Shattered Kingdoms

Good for you is unclean? Go-go-Gadget-hyper-sensitive-Alshain.

I was never a believer in the classic 9 point D&D alignment system. As originally defined, the majority of neutral alignments were stupidly written - with True Neutral being populated only by hard-ass druids of the balance and Chaotic Neutral being schizo coin-flippers ala Two-Face.

Meanwhile, Rifts/Palladium doesn't have dogmatic, so we aren't that system either (anymore). And for the record, our definitions of the alignment keywords have been substantially different from the Palladium version all along.

In general, I liked the alignment ideals from Palladium better because it better described the motivations for the characters that would actually be playing the game. Palladium specifically didn't have a "Lawful Neutral" type alignment because they aren't a personality that would go out adventuring. But our game DOES have a need for that alignment, because it is the ideal alignment for Tribunal members. Hence it was added.

Things do seem a bit unsymmetrical now. If anything, I wish we could remove miscreant. That would give things a nice symmetry again and as far as play-style goes, I feel like miscreant lacks any kind of hook to help a player standout in RP. But I don't actually see it being removed. It does fill a role of being the space between two other extreme types of being evil.

+karma

Thanks.

I feel like Miscreant is something of a catch-all "malevolent" term. I mean, Aberrant is for the strict-as-hell characters who exemplify the "eye for an eye" philosophy; Diabolic is for the batshit crazy mofos who might just disembowel you so they can laugh while you bleed, then hand you a band-aid and a lollipop; Miscreant is everything that is bad and nasty but not crazy extreme. It's a lot like Anarchist in that both ultimately just follow their own gratification, but Anarchist will only hurt other people if they can't reasonably avoid it, whereas Miscreant could not give less of a damn if you die in a pool of acid-scorpions.

Makes sense to me, at least.

I'm just giving you too hard a time. I am glad the SK system is less restrictive than the RIFTS one and more supportive of characterization than the D&D one.

My only real complaint is the same as what you noticed: there are three grey, three dark, and two light alignment options. Dogmatic provides a nice tribunal member, miscreant bridges a gap, so I'm left to wonder just what a third light alignment would be, hypothetically, if it were to exist.

Ideal how? I normally think of law enforcement and military members as having loyalty to a cause, community, or their own group, not just following orders or serving order. For real dedication to order, we have the Ain religion, which always worked fine with principled/aberrant.

My feeling is that the introduction of dogmatic essentially split the aberrant alignment in two. Dogmatic is drained aberrant: it keeps the ability to follow a non-good cause rigorously, but it drops most possibilities of initiative. (OTOH, it's an opportunity to play a functionally evil character that's immune to holy magic.) Aberrant has moved heavily toward miscreant. Aside from "honor" and loyalty to the loyal, there's no stronger code of ethics than the miscreant character has.

Since our hellion class is aberrant, it's understandable that we wanted to seperate the relatively moral aberrant from the dedicated evil aberrant. But I think we lost some of the fun of having hellions be aberrant in the first place.

I saw dogmatic as basically aberrant without the corruption. Aberrant means 'abnormal,' after all, not 'predictable.'

While I have respect for members of the police and military, in my view, the majority of them are still just people who are willing to take orders and occasionally risk their lives in exchange for a paycheck. That's pretty much what the dogmatic alignment is all about.

SK is actually Dulrik brainwashing us in order to instill in us his own political beliefs.

I don't feel the game conveys my political beliefs at all. But it certainly does attempt to convey my economic beliefs.