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Gray guilds?

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Project_Hero
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Kazander wrote:
Kazander wrote:

Ok I am trying to understand both sides of this debate.
Project hero does not see a reason to see this information and is fine with it being hidden.

Redlynne wants this information because the npc reacts to a player with this information and we the player can't see it and you feel if the npc can know this then we should for world consistency.

Have I accurately summed everything up?

I guess I don't see the need to know and I don't think I agree that it is the devs are saying play our way not your way. I guess I have trouble figuring out how are you affected by not knowing? The effect of the alignment system is for the personal story portion of the game so for a lot of missions is it really going to come up? Or have I misunderstood the alignment system?

You have accurately summed up my stance.

As for the extent of missions with alignment choices we shall have to see. They could be a choice in every path mission, 1 in 5, 1 in 10, anything. It might also just happen at key points clearly telegraphed to players.

And other than the attitudes of various NPCs the alignment, so far, hasn't been said to do anything else.

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

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I have to question this

I have to question this statement:

Redlynne wrote:

Everyone who is an NPC "needs" to know it. Always.
PCs "need" to NOT know it. Forever.

I'm not convinced that all (or even more than a few) NPCs will "know" my PCs' alignment. Certainly, the *game* knows...but individual NPCs will only "know" what they've been designed to know. I can't imagine every interaction with every NPC will cause a programmed lookup of my precise 3-axis alignment. Some kind of lookup will probably only occur when there is a story-driven cause for the NPC to have heard of me and my past actions, and even then they will probably just apply a hazy "is axis X value > threshold value" adjustment to their behavior, which doesn't seem to be a precise form of "knowing" - more a vague sense of "I've heard PC doesn't share my law-abiding ideals" or "I like the (honorable) cut of PC's jib".

In the cases where story demands NPCs respond to PC alignment, they are still only programmed to know the part of alignment (axis) and magnitude (>threshold) that they need to know to provide a modest variety in game experience. If every NPC was some advanced AI that could insta-check my background and respond to it with a full spectrum of attitudes (as a player with that info could), then I'd agree that keeping alignment info hidden from players would be unfair.

So - for now I think alignment is being overemphasized in this discussion. We will eventually get more details about how alignment will be used to drive NPC behavior...and faction rep too, and maybe I'll have a problem with the design at that point...but not yet. After all, wouldn't we expect faction reputation to play a much larger role than alignment anyway, during NPC interations? Reputation with NPC factions is definitely known to most faction members, while a PC's alignment should be mostly unknown to NPCs, except those in a position of sufficient wealth/power to know it. For now, it's good to place the possible mismatch (why can NPCs do background checks but PCs cannot?) on the table for MWM to consider as they finalize the way NPCs will use both alignment and rep.

Lord Nightmare
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Without going too into detail

Without going too into detail I'd like to remind people that there are plenty of stories of superheroes doing what is effectively the right thing but the public or the media doesn't see it that way and is turned against them. Something something Harvey Dent can we trust him?

In a way, the Tri-Alignment being visible only to the NPCs and the player feels more real as the alignment is based on how the world in general sees you. Contacts outside of the general populous wouldn't really care what you do as any villain knows you can be swayed to the dark side and heroes know you can try and return to the side of good, the same with the other players. Doesn't mean either side would let you walk into their base freely but prove you're not BSing and they'll tour you through.

Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...

Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain

Project_Hero
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Lord Nightmare wrote:
Lord Nightmare wrote:

Without going too into detail I'd like to remind people that there are plenty of stories of superheroes doing what is effectively the right thing but the public or the media doesn't see it that way and is turned against them. Something something Harvey Dent can we trust him?

Spider-man, criminal or menace!?

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

Redlynne
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Kazander wrote:
Kazander wrote:

Project hero does not see a reason to see this information and is fine with it being hidden.

Project_Hero doesn't see a reason NOW, and is unwilling to admit that there might be a reason in the future. By denying the opportunity for a reason, he's locking perspective to a singular exclusionary viewpoint. I call this Premature Optimization.

Kazander wrote:

Redlynne wants this information because the npc reacts to a player with this information and we the player can't see it and you feel if the npc can know this then we should for world consistency.

Correct. Even if the information is useless NOW (or at launch), that may not be true forever. After all, there's always the possibility of doing something COOL with the alignment system later on down the line, in which knowing this information (like almost every NPC does) would be helpful. The info doesn't have to be permanently visible at all times, but it ought to at least be available somehow. Best compromise is to put it somewhere on a PC's Bio page so as to make it accessible if needed, with the implicit understanding that most people won't "need" to see it.


Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.
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If it becomes pertinent to

If it becomes pertinent to see someone's alignment I'm sure then we'll be able to see it. Or get some powers or some such to be able to.

If it becomes USEFUL info then of course viewing it will be necessary.

But I don't recall you ever stating anything regarding a future state.

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

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I've known Redlynne for a

I've known Redlynne for a while, virtually, and he's a creative problem-solver, often coming up with interesting and imaginative solutions to problems. He can also be a bit defensive about those ideas. I suspect he's had an idea for something cool which could be done with alignment data, but perhaps the idea isn't well-developed enough to submit it to the scrutiny and mockery that is occasionally deployed on the forums. So, instead, he's arguing for the alignment data-stream to be exposed, so it can be used for something cool in later development.

(If you thought the 'Jiggle Debate' was bad, you should have been there for the 'Great Knockback Jihad'.)

I agree that, if PC Alignment ever becomes relevant to the game, then the Devs can come up with a method to display it at that time.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Kazander
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Thank you fireheart that

Thank you fireheart that extra information helps me understand this debate.

Redlynne, thank you. I see what you are saying and I can agree that placing that in the ID card registry like COX had would make available but not in our faces.

Huckleberry
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Kazander wrote:
Kazander wrote:

Ok I am trying to understand both sides of this debate.
Project hero does not see a reason to see this information and is fine with it being hidden.

Redlynne wants this information because the npc reacts to a player with this information and we the player can't see it and you feel if the npc can know this then we should for world consistency.

Have I accurately summed everything up?

I guess I don't see the need to know and I don't think I agree that it is the devs are saying play our way not your way. I guess I have trouble figuring out how are you affected by not knowing? The effect of the alignment system is for the personal story portion of the game so for a lot of missions is it really going to come up? Or have I misunderstood the alignment system?

I think you didn't read the whole thread.

It appears as if you've only looked at the last couple of arguments by the most heated active participants and stopped.

Project_Hero has only ever been arguing against the Last Argument madeTM, taken in isolation, and has thereby steered the discussion away from the points that he actually had no argument against. Go back and look again and see it for yourself.

I personally do have a gameplay impact of alignment to point out. And I think it is important enough to warrant alignments being visible. Take that reason and combine it with the cognitive dissonance of PCs not being aware of something the rest of the world is.
Right now "I don't see a reason for it and am fine with it being hidden".

Project_Hero wrote:

You have accurately summed up my stance.

Is hardly enough of an argument to stand against the arguments Redlynne and I have made. And by the way, if you don't see a reason for it, then you are deliberately not reading all the reasons for it that we have been making. Perhaps your summary would be better stated as "I don't care for your reasons for it"

And to make it more convenient for you, the gameplay impact I am referring to is this:

Every PC will have an alignment they get to forge for themselves; regardless of whether it is visible to anyone.
Regardless of the prevelence of alignment-impacting decisions, it will take dedication to get your alignment where you want it to be and it dedication to maintain it there. Even if you want to be the roguish scoundrel who plays in the middle ground you have to keep an eye on your alignment and make sure you don't do too many things on one side of any axis. In fact, the fewer opportunities to steer your alignment, the more important those opportunities become.

Will there be players who don't care what their alignment is and just play the way they want and let the alignment cards fall where they may? Yes, of course there will be. But there will also be just as many or more people who want to play the ultra honorable (or stay away from becoing the ultra-honorable all you paladin-haters, you know who you are) or any other other specific alignment position.
And so it will come to pass that players will become more and more reluctant to run content with other players unless they share the same alignment goals. Yes, we can re-run content if we don't like how our party leader made some choices; but how many times are players going to consign themselves to re-running content before they just give up on parties and play solo for the rest of their time.

When faced with this scenario, I find it is better to lay out alignments in the open than to hide them from players. And yes, alignments are indicators of past performance and not indicators of future behavior. But at least knowing someone's alignment can start the conversation if a conversation is what needs to happen. Worst-case scenario of making alignments visible is that people will continue to play solo as they were. So, not worse at all.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Project_Hero
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So, Huck. When running

So, Huck. When running missions why can't you just ask the party leader how they plan to make choices?

Even if their alignment is visible this doesn't give much indication on how they're going to choose. Alignments don't need to be visible to have a conversation about alignments especially involving missions where alignments will matter.

If you're so worried about having to rerun content BE the party leader.

Seeing others alignments still holds no real practical use.

Anyone running alignment specific quests would probably just say that that's how they're running alignments visible or not.

So again. Knowing someone's alignment is no indication of how a party will run.

My stance has always been that knowing someone's alignment is useless and adds practically nothing. I have argued as such against any of the reasons put forth.

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

Huckleberry
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Project_Hero wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

So, Huck. When running missions why can't you just ask the party leader how they plan to make choices?

Even if their alignment is visible this doesn't give much indication on how they're going to choose. Alignments don't need to be visible to have a conversation about alignments especially involving missions where alignments will matter.

If you're so worried about having to rerun content BE the party leader.

Seeing others alignments still holds no real practical use.

Anyone running alignment specific quests would probably just say that that's how they're running alignments visible or not.

So again. Knowing someone's alignment is no indication of how a party will run.

My stance has always been that knowing someone's alignment is useless and adds practically nothing. I have argued as such against any of the reasons put forth.

There you go again. Ignoring the whole argument to point out special cases where it might not matter.
Your argument is actually a formal fallacy. Specifically, it is a propositional fallacy known as Denying the Antecedent.

Let me turn the tables on you... yet again...

You have been asking for proof as to why we think it should be visible. We've gone above and beyond to show you reasons. But you have yet to provide ONE SINGLE REASON why it shouldn't be visible. For crying out loud, your last sentence is all the proof we need that your argument is baseless.

If you had stated that you just don't want your alignment to be visible. That would have been a perfectly valid point to make. You could even go so far as to say why you don't want it, realizing that it is a subjective opinion. But you didn't stop there. You attempted to argue based on logic, and by doing so, have demonstrated an inability to follow actual logic.

We have made argument A and argument B.

(argument A: cognitive dissonance: why should the world know my character's alignment but other players do not?)
(argument B: making alignments visible facilitates forming parties of similar alignment)

- your argument against argument A is... not coherent at all, actually. Every argument you've made against it attempts to address specific cases and not the whole basis of it; and every argument you've made against it was summarily disproven before you switched to the next special case.
- your argument against argument B is that if you can show one case where you don't need it, then it is never needed. Or don't you understand what the word facilitate means?


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Project_Hero
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A. The world needs to "know"

A. The world needs to "know" your alignment to act accordingly, where civilians run to or from characters and certain groups will attack them. Players do not do either of these things. Thereby knowing their alignment in this case is pointless. I have stated this before.

B. Visible or not parties aiming for specific alignments will be made. Ergo the visibility of said alignment does not matter. As people will likely preface their party invite to alignment missions with the alignment they are going for. You can team with anyone of any alignment and have it not effect yours so the alignment differences do not matter.

So why does the ability to see another's alignment do anything for either example? I have yet to see an actual benefit of it put forward.

Edit: For mechanics seeing another's alignment does not matter. For RP seeing another's alignment does not matter. For teaming seeing another's alignment does not matter. If seeing another's alignment never actually matters why see it at all?

Edit2: and if it doesn't matter one way or the other if it's visible or not why take up any part of the UI to have it? Why bother having something that tracks it for other players? People can share their alignment if they wish, not having it shown doesn't infringe on this. Having it be seen at all times removes the possibility of someone having an alignment others don't know about. One takes away no options the other takes an option away. If the alignment viewer was a toggle that a player could decide if they want their alignment visible to others would you complain that some choose to keep it hidden?

Edit3: With teaming if the leader's alignment matters so much for you and knowing their current alignment isn't a clear indication of how they're going to run a mission you could, I dunno, just throwing this out there... Ask them. Someone's looking for members of a team and didn't state what choices they'll be making? Send them a PM and just ask. Look it even removes a step from the process. Someone looking for team, check their alignment, ask how they're going to be running missions, join team or don't. See that? You can remove check their alignment right out of that and you lose NOTHING!

It's almost as if seeing someone's alignment can be easily replaced with just talking to the person. For like, a second. And seeing as Alignments are an unclear indicator of how that person plans to run content you'd need to talk to them anyway. So being able to see their alignment only helps you what? Create a snap judgment of a player when you could have taken about 10 seconds to just ask them? So useful!

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

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Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

I've known Redlynne for a while, virtually, and he's a creative problem-solver, often coming up with interesting and imaginative solutions to problems. He can also be a bit defensive about those ideas. I suspect he's had an idea for something cool which could be done with alignment data, but perhaps the idea isn't well-developed enough to submit it to the scrutiny and mockery that is occasionally deployed on the forums. So, instead, he's arguing for the alignment data-stream to be exposed, so it can be used for something cool in later development.

Nail vs Head
You are spot on (as usual) Fireheart.

I want alignment to "matter" in some way ... eventually. Doesn't have to be something done for launch, which will only be covering Levels 1-30, with room for an additional 20 more (to get to 50) later on post-launch. Point being, there's going to be room to grow the game.

Grow the game how? Dunno. But I'd rather not "nip that growth opportunity in the bud" before it has a chance to become nifty.

Consider ...

There's going to be Story Paths for Heroes and Villains (2 each) ... but the PCs are all going to be inhabiting the same zones. There will be Heroes AND Villains in Alexandria. There will be Heroes AND Villains in Clarkstown. This won't be like the great divide between Paragon City (Heroes only) and the Rogue Isles (Villains only). Which means ... all of the city zones will functionally be what amount to co-op zones, because you've got Heroes and Villains playing in the same spaces.

Now obviously, there are going to be stories that are written and designed and meant to be played by Hero only PCs. Same again with stories for Villain only PCs. So far so standard, right?

But what about the "co-op stories" where the distinction of Hero or Villain isn't important? Basically, why shouldn't there be "co-op stories" that segregate their content by alignment axis parameter, rather than by Hero/Villain designation?

So we've got three alignment axes ... Lawful/Lawless, Honorable/Dishonorable, Peaceful/Violent ... right?
Take each of those three alignment axes and chop them up into thirds.

Lawful - Neutral - Lawless
Honorable - Neutral - Dishonorable
Peaceful - Neutral - Violent

Now, pick ONE (or more) of those ranges on the continuum of the alignment axes ... and imagine stories written for specifically those alignments.

For example ...

We have information publicly available about the Five Dragons, who are a crime syndicate. Right off the bat, we can probably assume that a story involving the Five Dragons is probably going to be something having to do with Lawless activities ... right? But that doesn't necessarily have to translate into Good vs Evil in a sort of Hero vs Villain sort of way. It could instead be a story about the Five Dragons hiring the PC(s) as muscle to put a hit on their rivals, the Black Rose ... in which case this becomes a crime gang versus crime gang story (and good and evil can both take a hike). This would then, at its core, be something of a Turf War kind of storyline, putting the PCs into the middle of the action, possibly as mercenaries.

Now let's suppose that the Five Dragons are "hiring" supers who are known to not exactly have a whole lot of respect for upholding the Law. Practical upshot ... the Contact for this story (or collection of stories) is looking for Lawless supers who are willing to "get their hands dirty" for a payout. They don't care if you're a Hero or a Villain ... so long as you're Lawless.

So you have a story that's not written with a Hero slant or a Villain slant to it, but rather a Lawless slant ... meaning that Heroes and Villains can team up together to do it, so long as they're all Lawless.

And once you've got that story in the hopper, you can then write ANOTHER STORY ... again without a Hero slant or a Villain slant to it, but rather a Lawful slant. This could be something where the PCs are directly assisting the TCPD (so siding with "the law" in a turf war between the Five Dragons and their rivals the Black Rose), or could be doing something else more direct (like deliver this subpeona to the crime bosses who "aren't taking visitors") in support of a "legal" takedown effort.

And once you've got that extra story in the hopper, there's room to write YET ANOTHER STORY ... again without a Hero or a Villain slant to it, but rather a Neutral slant ... about how other people have gotten wind of this little turf war and are planning to "twist in the wind" so as to play each side against the other and skim the benefits off the top. Basically, someone's got "an angle" on how to get the better of everyone else involved, but they need someone who can plausibly be seen as a "neutral" party (who takes full advantage). Heck, this storyline could even be one casting the PCs as "spoilers" in the turf war, tasked with making sure that NEITHER the Five Dragons nor the Black Rose can "profit" from this turf war, and that any victories they might respectively achieve are pyrrhic at best so as to deter them from trying to pull this kind of thing again any time soon.

So from just a single story idea ... Five Dragons versus Black Rose in a turf war between rival syndicates ... you actually wind up with THREE story lines (Lawless, Neutral and Lawful) giving you three different perspectives on the events in that story idea ... rather than just two, of playing the Hero or playing the Villain. And because of that, you can write it all up as a "co-op story" in which the Hero or Villain distinction simply doesn't matter, and instead you're looking at a group (of PCs) brought together by commonalities of interests and reputations, rather than being about Good Guys fighting Bad Guys. Fill p(l)ot with meat, season to taste, stir vigorously while boiling and serve hot.

And if you can do that on one alignment axis, you can do it for all of them.
Peaceful? Restore order by dispersing a potential riot.
Violent? Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.
Neutral? Stay flexible so as to reassure people who need that reassurance while intimidating people who respect only blunt trauma applied to their noses.

I'll leave the Honorable/Neutral/Dishonorable story ideas as an exercise for the creative reader. My first thought(s) for this sort of thing?
Double crossed!
Treason!
Betrayal!
We've been sold out!

You get the idea ...

Now am I saying that ALL stories should be written this way? Of course not! Don't be foolish!
But I am suggesting that SOME of the stories for City of Titans could be written this way ... and if they are, since the content in them is functionally "gated" behind having the alignment of all of the PCs forming the team fall within a certain range to be eligible to participate (because it's where you fall on the respective alignment axis that matters, not whether you're a Hero or a Villain) ... it then becomes important to be able to see the alignment on other PCs. And as soon as you take the "Good Guys versus Bad Guys" framing out of the story equation, things get a LOT more interesting in a hurry because the stories you can tell (and have the PCs participate in) can start to get a LOT more complex with a greater range of motivations and outcomes than you'd get with a straight up Hero versus Villain framing. Now you can dive into questions of LOYALTY and TRUST, which don't always map perfectly onto questions of Good versus Evil.

And just to be explicitly clear, I very much want to be in stories that are more complex than just "street sweep 10 Skulls and then go Defeat All in their abandoned warehouse base" like we kept getting in City of Heroes. The framing for so many of those missions was "here are the Heroes and you cheer for them, and there are the Villains and you faceplant them" with really not much of a story, let alone a motivation, beyond merely just that.

In other words, I think that City of Titans can be more than just Heroes and Villains. I want there to be stories that are written for "crossover teaming" between Heroes AND Villains who have a "certain kind of reputation" around the city.

And it's really hard to do that if you keep all of the alignment info hidden because you're never going to let it be used for anything ... let alone for anything cool ...

In fact, if you REALLY want to keep that "co-op" sense that City of Heroes put on display in the Rikti War Zone and in Praetoria and eventually in the (new) Dark Astoria and in the Incarnate Trials, it would make a lot of sense for the storytelling and types of missions to make a "shift" in the late game (so like, Levels 40-50, maybe?) from being based on a Hero versus Villain framing to instead lean more heavily on an Alignment axis framing. Don't get me wrong, you'd still have Hero content and Villain content too ... but you'd also start seeing more Alignment oriented content, further stirring the pot of what people want to play in the "end game" Levels, and particularly at the Level Cap.


Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.
Huckleberry
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Project_Hero wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

A. The world needs to "know" your alignment to act accordingly, where civilians run to or from characters and certain groups will attack them. Players do not do either of these things. Thereby knowing their alignment in this case is pointless. I have stated this before.

B. Visible or not parties aiming for specific alignments will be made. Ergo the visibility of said alignment does not matter. As people will likely preface their party invite to alignment missions with the alignment they are going for. You can team with anyone of any alignment and have it not effect yours so the alignment differences do not matter.

So why does the ability to see another's alignment do anything for either example? I have yet to see an actual benefit of it put forward.

Repeating the same logical fallacies does not make them more logical. I appreciate your effort, because maybe if you repeat it enough times you will state in such a way that makes sense.
Do you want to know what your logical fallacies are? Maybe if I inform you, then you can form your words to form an actually valid point.

Argument A for making alignments knowable to players is based on the observation that if the world knows PC alignment, then other characters should as well. The cause is the very design that actively removes an aspect of character immersion; actually imposing a level of ignorance upon our characters that would not exist. Your argument against argument A is Players don't need it. What has that counterargument have anything to do with the argument it is attempting to counter? Redlynne's example about making costumes not visible is a perfectly valid example of why your counterargument is illogical. In fact, your counterargument is completely contradicted by your very counterargument to Argument B. Seriously. I think you are doing this just because you enjoy arguing. Shame on me for feeding the troll.

Argument B for making alignments visible is to better facilitate party formations around alignment goals. Your counterargument against it is that there are other solutions. I agree. There are other solutions. But that still does not counter my proposition that making alignments visible better facilitates forming alignment-centric parties. And by the way, you did it again. You either didn't read my argument or completely ignored the fact that I had addressed your counters already. Why do you do that? Its very frustrating to argue against someone who ignores your argument and just repeats himself. Its almost as if you have been saying "I know you are, but what am I" repeatedly ad infinitum. Shame on me for feeding the troll.

And, by the way, you still have yet to make any valid statement as to why we should not have alignments visible. You can keep taking logically ineffectual potshots at our arguments, but you have yet to make a statement to bolster your own position.

And, by the way, we have yet to even get into Argument C, which was my original argument on this topic: to wit, that guild leaders should be able to see their members' alignments so as to ensure if they have a vision for their guild that they can manage that vision.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Project_Hero wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

A. The world needs to "know" your alignment to act accordingly, where civilians run to or from characters and certain groups will attack them. Players do not do either of these things. Thereby knowing their alignment in this case is pointless. I have stated this before.

That behavior has nothing to do with alignment. It may have to do with Reputation. Low rep with civilians could be used in resulting in them running away from a character.

Being attacked by a faction has everything to do with Rep and nothing to do with alignment.

The npcs that respond to alignment data are one’s associated with choices you have made. This is where Red’s adverts ruin that all nocs have perfect knowledge falls apart.

Many here in this thread have been confusing alignment with reputation.

Alignment axi is not a requirement for teaming. I’ve already discussed the mechanics for this.

It is not required for role play. How players choose to act out their alignment through role play is up to the individual player.

In many pno rpgs that rely on alignment don’t require a player reveal their character’s alignment to other players. They provide a guide for how to play out the actions for that character. When alignment does come into play is when there are game mechanics associated to alignments that either rely on what a player can do (what it can affect or how it can affect things).

Alignment are not used to create player to player factions. They are not limiters to who likes or dislikes your character (unless related to the story driven choices - and that may be tangentially related to reputation).

Once again, alignment is representative of the player’s choices they made for their character and acts as a guide for the direction the player is driving their character’s story.

If you don’t engage is content where decisions are made, it can be entirely possible to never effect your alignment (like street sweeping to 50, or when ugc is out, making your own content to simply plow through masses of mobs). If you never engage in the decision-based content, alignment has zero bearing on your game.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Alignment axi is not a requirement for teaming. I’ve already discussed the mechanics for this.

It is not required for role play. How players choose to act out their alignment through role play is up to the individual player.

In many pn[p] rpgs that rely on alignment don’t require a player reveal their character’s alignment to other players. They provide a guide for how to play out the actions for that character. When alignment does come into play is when there are game mechanics associated to alignments that either rely on what a player can do (what it can affect or how it can affect things).

Alignment are not used to create player to player factions. They are not limiters to who likes or dislikes your character (unless related to the story driven choices - and that may be tangentially related to reputation).

Once again, alignment is representative of the player’s choices they made for their character and acts as a guide for the direction the player is driving their character’s story.

If you don’t engage is content where decisions are made, it can be entirely possible to never effect your alignment (like street sweeping to 50, or when ugc is out, making your own content to simply plow through masses of mobs). If you never engage in the decision-based content, alignment has zero bearing on your game.

Thanks for the clarification.

I believe the arguments Redlynne, others and I have made for why we think alignments should be visible are unaffected by this clarification, but it is good to have nonetheless.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Viewing alignments is a waste

Viewing alignments is a waste of time.

Want to know about a character read their bio. Seriously. They probably have what kind of character they are. There you know about them. Knowing that their alignment reinforces their bio adds nothing. For those without a bio, ask them like you would have if you could see their alignment anyway.

Facilitating party formations? HOW? People will put things like "Running Lawful missions LFM!" If they matter enough to people and if not just freeking ask them.

How will viewing a person's alignment help that? All I can see happening with that is making a snap decision based on their current alignment. Cool, limiting your teams and potential grouping. Great idea.

Red, having specific team up missions for specific alignments does not facilitate the need to have alignments visible, especially if the mission info or name clearly spells out what it's about. Which you can do by easily adding the alignment it enhances before the mission title. Viewing others alignments doesn't help here. The specific alignment missions aren't enhanced in any way by seeing another player's alignment.

Most of these pro alignment visibility arguments seem to boil down to "well, I could just communicate with another player, but I'd rather make an assumption based on a specific game mechanic."

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So a character's alignment is

So a character's alignment is more just an indicator to the player of how their choices are shaping their character.

Essentially allowing you to see the direction your choices are taking you.

I can definitely, now more than before see, why this is a value hidden from others. As it seems to be more of an introspective thing than an outward reputation.

I assume that certain choices will have both alignment and reputation changes with them. Like say killing a badguy instead of handing them over to the cops would make you more lawless and violent and give you negative rep with the PD.

It's especially helpful that teaming with others doesn't have to effect your alignment. How many times in super hero comics has say Batman and Superman teamed up, and their alignments haven't effected eachother. Much. Or a villain helps out a hero and the villain doesn't change.

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Project_Hero wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

Viewing alignments is a waste of time.

Want to know about a character read their bio. Seriously. They probably have what kind of character they are. There you know about them. Knowing that their alignment reinforces their bio adds nothing. For those without a bio, ask them like you would have if you could see their alignment anyway.

Facilitating party formations? HOW? People will put things like "Running Lawful missions LFM!" If they matter enough to people and if not just freeking ask them.

How will viewing a person's alignment help that? All I can see happening with that is making a snap decision based on their current alignment. Cool, limiting your teams and potential grouping. Great idea.

Red, having specific team up missions for specific alignments does not facilitate the need to have alignments visible, especially if the mission info or name clearly spells out what it's about. Which you can do by easily adding the alignment it enhances before the mission title. Viewing others alignments doesn't help here. The specific alignment missions aren't enhanced in any way by seeing another player's alignment.

Most of these pro alignment visibility arguments seem to boil down to "well, I could just communicate with another player, but I'd rather make an assumption based on a specific game mechanic."

fa·cil·i·tate
fəˈsiləˌtāt
verb
make (an action or process) easy or easier.

What part of that definition do you not understand? You were here back in post #65 when I addressed these very questions. So why do you do this? Why do you ignore previous arguments and ask the same questions again and again? All this accomplishes is belaboring the entire thread and exasperating me and Redlynne and the others who disagree. ...wait a minute... is that your goal? Is your goal to ask us to continually defend our positions to the point that we give up so that you never have to defend your own position?

Because, if "it's a waste of time" is your only basis for your position, it's not a bad tactic to adopt.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Still think we need a Sledgehammer on the TCPD.


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

Viewing alignments is a waste of time.

Want to know about a character read their bio. Seriously. They probably have what kind of character they are. There you know about them. Knowing that their alignment reinforces their bio adds nothing. For those without a bio, ask them like you would have if you could see their alignment anyway.

Facilitating party formations? HOW? People will put things like "Running Lawful missions LFM!" If they matter enough to people and if not just freeking ask them.

How will viewing a person's alignment help that? All I can see happening with that is making a snap decision based on their current alignment. Cool, limiting your teams and potential grouping. Great idea.

Red, having specific team up missions for specific alignments does not facilitate the need to have alignments visible, especially if the mission info or name clearly spells out what it's about. Which you can do by easily adding the alignment it enhances before the mission title. Viewing others alignments doesn't help here. The specific alignment missions aren't enhanced in any way by seeing another player's alignment.

Most of these pro alignment visibility arguments seem to boil down to "well, I could just communicate with another player, but I'd rather make an assumption based on a specific game mechanic."

fa·cil·i·tate
fəˈsiləˌtāt
verb
make (an action or process) easy or easier.

What part of that definition do you not understand? You were here back in post #65 when I addressed these very questions. So why do you do this? Why do you ignore previous arguments and ask the same questions again and again? All this accomplishes is belaboring the entire thread and exasperating me and Redlynne and the others who disagree. ...wait a minute... is that your goal? Is your goal to ask us to continually defend our positions to the point that we give up so that you never have to defend your own position?

Makes things easier by adding an additional step?

Someone looks for team members

You check their alignment

You then ask them if that's how they're going to be running it.

They answer, you join or you don't.

As opposed to:

Someone looks for team members

You ask how they're running it

They answer, you join or you don't.

So. It only saves time if you never ask them and just base your joining of a team on their alignment.

Edit: which to me seems a good way to miss out on potential teams.

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Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

If you thought the 'Jiggle Debate' was bad, you should have been there for the 'Great Knockback Jihad'.

Ironically I've always thought arguing over the relative merits of the Knockback mechanic in games like this to be pretty silly and/or pointless. If you don't like how other people use their powers then don't play with them - problem solved. I suppose we all have our own "pet causes" that we feel are much more important to fight for (and bicker about) than other people's forum crusades. ;)

As far as whether a PC's Alignment should be visible to other players or not goes I don't really have overtly strong feelings either way. Regardless of how CoT handles things I'll likely fall back on my several decades of tabletop RPG experience to inform me on how I chose to interact/RP with other players. Sure player X or Y might have "Lawful Good" or "Chaotic Evil" written down on their character sheets (or visible in their equivalent MMO bios) but I'll always leave it up to the individual player as to how they interpret/express their own alignment in their own way. No game's narrow definitions of these things will ever fully prejudice me on how I interact with them one way or the other. *shrugs*

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Thanks for the clarification.

I believe the arguments Redlynne, others and I have made for why we think alignments should be visible are unaffected by this clarification, but it is good to have nonetheless.

I will specially address the main concerns you brought up in this thread.

The desire for players to use the tri-axis alignments in order to make and maintain their own social network - primarily through super team formation and maintenance by a super team leader.

This is basically trying to use the alignment system for something it is not: a player-based faction system.

Each players individual choices for their character do not have to have an impact on other players. There are choices that can be made to ensure this.

Creating social networks based on alignments can still happen. Players can choose to state their intent in a bio, or super team description, and if the group with players that make choices going against those guidelines, chose to enforce them at that time. The game providing the inflrmation does not impact this capability. It is, quite simply a very specific choice to associate with a players who who are playing the game in a particular way.

Players can do that without the system providing details of their choices. Players create social groups of all kinds without ever relying upon the game design to provide a qualifier of any sort.

The other main issue you discussed is the world maintaining a record of the player’s alignment.

This does not occur at the “world level”. It only occurs with npcs Within content which reference choices made by players as part of the story they are in. Not every npc in the game has a reference point decision tree triggered by a player’s alignment.


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A brief intermission..

A brief intermission...regarding the possible future of alignment axis usage.

Let's assume that eventually a full complement of missions are made with intent to cover all three axes, with each axis split into three segments - as described in Redlynne's post #104. I am generally supportive of that concept - and I think something similar would be done by MWM without us suggesting it, once they have time and a solid foundation of path & basic missions and a successful launch.

However, I believe that type of system benefits from - and may even require - alignments that are either hidden from players or only very vaguely revealed. Why?

Any such design needs to provide a way forward for those characters which are trying to switch alignments (say, from lawless toward lawful). Therefore, at least some of the "lawful" missions need to accept neutral PCs and maybe even the lawless, or else the lawless & neutrals will be stuck forever in their segment of the axis. That means we'll need NPCs who allow, by design, at least some non-particularly-lawful characters to participate in at least some "lawful" missions.

I would much rather rely on MWM's judgement to define the alignment limits (if any) that my PCs must meet to participate, than to have other random players considering whether my neutral-but-almost-lawful character is eligible for a lawful mission team. That doesn't sound fun to me. If I want that kind of experience, I'd roleplay it with friends and everyone would be aware I have a more lawful alt available in case they roleplayed a "no" answer.

Also, we shouldn't assume that the mission-giving NPCs should always care or know enough to lock out even opposite-end-of-spectrum characters - perhaps there are story reasons for them to be very desperate or unaware of the PC's position on the axis. Perhaps they only care about the team leader's alignment or reputation, and trust the leader to vouch for the team. If alignments are visible to players, that creates a potential second gate to participation - one that I see as unnecessary, confusing, capricious... and therefore undesirable for the health of the game / community and especially pick-up-grouping. If NPC mission-givers are ever used as alignment gates, we should keep it simple - make that the only gate we need to pass in general teaming situations, and warn team leaders and players of the eligibility requirements...or just base the gate on the team leader's alignment for even simpler design & teaming. This is especially true if only the team leader's decisions will be considered canon for the mission's visible outcome and the path taken at any branch points, while the team members' decisions just shift their own alignment.

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Thanks for the clarification.

I believe the arguments Redlynne, others and I have made for why we think alignments should be visible are unaffected by this clarification, but it is good to have nonetheless.

I will specially address the main concerns you brought up in this thread.

The desire for players to use the tri-axis alignments in order to make and maintain their own social network - primarily through super team formation and maintenance by a super team leader.

This is basically trying to use the alignment system for something it is not: a player-based faction system.

I have never associated players forming roleplaying guilds with player forming factions. That's a pretty outlandish argument Tannim.

On the other hand, I suppose it is possible that if players want to get a bunch of like-minded guilds together and form a Dishonorable faction or a violence faction or an honor faction for PvP, that would be really something! But just because a feature in the game wasn't designed for the way players use it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be used for it. Besidfes, would alignment-oriented factions really be a bad thing anyway?

The reason sandbox games like Eve and Archage and BDO are popular isn't because of the instanced content. It is because they allow the players to incentivize their own missions.

Tell us. Regardless of alignment, will player characters be able to carry the label of Hero or Villain? The answer is quite important to this discussion.

Tannim222 wrote:

Each players individual choices for their character do not have to have an impact on other players. There are choices that can be made to ensure this.

Yes, you've told us this already. And the choice we have is to accept or not accept the decisions made by the leader. Will we be able to pick and choose on a decision by decision basis, or is this an option we select when we join a party or when we start an instanced mission? The answer to this question is important to this discussion.

Tannim222 wrote:

Creating social networks based on alignments can still happen. Players can choose to state their intent in a bio, or super team description, and if the group with players that make choices going against those guidelines, chose to enforce them at that time. The game providing the inflrmation does not impact this capability. It is, quite simply a very specific choice to associate with a players who who are playing the game in a particular way.

Players can do that without the system providing details of their choices. Players create social groups of all kinds without ever relying upon the game design to provide a qualifier of any sort.

So what you are saying is that the only way for a guild leader to enforce guild alignment is by actually playing in a party with every member. That is absurd.

And everything you just mentioned is great evidence that making alignments visible will facilitate such networking. Thank you for making my point for me.

Tanim222 wrote:

The other main issue you discussed is the world maintaining a record of the player’s alignment.

This does not occur at the “world level”. It only occurs with npcs Within content which reference choices made by players as part of the story they are in. Not every npc in the game has a reference point decision tree triggered by a player’s alignment.

I don't understand what this statement is attempting to prove. If you were to say that only special omniscient NPCs that descend upon the world like angels from time to time to hand out guidance, then I would agree. But all you are saying is that not every NPC in the city is programmed to react to a character's alignment.

Newsflash: We didn't expect every NPC to have that programming.

The important takeaway from the player's point of view is that: at any time, any NPC could be written with alignment affected content. Even if it is only one out of every 100 NPCs. From the character's perspective, NPCs have information that player characters are being deliberately prevented from knowing, against all lore and common sense. And like I said in one of my earlier posts, the less frequent opportunities are to impact our alignment, the more meaningful they become to make sure we impact our alignment in the way we want.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Scott Jackson wrote:
Scott Jackson wrote:

A brief intermission...regarding the possible future of alignment axis usage.

Let's assume that eventually a full complement of missions are made with intent to cover all three axes, with each axis split into three segments - as described in Redlynne's post #104. I am generally supportive of that concept - and I think something similar would be done by MWM without us suggesting it, once they have time and a solid foundation of path & basic missions and a successful launch.

However, I believe that type of system benefits from - and may even require - alignments that are either hidden from players or only very vaguely revealed. Why?

Any such design needs to provide a way forward for those characters which are trying to switch alignments (say, from lawless toward lawful). Therefore, at least some of the "lawful" missions need to accept neutral PCs and maybe even the lawless, or else the lawless & neutrals will be stuck forever in their segment of the axis. That means we'll need NPCs who allow, by design, at least some non-particularly-lawful characters to participate in at least some "lawful" missions.

I would much rather rely on MWM's judgement to define the alignment limits (if any) that my PCs must meet to participate, than to have other random players considering whether my neutral-but-almost-lawful character is eligible for a lawful mission team. That doesn't sound fun to me. If I want that kind of experience, I'd roleplay it with friends and everyone would be aware I have a more lawful alt available in case they roleplayed a "no" answer.

Also, we shouldn't assume that the mission-giving NPCs should always care or know enough to lock out even opposite-end-of-spectrum characters - perhaps there are story reasons for them to be very desperate or unaware of the PC's position on the axis. Perhaps they only care about the team leader's alignment or reputation, and trust the leader to vouch for the team. If alignments are visible to players, that creates a potential second gate to participation - one that I see as unnecessary, confusing, capricious... and therefore undesirable for the health of the game / community and especially pick-up-grouping. If NPC mission-givers are ever used as alignment gates, we should keep it simple - make that the only gate we need to pass in general teaming situations, and warn team leaders and players of the eligibility requirements...or just base the gate on the team leader's alignment for even simpler design & teaming. This is especially true if only the team leader's decisions will be considered canon for the mission's visible outcome and the path taken at any branch points, while the team members' decisions just shift their own alignment.

Yeah, definitely think that alignment-oriented mission branches should be based only on how I want it to go, not how I am know for doing it before. As such, I really don't think that there will be mission branches associated with characters' existing alignments. Rather I think mission branches should be based upon what decision I make right now. I choose you Lawful Path!

But even having said that, I do believe there is a time and place for everything. So in this regard, I do hope that some day an aging Samurai finds a character because of the extremely positive honor alignment score the character has created up to now. No amount of reputation with the shogunate will cause the samurai to turn to you if you are not the epitome of honor. And maybe some black market syndicate finds to most lawless of the lawless to run interference for a truck convoy coming through town. They are relying on your lawless reputation to draw smokey away from Snowman hauling the goods.

Sure, faction reputation can fill in for some of that; but since alignment exists, it would be a pity if MWM didn't make the most of it eventually.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

...the only way for a guild leader to enforce guild alignment...

Agree on this point; though I wouldn't use it myself as a guild leader as I would either restrict invites to RL friends or make it 100% open to all players who can get along with each other, it seems entirely reasonable to have some in-game way to share some alignment data for this purpose. I have zero objections - besides the unknown impact to schedule - to a system that would allow a guild leader or designated subordinates to run a sort of background check on current guild members and invitees who agree to the procedure while being invited. It's semi-realistic, could charge a game currency fee, could be a bit imprecise, and only happens with consent to "view your character sheet" to maintain a fun environment. Seems like a feature that could go into a guild system upgrade after launch, as I doubt all guild details (e.g. permission-based storage units, guild PvP missions, etc) will be ready on day 1.

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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Sure, faction reputation can fill in for some of that; but since alignment exists, it would be a pity if MWM didn't make the most of it eventually.

I have no problem (as I implied earlier) if MWM can eventually "make something more" out of the alignment system that can affect game consequential things like how missions play out. I just necessarily think it might be relatively hard to pull off without it becoming something akin to the CoH Origin system that became something the Devs of CoH ultimately spent years trying to remove from the foundations of the game because of the arbitrary "factionalization" of the playerbase it represented.

Not saying alignment-gated content in a game like this would be bad and/or impossible. Just saying that implementing it well might not be as straightforward (or beneficial) as one might initially think. Players using alignments to "filter" various players for teams or supergroup memberships is one thing - having the game use alignments to compartmentalize what content is made available to players is something else.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Hopefully if any alignment

Hopefully if any alignment gated content comes out it'd only be to talk to the initial contact, or just the party leader that needs to have such an alignment.

Especially because folks can choose to accept the leader's alignment choices or not.

Edit: also if there's alignment gated content there should be some for those who do not have strong alignment leanings. Most games with alignment systems don't give much/anything to the neutrals.

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Let's make this easy to

Let's make this easy to conceptualize. Here are the continuums on the alignment axes that I'm presuming:

Lawful - Neutral - Lawless
Honorable - Neutral - Dishonorable
Peaceful - Neutral - Violent

Now all you need is to define parameters that are either inclusionary or exclusionary for which alignments are "allowed" to do what content. If all alignments are included with none excluded you have an alignment agnostic story, because the alignments of the PCs are not relevant to being allowed to do that content. I would presume that alignment agnostic content would be the supermajority of content created for the game, because that's Anyone Can Play content.

But ... "all inclusive" content like that needs to be written with a relatively "bland" or otherwise "neutral" slant on everything that happens within that content ... unlike content that excludes certain alignments which can be "skewed" in different directions for different storytelling reasons. Indeed, it could even be set up such that over time (i.e. Levels gained) the inclusion/exclusion ratio in effect "flips" such that early on, the content is as inclusionary as possible, but over time diverges into a wider variety of possibilities around specific unifying events.

So, for example, an "early" mission could be set up as excluding Peaceful but inclusive of everything else (so, not a mission for Peaceniks, basically). That would be an Include: 8, Exclude: 1 setup for usage of alignments.
Later on, an "endgame" mission could be set up as being exclusively for Peaceful (so, Peaceniks only). That would be an Include: 1, Exclude: 8 setup for usage of alignments.
But the story elements of that particular content would have commonality with OTHER MISSIONS and content in the game, so as to give Players a different viewpoint on the same event(s) that occur in the game world.

The simplest possible example I can provide for that differentiation would be using the Peaceful/Violent divide to do a "variations on a theme" deal where the Violent take on a mission involves DEFEAT ALL, while the Peaceful take on a mission involves Defeat Boss ONLY. The former is something geared for Scrapperlock, while the latter is geared towards Stealth, so as to make it a difference between indiscriminate slaughter of everyone and everything versus making a decapitation strike that ONLY takes out the (load bearing?) Boss with a minimum of collateral damage. So rather than coming in "guns blazing" (as it were), instead you sneak in (like a ghost/ninja), nail the target (and only the target!) and get out without raising the alarm (before you leave).

The "events" are essentially the same (go get That Guy™) but HOW you go about doing it is quite different. Same situation, VERY different objectives/outcomes. And THAT is where you can leverage the alignment system into being something more than a trivial afterthought with no meaning to PCs.

Again, very simple notion of making Variations On A Theme™ or even allowing different PCs to play different "routes" through the same situations, but in doing so you add a wealth of replay value to the game itself. So your first character was Lawful and worked with the TCPD during a riot? What if your second character was Lawless and was one of the agitators who started that riot that your first character worked to stop? Was the riot "used" as a cover for something else that happened DURING the riot?

Basically, there's more than one "side" to every story. I'm thinking it would be foolish to prevent exploring those possibilities simply because the only thing that matters is having Hero or Villain on your character sheet. In other words, there's more stories to be told than just the White Hats versus the Black Hats.


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We don’t have neutral. We

We don’t have neutral. We have a non-binary scale for each axis of the alignment system.

There is no directly alignment axis exclusive content.

The direction your story takes is based on the decisions you make when choices are offered. At any point in time you can begin making choices that are in opposition to your earlier ones, changing your alignment, and the direction of your story over time.

Now, in theory we could make exclusive alignment axis content that doesn’t offer choice, but it would be based on the content holder’s alignment and not exclude others of different alignments from engaging in the content if they are on the holder’s team.

There may be particular version of events which are exclusive to alignments down the road, but they are a result of choices, not a requirement from the outset to start.

Red’s second to last paragraph has it just about right with how the system is set up now. The same content can be replayed and viewed from different angles of the story based on previous decisions made.


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No neutral? What alignment do

No neutral? What alignment do characters start with then? Or are you just not considered to have one till you make an alignment choice?

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Sounds like someone has some

Sounds like someone has some explaining to do ...

I've been thinking in terms of a -10 to +10 scale/continuum, for ease of concept, in which zero is the "middle" of the neutral region. So you'd have ...
-10 to -4
-3 to +3
+4 to +10
... for a relatively "even" distribution of ranges (in integer terms). Actually MOVING a +/- 1 in either direction would require an accumulation of effort culminating in a mission to "finalize" the overall movement choice, kind of like the system that City of Heroes used, so as to prevent any kind of "accidental" movement of alignment values without Player buy in on the choice to do so. Set things up such that the "amount" of accumulated effort needed to shift another +/- 1 is on a sliding scale where the closer you get to the extremes, the more "effort" you have to put in for each additional bump towards the extreme, and you wind up with a sort of "rolling uphill" dynamic where the further you go the harder it is to KEEP going towards the extreme, but the "easier" it becomes to slide back towards the center relative to the amount of effort needed to keep pushing towards the extreme.

So if it takes 10 choices to go from +0 to +1 (or -1), it then takes 20 choices to go from +1 to +2, and 30 choices to go from +2 to +3 ... all the way up to 100 choices to go from +9 to +10 ... so the amount of "effort" needed for each additional bump towards the extreme end increases with each bump.

Conversely, any sort of "backsliding" will only get easier and easier. So going from +10 to +9 would need only 1 choice. Going from +9 to +8 would need only 2 choices. Going from +8 to +7 would need only 3 choices ... and going from +1 to +0 would take 10 choices in that direction.

So, going from +0 to +10 would take:
10 + 20 + 30 + 40 + 50 + 60 + 70 + 80 + 90 +100 = 550 choices to "push" in that specific direction ... which is a LOT of effort!

Backsliding from +10 back down to +0 would take:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 +10 = 55 choices to "fall" back down to the absolute middle ... which is a lot LESS effort.

In other words, the amount of "work" that needs to be done to move your alignment in any given direction is asymmetric. Going to the extremes is hard, while moving to the center is easy, and nothing ever happens because of a SINGLE decision. First you make the choice(s) that create the opportunity to move your alignment by +/- 1 ... and then you have to deliberately (and therefore, knowingly) choose to execute that option by completing a mission that is explicitly designed to achieve that purpose (like City of Heroes did with their morality/alignment mission system).

And this is where Tannim steps in and says everything I just wrote is completely wrong and City of Titans isn't going to be doing ANYTHING like that AT ALL ... and then proceed to elaborate what the system City of Titans will be using actually looks like and how it is structured (and why) so we don't have to keep wildly speculating about unknown systems that result in Left Hand No Talk Right Hand anymore on this topic.


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Project_Hero wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

No neutral? What alignment do characters start with then? Or are you just not considered to have one till you make an alignment choice?

Correct, you begin determining your alignment when choices are made.

As I said, in theory, it may be possible to play through the game and never make an alignment choice by street sweeping, playing ugc, etc.


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Here, I'll even do you one

Here, I'll even do you one better. Here's what I'd imagine the UI for showing alignments on the Bio page could look like. Mind you, everything I'm about to throw out here is fanciful/notional and I have no expectation that City of Titans will ACTUALLY do anything like this.

So ... start with an ordinary clock face.

Divide the clock face up into 3 parts ... one for Law (blue) one for Honor (gold) one for Peace (red) ... like this:

Then use an "arrow" or "pointer indicator" radiating out from the center showing where on the continuum for that particular axis a PC's alignment lies. Basically something like this for a 0, 0, 0 "all neutral" alignment.

At that point, it's just a matter of "turning" the respective arrows through the 120 degree sweep available to them to show which "direction" a PC's alignment is "angled" for each of the alignment axes. Basically do it up as a sectioned pie chart, rather than as a grouping of three linear bars stacked on top of each other. The nice thing about doing the presentation in this "round" format is that it doesn't inherently have any positive/negative associations with any specific direction for which way the arrow is pointing (or where a dot lies on a horizontal or vertical bar line). It also lets you know "at a glance" (once you learn the symbology) roughly "where" a PC's alignment settings lie.

I mean, you can easily tell the difference between these three sets of alignment settings, can't you?

. .

Now realize that the red/gold/blue arrows move independently of each other and not necessarily in unison (as I'm depicting here) because each alignment is "independent" of the others and you've got a simple visual representation that can be done in a relatively small screen area. If you need "more detail" hover your mouse cursor over the alignment icon to get a pop up window with text information for each alignment.

This is what it would look like at 60x60 pixel resolution (so "icon sized").


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Mmh, I'm intermittently

Mmh, I'm intermittently following this thread. I may have something to add to the points, let's see if I understood correctly.

- The alignment is like your soul, nobody knows about its true nature, not even you, since you may surprise your self or change your mind (for example, by acting heroic now and violent 5 minutes later).

- The reputation is the "public" alignment, what you're known for. If you kick children you'll be known as a "child-kicker" (this is the true feature that substitutes the hero-villain-rogue etc. division of CoH), if you act heroic your reputation will be good for the good peoples (npcs) and bad for criminals (npcs) etc.

@players
After this summary, and if it's correct, why don't you all ask for a reputation-based "guild/supergroup" instead of an alignment-based one? Did you try this simple shifting with the request (maybe I missed the attempt)?
That way you could do the "heroes-only" supergroups, "villains-only" leagues, "free-for-all" guilds, "child-kickers" clans etc.

@devs
I think I don't like the idea that all guilds are automatically open to all kind of players and the player cannot put some sort of restriction (therefore the player needs to play or read all bios of 50 peoples to have a hero-only supergroup). The majority of dc-marvel comics contain distinct supergroups clearly divided in good and bad ones (and a few grey), so making all guilds "grey" it's like building the game on a minority instead of a majority.
If the alignment is your personal soul balance, and the reputation is instead what affects the world around you, then it may be useful to have some automatic way to group peoples based on their "reputation", which should be publicly known by npcs therefore by all peoples in the virtual world including players.

That way a supergroup will automatically accept only peoples with a certain reputation and the guild leader doesn't need to investigate and punish and kick out as much as he should if we get only "free-for-all" guilds (mind it will be a good thing to also have groups open to all, so those must still exist imho).
If your reputation changes and it becomes against the automatic-rules of your guild, than you get automatically kicked out after a few days (where you have the possibility to correct your behaviour by acting good/bad again with npcs).

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I have been in games where

I have been in games where guilds can have characters of different races and different npcs faction access and it was not an impedement to the guilds formation not function.

We have systems in place to prevent arbitrary segregation of player pollution on purpose. We aren’t going to keep adding systems to enforce every possible distinction of how and why a super team can be formed and by what rules that formation must adhere to.

This does not prevent players from forming social groups based around a common concept. Players do this all the time even without a game mechanic driving the need for it.


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ThunderCAP wrote:
ThunderCAP wrote:

- The alignment is like your soul, nobody knows about its true nature, not even you, since you may surprise your self or change your mind (for example, by acting heroic now and violent 5 minutes later).
- The reputation is the "public" alignment, what you're known for. If you kick children you'll be known as a "child-kicker" (this is the true feature that substitutes the hero-villain-rogue etc. division of CoH), if you act heroic your reputation will be good for the good peoples (npcs) and bad for criminals (npcs) etc.

I think that's not quite accurate. As currently implemented, alignment is somewhat of a mixture of a PC's soul or self-image and of the PC's public image with any "programmed-to-be-interested-and-aware" NPCs, which are apparently uncommon for now. Alignment is based on a mixture of decisions - some done in secret (which *should* be known only to the PC), and some public (which *should* be known to any observer, and potentially to more if deemed newsworthy). At the moment, a ratio between them hasn't been revealed. Also, the game doesn't appear to be designed to distinguish between the two categories, for now. So both types of decisions affect the 3 numbers that represent the PC's alignment on the 3 axes. You're right that even the PC doesn't know (or control) the full and true nature of alignment - the player can make the PC appear to choose at random. Commenters have also noted that even to observers of a publically-made decision, in the real world they could disagree on how "lawful" or "honorable" or "violent" that decision was, leading to wildly varying opinions of your PC's general public image. So it's difficult to really map alignment's meaning to a single real-world concept, at least as it is designed today.

So in the thread we have advocates of "show alignment to other players" on the basis that alignment is partly public information and thus logically should be readily searchable, and may be useful to segregate players for various purposes at launch or later. We also have advocates of "hide alignment from other players" on the basis that it's partly private knowledge, and thus logically should be hidden or heavily obscured, and could be used to segregate players in ways that harm the game, or would add useless data to the UI. Within each basic group there's a spectrum of opinion regarding how vague any reveals should be, in which situations (and to what degree) a reveal benefits the game / community / guild leaders / etc, and when such features should be added (if at all) during CoT's launch and post-launch schedule.

Reputation is more specific to each NPC faction (such as the TCPD), so each PC will have many faction rep numbers, though each one is a simple single axis from negative to positive. That's probably why no one is advocating its visibility to other players or its use by players to segregate. Of course, NPCs in [faction X] could use their knowledge of a PC's [faction X rep] to have different dialogue or segregate players (rep < -50% = attack on sight, for instance) - though I don't know how extensively it will be used for those purposes, yet. If you check each of Tannim's posts, some of the likely uses of faction rep will be clarified. The overall sense I have gotten from his comments is that faction rep will be the main driver of NPC behavior differences toward players, and alignment will be much less frequently used for this purpose.

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I think the problem is that
Tannim222 wrote:

I have been in games where guilds can have characters of different races and different npcs faction access and it was not an impedement to the guilds formation not function.

We have systems in place to prevent arbitrary segregation of player pollution on purpose. We aren’t going to keep adding systems to enforce every possible distinction of how and why a super team can be formed and by what rules that formation must adhere to.

This does not prevent players from forming social groups based around a common concept. Players do this all the time even without a game mechanic driving the need for it.

I think the problem is that this game is based on comics. While in medieval-fantasy MMORPGs a Paladin is often together with an Assassin, in comics that's very rare in regard of lasting supergroups.
It may happen more in fast teaming up (temporary duos etc.), but a superhero and a supervillain in the same superteam for months? I think we're getting close to zero examples in comics.
Some ex-supervillains became avengers, but they changed their reputations, they become heroes, they didn't remain villains.

You join a game like this thinking you want to form the Avengers/X-men/Fantastic Four/Justice League/TeenTitans or the Masters of Evil/Injustice League.
Therefore if you (Tannim&devs) also think that a majority of players will join the game with that in mind (it would be an error to base such assumption just because 10 peoples in this forum say so, we could be all wrong or represent a minority, therefore I trust you can do the maths on your own and with more info than what we have, I can only inspire you with my questions and doubts) than you may want to build features related to what you think is the majority of players, since leaving such an huge group to blindly roleplay a big part like that (forming a superteam of heroes-only, for example) without a system that slightly helps may make them feel abandoned.

Imho you don't need to put the "child-kickers" or the "assassins-only" kind of group or all possible reputations (it would be too many), but the major and more obvious "supergroup-joining-limitations" should be there (the rest can adapt with a free-for-all guild and roleplay from there). 3-4 options when you create a supergroup like:
- Oper for all reputations
- Heroes-only (based on reputation)
- Villains-only (based on reputation)

But you know the game better than me, I'm not sure there will be a way to put some shades of grey into the major group "heroes" that the guild can automatically recognize.
I repeat the center of the problem imho is the comics being more Black&White than this game will be, we're lucky CoT is going toward a more "Shades of grey" world and I don't want to change that, but in this specific case (supergroups/guilds) the line between good and evil is really written in stone in comics (while for "fast teaming up/party/duo" it is not).

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This really depends on what

This really depends on what kind of comic you read, what era, etc.

There are plenty examples of mixed “shades of grey” groupings in the comics over history.

The thing about using comics as a guide is that they are only a guide - not a set bound of rules of which to design a game over.

While we draw inspiration from comics for many aspects of design, we must also design within the context of the game itself.

At times this will mean that we do something which may not be a direct 1:1 relationship between the mediums.

I also just spent my entire morning away from other work researching our entire archive of design documents, discussions, and early code related to the alignment system.

Specifically I noted that the decision had been made to not include alignment data as player to player facing as I said earlier. There is currently no UI work detailing displaying such tomother players.

I went through all our player interactions systems and again, nothing related to the tri-axis alignments is being designed, including super team formation.

In fact, to do so would result in some serious set backs due to how everything is interconnected. Changing one thing now would mean other aspects of design need changing.

Even so, I’ve put in a request for re-evaluating our UI to consider displaying the information requested. My guess is since those who make the decision are the same ones who already made up their minds on this subject and design has already been in place...it won’t be happening any time soon.


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I think an important lesson

I think an important lesson might be becoming forgotten--give the player choices unless there's a bona-fide game reason to remove an option.

What I envision, if not at launch, but sometime soon, is this:

Every character has a publicly accessible (from within the game and/or on this website) Cape Chasers' page. Elements on this page would include these: character name, @user name, civilian name, secret name, classification, specification, tertiary group, level, powersets, powers, supergroup (can we have more than one?), head-shot photo, action-shot photos (one per costume?), alignments, reputations, biography, badges, achievements, start date, last-active date, etc. The user of the character could toggle on/off each element separately.

Don't want your user name on the page. Toggle it off. Don't want your Five Dragons reputation on the page, but do want your CAP rep on it? Toggle the former off and the latter on. And so on. It should be as granular as possible.

Yes, one could periodically update one's bio, but if the database is keeping track of something, why not take advantage of that? Nothing on your Cape Chasers' page is needed by other players, but many might want to be shared or kept private. Let each player decide for each of their characters.

I'll have a Silver age hero who is very public and squeaky clean; everything will be public, even the "secret" ID. I'll also have a ninja anti-hero who is so secret, even their name is unknown to Cape Chasers. Please give me the ability to control mine own characters' information.

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Tannim, I think it should be

Tannim, I think it should be communicated that we definitely appreciate your time and feedback on the forums here. You've been especially present as of late on this topic.

Thank you!

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MeSoSollyWan wrote:
MeSoSollyWan wrote:

Tannim, I think it should be communicated that we definitely appreciate your time and feedback on the forums here. You've been especially present as of late on this topic.

Quoted for emphasis and agreement.


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Thanks to all. I truly do

Thanks to all. I truly do appreciate everyone’s passion for the game.


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:
MeSoSollyWan wrote:

Tannim, I think it should be communicated that we definitely appreciate your time and feedback on the forums here. You've been especially present as of late on this topic.

Quoted for emphasis and agreement.

Ditto.


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It's definitely a tough task

It's definitely a tough task to keep us from stirring up too much trouble before we even get our hands on the character creator.
I think we forumites could agree that you and the team are working toward a very impressive vision overall, no matter how many lesser components we may wish to "polish" in one way or another.

Good luck to us all in shaping a game we can be proud to share with our friends for many years...as many of us were fortunate enough to do in CoH.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Sure, faction reputation can fill in for some of that; but since alignment exists, it would be a pity if MWM didn't make the most of it eventually.

I have no problem (as I implied earlier) if MWM can eventually "make something more" out of the alignment system that can affect game consequential things like how missions play out. I just necessarily think it might be relatively hard to pull off without it becoming something akin to the CoH Origin system that became something the Devs of CoH ultimately spent years trying to remove from the foundations of the game because of the arbitrary "factionalization" of the playerbase it represented.

Not saying alignment-gated content in a game like this would be bad and/or impossible. Just saying that implementing it well might not be as straightforward (or beneficial) as one might initially think. Players using alignments to "filter" various players for teams or supergroup memberships is one thing - having the game use alignments to compartmentalize what content is made available to players is something else.

This is a very good point, Lothic. A cautionary tale. I think the major difference between gating things by alignment and gating things by origin is that characters can change their alignments in CoT, but characters could never change their origins in CoX. Accordingly, I don't see alignment gates as that big of a deal for that reason. But that doesn't invalidate your point.

But there is one aspect of gated content that MWM is probably looking at, or should. That is they are only a small band of part-time volunteers. They have to make sure that they maximize their return on investment(ROI). So every Man-Hour-Equivalent they invest has to translate into as many Player-Hour-Equivalents as possible. This means that they need to maximize the replayability of content and the accessibility of content. Otherwise the playerbase will overrun their development efforts and will stop playing the game because they ran out of fresh content. Hiding some content behind alignment gates means that less than 100% of players will see the content. Thus it is a self-imposed reduction on the ROI. (or an improvement to the ROI if you consider the time players could take to change alignments is time spent playing the game)
Then there is the trade-off between the time spent by a single character to complete all content versus the time spent by a single player using alts to complete all content. It would seem to me, at first blush, that requiring players to run alts to consume all content provides the higher return on investment because of the sheer amount of content that will be duplicated by each alt. But there are soft-measure that start to play in that case. Measures like enjoyment factor which invariably drops with each replay, and the cash shop saturation factor in which players stop spending money in the cash shop because they got everything they really wanted by their third alt, and also the percentage of player population who just plainly don't want to play alts.
I'm sure MWM has given this great thought.


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

I'm sure MWM has given this great thought.

The question of whether a player can use a single character to experience 100% of a game's content is a fundamental concern to a game like CoT which will likely be relying on the desirability of alting as a key means to motivate people to keep playing the game. Should this game allow people to accomplish anything/everything with a single character or should it arbitrarily require multiple alts to experience all of the content? This core question clearly gets more complex when you add further discriminators like Origin or Alignment to the mix.

I'm personally in favor of allowing a single character to be able to do/accomplish everything in CoT, even if the game makes doing that relatively difficult and/or time consuming. As you pointed out a strict adherence to an unmodifiable Origin-based system would likely make that impossible but by definition a character should be able to "alignment hop" through any alignment position. This was essentially what CoH allowed for when it let players traverse through the Hero-Vigilante-Villain-Rogue cycle.

I have nothing against people playing alts - I had several dozen of my own in CoH. I just don't want to be FORCED to play X number of alts if I want to see everything the game has to offer. Making things gated strictly on anything that a character cannot likely change like Archetype or Origin should be avoided. On the other hand gating content based on level or alignment at least allows a player to change those values as needed. If the game ends up gating some content based on alignment then it's up to the player to decide how to handle it - either they'll let a specific character shift his/her alignment or they'll simply create an alt with the appropriate alignment values.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Easiest response I've got to

Easiest response I've got to these concerns is ... YES, you can do everything, just not all at once.

In other words, with enough "effort" and investment on the Player's part, ALL of the content in the game is accessible ... BUT ... that doesn't mean that all of the game's content is accessible all at the same time. This means that gating content behind mutually exclusive categories is "fine" so long as the Player can "shift" their stats in a way that allows them to meet those criteria AT DIFFERENT TIMES. Kind of like how you could be a Hero/Vigilante/Villain/Rogue, but you could only be ONE of those things at a time, which then locked out certain bits of content. You could shift between the states, but you had to shift in order to be able to "do everything" the game had to offer.

It's the basic notion of You Can't Have It All (at once). You can "have it all" EVENTUALLY, but it's going to take work to do, but you aren't going to have "everything" available to you all at the same time. That way, the completionists will be required to pursue change and "circulate" through the game's content, rather than settling on a single "best" build and then doing everything with the One PC To Rule Them All™ (or words to that effect).

So, gating content behind factors that the Player can influence and change (and adapt to) AFTER character creation ... is fair game.
Gating content behind factors that a Player can NEVER change after character creation ... utterly bogus.

Remember, it's not the destination, it's the journey ... although, granted, a lot of people wouldn't even begin the journey without a reward at the destination. People are funny like that.


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I would actually like to see

I would actually like to see the alignment of others displayed on their info page. Not for SG purposes, but just because I like to see what others have chosen to do in game :p

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Considering that we are

Considering that we are talking Alignments... is the Weird/Mundane axis still a thing? Or is that not even an axis but just another set of labels?

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Weird / Mundane aren’t used

Weird / Mundane aren’t used at all.


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Good to know, thanks. I was

Good to know, thanks. I was wondering how you wanted to determine where PCs fall on that anyway.

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Nos482 wrote:
Nos482 wrote:

Considering that we are talking Alignments... is the Weird/Mundane axis still a thing? Or is that not even an axis but just another set of labels?

Where did the idea of having a "Weird to Mundane" alignment axis even come from? Your post here is the first time I've ever heard mention of such a thing for CoT.

How would you quantify something like that along an alignment axis in the first place? Is this supposed to be some kind a measure of how "normal human" vs "weird alien/mutant critter-like" your character is supposed to be and how would your moral/psychological choices supposedly affect what would likely be something that'd be based more on genetics?

Not necessarily saying this idea is bad but more just curious what the thinking behind it was.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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The Twelve, 1-4 , scroll down

The Twelve, 1-4 , scroll down to Pale Ride.

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Yeah, we aren’t using the

Yeah, we aren’t using the full list of labels for players at launch. And some may not apply to pcs at all, on that, we will have to wait and see. Some where there for the Composition team to use.


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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

The Twelve, 1-4 , scroll down to Pale Ride.

Yeah I totally forgot about this reference because I never even seriously assumed this game's alignment system would be based on a full 12-way axis system much less anything as vague as "mundaneness vs weirdness". Out of the twelve listed qualities the only two that are remotely descriptions of "physical" qualities are these two and as such have no place as part of an actual alignment system - clearly the folks at MWM were simply trying to come up with two more named qualities so that they could have a symmetrical number between the top six and the bottom six.

At best I probably considered this just a "working idea" placeholder of what was to come and it appears Tannim has backed up my assumption on this. *shrugs*

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Foradain wrote:

The Twelve, 1-4 , scroll down to Pale Ride.

Yeah I totally forgot about this reference because I never even seriously assumed this game's alignment system would be based on a full 12-way axis system much less anything as vague as "mundaneness vs weirdness". Out of the twelve listed qualities the only two that are remotely descriptions of "physical" qualities are these two and as such have no place as part of an actual alignment system - clearly the folks at MWM were simply trying to come up with two more named qualities so that they could have a symmetrical number between the top six and the bottom six.

At best I probably considered this just a "working idea" placeholder of what was to come and it appears Tannim has backed up my assumption on this. *shrugs*

It was actually because some on the comp teams were firm in how certain characters didn’t fit within the other descriptions afforded by the other alignment labels yet wanted to apply a label to such characters.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Foradain wrote:

The Twelve, 1-4 , scroll down to Pale Ride.

Yeah I totally forgot about this reference because I never even seriously assumed this game's alignment system would be based on a full 12-way axis system much less anything as vague as "mundaneness vs weirdness". Out of the twelve listed qualities the only two that are remotely descriptions of "physical" qualities are these two and as such have no place as part of an actual alignment system - clearly the folks at MWM were simply trying to come up with two more named qualities so that they could have a symmetrical number between the top six and the bottom six.

At best I probably considered this just a "working idea" placeholder of what was to come and it appears Tannim has backed up my assumption on this. *shrugs*

It was actually because some on the comp teams were firm in how certain characters didn’t fit within the other descriptions afforded by the other alignment labels yet wanted to apply a label to such characters.

Any living sentient being could be pegged on alignment axes such as Law/Chaos, Merciful/Violent and Honorable/Dishonorable to various degrees. To me something like Weird/Mundane could only be covered by some kind of twisted variation of a Charisma/Appearance stat. These were Apples and Oranges that never belonged together in the first place. Physical descriptors have nothing to do with alignment.

Now if you somehow "squinted real hard" and meant to have the terms Weird/Mundane apply to some kind of measure of sanity (where "Mundane" might equal generic sanity and "Weird" might equal generic insanity) then that -might- apply to alignment. But if that's what you intended you could have just used Sane/Insane as your descriptors.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Foradain wrote:

The Twelve, 1-4 , scroll down to Pale Ride.

Yeah I totally forgot about this reference because I never even seriously assumed this game's alignment system would be based on a full 12-way axis system much less anything as vague as "mundaneness vs weirdness". Out of the twelve listed qualities the only two that are remotely descriptions of "physical" qualities are these two and as such have no place as part of an actual alignment system - clearly the folks at MWM were simply trying to come up with two more named qualities so that they could have a symmetrical number between the top six and the bottom six.

At best I probably considered this just a "working idea" placeholder of what was to come and it appears Tannim has backed up my assumption on this. *shrugs*

It was actually because some on the comp teams were firm in how certain characters didn’t fit within the other descriptions afforded by the other alignment labels yet wanted to apply a label to such characters.

Any living sentient being could be pegged on alignment axes such as Law/Chaos, Merciful/Violent and Honorable/Dishonorable to various degrees. To me something like Weird/Mundane could only be covered by some kind of twisted variation of a Charisma/Appearance stat. These were Apples and Oranges that never belonged together in the first place. Physical descriptors have nothing to do with alignment.

Now if you somehow "squinted real hard" and meant to have the terms Weird/Mundane apply to some kind of measure of sanity (where "Mundane" might equal generic sanity and "Weird" might equal generic insanity) then that -might- apply to alignment. But if that's what you intended you could have just used Sane/Insane as your descriptors.

Nope it doesn’t have anything to do with “sanity”.

I’m telling you, quite literally , that those two exist for the Comp team’s purposes as a compromise because some creators had issues with the alignment system insisting their creations didn’t fall under the regular axi.

Some of those characters are conceptually either somewhat “normal”or very strange.
Mundane <———> Weird


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Any living sentient being could be pegged on alignment axes such as Law/Chaos, Merciful/Violent and Honorable/Dishonorable to various degrees. To me something like Weird/Mundane could only be covered by some kind of twisted variation of a Charisma/Appearance stat. These were Apples and Oranges that never belonged together in the first place. Physical descriptors have nothing to do with alignment.

Now if you somehow "squinted real hard" and meant to have the terms Weird/Mundane apply to some kind of measure of sanity (where "Mundane" might equal generic sanity and "Weird" might equal generic insanity) then that -might- apply to alignment. But if that's what you intended you could have just used Sane/Insane as your descriptors.

Nope it doesn’t have anything to do with “sanity”.

I’m telling you, quite literally , that those two exist for the Comp team’s purposes as a compromise because some creators had issues with the alignment system insisting their creations didn’t fall under the regular axi.

Some of those characters are conceptually either somewhat “normal”or very strange.
Mundane <———> Weird

And I'm telling you that the terms "Mundane" and "Weird" are effectively gibberish when it comes to meaning anything in regards to traditional alignment systems. I can only tell you that I've played (and run) nigh-countless games using dozens of RPG systems over the last few decades and no game I know of (until now I suppose?) has ever applied such terms to anything remotely related to alignment.

I was giving you the concept of "sanity" just as a super, super vague way to make any sense of what those other creator people you mentioned were talking about. I have no idea what those other people were thinking and why they couldn't "shoehorn" their characters into more traditional alignment definitions.

Basically all I'm saying here is that I'm very, very glad you are not using "Mundane" and "Weird" in CoT's alignment system (at least for PCs at any rate) because I don't even know where I'd begin to "square that circle" of illogic. There's absolutely nothing wrong with describing your characters as being more "mundane" or "weird" compared to anything else, but those qualities are anything but alignment descriptors.

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Should call these Non-RP

Should call these Non-RP/Theme Supergroup instead of Gray Guilds. We're superheros, not D&D :p

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Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

Should call these Non-RP/Theme Supergroup instead of Gray Guilds. We're superheros, not D&D :p

Superteam*

Fixed it for you :p

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I think the mundane<-----

I think the mundane<----->weird alignment would have something to do with how they view the word.

For example, someone without any moral compass whatsoever, such as an alien or a computer program, would be best measured on this scale. They would act in accordance with an alignment that just isn't measurable using honor lawful or violent. I think someone with insanity could very well fall within this realm, but not necessary exclusively.

I think mundane would mean something more predictible, whereas weird would be completely unpredictible.


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Mundane and weird have such

Mundane and weird have such broad definitions as to make them almost useless to describe anything.

A billionaire who dresses in bat pyjamas to fight crime because he misses his mommy? That's weird.

A Kryptonian with Super Powers that are normal for Kryptonians on earth? Mundane.

As alignments they get even more screwy. Superman is mundane because he was raised in Kansas?

About the only character I could count as weird is someone like Deadpool. And a guy like that having his own special alignment? Yeah, I get that.

Without a reference point for the weirdness it's hard to judge where anyone would fit.

Though even with the Deadpool example (as someone who knows not too much about the character) I could pretty safely say he's violent and lawless. At least most of the time.

I really can't see how mundane and weird could be used as alignments.

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That's why it confused me.

That's why it confused me.

Project_Hero wrote:

Though even with the Deadpool example ... I could pretty safely say he's violent and lawless. At least most of the time.

Nope, all the time... but I'd guess he'd me more honorable than not. Most times and in his own weird way, of course.

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It would be interesting to

It would be interesting to hear more about (and eventually see in game) at least one example of a CoT NPC that the axis was meant to support.

Tricksters...who are also fooling themselves?
Multi-personality or multi-brain minds that aren't just internally conflicted, but also have no dominant mind (and thus no dominant alignment) when acting, and may seem to act at random?
Beings that are being heavily controlled by another, so they only display the controller's alignment until control is broken?
Actors who have no internal sense of morality?

I guess to some degree, it comes back to what alignment is really supposed to represent...a being's judgement of itself, the being as judged by a sort of "traditional comics morality", something in between, or something else entirely.
Curious.

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Alignment is a representation

Alignment is a representation of your actions. How you, the player interpret what it means for your character is up to you.


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To be completely fair if the
Tannim222 wrote:

Alignment is a representation of your actions. How you, the player interpret what it means for your character is up to you.

This is why "mundane" and "weird" can't really work for an alignment system because they are not "actions" in the conventional sense.

To be completely fair if the Devs seriously wanted to use something unconventional like "Mundane/Weird" as an alignment axis they would need to very specifically define what they wanted to represent with those terms as they would apply to CoT. I still contend it would be "less than ideal" at the very least.

Huckleberry wrote:

I think mundane would mean something more predictible, whereas weird would be completely unpredictible.

Exactly how do you quantify "predictability" in a superhero based universe where almost anything is possible? What frame of reference do you use for that? Again to be fair some kind of "predictability mechanic" might have a viable purpose in another type of RPG like a Call of Cthulhu where differentiating between "normal" and "not normal" is a little more relevant to the basis of the game. But for a game like CoT where the very concept of "normal" is basically turned on its ear I simply can't fathom a reasonable use for it.

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Yuck, I wouldn’t use mundane

Yuck, I wouldn’t use mundane and weird as the extremes. Mundane would be the center. The other extreme would be Conformal. You know, the straight-laced, uptight type. It’s like the D&D lawful/chaotic axis except without bringing the law into it.

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Yuck, I wouldn’t use mundane and weird as the extremes. Mundane would be the center. The other extreme would be Conformal. You know, the straight-laced, uptight type. It’s like the D&D lawful/chaotic axis except without bringing the law into it.

Yeah maybe that'd work for a "normal world reality-style high school" RPG where you just have to work yourself into the right cliques and figure out how to date the prom king/queen without posting something embarrassing on social media. ;)

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Yuck, I wouldn’t use mundane and weird as the extremes. Mundane would be the center. The other extreme would be Conformal. You know, the straight-laced, uptight type. It’s like the D&D lawful/chaotic axis except without bringing the law into it.

Yeah maybe that'd work for a "normal world reality-style high school" RPG where you just have to work yourself into the right cliques and figure out how to date the prom king/queen without posting something embarrassing on social media. ;)

I was thinking of city government workers, but okay.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Yuck, I wouldn’t use mundane and weird as the extremes. Mundane would be the center. The other extreme would be Conformal. You know, the straight-laced, uptight type. It’s like the D&D lawful/chaotic axis except without bringing the law into it.

Yeah maybe that'd work for a "normal world reality-style high school" RPG where you just have to work yourself into the right cliques and figure out how to date the prom king/queen without posting something embarrassing on social media. ;)

See, now I want a rogue like game that's set in a highschool. Be like Long Live The Queen. You'd make a bunch of choices as the game goes on with the goal of becoming prom king/queen, which would be impossible if you end up embarassing yourself.

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Maybe I misunderstood; was

Maybe I misunderstood; was the weird/mundane axis proposed by some Composition Team members to support their own planned PCs, or was it for NPCs? I could have incorrectly assumed they were doing it for the sake of the NPCs they were writing into the game...

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Scott Jackson wrote:
Scott Jackson wrote:

Maybe I misunderstood; was the weird/mundane axis proposed by some Composition Team members to support their own planned PCs, or was it for NPCs? I could have incorrectly assumed they were doing it for the sake of the NPCs they were writing into the game...

The last one.


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