Greater than Ourselves

Paladins Can Loot?

This way, though, the player's conscience is salved preemptively. When the inevitable slaughter of hordes of enemies begins, a Good player has already rationalized killing them as the inevitable consequence of their Evil nature - and their experience point value. If the player has the audacity to choose Evil, well, what conscience is there to salve? Indiscriminate slaughter is Evil's watchword.

Alignment weights can also be abused more directly. If you pickpocket a farmer but rescue the blacksmith's daughter from her kidnappers, the net result is a shift in your alignment toward Good. Trying this approach in real life will make you pretty unpopular and maybe even land you in jail, but somehow it works just fine in BioWare's Neverwinter Nights. In fact, a Paladin in NWN can go to an inn, loot someone else's wardrobe and remain a Paladin; in tabletop D&D, the Paladin would immediately lose all unique Paladin abilities and have to undertake an atonement quest to regain them.

The outcome of these problems is twofold: Most CRPGs that implement an alignment system only assign weights to a small subset of actions - hence NWN's looting Paladins - and also severely restrict player choice in terms of both dialogue and course of action, in order to focus the game's narrative. In other words, the principal effects of the Gygax model on North American CRPGs have been less open, more linear gameplay, clich