Alignment in DDO

[Telayna]

I love the way that DDO conforms to so many of the Pen and Paper (PnP) D&D concepts of 3rd edition D&D. To that effect, I feel any changes, upgrades, enhancements and updates should keep in mind the game it comes from. I know there are a lot of house rules, but Alignment has always been a mutable factor in the game, that can change based on your character's actions, which is how paladins can fall. I would love to see an ACTIVE alignment system in DDO. Some suggestions include:

1) Adjustable alignment based on Character actions
2) Alignment-based spells
3) Alignment based weapons


1) Adjustable alignment based on Character actions
Ransack bonus: This is a chaotic behavior if I have ever seen one. Quest giver: "Help save my house from the evil assassins. Bonus: +15% for destroying everything in my house!" Advancing Ransack should earn you Chaos points. Keep the ransack bonus XP, though...I will introduce a way to balance it out.

Pacifist bonus: This rarely seen bonus should earn you some Good points.

Collectibles: Have you ever seen a player who was obsessed with gathering each collectible in a dungeon. This is a lawful behavior, and should earn Lawful points. These points should always balance to 0 with the amount of Chaos points you can earn in a dungeon. (Maybe 100 points per dungeon, if there are 100 breakables, and 10 collectibles, you would earn 1 chaos for each item YOU destroyed, and 10 lawful for each item YOU collected, not including treasure bags or chests).

Certain decisions in the game should earn evil points. It's ok to make a minimum (to where people are stuck at neutral), if you wish to maintain the current system. Giving the dead girl the gem in the Delarra's pack strikes me as an evil action.

Perhaps each alignment has 10,000 points before dropping in to Neutral, which has 20,000 points. You start your character at one end of the spectrum, so a Lawful Good paladin would start with 10000 good and 10000 lawful points. If all he did was break crates, when he reached 0 lawful points, he would be at 20000 neutral. True neutral would be at 10000. When he hit 0 neutral, he would become chaotic. (Just a sample system, feel free to improve it)

2) Alignment-based spells
To a certain extent, these are already in the game. Way to go Turbine. Alignment does matter (Protection from Evil, Smite Evil, Chaos Hammer). However, some of the most basic D&D spells are not:

Detect Evil/Good/Law/Chaos/Alignment: This suite of spells would be useful in the game even if no other changes are made. The above spells would allow players to properly use some abilities, and learn more about their opponents (the divination school is way underrepresented in DDO...a game with lots of data that could be provided to players!) In my PnP games, I always envisioned these spells as showing an AURA around the detectee, which would work wonderfully in DDO. Evil is pure black, Good is Pure white, Neutral is grey. Chaos is pure red, Lawful is pure blue. Apply a color palette based on the number of points in that alignment (if that system is also used) and you could get a variety of colors for characters...a lawful good character would have a baby blue aura, a chaotic good character would be pink, a true neutral would be some sort of purple, a neutral good would be white, chaotic neutral would be red, chaotic evil would be crimson.

Undetectable alignment: Anytime you add a feature, make sure you have a way to hide it if you want. This spell/ability may be available to rogues, for example, or to NPCs to hide their true intent (The first NPC in Running with Devils, perhaps!)

Protection from Law/Chaos/Good: As Protection from Evil, but from different alignments.

Dispel Good/Evil/Law/Chaos: As per lvl 5 Cleric spell in PnP.

Magic Circle against Law/Chaos/Good: As Magic Circle Against Evil, but from different alignments.

Other PnP spells you could include: Dictum, Shield of Law, Word of Chaos, Cloak of Chaos, Blasphemy, Unholy Aura, Holy Word

3) Alignment-based weapons:
Congratulations! We already have a great system of alignment-restricted weapons and armor in the game. Cannith crafting could be updated to allow an alignment restriction to be placed on an item, thereby reducing the Minimum Level(ML) of the item by 2. These would be divine shards, and the components to create them would be sold by vendors representing the various alignments. Perhaps good would be sold by Silver Flame, Chaos by The Yugoloth, and Lawful by House Deneith (or some future faction).

In summary, Alignment is already a deep-seated aspect of the DDO game. It is often overlooked as simply a prerequisite for classes or certain weapons, but a more dynamic system could greatly enrich game play. Adding the ability to detect alignments also enables players to more intelligently use abilities.

[yawumpus]

/not signed.

This wouldn't have been a bad way to start out, but alignment is strictly an afterthought in DDO. The only real effects alignment has it prevents monk/barbarian builds and other interesting and likely OP builds. It also gives the default option of slightly stronger at first, slightly weaker later (with extra the extra foly of selecting "lawful" as well as good. Good allows new players to wield "of pure good" without issue, but locks out stronger items later. Lawful just nerfs the player from taking the better cove scimitars and takes extra damage from DQx, while only being good for monks and paladins (who must be lawful)).

DDO is in the Eberron setting, where alignment is less enforced (or practically non-existent depending on your view). To get a good look at alignment in DDO, try playing "purge the heretics" or even the catacombs series.

Finally: detect evil (and know alignment) would have some use in the game without further modification. It would be somewhat useful for new players who don't know on sight the alignment of various mobs and which weapon effects matter. I would probably only include it as a paladin ability (with a fast cooldown) as a spell would be too expensive. This would give a small advantage to newbie paladins (a good class for them) without overbalancing anything (experienced players would never use it). I just don't see it worth the time coding it in.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

in NWN2 (I think), my NG Druid found it impossible to stay NG, do to the way the game was set up.

And impossible to get back to NG, no matter what I tried, so I could no longer advance as a Druid.

I would hate to see this in DDO.



(every Paladin would fall from grace as soon as they started doing House P quests. )

[Telayna]

/not signed.

This wouldn't have been a bad way to start out, but alignment is strictly an afterthought in DDO. The only real effects alignment has it prevents monk/barbarian builds and other interesting and likely OP builds. It also gives the default option of slightly stronger at first, slightly weaker later (with extra the extra foly of selecting "lawful" as well as good. Good allows new players to wield "of pure good" without issue, but locks out stronger items later. Lawful just nerfs the player from taking the better cove scimitars and takes extra damage from DQx, while only being good for monks and paladins (who must be lawful)).

DDO is in the Eberron setting, where alignment is less enforced (or practically non-existent depending on your view). To get a good look at alignment in DDO, try playing "purge the heretics" or even the catacombs series.

Finally: detect evil (and know alignment) would have some use in the game without further modification. It would be somewhat useful for new players who don't know on sight the alignment of various mobs and which weapon effects matter. I would probably only include it as a paladin ability (with a fast cooldown) as a spell would be too expensive. This would give a small advantage to newbie paladins (a good class for them) without overbalancing anything (experienced players would never use it). I just don't see it worth the time coding it in.

Thanks for the comments! I do agree that DDO treats alignment as an afterthought, but so is crafting, War Forged, and monks. Variable alignment can be tricky, but if there are enough mechanics to offset it, it can provide another dimension to the game. In my samples, it would be easy to maintain your law/chaos alignment by controlling your actions in dungeons. I didn't come up with many evil/good modifiers, but a paladin questing to regain favor might have to earn a few pacifist dungeons. I don't believe the system should allow overnight changes. In the above examples, it would take 100 adventures to go from lawful to neutral. It is more of a flavor of how you play your character.

As far as a paladin ability vs a spell, I think it could easily be both. Paladins could have a sense evil ability, and there could be 1st level divination spells for each alignment, and a 2nd level divine spell for know alignment. It wouldn't be a common spell pick, but there are a lot of spells that are situationally used. Disrupt Undead, detect secret doors, merfolks blessing, and others. It would provide an in-game resource to exploring monsters, instead of relying upon the Internet to tell you what weapons you should use.

In summary, I agree that alignment is poorly utilized in DDO, but instead of accepting it for what was implemented, perhaps we can encourage Turbine to improve upon the system.

[dkyle]

No thanks. I don't like alignment in PnP. I have no interest in it besides the game mechanics it produces. Like how it provides a reason to use different weapons against different enemies.

PC alignment is currently rather silly. True Neutral is simply the best alignment at end-game. At most, I'd like to see more reason to prefer different alignments. But not much. Honestly, I'd be fine removing player alignment all together.

I definitely don't want to see actions influencing alignment. DDO is simply not that kind of game. All it would do is encourage us to metagame our choices towards whatever the most desirable alignment is.