In praise of NWN2 & Alignment

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I have a couple of saves of different characters in NWN2 and while some of the story writting or graphics aren't as good as games today I do have one thing to praise about the game that seems to hold up well today.

Their alignment system let your character change his or her alignment over time with the sum of multile decisions.

Any of these decisions seem to add or take away 1-3 points on an alignment scale where each alignment has a set value. Make enough Lawful decisions as a Chaotic character and your character's alignment may shift to Neutral (or even Lawful eventually). Ditto for the reverse as well as Good and Evil.

I like this because it is arguable that character typically follows his or her alignment but may not every single time.

Even a lawful good character may loose his cool and do something unlawful while a evil character may occasionally do something nice without expecting a reward. Both of these characters can occasionally do something different but still keep their prior alignments because that isn't what they typically do even though they did this 1 time or a few times.


However if these aren't just a few incidents but a pattern of behavior that runs opposite to a specific alignment then it makes sense the alignment may change.

 

Problem is with this approach is you are relying on the module designer to assign the changes appropriately. Remember one module I played where my lawful good paladin rapidly ended up chaotic good as the builder had set it so unless you played lawful stupid you moved across to chaotic.

 

Also IIRC, it was difficult to play lawful evil. Most lawful decisions were also good.

 

I think chaotic good was also difficult in the OC, but not as hard as lawful evil or lawful neutral.

Being True Neutral was also a challenge without committing evil acts just to stay "in balance". You tended to drift towards Good since a neutral character might not go out of his way to be self-sacrificially heroic, but won't commit deliberately evil acts just to stay "in balance". This led to him gradually becoming Good in the game.
Actually, any of the neutral statuses were hard to maintain, but the good/evil axis was harder than the law/chaos one.