A common trend among player characters within RPGs is that they tend to be blank slates - protagonists with little predetermined history or personality that players can customize as they see fit. This is particularly true among games that emulate Dungeons & Dragons or similar tabletop releases. Players are often allowed to change their character's race and class, allocate skill points, and pick dialogue options or other choices based on what they feel best suits the game's protagonist. However, not many RPGs take full advantage of another important aspect of D&D character creation: moral alignment.

If customizable RPG characters have any moral alignment, it's usually because players impose it on them for the purpose of roleplaying. In Skyrim, for example, there's no mechanic in place to determine that the Dragonborn is lawful good. Players will still be able to kill and steal without justification. A player who wants their character to be more law-abiding, though, could opt to simply refrain from playing through any actions that their character wouldn't logically do. Even then, it often feels like the gameplay actively discourages a lawful approach. Many main questlines like the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim and those of similar games cannot be completed or sometimes even started without committing actions that certain morally-inclined characters wouldn't have sound reason to.

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Fortunately, there are quite a few mods out there for various RPGs that help to make the alignment system a more inherent part of gameplay, either by adding alternative pathways for players to take or by restricting certain actions based on a character's chosen alignment. Many RPGs would have more replayability if they included similar features from the start, though, as players would be more inclined to pick different options with each different character alignment. Developers could even go so far as to restrict players from engaging with certain elements if they clash with the protagonist's alignment, meaning that multiple different characters would be necessary to fully experience all the game had to offer. Disco Elysium recently featured similar systems (to critical acclaim) that helped create character identity, despite being far more morally ambiguous.

RPGs Need To Offer D&D's Levels Of Player Freedom

Two D&D characters examine a stack of books

It could be argued that PC RPGs are inherently different from tabletop games in a way that would make it difficult if not impossible to fully capture the experience. In Dungeons & Dragons, if a player were to encounter a wolf there are potentially dozens of different actions that they could choose to take from there, limited only by the scope of the player's creativity and the level of freedom a DM is willing to give them in that precise situation. This could vary drastically depending on which rules a DM enforces and how strictly. While the game's foundation remains the same, the specific circumstances of the moment are always shifting in real-time with each encounter: something that can't necessarily be achieved in a pre-programed computer game. When a character in a RPG such as Skyrim encounters a wolf, then, they're met with significantly less options - for example, they couldn't befriend it as a pet without the use of mods.

Game studios could help get closer to the feeling of D&D by adding actions that correspond to different character alignments. An evil character would be given the option to complete a quest through murder, stealing, or blackmail. A good character may instead be presented with persuasive options or made to complete other tasks for villagers to earn the next step in the larger questline - there are plenty of creative ways to play good D&D characters, and RPGs could take advantage of that. This would open the world of the game up to a much wider range of player freedom, encouraging additional playthroughs and allowing players to fully flesh out the protagonist they've created. While there are many other mechanics that more RPGs could stand to borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, moral alignment is arguably one of the features with the most potential in the world of video games.

Next: What D&D Backgrounds Are Best For Which Classes (& How To Choose)