Editing Alignment (section)

== Alignment, Allegiance and Personality in other RPGs ==
* White Wolf's [[World of Darkness]] games clearly separate allegiance and personality. For example, Vampire: the Masquerade has Camarilla, Anarchs, and Sabbat for the character's basic allegiance (although unlike D&D, these have no metaphysical consequences). All of the World of Darkness games use a shopping list of Jungian archetypes to describe a character's personal code of conduct, described as their "Nature." The games have much emphasis on social interactions, betrayal, deception and general being a bastard, so there's also the archetype they present publicly, called their "Demeanor." Good or evil can be a bit irrelevant when the player characters are all vampires/werewolves/demigods/dead/half-imaginary. Characters that behaved appropriately to their Nature archetype were gained a stronger self-confidence, evidenced by awarding "willpower" points they could spend later to make tasks more likely to succeed.
**There's also nWoD/Chronicles of Darkness' Virtue and Vice system, where your character's most fundamental drives are located, that served some of the purposes of character alignment. (nWoD confined it to the traditional Seven Deadly Sins and their opposite, but CoD opened it up to just about anything.)

* White Wolf's [[Exalted]] has the four Virtues: Valor, Compassion, Conviction and Temperance. All are measured on a scale of 1-5 for mortals, but some beings can go up to ten. It describes, respectively, how brave you are, how nice you are, how good you are at sticking to your guns, and how much willpower you can muster to avoid temptation. Two is considered the human average, but since you're (hopefully!) supposed to be some kind of mythical hero, you have to at least three in something to start with. 
** Being all the way down at one means you are, respectively, a coward, a sociopathic dick who can't feel empathy, an aimless wishy-washy vagrant, or any flavor of hedonist you care to name. The cosmic spirit of unlikable douchebaggery, the Ebon Dragon, is about the only being with a one in ''every'' virtue. 
** Having too much, though, turns you a different flavor of psycho; respectively, a frothing berserker, an unbalanced lunatic who can't stop helping people and won't look at the bigger picture, a zealot incapable of realizing that you're wrong, or an uptight jerk who literally wants to stop everyone else from having fun. Each virtue can override one other virtue, but raising them all high takes up lots of XP and can turn you into a neurotic wreck like the Unconquered Sun, who has a ten in ''every'' virtue and has turned into a burned-out wreck of a deity listlessly squatting in his celestial house playing ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' all day because breaking ''any'' virtue would lessen him and it's really hard to function without repressing at least one in a weak sort of way.

* [[d20 Modern]] uses "allegiances" instead of ethics, indicating the character subscribes to an established code of conduct, or the mores of a social group. Dealing with an NPC with a matching allegiance gives the player a +2 circumstance bonus to social tasks. If an NPC witnesses you violating one of their allegiances, that's a -2 for any social tasks with that NPC evermore. Characters can have multiple allegiances, each providing the +2/-2 when appropriate, but not cumulatively.

* [[RIFTS|Palladium Fantasy RPG]] (and all Palladium games that came later) uses three categories for alignment: Good, Selfish and Evil. These break down into seven alignments: Principled, Scrupulous, Unprincipled, Anarchist, Aberrant, Miscreant, and Diabolic. They added "Taoist" for their Kung-fu games, but nobody used it. D&D fans often enjoy noting that these roughly correlate into most of the same alignments as the classic 9-axis. There is no "True Neutral" equivalent alignment in Palladium, however; per word of god, this was because A: [[Stupid Neutral]] was, well, a stupid idea, and B: anyone who truly did not give a shit about anything (the ''other'' primary description of the True Neutral alignment in D&D) would not be at all inclined to go adventuring. By the game designer's arguments, somebody who's only adventuring to get something they need or want done (your classic "I don't care if the Empire's hurting people, but they'll take my farm if I don't take them out" jerk) would fall under one of the Selfish alignments.

* [[GURPS]] doesn't have alignments. Instead, it's a long list of mental disadvantages you can take during character generation to restrict the character's behavior. Since characters are on a point-buy system, these disadvantages can be traded for other advantages. You could take Compulsive Honesty (-10 point flaw), for enough points to get you Ambidexterity (+10 point advantage), or Kleptomania (-15) for a military rank of Lieutenant (three ranks @ +5).

* [[Warhammer Fantasy]] had five alignments on a linear scale: Law - Good - Neutral - Evil - Chaotic. This was used as a rule of thumb for reactions between people — identical alignments would be well-disposed towards each other, but the further apart alignments are, the more likely things would come to blows. A character's alignment could shift at most one step left or right from where they started. Later editions of Warhammer de-emphasize the alignment system in favor of allegiances and broad personalities.

* [[Dungeon World]] uses alignment as a method for gaining experience points; you choose one of the three offered during character creation. Playing an evil rogue? Get 1 XP when someone else gets in trouble for something you did. Playing a good druid? Get 1 XP when you eliminate an unnatural menace.

* Sitting somewhere between a D&D alignment and a personality test, [[Magic: The Gathering]] has a five color system of magic that also had personality traits wired into make up. For example, red is the color of acting rather than thinking, and they have the most destructive spells and cheapest creatures. Blue, on the other hand, is logical and thinks rather than acts, and they have the most counter spells.

* The [[Star Wars Roleplaying Game]] uses a form of alignment called '''Morality''' which has a mechanical effect, but it only applies to Force users and how they activate their powers, so any other character can behave in whichever manner they choose without penalty. Force users move up and down the Light/Dark scale in a fluid manner which can be incredibly difficult to maintain at the same value from session to session. It has an inbuilt tendency to climb upwards, but can be decreased due to actions on the part of the player. The rules incorporate a hard and fast list of what actually constitutes "bad" and how minor or major it impacts your score, and doesn't really incorporate any level of intention or thought process that goes into the act (except for cases where the character lies), meaning that the GM shouldn't be blamed for hitting the character with a big alignment shift at the end of a session, but character could swing back in the following session just as naturally.
**Wizards [[Star Wars D20]] also used a light/dark system which influenced what powers were available to Force users, but the system was incredibly punishing to players, requiring them to have absolutely no dark side points at all in order to get the best out of ''Light'' powers while causing them to alignment shift every time they even ''used'' a dark-side power, also it risked them losing their characters to the GM if they reach a ''Dark'' threshold determined by their wisdom score. Plus while there was a list of what actions accumulate "dark" points, some of them are subjective and call on GM rulings, and those points are quite difficult (but not impossible) to get rid of once obtained.

* [[Mutants and Masterminds]] avoids alignment and replaces it with the motive category of '''Complications''', of which each character must have at least two. While these can encompass weaknesses (shards of your home planet being deadly to you or your powers not working on wood) and things to protect (most commonly secret identity and friends/family), one must be a '''Motivation''' for why you're out being a hero. These force a character to act a certain way or let the GM hose you when he wants to but, in exchange for the inconvenience, give a [[Action Points|Hero Point]] when it comes up. For most heroes in the intended genre the motive isn't much of an issue, if you aren't protecting the city/fighting evil/whatever variant you call it, you aren't playing the game. Further Complications can be based on personality like being unable to resist the request of a pretty girl and/or flying into a rage at a certain type of criminal.

===Alignments in Real Life===
A lot of tabletop game mechanics exist to simplify complex things down to a few simple things you can work out with a calculator. There are a lot of variables in the outcome of Ned the Knight being hit with a sword IRL in regards to angle of impact, area of impact, blunt force trauma and similar, but in a game it comes down to a pair of dice rolls and a loss of eight hit points. Alignment is a lot like that that. There are questions which are generally easy (is killing a random innocent child good or bad?) but there are a lot more that are complex. For example a civil war breaks out because a monarch attempts to centralize the kingdom and some noble houses object to this centralization. Is the monarch a power mad tyrant opposed by houses defending tradition and their smallfolk against the crown's overreach, or is the monarch a modernizer seeking to improve and stabilize their realm opposed by obstinate lordlings concerned only with their own power bases at the expense of the kingdom and it's people? Both could make the case, especially given the limited information given and people will come to different conclusions.

From basic primate social instincts to various religious figures, lawmakers, philosophers, commentators, political theorists and behavioral psychologists there have been a lot of factors which shape how people see morality. To function a society needs some form of morality but the permutations can be radically different, compare Confucius (highly traditional and concerned with hierarchic relationships and societal harmony) with John Locke (highly individualistic, concerned with individual rights and generally non-interventionist) as an example.