Source
r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker•
NotNullTerminated

Silly alignment shifts and shout-out: mod to fix them

Righteous : Mods

Picking 'good' or 'evil' options can potentially ruin your alignment along the lawful/chaotic axis. My paladin 'fell' once because she picked too many 'good' options and became neutral good. IMO, shifts along the lawful/chaotic axis should only occur if you actually take an action that explicitly moves you in that direction. Of course you can use a scroll of redemption, but I feel that's just dealing with the symptom, not with the cause.

The wonderful lad09 (i.e. not me) has written a mod to fix this and I'm loving it.

Posted Sep 20, 2021, 6:54 AM UTC

2231
throwmeinwatersam•

Yeah, I was genuinely surprised today about it after getting the tick about my Alignment shift. There's not a lot of good (not Good, but good, thought-out) Chaotic dialogue options from what I'm experiencing so far, so I end up just sticking to Neutral dialogue or Good. I really don't understand why they made so much of Chaotic either border-line evil, stupid, or negligent. That's not what it means to be chaotic and defeats the purpose of CG Alignment. Anyway, yeah lol. I'll probably use the mod for my next run.

14
CI_Iconoclast•

Because chaotic needs to encompass chaotic good, neutral, and evil. That's why you get mindless butchery as chaotic in one set of dialogue and in another it's all love and freedom and flowers. It's a consequence of removing dual axis dialogue choices in favor of single axis, it contributes this weirdness but at the same time it lets there be more evil dialogue thats not just wanton murder like most of the evil dialogue seemed to be in kingmaker.

10
Nyghtrid3rTentacles•

Except half the evil choices are still being a murderhobo. There really should have been more dialog options (inconsequential dialog choices that just give you a different response or cause short term outcomes which would have been easy to implement, not choices that lead to another branching path), and they should have kept multi-alignment choices.

10
JeanMarkk•

And if they did that a huge chunk of people would be complaining that the dialogue is pointless because it changes nothing, just like they do in every other game that has ever tried that.

1
Nyghtrid3rTentacles•

Dialogue doesn't need to do that. The game doesn't always need exactly 9 choices or more, but simply being able to flesh out your character or, you know, not lose your LG alignment because you picked the Good option more often than the clearly Lawful Evil or Lawful Stupid """Lawful""" option.

But then again, the entire dialog based alignment shift system is deeply flawed, because it doesn't allow nuance. You can still be Lawful Good if you are 75% Good and 25% Lawful. The game forces a 50/50 split in the long run, though.

6
Sthrax•

This happened to me as well- picked too many "Good" choices and now my Paladin is screwed over. This is just plain dumb as most Paladin codes in Pathfinder actually push the "good" option over the "lawful" if the two conflict. No tabletop DM would ever cause a paladin to fall over picking the "good" choice, especially when many of the "lawful" options are clearly not good and borderline evil.

6
AwesomeDewey•

I'm at the stage where if I pick more Evil options my Neutral Good character will become Chaotic Good, which is... weird.

5
WolfWhiteFireInquisitor•

It makes sense to me. Your character is just regular good right now. If a good person started occasionally acting out of character for them, losing their temper and killing someone, making cruel remarks, whatever evil option you chose, that apparent mental instability would definitely make them seem more chaotic, and if it gets too bad then they would switch to neutral then evil.

Meanwhile, someone who is practically a saint and thus further along the good axis, or who keeps to some sort of code or set of beliefs, would help counteract that somewhat and make them be viewed as less chaotic.

2
CalmButArgumentative•

Totally agree with you. The good choices just FEEL right most of the time for a Lawful Good Paladin that wants to do good.

I intentionally picked all the inoffensive lawful options to balance it out, but I'm still on the border to becoming neutral at this point.

The alignment system is straight-up stupid, especially if you consider that if you just pick a few evil options it actually ALSO moves you away from the neutral alignment, and thuds you could pick Good + Evil options and REMAIN in Lawful Good.

That fact alone shows the whole system is completely flawed.

4
JeanMarkk•

Well if a LG character never picks Lawful choices and only Good ones, than it's correct that they should shift to NG.

If you want to play a LG character then you need to balance out the Lawful and Good parts.

2†
NotNullTerminatedOPCleric•

What are you talking about?

The game very rarely even gives you the option to choose between an alignment on the lawful/chaotic and one on the good/evil axis. Most of the time you'll get one or the other. And I'm not willing to accept that every time I do get the choice to pick a lawful option, I have to pick it because I already picked good too often when I didn't even get an option to pick lawful, i.e. 'balancing' was impossible.

The writing is fantastic in this game, but that is railroading and thus a mechanical flaw, pure and simple.

6
JeanMarkk•

You realize that between "always" and "never" there are other options right?

Nobody is saying that you must always pick a lawful aligment choice, the problem is just when you never pick one.

And yes, a character that only picks Good choices but never a Lawful one would be Neutral Good.

That is neither railroading nor a mechanical flaw, it's just common sense.

0†
NotNullTerminatedOPCleric•

It's not that easy.

If a decision point gives you three choices: 'pardon the prisoner (GOOD)', 'let the prisoner stew in his cell (NOTHING)' and 'execute the prisoner (EVIL)', then what would a LG paladin pick? Correct, they'd most probably pick GOOD, ergo endangering their LG alignment.

Doing the unrated (neutral) thing induces no alignment change whatsoever, so despite you NOT being good and NOT being lawful either you'll just stay at LG.

Ergo: Do the good thing and you risk falling (from LG to NG). Do the non-good thing and you don't risk falling.

Don't you see the problem there?

5
JeanMarkk•

A single instance doesn't mean anything.

You don't fall for 1 choice.

If throught the game you never pick any Lawful choices and just stick to Good ones, you are behaving like a Neutral Good character and so eventually your aligment will shift.

You can't just point at a made up example to prove how you are right.

0†
worm4realWizard•

Jesus, I'm glad I just played Evil now.

2
pathofdumbasses•

I'm playing a lawful neutral monk that I'm going to make into a chaotic trickster. It took me almost 2 chapters to go from lawful to neutral picking pretty much every chaotic choice that isn't straight up ass clown evil. If you are doing the same thing accidentally, you really aren't lawful. Lawful doesn't necessarily care if the option is good or bad, the law is the law.

0
NotNullTerminatedOPCleric•

The problem is that the invisible N in answers that are marked as (good) or (evil) is a capital N: it drags you towards the center. so LG runs the risk of becoming NG just by picking (good), and CE runs the risk of becoming NE just by picking (evil), despite never actually picking an opposite on the law-chaos axis. The only way to escape that drag is to not pick good or evil at all, which really is counterintuitive.

My paladin did pick quite a few L choices when they got offered, but 'fell' exclusively due to picking (good) in those GxE situations. She would not have fallen if she hadn't picked (good) choices and had gone for the N alternative instead. That's just borked.

0
pathofdumbasses•

All of my choices have just moved me left/right on the alignment wheel. None of them have moved me up or down as I pretty much haven't picked a single good or evil choice. The choice system is not a dual system of lawfulness+good/evil at the same time.

I think you might be mis-remembering some of your choices mate. The bigger issue is that the law is harsh and cruel a lot of times so you probably didn't pick them enough. I played as an Aeon for my first play through before abandoning it. Lots of the choices I made were dick moves, BUT I AM THE LAW.

2
NotNullTerminatedOPCleric•

I get what you're saying, but if you haven't picked good/evil [much], you won't have noticed. It is as I described: picking (good) equals NEUTRAL good, moving you up (obviously) AND towards the center. The reverse is true for (evil) = NEUTRAL evil. You can check that in your character's biography.

Chaotic/Lawful don't suffer from the same center drag, IIRC.

Edit: Just to clarify, I don't have any issues with L. I have an issue with a hidden 'N' (in good-evil choices) being effectively treated as the opposite of my current alignment, in my pally's case chaotic. That's just not...

1
Contrite17•

This is not correct. You only get pulled toward neutral if you can get not further on the tagged alignment.

1