What are they? I will gather opinions from the thread and organize them into this post, as well as some post references.
Pro:
It's optional
Can be utilized for roleplaying
Can be utilized for character creation (Reference: SagaTympana, Post #12): Useful for picking out character details for archetypal characters.
It's guidelines keep character's consistent
Useful for picking out adventures based on your player's alignments (Reference: NaivaraArnuanna, Post #6)
Planescape setting
Con:
Broken gameplay mechanics (reference: quindraco, post #7):
Can be harmful to roleplaying (reference: quindraco, post #7): Alignment-based gameplay features may encourage players to pick alignments for their gameplay utility rather than their roleplaying qualities
Can break worldbuilding (reference: quindraco, post #7): It would be illogical if authorities from magic-wielding, developed territories, especially good aligned territories, didn't use detect evil and good to survey potential threats, because evil is generally bad for societies; so unless under special circumstances or the territory embraces it's evil, most evil territories probably wouldn't exist.
Spells or features like detect evil and good probably shouldn't exist if people can't agree on alignment
Alignment is rigid (References: Belial420, Post #3; NaivaraArnuanna, Post #6; Third_Sundering, Post #8; Spideycloned, Post #15):
It restricts characters from shifting to attitudes outside of their alignments and neglects other character qualities: the alignment system only measures morality and lawfulness, determining character's afterlives solely by these qualities regardless of whether their their most significant or distinguishable qualities.
The wide spectrum of distinctions between character's morality and lawfulness varies from person to person, people are amalgamations of conditional & unconditional behaviors, so a character's morality and lawfulness (along with other qualities) are unlikely to remain constant, especially for chaotic characters like anti-heroes.
Reinforces bad character design
Chaos can be difficult to classify:
Chaos can stem from different things: being chaotic can come from mental health problems, philosophical or political beliefs, a need to act out for validation and probably other sources, so being chaotic doesn't necessarily reflect every aspect of who they are, especially when they don't choose to be chaotic and it's something their not conscious of.
Their are different ways one can be chaotic: they could be adherent to only a few rules, but ignore all other rules, or they could be completely lawful, in the sense that they are devoted to following the rules in general, yet be chaotic in the sense that they flip from good to evil and vice versa. This can be an issue for characters with complex morality like anti-heroes, who can teeter between good and evil.
Not very optional: creatures without alignments lack personality, making creature design reliant on the alignment system
Some players abuse the alignment system
Easy to misunderstand
Alignment is subjective (References: Pantagruel666, Post #13; Spideycloned, post #15; OptimusGrimus, Post #31): It's subjective because people interpret alignment subjectively; they have their own views on morality and lawfulness, and that reflects how they view character alignments.
It's controversial and difficult to agree on (References: NaivaraArnuanna, Post # 6; Biowizard, Post #14)
It's a tool: good to have when you can use it, no skin off your nose to have when you don't. In terms of the player characters you can entirely ignore it if you want, so I don't think there are any meaningful cons anymore - don't want it, then don't use it. Players who do like the system can use it to guide their roleplay, but the biggest pro is almost certainly for DMs who like to incorporate Good, Evil, Chaos, Law and Neutrality (which I'd rename Balance or Equilibrium or something similar in that case) as powers in the cosmology of their setting.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
It can be useful shorthand at times for describing the general attitudes of some fantasy creatures or races.
In terms of specific characters, especially player characters, I find it to be too simplistic and lacking nuance to be of any actual use, and I find filling out your own personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws to be much more useful than the 3 by 3 alignment chart. Maybe useful short hand for npcs, but for fully fleshed out player characters I don't find much use for it.
Pro: It can be a really good RP aid -- it tells you at one glance the moral outlook of a character, and it can help a player lock into an RP scheme for a character that is otherwise not well developed in their mind yet.
Con: People can feel strait-jacketed if they feel like the "have to" RP a certain way -- that is if they come to view the guidelines as limits.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Pros: It’s easy to decide what adventures you can and can’t throw at your players (“a Good character might not want to do this quest”) or restrict what morality characters have (“no Evil characters this campaign”). Shorthand.
Cons: No one can decide what Law and Chaos mean, or even Good and Evil (e.g. consequentialism vs dentology vs virtue ethics). And they enable stupid meme characters like “stick-up-their-butt paladin” or “lol-so-random rogue.”
What are they. I will gather answers from posts from this thread and organize them in this post.
Cons:
In every edition, including 5E, the company making D&D misunderstands what alignments are for and introduces elements that break the world to varying degrees. Two 5E examples are the Rakshasa and the candle of invocation; any time your alignment has any mechanical impact on the game directly, someone made a bad rule. The details of exactly why and how it's bad vary based on impact; for example, if you allow a spell that detects alignments, every city on the planet should make it a capital crime to be evil, and your world will be very boring.
In 5E, widespread misunderstanding of the alignment system by players has fed back to the company, such that monsters no longer ship with alignments in their stat block, causing two problems.
Statblocks with no alignment listed are not well-defined, game-wise - the Monster Manual tells you how to read a statblock, and it insists a statblock has to have one of the ten 5E alignments.
When a DM fixes it by assigning an alignment, there's literally no guidance, which is what the original alignment entry was for - giving the DM an idea at a glance of the general mindset of the majority of this entity's kind. As this continues, expect more and more creatures where the DM has no idea how they're even intended to behave, what their motivations are, etc.
Pros:
An NPC with an alignment immediately lets a DM know at a glance roughly what the NPC's general attitude, etc will be - for a named NPC, anyway. For unnamed ones, it's a general guideline for how they generally are, culturally. Very useful for roleplaying the part of the NPC in question.
For PCs, well-understood and well-chosen alignments can serve as tools to help you keep in character, just like personality traits, bonds, ideals, and flaws.
Pros: I think that the main benefit of the alignment system is the Planescape setting, which I would love to have officially transported to 5e, but there are a few other benefits. It's a good tool to get an idea of how "typical D&D campaigns" work, for example, with the three types of goblinoids embodying the 3 different "types of evil", like Bugbears as Chaotic Evil, Goblins as Neutral Evil, and Hobgoblins as Lawful Evil. I've always liked that difference, even when I don't use alignment in my campaigns/worlds and have different tools to illustrate their differences besides a one-word moral difference between them. It can help inspire cool character concepts, like whenever I think of a Chaotic Good Paladin I think of an Elven Oath of the Ancients that wants freedom and justice for all creatures, and whenever I think of Chaotic Neutral Rogue, I think of a halfling Thief that kind of takes whatever from whomever.
Cons: It's an oversimplification of a complicated and nuanced topic, is mostly vestigial in 5e, and is not clear-cut "right and wrong" even though it often tries to pretend that it is (see Planescape). Furthermore, it has been used as an excuse for bad behavior in the past and has also been used as a gate to stop certain styles of play (see previous editions requiring paladins to be Lawful Good and similar examples). IMO, any form of alignment should be explicitly optional (quite possibly limited to Planescape and the DMG), and it should be a tool, not a gate (granted, 5e has gotten rid of almost all of these gates, but some still remain).
DMs have an "at-a-glance" tool to understand or assign NPC attitudes, motivations, and likely behaviors
It enables the world cosmology and understandings of outerplanar beings
It enables players to set a general tone for their character's background at the start of a campaign
Cons:
If followed too rigidly, players can feel pigeonholed in their character's behaviors
It's mostly vestigial in gameplay, except in a few glaring areas
My biggest thing I tell my players in session 0 is that their alignment is mainly set to define their character up to that point. Once the campaign begins, alignment can shift as the players develop the character further. I also try to encourage them to find something beyond simple alignment as a motivating force (does the PC worship a god, or belong to a creed).
Pros: moral categorization of fictional characters is actually really useful, even (or especially?) if the story is one in which most characters are neutral. It provides a very simply and easy guide to roleplaying decisions. It aids immensely in achieving consistent characterization.
Cons: I'll be honest, I don't think the concept of the alignment grid per se has many cons? I think the books traditionally explain things very poorly (5e's descriptions of law and chaos are utterly meaningless, for example), and it's apparently very easy for some people to treat alignment as prescriptive, rather than descriptive, but that's not really alignment's fault. "It's possible to **** it up" is true of anything; I'm not comfortable blaming the tool for that.
The fact that it's an oversimplification isn't a bug; it's a feature. It's meant to be a quick-and-dirty, easily graspable initial answer to the question "what would this character do," which then acquires more specific context as the thought deepens. It's a springboard, not a destination. If it were more complicated, it wouldn't work.
The big problem is that people who play the game often both (a) have strong opinions about what it means to be 'good' or 'evil', and (b) don't reliably agree with one another. Conversely, people mostly don't have strong opinions about what it means to be lawful or chaotic, nor does the game system do a great job of explaining, so people don't have a sense of what it even means.
The other problem is that assigning alignments to monsters that should have free will is problematic. It's okay for creatures that lack free will, or where they are what they are by choice, but it gets into trouble with things like orcs.
The other problem, besides people not agreeing, occurs when some people want to follow the "classical" alignment definitions and others at the same table think 'alignment is b/s" -- you can have a lot of trouble from the table not being in agreement about how to treat alignment.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The other problem, besides people not agreeing, occurs when some people want to follow the "classical" alignment definitions and others at the same table think 'alignment is b/s" -- you can have a lot of trouble from the table not being in agreement about how to treat alignment.
This is really what it boils down to.
Alignment as a construct existed(I use past tense because no recently released books reference alignment in any way) as an easy way to help both players/DMs guide the game. Due to it's existence in D&D and other games for the last 30 years, it's just ingrained into the hobby. To earlier points, there are things in 5th edition that work based off alignment from candles of invocation to Robes of the Archmagi. Getting rid of alignment mid edition is tricky, and honestly shouldn't have been done. That being said, it was easier to start to get rid of alignments and start the change now during the most popular edition of D&D ever rather than do it during what will eventually be the playtest for 6th.
I've ALWAYS hated the concept of alignment, because it's a great casual glance at character creation thing for PCs, but that's it. There's also the fact that just because my character is "Lawful Good" doesn't mean that my character won't do an inherently evil action if he BELIEVES the action is good or that the outcome might influence the greater good. I think it's safe to say most of us have seen that argument at the table either from a character to another character, or a DM to a character of "Your character wouldn't do that, it's against their alignment". Whereas my response is "It's my bloody character, I'm the one who knows what it wants to do. I know these actions will have consequences but that's a future me problem, and right now I have to deal with present situations."
I do think the game will be better off without the concept of it. I think as a whole the fantasy genre has evolved and its denizens have enough experience/material to better portray good vs evil without just categorizing every single being of a single sect as evil.
It's fantasy. For myself I want there to be evil in the world and good to counter it. I think it's stupid to think Sauron or Voldemort were merely misunderstood.
Even when it comes to items, yes it's tropey, but I like having weapons of great goodness like Glamdring or evil like Morganti Blades.
Sure there are cons, but they are the creation of misguided players (HA!)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
What are they. I will gather answers from posts from this thread and organize them in this post.
Con:
In the real world many of life's great mysteries have influenced cultures and societies. They have influenced religions, art, poetry, etc. and have influenced individuals ideas about the world. Humans can create because we have an imagination, but in a world where everything is completely objective and everyone is omniscient: all of life would be a hive mind with probably no value to create beyond survival and imagination would no longer serve a purpose, because everything would already be imagined and nothing new could be thought of.
The alignment system has more to do with itself than with characters: Morality and personality traits shouldn't be based on cosmic planes, because these things vary from person to person and people are a blend of behaviors that change from time to time, fluctuating at a rate of who the person is; with the variety of morality and personality traits, many characters couldn't fit into a single category. The cosmic planes aren't flexible, they don't reflect the wide spectrum of distinctions between characters that supposedly matter (morality and lawfulness). If someone's alignment is somewhere between two categories of morality e.g. between good and neutral, then which plane do they go to? If their alignment changes after death, do they still stay in the same cosmic plane?
Erm... is this supposed to be "gathered from this thread"? Right now I'm getting the impression you are more interested in taking down the alignment system than in any objective discussion of it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
That being said, it was easier to start to get rid of alignments and start the change now during the most popular edition of D&D ever rather than do it during what will eventually be the playtest for 6th.
If I may, this sentence makes a weird connection. The design decision to tone it down was pre-PH release, and there was no way at that point in time that they knew it would become the most popular edition ever...
And I'm less and less convinced that there will be a 6e, and in any case not any time soon.
There will be a 6th. This edition is not forever. If it is, its because D&D dies with this edition and with the money that happened with this one, will never happen. WoTC has made more with this edition and sold more copies of this edition than most other editions combined.
We're in the process of the death of the alignment system. At the start of 5th, it existed and was actively designed around. It was actively mentioned in the SRD/Chapter 4 of the Basic Rules. Chapter 7 of the DMG talks about alignments for Sentinent Magic Items. The introduction to the monster manual talks about the concept of alignments. In 2019 when the new essentials kit came out, you know what it talked about? The Young Adventurers Guide which came out in the first half of 2020? Where it talks about how all Orcs are inherently evil? You guessed it.
Alignment.
The reason Tashas is so abhorrently reviled by a section of the community is the stripping of it. Even then, it doesn't really do that! It never actively addresses the fact that certain races are inherently evil, it just goes "Well, maybe you're different!", which honestly is what people of color have been told all their life if they don't "fit in with their kind". All Tashas OFFICIALLY did was just start to remove the alignment words out of creature stat blocks. That's it. The reason for that is in order to truly change how alignment works, you'd have to change all the previously release material for this edition. You'd have to rewrite the PHB, Monster Manual and DMG. Some of that has kind of been done, with the changes to the Vistani in Curse of Strahd, one of the most egregious examples of awful stereotyping combined with alignment issues. The issue becomes how do you do that when you have 30+ years of lore in multiple mediums and how do you do it in a way thats caring but at the same time respectful to everyone? Short answer is, you can't. Some people are gonna get mad. That's fine, the ones who are going to be angriest are probably those who aren't receptive to the thoughts and feelings to those it affects negatively.
So that's the con of the current alignment system. Did it work for 30+ years? Sure. Does it work today? No. Will it diminish my enjoyment of a Lord of the Rings movie and watching every single Uruk-Hai be considered an evil being? No. Do I have faith that the Amazon series will address that? No, because within that construct of that lore, that is defined, but D&D isn't. New lore is produced, and new interpretations exist. The cosmology can be changed from an official stance, and combine that now with how we all run our tables different, we all tell our own stories and we as the community have a great power to keep the game running in the way that should be the most inclusive to everyone. If that means getting rid of the alignment system? Burn the bloody thing to the goddamn ground.
Relatively simple way to define the basics of an NPC you don't want to put the effort into thinking about
Some people, particularly "traditionalists", seem to like it and use it as core parts of their settings
Cons
Very badly understood, with often massive differences in personal definitions between players at a table and leading to arguments (especially when used as a core defining attribute of the character concept)
Often used to pigeonhole characters (player and non-player)
IMHO Lazy and boring, often used as a way to avoid deeper thoughts about the character's personality and morality
Encourages thinking in terms of absolutes (especially when taken with the Planescape), when morality is more often relative, malleable and circumstantial (which, as well as being more realistic is vastly more interesting to play, IMHO)
Encourages the use of lazy and damaging tropes (e.g. All Orcs Are Evil)
What are they. I will gather answers from posts from this thread and organize them in this post.
Con:
In the real world many of life's great mysteries have influenced cultures and societies. They have influenced religions, art, poetry, etc. and have influenced individuals ideas about the world. Humans can create because we have an imagination, but in a world where everything is completely objective and everyone is omniscient: all of life would be a hive mind with probably no value to create beyond survival and imagination would no longer serve a purpose, because everything would already be imagined and nothing new could be thought of.
The alignment system has more to do with itself than with characters: Morality and personality traits shouldn't be based on cosmic planes, because these things vary from person to person and people are a blend of behaviors that change from time to time, fluctuating at a rate of who the person is; with the variety of morality and personality traits, many characters couldn't fit into a single category. The cosmic planes aren't flexible, they don't reflect the wide spectrum of distinctions between characters that supposedly matter (morality and lawfulness). If someone's alignment is somewhere between two categories of morality e.g. between good and neutral, then which plane do they go to? If their alignment changes after death, do they still stay in the same cosmic plane?
Sorry, I have almost no idea what you're trying to convey here.
Alignment is great for giving an indication of where your character is at the moment and can help you decide on what to do when you find yourself in situations where you're asking "what would my character do".
Alignment is not something locked down as I see it. It can be changed over time.
Alignment is great for giving an indication of where your character is at the moment and can help you decide on what to do when you find yourself in situations where you're asking "what would my character do".
Alignment is not something locked down as I see it. It can be changed over time.
If you need your alignment in order to figure out what your character would do in a given situation, surely you have bigger problems. Especially if you first have to figure out what your alignment is and how it may have changed recently.
Now, for a throwaway NPC, sure. It can give a good indication without thinking about the character in much detail.
Alignment is interesting. There must be 20 threads on it in the last month. Ask one person what they think a given Alignment should be played like, get one answer. Ask two? You get 3 answers from each of them and they probably change their votes four times each. It goes up exponentially from there.
The Pro side is that it's very simple.
Two words that tells you all you need to know about the character's morals and ethics. You don't have to follow it, you can go against expectations at any time, so it's really just a matter of whim. You wonder how a character would think if they were differently aligned from yourself? There you go. "I'm Chaotic, my character is Lawful, so I'm going to break expectations and do something totally Chaotic." *flips coin* "I shoot the magistrate with my hand crossbow, throw it to the bailiff, and scream 'I saw it all! I was looking right at him! He did it!' (while pointing at the magistrate) For extra bonus points, poison the bolt first, be holding the vial of poison, and use it to point.
The Con side is that it's very simple.
It really gives a DM no clue how to handle interactions between the players and the things they encounter if you don't know their Alignment. The trend of removing Alignment from stat blocks makes this worse. Then it takes research to know anything about goals and motivations. Sure, Drow are all evil and slaughter anyone they don't take as slaves to slaughter later at their leisure after they torture them, but maybe this one does it in a nice way. They are all hearts and flowers, puppies, kittens and children. (Who are lovely when properly cooked and served. 350 degrees with a little lemon... don't ask me how I know that.)
What are they? I will gather opinions from the thread and organize them into this post, as well as some post references.
Pro:
Con:
It's a tool: good to have when you can use it, no skin off your nose to have when you don't. In terms of the player characters you can entirely ignore it if you want, so I don't think there are any meaningful cons anymore - don't want it, then don't use it. Players who do like the system can use it to guide their roleplay, but the biggest pro is almost certainly for DMs who like to incorporate Good, Evil, Chaos, Law and Neutrality (which I'd rename Balance or Equilibrium or something similar in that case) as powers in the cosmology of their setting.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Pros: It's a good general reminder for yourself on how to react to situations, make decisions, and interact with others and NPCs
Cons: Way too much gray area in my opinion, can be hard to stay consistent with alignment in unusual situations
It can be useful shorthand at times for describing the general attitudes of some fantasy creatures or races.
In terms of specific characters, especially player characters, I find it to be too simplistic and lacking nuance to be of any actual use, and I find filling out your own personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws to be much more useful than the 3 by 3 alignment chart. Maybe useful short hand for npcs, but for fully fleshed out player characters I don't find much use for it.
Pro: It can be a really good RP aid -- it tells you at one glance the moral outlook of a character, and it can help a player lock into an RP scheme for a character that is otherwise not well developed in their mind yet.
Con: People can feel strait-jacketed if they feel like the "have to" RP a certain way -- that is if they come to view the guidelines as limits.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Pros: It’s easy to decide what adventures you can and can’t throw at your players (“a Good character might not want to do this quest”) or restrict what morality characters have (“no Evil characters this campaign”). Shorthand.
Cons: No one can decide what Law and Chaos mean, or even Good and Evil (e.g. consequentialism vs dentology vs virtue ethics). And they enable stupid meme characters like “stick-up-their-butt paladin” or “lol-so-random rogue.”
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Cons:
Pros:
Pros: Planescape!
Cons: Pretty much everything else.
Okay, okay, I'll be a bit more serious now. ;)
Pros: I think that the main benefit of the alignment system is the Planescape setting, which I would love to have officially transported to 5e, but there are a few other benefits. It's a good tool to get an idea of how "typical D&D campaigns" work, for example, with the three types of goblinoids embodying the 3 different "types of evil", like Bugbears as Chaotic Evil, Goblins as Neutral Evil, and Hobgoblins as Lawful Evil. I've always liked that difference, even when I don't use alignment in my campaigns/worlds and have different tools to illustrate their differences besides a one-word moral difference between them. It can help inspire cool character concepts, like whenever I think of a Chaotic Good Paladin I think of an Elven Oath of the Ancients that wants freedom and justice for all creatures, and whenever I think of Chaotic Neutral Rogue, I think of a halfling Thief that kind of takes whatever from whomever.
Cons: It's an oversimplification of a complicated and nuanced topic, is mostly vestigial in 5e, and is not clear-cut "right and wrong" even though it often tries to pretend that it is (see Planescape). Furthermore, it has been used as an excuse for bad behavior in the past and has also been used as a gate to stop certain styles of play (see previous editions requiring paladins to be Lawful Good and similar examples). IMO, any form of alignment should be explicitly optional (quite possibly limited to Planescape and the DMG), and it should be a tool, not a gate (granted, 5e has gotten rid of almost all of these gates, but some still remain).
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Pros:
Cons:
My biggest thing I tell my players in session 0 is that their alignment is mainly set to define their character up to that point. Once the campaign begins, alignment can shift as the players develop the character further. I also try to encourage them to find something beyond simple alignment as a motivating force (does the PC worship a god, or belong to a creed).
Pros: moral categorization of fictional characters is actually really useful, even (or especially?) if the story is one in which most characters are neutral. It provides a very simply and easy guide to roleplaying decisions. It aids immensely in achieving consistent characterization.
Cons: I'll be honest, I don't think the concept of the alignment grid per se has many cons? I think the books traditionally explain things very poorly (5e's descriptions of law and chaos are utterly meaningless, for example), and it's apparently very easy for some people to treat alignment as prescriptive, rather than descriptive, but that's not really alignment's fault. "It's possible to **** it up" is true of anything; I'm not comfortable blaming the tool for that.
The fact that it's an oversimplification isn't a bug; it's a feature. It's meant to be a quick-and-dirty, easily graspable initial answer to the question "what would this character do," which then acquires more specific context as the thought deepens. It's a springboard, not a destination. If it were more complicated, it wouldn't work.
The big problem is that people who play the game often both (a) have strong opinions about what it means to be 'good' or 'evil', and (b) don't reliably agree with one another. Conversely, people mostly don't have strong opinions about what it means to be lawful or chaotic, nor does the game system do a great job of explaining, so people don't have a sense of what it even means.
The other problem is that assigning alignments to monsters that should have free will is problematic. It's okay for creatures that lack free will, or where they are what they are by choice, but it gets into trouble with things like orcs.
The other problem, besides people not agreeing, occurs when some people want to follow the "classical" alignment definitions and others at the same table think 'alignment is b/s" -- you can have a lot of trouble from the table not being in agreement about how to treat alignment.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
This is really what it boils down to.
Alignment as a construct existed(I use past tense because no recently released books reference alignment in any way) as an easy way to help both players/DMs guide the game. Due to it's existence in D&D and other games for the last 30 years, it's just ingrained into the hobby. To earlier points, there are things in 5th edition that work based off alignment from candles of invocation to Robes of the Archmagi. Getting rid of alignment mid edition is tricky, and honestly shouldn't have been done. That being said, it was easier to start to get rid of alignments and start the change now during the most popular edition of D&D ever rather than do it during what will eventually be the playtest for 6th.
I've ALWAYS hated the concept of alignment, because it's a great casual glance at character creation thing for PCs, but that's it. There's also the fact that just because my character is "Lawful Good" doesn't mean that my character won't do an inherently evil action if he BELIEVES the action is good or that the outcome might influence the greater good. I think it's safe to say most of us have seen that argument at the table either from a character to another character, or a DM to a character of "Your character wouldn't do that, it's against their alignment". Whereas my response is "It's my bloody character, I'm the one who knows what it wants to do. I know these actions will have consequences but that's a future me problem, and right now I have to deal with present situations."
I do think the game will be better off without the concept of it. I think as a whole the fantasy genre has evolved and its denizens have enough experience/material to better portray good vs evil without just categorizing every single being of a single sect as evil.
It's fantasy. For myself I want there to be evil in the world and good to counter it. I think it's stupid to think Sauron or Voldemort were merely misunderstood.
Even when it comes to items, yes it's tropey, but I like having weapons of great goodness like Glamdring or evil like Morganti Blades.
Sure there are cons, but they are the creation of misguided players (HA!)
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Erm... is this supposed to be "gathered from this thread"? Right now I'm getting the impression you are more interested in taking down the alignment system than in any objective discussion of it.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
There will be a 6th. This edition is not forever. If it is, its because D&D dies with this edition and with the money that happened with this one, will never happen. WoTC has made more with this edition and sold more copies of this edition than most other editions combined.
We're in the process of the death of the alignment system. At the start of 5th, it existed and was actively designed around. It was actively mentioned in the SRD/Chapter 4 of the Basic Rules. Chapter 7 of the DMG talks about alignments for Sentinent Magic Items. The introduction to the monster manual talks about the concept of alignments. In 2019 when the new essentials kit came out, you know what it talked about? The Young Adventurers Guide which came out in the first half of 2020? Where it talks about how all Orcs are inherently evil? You guessed it.
Alignment.
The reason Tashas is so abhorrently reviled by a section of the community is the stripping of it. Even then, it doesn't really do that! It never actively addresses the fact that certain races are inherently evil, it just goes "Well, maybe you're different!", which honestly is what people of color have been told all their life if they don't "fit in with their kind". All Tashas OFFICIALLY did was just start to remove the alignment words out of creature stat blocks. That's it. The reason for that is in order to truly change how alignment works, you'd have to change all the previously release material for this edition. You'd have to rewrite the PHB, Monster Manual and DMG. Some of that has kind of been done, with the changes to the Vistani in Curse of Strahd, one of the most egregious examples of awful stereotyping combined with alignment issues. The issue becomes how do you do that when you have 30+ years of lore in multiple mediums and how do you do it in a way thats caring but at the same time respectful to everyone? Short answer is, you can't. Some people are gonna get mad. That's fine, the ones who are going to be angriest are probably those who aren't receptive to the thoughts and feelings to those it affects negatively.
So that's the con of the current alignment system. Did it work for 30+ years? Sure. Does it work today? No. Will it diminish my enjoyment of a Lord of the Rings movie and watching every single Uruk-Hai be considered an evil being? No. Do I have faith that the Amazon series will address that? No, because within that construct of that lore, that is defined, but D&D isn't. New lore is produced, and new interpretations exist. The cosmology can be changed from an official stance, and combine that now with how we all run our tables different, we all tell our own stories and we as the community have a great power to keep the game running in the way that should be the most inclusive to everyone. If that means getting rid of the alignment system? Burn the bloody thing to the goddamn ground.
Pros
Cons
Sorry, I have almost no idea what you're trying to convey here.
Alignment is great for giving an indication of where your character is at the moment and can help you decide on what to do when you find yourself in situations where you're asking "what would my character do".
Alignment is not something locked down as I see it. It can be changed over time.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
If you need your alignment in order to figure out what your character would do in a given situation, surely you have bigger problems. Especially if you first have to figure out what your alignment is and how it may have changed recently.
Now, for a throwaway NPC, sure. It can give a good indication without thinking about the character in much detail.
Alignment is interesting. There must be 20 threads on it in the last month. Ask one person what they think a given Alignment should be played like, get one answer. Ask two? You get 3 answers from each of them and they probably change their votes four times each. It goes up exponentially from there.
The Pro side is that it's very simple.
Two words that tells you all you need to know about the character's morals and ethics. You don't have to follow it, you can go against expectations at any time, so it's really just a matter of whim. You wonder how a character would think if they were differently aligned from yourself? There you go. "I'm Chaotic, my character is Lawful, so I'm going to break expectations and do something totally Chaotic." *flips coin* "I shoot the magistrate with my hand crossbow, throw it to the bailiff, and scream 'I saw it all! I was looking right at him! He did it!' (while pointing at the magistrate) For extra bonus points, poison the bolt first, be holding the vial of poison, and use it to point.
The Con side is that it's very simple.
It really gives a DM no clue how to handle interactions between the players and the things they encounter if you don't know their Alignment. The trend of removing Alignment from stat blocks makes this worse. Then it takes research to know anything about goals and motivations. Sure, Drow are all evil and slaughter anyone they don't take as slaves to slaughter later at their leisure after they torture them, but maybe this one does it in a nice way. They are all hearts and flowers, puppies, kittens and children. (Who are lovely when properly cooked and served. 350 degrees with a little lemon... don't ask me how I know that.)
I like Alignment and use it in my games.
<Insert clever signature here>