alignment change with. IRL age
etagloc
Member Posts: 349
So by now i have been playing P n P rpg and CRPG's for around 10 - 15 years now.
i have found that the alignments of most of my Toon's have changed abit with age.
when i was younger my fav. was the paladin the easy lawful good option,
later it changed to chaotic good.
and now always the grey neutral options. (I still dont like playing evil)
am i slowly turning darkside
. or is this just a natural age progression? ^^
..so have you changed like me?..
i have found that the alignments of most of my Toon's have changed abit with age.
when i was younger my fav. was the paladin the easy lawful good option,
later it changed to chaotic good.
and now always the grey neutral options. (I still dont like playing evil)
am i slowly turning darkside
. or is this just a natural age progression? ^^..so have you changed like me?..
1
Comments
On the first one, I could write several paragraphs of personal information, and then draw philosophical conclusions about human psychology and spirituality.
On the second one, I would answer with a strong "no". I always play a good hero, because that's how I fantasize myself as a super-powered individual. The thought of playing evil makes my stomach turn, gives me a headache, and turns more of my hair grey.
well its a bit of both, since i normaly try to play as myself. I even add my own name. ( but im not nearly as brave In real life ^^)
though writeing several paragraphs of personal information is a bit much on a bg forum ; ), i was going for something abit more light hearted. but its nice to see that some people keep their faith.
Then I went to college and started learning stuff about World History, and the History of Thought, in philosophy classes. My alignment started drifting inexorably toward Neutral Good. I still believed in a higher spiritual power, and I wanted to leave the world better than I found it, and I was willing to work toward those ends.
Then came boohoodles of real life, negative experiences with the "real" world, outside of the shelter of academia. My religion gradually turned to atheism, and my hard skepticism about the worth of religious and philosophical abstractions and myths grew and grew. As I became more and more cynical and hardened, my willingness to sacrifice my own comfort for the benefit of others began to shrink, and my real life alignment got closer and closer to true neutral.
Paradoxically, lest I sadden or depress anybody, I still have a very jovial, optimistic side. Part of me loves and relishes life, and still has faith that this whole consciousness thing is created and governed by a Source of Human Goodness. (google Henry Nelson Wieman).
So, I have gone from being entirely Lawful Good to the core, to some mixture of having both "good" (I hate suffering, for me or anybody else, and wish I could alleviate it somehow) and "neutral" (I'm very lazy and selfish, now) in my alignment. Most of those online tests wind up pegging my current, seasoned alignment as "True Neutral".
I started out as Keldorn, but now, I have a mix of Xan and Jaheira in my personality.
I guess I always dreamed of being the awesome good hero when I was a kid, you know Robin Hood, paladins, knight in shining armour in and all...
But after spending too much time with the society, being way too nice for my own good, and losing the child's innocence, I just want do what has to be done now. Screw being nice and screw caring. It's all about LE and TN now.
I agree with you that most kids want to be good (or at least regarded as good), but I don't think that humans are inherently "good." Since we're products of the societies in which we're raised, I don't think there is any "natural" alignment to humans. We are taught what is "good" and "evil" (but "good" is always "us" and "evil" is always "them"). We're exposed to norms and values by our families and communities, and what is considered good/evil, right/wrong, and desirable/undesirable are all social constructions: subjective, consensual understandings of the world in which we live. Most kids want to be good because they're taught that being good is desirable.
I never said I believed humans are inherently good, I believe no such thing. I believe humans are inherently of the self-serving attitude above all else, it's ingrained in our genetics. In a lot of societies, being good is self-serving, because having a prospering society benefits the individual. But I believe becoming more good or evil than is self-serving requires shaping of some sort to one's personality.
I think that Santa Claus and my mother's and grandmother's childish glee in spoiling me at Christmastime had more to do with my eventual belief in God (as a teenager), than anything "real" or "true" about the idea.
A few of my characters end up changing alignment part way through the game, but that's due to character development, not a sudden urge to play a different alignment.
When BG1 came out I started as a young pure chaotic evil 18 year old elf (shame on me for picking an elf), for the simple reason that evil chars are always more interesting. Sadly the interpretation of chaotic evil in BG1 left me with the feeling of being "stupid evil". Just like a Ned Stark turned evil... or a Knights of the Old Republic evil character.
Then years passed, BG2, Planescape and the IWD series were released (great games all of them), and my dissapointment with 3d games and game industry in general grew up. But I digress.
Every "good doer" answer option in those games left me with the feeling of being an idiot aswell (maybe I was already and did not knew). But also, if you stop to think about it... there was no reason to kill half the city because THAT npc in particular was wearing a robe or an apparently fancy shield, and thus it must have gotten some good loot on it... or because that dead end conversation lead me either to do as someone whished, or being slaughtered by the guards/thugs/idiots (back to kill half the city).
Thats what I mean by limiting options to be really chaotic evil: your reputation was harmed (I dont mind low rep, I mind the consequences) everyone attacked you and ruined the rpg feeling turning the game into a Diablo style Npc hunt in the Sword Coast. You might even not be able to finish certain quests (unless I remember wrong) and well... wandering the country killing everyone while you exchange jokes with Xzar and Montaron gets old fast.
So as it turns out Neutral Evil seemed the best choice. And I was happy and the games satisfying, for a few years.
Then one day (lets say 29 years half-elf... still shame on me but not as bad as pure elf) I realized that really did not care that much for those faceless npcs. Their personal dramas, some old fart who never told me the truth (which I dont care about lets face it) about my past and my heritage, a bunch of kobolds terrifying some miners.
At some point the most amusing conversation I had was with some villager who was vomiting corn (at least thats how they translated it). I really wanted that guy to come with my party and kill the monsters vomiting on them (the villager scratching his ass was cool aswell).
So in the end I took the chaotic Neutral bus, for the above mentioned reasons and others that dont relate (dissapointing facts of life, jobless).
And we had good adventures, and we ate villagers, saved Kobold maidens in perill and all those things heroes do. Kinda.
And we still do.
Extract from "The incredibly exciting life of a 32 year old chaotic neutral human fighter (ocassionally fighter/thief)" .
From there, I have moved to Neutral Good as my favorite alignment in my late teens, and now I tend to play Lawful good characters, with NG, N, and LN characters being close seconds. I'll play as all alignments, but those three are the most common for me.
So pretty much, my characters have gone from Chaotic to Lawful, and though they still lean towards Good, I play Neutral a lot more often.
...I still stay away from Evil characters unless I just have a really good concept for one and want to see how they'd be in actual roleplay.