in your game.

All right. Next up: alignment, spellcasting classes, and spell list seeds for Sorcery World ... where Good, and Christianity, have not come to pass.

Limits of AD&D Alignment 3: Solutions

Well, you could just not have alignment for player characters. Sure, you can have an affiliation that boils down to a cultural background and reminder - raised in the Church; follows Odin; reveres Chaos. And you can have morality. Your characters' actions have consequences in the eyes of others, after all. Even when nobody is watching there might be a certain karma for really heinous actions. The moral workings of our world are contested and uncertain. Why should the world of adventure be any different?

But okay, in some settings you really need the behavior of holy people to be exemplary in some way in order for them to deserve their magic powers. As I suggested before, a more specific set of principles seems in order.  Most importantly, these principles need to be ranked in some order, to give a guideline for resolving the kind of conflicts I outlined last time.

Should the principles be about what you should do, or what you should not do? I lean toward "shalt nots," although really some commandments can be phrased either way. They're more likely to keep characters out of trouble - no spending your last copper for food on alms, or suicidal cavalier charges. Being forbidden from doing something also feels less restrictive than being commanded to do something. Yes, religions often require actions like prayers, religious attendance and so on, but these actions are probably best assumed to go on in the background whenever the opportunity occurs.

Finally, I am assuming that the main fight between alignments in this setting is between Good and Evil, with Law being an additional social source of behavioral restrictions on good and evil alike.

COMMANDMENTS OF GOOD - most to least important

Life: Don't kill or torture a helpless sentient being.
Benevolence: Don't harm, disrespect, or steal from a peaceful sentient being.
Crusade: Don't back away from a fight against Evil that you can win.
Justice: Don't let crimes against Life and Benevolence go unpunished.
Generosity: Don't hoard wealth; spend what you need for your own security, then give to others.

COMMANDMENTS OF LAW - most to least important

Honor: Don't break your given word.
Chivalry: Don't use trickery when you fight.
Restraint: Don't indulge pleasures wantonly. Food is for surviving; drink is for tasting; sex is for commitment; wealth is not for wasting.
Legalism: Don't break the law or let lawbreakers go unpunished. 
Obedience: Don't disobey or disrespect your superiors in society.


With these ten commandments in hand, we can see that it's ridiculous to require Evil and Chaotic characters to do everything exactly the opposite, like the Bizarro planet or Opposite Day. Evil, quite obviously, gives freedom to ignore the moral emotions - sympathy, remorse and the anticipation of remorse - that drive ordinary people to do Good things. Chaotic alignment, where separate from Evil, gives freedom to ignore the sense of honor and shame that drives Lawful behavior.

It might be interesting to have particularly Evil or Chaotic characters or beings pick one commandment they feel compelled to violate; the sadist revels in Anti-Life, the Anti-Crusader picks a special fight with the forces of Good, the Unrestrained Chaotic is a compulsive libertine. But that's about as far as it reasonably goes.

So what about Neutrals? They have some moral feelings, but not enough to compel them to do the right thing always. The most reasonable way to show this, I think, is by having Good/Evil Neutrals personally pick one or two of the Good commandments as Scruples that keep them from being completely Evil, and likewise for Law/Chaos Neutrals and the Law commandments.

Finally, people who hold to the difficult paths of Law and Good might just be required to follow all five of their alignment's commandments, or all ten if they are Lawful Good, choosing one set to hold supreme. However, at a small cost to complication but a huge benefit to characterization, players might also be able to choose one commandment that they can ignore as a Foible while still maintaining their alignment, for each set of five.

We're just about ready to step into my three template worlds, each with a different system of magic, alignment, and religion. So hang on - all this theory is soon about to burst into practice. In the meantime, you can let me know if there are any moral principles I left out of the Commandments, and in general what you think of this way to handle alignment.

Limits of AD&D Alignment 2: Behavior

The other problem with alignment in AD&D is not so much about the structure of Good/Evil and Law/Chaos, as it is about the use of alignment. As I outlined previously, a number of AD&D classes (some adapted from the OD&D supplements) traded game benefits for alignment-based restrictions upon the behavior of characters of that class.

Some of these restrictions make sense when two assumptions about the spiritual universe both come into play in a campaign:

1) Certain kinds of magic, like a cleric's spells or a paladin's powers, are derived directly from God, gods or other divine powers;

2) Those divine powers themselves have a value-based alignment, and consciously uphold and represent it through the magic granted to mortals.

Break either one of those assumptions and alignment in a campaign can exist blind to behavior. But if a cleric by her behavior breaks her god's core values, it's only right that her god, if aware and in charge, should refuse to let sacred power be used by such a person.

Cartoon by David Sipress, Boston Phoenix

Now alignment, as we have seen, is great for describing a character's values and motivations. But the real devil in the details comes when DMs try to translate those values and motivations into concrete actions. When do your actions uphold your alignment, and when do they violate it? Veterans of the game are familiar, by experience or hearsay, with these advanced difficulties and dilemmas:

• Team alignment vs. alignment principles. Having defeated the orc lair, you are the custodian of three kneeling, disarmed cowards, their wretched females and puling young. Do you show mercy as a Good person should? Or slay them all, ruthlessly pursuing the agenda of Team Good against Team Evil? Perhaps you trot out a rationalization - "It is mercy to end their miserable existence!" How seriously should you take your principles in time of holy war? Is the survival of a great champion of Good (yourself) worth a little ethical slippage?
• Conflicting alignment principles. Looking back at the Schwartz value diagram, the three "self-transcendence" values that correspond to Good - benevolence, justice, and equality - often clash. Does a Good person spread benevolence equally, target it where it will do the most good, or give it to the most deserving? How much should justice, in a Good society, be merciful or harsh, when benevolence to a murderer is cruelty to the victim's family? And should a Lawful knight follow the traditions of his people, or the command of his reformist monarch?
• What does it mean to be Evil or Chaotic? Is an Evil character merely free to pursue her own selfish interests liberated from any concern for others? Or must she actively refuse to cooperate, actively commit acts of cruelty, even at the expense of the ambition and power she craves? Likewise, must a Chaotic character act crazy and stick it to the Man at every turn, or is that alignment merely about seeking personal freedom from obedience, conformity, and tradition? 
• Do I follow my alignment at the expense of an enjoyable game? If the extreme answers to the above question are true, then what place does an Evil or Chaotic character have in a game that is best played in a cooperative spirit? For that matter, if a Good character is in a group with Neutrals who slay  and pillage when expedient, doesn't ethics dictate that their ways part - or at least that the Good character should endlessly harangue and undermine the efforts of the party?
• What does it mean to be Neutral? Do you simply not care about alignment concerns, acting on a variety of motivations as it suits you? Do you have some minimal amount of compassion, setting you apart from Evil, but not enough to make you truly Good? Are you an opportunistic neutral, siding with the winning team? Or do you take an active part in ensuring alignment balance, siding with the losing team, and making sure to commit a carefully balanced schedule of Good, Evil, Lawful and Chaotic acts? Doesn't that last one make you kind of like the person who felt she had to sleep with men on even-numbered days and women on odd-numbered days in order to count as a bisexual?

The answers to these questions are not supposed to be easy. They are hard moral questions even in real life. Discussing them might be interesting and enlightening in a more free-wheeling situation. But when a DM has to answer them fairly in order to decide whether to to strip a player's character of his major powers, or a player has to guess how to behave in order to avoid such a fate, the exercise becomes less fun and more arbitrary.

I'll let the problems stand for a while, and next post, consider a number of ways they might be solved without completely throwing out the idea of divinely directed sacred magic.

Limits of AD&D Alignment 1: Teams

The main problem with the two-axis alignment system is that it’s used for two things it isn’t great for: as a way to describe conflicts and coalitions (the “team” use of alignment) and as a way to regulate specific behaviors, rather than describe general motives (the “code” use of alignment).

Let’s look at the team use first. We all remember those stirring moments in our own AD&D campaigns where the High Elves teamed up with the ogres and demons to defend the cause of freedom against the Lawful empire of paladins, devils, goblins and dwarves ...

Uh, what? Unless you were playing in a very unusual campaign, individuals and countries usually formed alliances along the Good-Evil axis, not on the basis of Law and Chaos. Making the alignment diagram work more like this:

Here, the main fight is between Good and Evil, and Law and Chaos are just disagreements in how to pursue your side's agenda.

Now, there are other fantasy settings that squash the diagram the other way, going Moorcock rather than Manichean:

For example, the Warhammer world pushes the fight of Law against Chaos to the front. Chaos is pretty much always evil and represents the corruption and magical alteration of the very universe. The people who fight it may be kind or cruel, cooperative or selfish to various degrees, but those differences are on balance less important than saving the world from a tentacled, fiery ruin.

(And there is no Chaotic Good there because Chaos means very different things in AD&D and Warhammer; in AD&D it means you believe in loose social organization; in Warhammer it is the crawling crud from beyond the edge of the world. But that’s a topic for another time.)

So why the one big axis with a few lesser choices within each side? Quite simply, it’s how real-world multiplayer conflicts work. In a three or more player game, two players who team up or even just truce have a definite advantage, defeating in detail the other ones. Unless those team up themselves. Either way, the game quickly resolves into either a two-sided game or a two-player game. Players may waver or switch sides, but a true three-way or four-way fight is very unstable and short-lived. 

This strategic wisdom, perhaps, is reflected in people’s fictional preference for stories with two sides, instead of a multitude of conflicting interests in an ever-shifting web of intrigue. I know you’re thinking now about the wildly successful World of Darkness and all its faction-rich progeny, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Players approach those games first as a way to choose an identity for self-expression, and the kind of conflicts that occur build themselves around that. Not to mention, you know, how all those clans line up into the Camarilla and Sabbat.

Some of the contributors to my previous post’s comments, and a number of recent original settings for “old school” gaming, look on alignment as just a way to show which "team" a character belongs to in a two-sided world struggle. Indeed, the Team Alignment approach is a very easy way to handle this thorny but traditional trait in a D&D game. 

Team Alignment shows that a being has decisively chosen one of the sides in the Great Fight – or was just born that way. It shouldn't be easy to change, especially not if there are rules in the game that care about alignment. But really, those rules should mostly be there to smite the extra-special Team members who are magical, or have made themselves so, not the poor mortals who happen to swear by one name or the other.

Team Alignment doesn't reflect the motivations or enforce the behaviors of individual characters. Sure, the teams have colors and mascots that play on long-standing moral ideas. The White and Silver Unicorns meet the Red and Black Bats on the Fields of Armageddon. 

So much the more interesting, then, when the self-styled paladin of Law behaves in a corrupt and selfish manner, or the Chaos-born creature shows pangs of conscience. Perhaps appearances are only skin deep, and the only divine justice for the wicked archbishop's sins awaits him in heaven? For Team Alignment, the ambiguous labels "Law" and "Chaos"  fit better than "Good" and "Evil," which are full of expectations about how people on each side should act.

So what's missing from Team Alignment? For some people, nothing. For others, the very moral dimension it gleefully casts overboard. This leads us right to the next failure of alignment that AD&D walked into: the problem of regulating behavior.