Why do I say that? Well, it is because there is no option for one of the most important aspects of a true RPG; and that is your “Alignment!”
What happened to Alignment? Did Wow’s developers forget to include alignment when they created Wow? Well, how about now? The Devs have not mentioned anything about
Alignment. Have they! Apparently no one on Wow’s staff thought including Alignment.
How could the Devs neglect such an important part of RPG game-play.
What about you? How would you know who you could trust or not trust when you run across other characters in the game world? There is no way of determining the character’s Alignment is there!?
So I propose that along with the character’s name Bliz including the character’s Alignment.
And to help with this endeavor I created a list of Alignments:
You can take their lunch money
Push over
Goodie two shoes
Real Nice Person
Lawful Good
Neutral Good
Chaotic Good
Lawful Neutral
True Neutral
Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Evil
Neutral Evil
Chaotic Evil
Real bad person
Thug
Serial Killer
So yes! If Bliz listens to me. You’ll be able to assign a Alignment to your character in character creation. Now wouldn’t that be wonderful!
But wait. After looking at my list I realized that it was not perfect. So please add whatever Alignments you think would be appropriate.
You can choose your own alignment for your character on your own. That doesn’t need to be present in game and isn’t typically present in MMORPGs. You are thinking of tabletop RPGs.
WoW’s cosmology does not include planes of order, chaos, evil, and good. (Not as clear cut, anyway, order and chaos do exist in an ephemeral sense with fel and titans.)
The reason these exist in D&D and Pathfinder is because cosmic alignment plays a role in the lore, not because it’s good for an RPG.
In RPG games, alignment is a categorization of the moral and ethical perspective of the player characters, non-player characters, monsters, and societies in the game.
I think this factor is important.
Not quite. The alignment system from D&D (the one you’re referencing) is actually tooled from an old novel that focused on the battle between forces of order and chaos, which existed on their own planes.
The idea behind alignment in PF and D&D is that your actions in a mortal life align you to certain planes. For example, being orderly aligns you toward Mechanus.
It isn’t really meant to be a guideline for your morality, but a result of your morality.
For those wondering what this is all about:
Allignment noun
arrangement in a straight line, or in correct or appropriate relative positions. “the tiles had slipped out of alignment”
a position of agreement or alliance. “the uncertain nature of political alignments”
You can turn your character in any direction by using the movement keys which should take care of definition 1.1. When you pick a class you join the Alliance or Horde automatically and of course you can always form a group and role play.
I respectfully beg to differ. Alignment is the guide as to how a person plays their character while making decisions in a RPG game. Which defines what your character would do as opposed as to what you would do in irl.
That’s fine, I can explain further as you need. I do know a lot about this topic, though. TTRPGs are my primary hobby.
It’s been a frequent mistake that players make, taking an alignment as law for how they should play. In reality, alignment is named so because it literally just has to do with your cosmic alignment. Which plane your soul will go to when you die, for example, is most often determined by this cosmic alignment.
It also gave a lot of room for interesting mechanics with an explanation. Say you wanted to give players Excalibur, but wanted to keep the requirement of “goodness of heart.”
Enter Carsomyr, or the Holy Avenger as it’s also known. You must be Good to wield it, or Lawful Good or even a Paladin in older editions. These sort of limitations represent where your character is at a given time. Importantly, your alignment can always change. Your character can fall from grace, and lose access to something like Carsomyr.
Besides, it’s far more realistic for a character’s alignment to be a hidden and flexible attribute that you only learn by increasing familiarity with them.
Sacrifices were made to support the mmo theme, biggest of which to me is the lack of meaningful choices. I kill, it respawns. I don’t kill the boss they die anyway and people treat me like I did it. Then they respawn.
Agreed. But I find it curious that you ignore the Character’s actions and reactions to circumstances.
Example: If you were role playing a Chaotic evil Character in a game. And the situation
arose where your character was faced with making a decision to save a injured knight from wild wolves but loose the chance to steel his bag of gold. Or let the wild wolves kill the injured knight and steel his bag of gold? What would your decision be?
