The alignement sytem, or why I hate essentialism

 

All of these discussions of « monster as people » and « evil races » that are all the rage right now actually hit a chord in me, as I remember as a teen I would look up in the monster manual to find monstrous races to play for my next character, and my inability to play as an evil alignement.

The alignement system is very boring to me. It always was. I can't tell what an evil character thinks or acts like, besides killing people, and our characters always end up killing people even when playing good or neutral characters anyways. Maybe we were just bad at playing the game, Maybe no one really undertands what alignements are supposed to be, I don't know...

It seemed that the alignement was refering to something outside of the character, and not to a characteristic inside of them. How do you do intrigue inside of a clerical order, whent hey all worship a lawful good deity and everyone can cast detect alignement ? What if the lich truly thinks they are doing their nefarious plots for the common good ? Can a band of revolutionary people be anything else than Chaotic if they go against the established order (backed by a Lawful godly power), even if they have a very stable set of moral rules ? Stealing food is bad, even if it is to feed your starving family ?

Like what the hell does « chaotic » even mean for people ? Do you hate the law ? Are you tossing a dice to take any kind of decision ? Is the law never wrong ? What is the alignement of someone who follows the law without faith in it ? Is the alignement set by core beliefs or by the actions of a character ? No one knows, everyone is winging it. Law and chaos really is the messiest part of this system, it is just good and evil, but set to an administrative setting.

These are charicatures of people inside a system that KNOWS what good and evil are. This is a deeply manicheic view of a world where there IS a RIGHT and a WRONG and where you have to chose to be wrong if you want to go against it, and no one choses to be wrong, aside from your occasionnal evil mad cultists. This system takes for granted that there's a correct way to be, a correct way to think, a correct god to worship, and that everyone else wants the end of that world because they disagree with it.

In a word, it is very monotheistic, and from a monotheistic point of view : my god is good, my city is lawful, therefore, our enemies can only be the opposite of that, they are enemies of our civilisation, and of our way of life, or something. They must be evil and want to bring about chaos. Nonsense.

You can play a character that thinks like that, and playing a zealot can be fun, but I refuse to live in a world where this is the right way to be. Not everyone has to be a pure zealot.

I needed something more personal than good/evil and chaos/law because those things don't mean anything to me for people. Nobody is really Evil in real life. So I started thinking about a way to make an alignement system that looked more like what I think people can be defined with, from the inside.

It had to be a system to explain relationship with people between people and not as a society. If your system can't have nuance, don't give me those big axis with huge concepts like good and evil is what I'm saying.

SELFLESS/SELFISH, your relationship to others, or ALTRUISM/EGOISM

« I act to help others/I act in my own interest »

What do you think of when you start a quest ? What you get out of it, or the people you are helping ? You can be good or evil while being selfless, same with being selfish.

A religious person can still worship the undiying light (or whatever), believe very hard in everything it teaches, and act selfish or selfless. It shows the reason they are doing something instead of what they are doing. You can break the law if it helps you, or to help other people in need. You can be a hardcore process-following bureaucrat for the exact same reason. 

Everyone believes the system they are following is doing the right thing, if they didn't, it would make them sick to do it.

You are not just "GOOD" or "EVIL"; those are moralistic principles and are relative based on space and time. Putting others first or putting yourself first is a very concrete thing that you can use to make decisions.

What a "GOOD" person would do changes based on where and when you are, stepping on someone for your own gain rarely changes based on the times, you either do it or you don't. You either want to benefit from the situation, or you don't.

Which leads us to...

SET/FREE, how you act about institutions and power, or HIERARCHY/ANARCHY

« The law protects us all/I decide for myself »

You follow the law, not because you think the law is particularly good, but because following the law is the right thing to do. It is what keeps our cities from crumbling everyday, even if the law has to hurt an innocent, or a justified person from time to time.

You are SET in this system, you don't want to change it, wether you are living in a utopia, or the worst dictatorship, you believe that the hierarchy is the way to social order, and that the system has to be changed from the inside, updated or kept the exact same; but more importantly, it has to be obeyed.

At the opposite end, you can believe that the law is faillible, put in place by people with interests, that want to remain in power. The law does not decide what is right or wrong, your guts do, or the people do, your moral code, whatever, the point is that the law of the local king is not going to stop you from making decisions. You could be a bandit, you could be a revolutionary; breaking the law is no longer good or evil, and you don't have to be labeled chaotic if you disagree with the way a lawful evil god-king opresses his citizens through a complicated legal sytem. You are FREE (at least in your mind), this is what is defining your relationship to power.

I don't want law/chaos to be civilisation vs savages, because I think it is way more complicated than that.

It can be simplified as "Do you trust the establishment, to begin with ?"

CONCLUSION

I just want an alignement system that does not tell me from the get-go that there is a correct way to be, and that I can choose to be wrong. This just leads to essentialism, and I hate that.

A lawful evil person seems like a fake thing to me, a selfish « hierarchist » person does not, I know what this person is like, I've met a few before...

Maybe it is just a reflavoring of the basic alignement system, that I maybe never understood right, but these words seem better to me than the previous ones, and maybe I'll come back to it at some point, who knows ?

Great skull abomination

A great hulking shape of flesh, bones and fur pelts sometimes takes form on the site of fresh battlefields, or in mass graves ; an amalgamation of spirits and bodies. The consciousnesses and bodies alike, melted into one another. The skull often does not understand what is happening to itself, constantly remembering having died as multiple people. Great skull abominations spend their time crying and sobbing in a high-pitched voice, not unlike the voice of a child. 

Great skulls tower at 8 feet and are about the same width, a number of arms and legs that may vary, and are not always symmetrical. Their limbs are often shaking or prone to spasms.

They are mostly intelligent (although always confused about their situation), but unable to express themselves through voice, and very prone to anger. They lack patience, to a very high degree, and will go into tantrums where they try to break everything they encounter fairly quickly. Their own failure at communication may throw them in such a state of anger and frustration that they will find it easier to rip apart their interlocutor than to endure the shame of their current situation.

Great skull abominations are not undead, but a very strange magical creature, and as such have bodily needs, such as feeding, breathing or sleeping. They will eat anything but they are not very fast or good hunters, so they mostly eat scavenged food or carrion. Sometimes raiding nearby farms or settlements to steal food at night. They won't attack humans for food unless the situation is already dire and they don't have any other choice.

A few days after their birth, they will move away from their place of apparition, to find shelter. Oftentimes a cavern, or a ruin, but will often travel to their birthpace to mourn on themselves and cry. As they live in those shelters, they will start to gather things that will make them feel "more human" and fashion their lair as a household, wearing unfitting clothing on their misshapened bodies, almost looking like they are playing house.

The skull will store anything that has been created by other human beings, be it carpets, furniture, clothes, or even weapons or art, and are very possessive of their hoard. They can generally cohabit peacefully with the usual dungeon ecosystem, which will protect their treasures while it's away, and will probably never try and talk to them, which the skull finds nice. A relative peace will be attained after some time, and some boundaries established in torn and crushed trespassors.

Stats :

It has got the same amount of HP as a buffalo would;

Armour is the same as leather or fur;

It can attack at least twice per turn (once with claw and once with bite) and more depending on the number of arms you gave it. Sometimes it can even carry a weapon instead of using its claws.

It can't talk, but it would scream like a deer (look it up, it's scary) to scare opponents off, or cry if they were being beaten and cornered.