Alignment

[Rhaegar]

Haha, I love to spam you with all this wonderful threads!

This one is going about the alignment, and why I think it's bullshit.
First of all, it sucks because it doesn't reflect the reality (you can be holy knight and yet a bad person) nor the way of gaining it makes much sense.

My idea is to remove alignment entirely and introduce faction standings instead. This would make more sense in my eyes and could be a lot of fun.

This is how I see how it would work:
Some areas (not all as it's not necessary to have it everywhere) would have 2 or more 'factions', some of them opposing each other (Takhisis and Paladine or Free Peoples and Mordor for example).
You could increase your standing with given faction with quests, special tasks or by killing the select few key NPCs (note however that killing this NPCs would make your standing increase extremely slowly as opposed to the tasks and quests).
If your standing with a faction would increase, and it has an opposing faction, it would automatically decrease for the opposing faction for the same amount.
Guilds would require certain standing with a given faction instead of alignment level, the same could be implemented for items that require certain alignment to use.

Some other things that could be implemented:
When your standing with certain faction would drop to some levels, you would be auto-attacked by this faction's NPCs, denied services in banks/shops, boat rides etc.
And when it would be high enough, perhaps you could get a discount for the services?

What do you think?

[Tarax the Terrible]

Like the factions idea, but think alignment does still serve a purpose.
Would be complicated to replace it.

Anyway here is the previous related topic..
http://www.genesismud.org/forums/viewto ... 81&start=0

[Fourtcoer]

Alignment and how meaningful it is, is entirely a matter of perspective.

In the Krynn/Dragonlance universe, alignment is absolutely central to the way the realm's lore operates, up to and including self-righteous ideologues that bat-shit crazy with power, and evil denizens that are hell-bent on some ideal of a deviant communist vision, and the idea of "balance" playing a role to keep evil and good functioning in a way that follows some prescribed laws laid out in Krynn's lore.

In contrast, in the Sybarus domain as an example, alignment is utterly meaningless.

Removing alignment would utterly confuse matters for Krynn, while having alignment does not at all confuse things for Sybarus - they can simply choose to ignore it.

For the purposes of a game like Genesis, quantifiable alignment is akin to quantifiable intelligence, wisdom, and discipline. My character's non-physical stats do not necessarily reflect how often my character acts bravely or disciplined, espouses words of wisdom, or how many (or few) clever ideas he comes up with. Yet the stats still serve a functional purpose relating to game mechanics.

I'd say alignment is pretty much exactly the same thing. While it does not *always* match a character's role-play, it still serves a functional purpose relating to game mechanics.

That said, I think a faction system would enhance the game, and is certainly something that could be added piecemeal by domains (or not) as those domain's wizards felt appropriate.