Eh, the Empire as presented in the larger EU would probably offend a typical LN, assuming they saw the full picture: it was rife with corruption and often badly managed. An LN is likely to be utilitarian about the means of government structure and enforcement, but belief in Lawfulness generally requires that the system works.
Tldr: Badly managed alignment is the death of nuance.
Fixed that for you. Alignment- particularly for humanoids or other "meant to exist in a way roughly analogous to people IRL" creatures is a general trend, not an absolute boundary. Small, singular acts don't invalidate an alignment, but going back to the example above, hardcore sadism isn't just "oh, they're a nuanced character"; torture for personal gratification- as implied by "genuine sadist"- is a defining character trait/act. Nuance is "the Good character gives his word to let a bad guy go free in exchange for important info, then goes 'I lied, you're still facing justice' after"; although it can be worth expanding on the implications for future interactions if the character's integrity was considered significant and people learn what they pulled, it's not something that most DMs would say redefines them as Neutral.
Tldr: Badly managed alignment is the death of nuance.
Fixed that for you. Alignment- particularly for humanoids or other "meant to exist in a way roughly analogous to people IRL" creatures is a general trend, not an absolute boundary. Small, singular acts don't invalidate an alignment, but going back to the example above, hardcore sadism isn't just "oh, they're a nuanced character"; torture for personal gratification- as implied by "genuine sadist"- is a defining character trait/act. Nuance is "the Good character gives his word to let a bad guy go free in exchange for important info, then goes 'I lied, you're still facing justice' after"; although it can be worth expanding on the implications for future interactions if the character's integrity was considered significant and people learn what they pulled, it's not something that most DMs would say redefines them as Neutral.
Nah. Im fine with the original.
Maybe alignment gives a player or dm a starting point for a character, but the moment one person says "a good character woukdnt do that" and another person says "yes they would", you have passed the usefulness of alignment.
Alignment has no fixed definition. Philosophers have been arguing about what is "good" for thousands of years. Two people playing make believe arguing over whether the "good" paladin can do something another player or dm doesnt want thrm to do, it completely falls apart.
Alignment is only useful until the first disagreement, at which point it is not only useless, but actually harmful because alignment disagreement means someone is trying to use impossible to define rules to control another players CHOICES.
If its the dm, they're railroading the player. If its another player trying to impose what is "good" for another player, then its party breakdown. In this situation, the idea of "alignment" can only make things worse. Because everyone has a different place where they draw the line as to what is "good". No two people will agree 100% on what is "evil". And the notion of "alignment" will be weaponized to enforce mmotality on another.
At which point nuance is gone.
I would grant that alignment might be useful as long as no one talks about what it means in game. But at the first sign of disagreement, it actually turns into a hindrance. The most poorly writteb rule with no universal objective meaning. And everyone thinks their interpretation is the correct one.
I remember early edition paladins losing their class features because the dm didnt agree with the players drfinition of "good". That was alignment with game mechanics consequences. And it almost never went well.
Alignment is useful as a suggestion for a starting point for roleplaying. But the moment it is used to control someone else's actions, or even someone to worry about how they themselves "should" behave because their alignment is "whatever", its causing more harm than good.
Tldr: Badly managed alignment is the death of nuance.
Nuance is "the Good character gives his word to let a bad guy go free in exchange for important info, then goes 'I lied, you're still facing justice' after";
Nuance is realizing that good/neutral/evil is waaay too black/white for any moral system.
No, the original is more accurate. Trying to fit all moral behavior patterns into nine bins most certainly lacks nuance, and if you add enough detail so you aren't doing that, you're also adding enough detail that you don't need the alignment in the first place.
If a table can't handle "the first sign of disagreement"; then there's some much larger problems than alignment that are gonna bring it crashing down.
Thats exactly NOT what i said. If a table is running into the "first sign of disagreement" thats normal. Players and dm should have a conversation.
Dm should allow players to have some freedom to do what they want without consequences impacting the other players. If one player is a murderhobo, the dm should have the city watch and the angry mob go after that player, not the party. That way, the players dont feel the need to police other players actions every step of the way. Things like that.
But the moment someone brings "alignment" into the conversation, it will only make things worse because no one will agree on what alignment means and everyone who invokes alignment thinks their definition and interpretation is the mozt accurate.
Theres no such thing as just "alignment" at that point. There's Bobs version of alignment. There's charlies version of alignment. If Bob says that was not "good" behavior, thats his version of alignment. Maybe charlie has a different version.
Arguing about iwont help.
At that point the best thing the dm can do is try to isolate Bobs consequences from Charlies consequences so that Bob doesnt feel like he has to police Charlie.
If the problem is the dm invoking their definition of alignment, then the player might as well find a different group. Unless a player can convince the dm to give up alignment and instead focus on consequences, theyre just going to be railroaded and the dm will think alignment justifies it.
Which us why alugnment makes disagreements worse. Alignment becomes dogma that players or dms can use to cudgel others.
So, at the first sign of trouble, a table and its players and dm should have a conversation about how they want to play and how the dm can allow differences in players to only affect the players actions.
But the moment anyone invokes any term from an alignment chart, that conversatiom just went off on an hour long tangent that has no resolution. Thats not good. Yes it is. No it isnt. Yes it is. Repeat forever.
Arguments arounf alignment are never "we both agree this is "evil" and we disagree on whether we should do evil" rather they are always "i think the consequences of this action are worth the payoff, but Bob thinks its evil and we shouldnt do it".
The only way out of that is to stop talking about alignment and focus on who gets what consequences. The dm should try to let consequences fall on individual players as they deserve, rather than colllectively punishing thr party for one murderhobo.
So if charlie lies to someone to extract info, and bob doesnt agree they should do that, have any good or bad consequences of that torture fall on charlie so bob has less incentive to police everyone.
Make it about individual consequences and remove arguments about what the party "should" do morally speaking.
Furthermore, despite whatever one may think is good or evil on some alignment chart, the campaign should have started with a session zero to define limits of play. Even in an all-evil party, if session zero indicates some specific evil act is off the table, then it is out of bounds.
So, impose limits during session zero for what is off the table. Focus on individual consequences. And make alignment irrelevent.
The alternative is charlie does something bob doesnt like and Bob invokes a moral alignment argument and the table goes ariund in circles for ten minutes.
Respectfully, the GM's definition of alignment is what matters for a table. That was one of the things that made paladins so unplayable in older editions: a tendency for GMs to insist that they had to be Lawful Stupid.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I think there is one other place where alignment can play a role for the good of the game, and that's with players who are actually new to the idea of "role playing", but actually want to do it. There is nothing wrong with a player asking themselves if this action is something their character would do. Those that want to play as someone else, but have a tendency to simply play themselves (with magic, sometimes) can use alignment to guide their actions and decisions.
I do agree, however, that outside imposed alignment is often more harmful than not. That said, I've integrated a third axis to my world, so I guess I'm a hypocrite...
Is the D&D alignment system useful for a discourse on IRL philosophies? No, much like how one won't find much of use for how the body copes with trauma in the HP system, and so on and so forth. Is it useful for implementing classic narrative tropes such as "Good vs Evil" and "this powerful being has supernatural awareness that allows it to promptly evaluate someone's moral character"? Yes, very much so.
At the end of the day, if you want your system as a whole to be able to engage with PC characterization without being wholly dependent on the GM to figure out how from scratch, you need to make some labels and draw some lines. Obviously you can't perfectly describe a "real" or "plausible" or whatever set of parameters in a text of... well probably any length, but definitely not something practical for a gaming manual. Thus the DM adjudicating. Will DMs' interpretations not play well with the table sometimes? Yes. Kinda like how DMs might make a ruling the table isn't happy with for pretty much any other facet of the game. The abstract "but it might happen" isn't a useful talking point, because this is not some unique failure point of alignment. It's part and parcel of the system, and the actual breaking point is if the table can't reconcile their disagreement, which comes down to fundamental table dynamics more than poor design. Especially in 5e where alignment is more descriptive/informative than anything else.
Also, quite frankly, if someone refuses to pick one segment of the alignment chart to generally define their approach or insists on a "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" caveat at creation, that's a flag for me that this could be someone who's operating on the "no real consequences, so just do whatever I feel like in the moment" mentality. Which is not inherently a Wrong Way to Play, but is something a person should be open about and ideally find a table who are all looking to just stomp around in the sandbox rather than try to play the "well it's what my character would do" card for it.
Ace, It sounds a little like you are the "Badly managed Alignment is the death of nuance." that you 'corrected' Sunisgettingreallow's statement to if you see someone trying to be Nuanced with alignment as a red flag. Not everyone who does that is trying to pull a "No consequences for my actions" they just as easily, and in my experience, often are, saying 'here is an avenue for interpersonal conflict to drive roleplay.' People can " pick one segment of the alignment chart to generally define their approach" and "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" at the same time, those are not mutual exclusive. They are in fact coherent together. Someone who tries to be good but has flaws that make them do or be tempted to do things considered outside of their general alignment is still "generally defining their approach."
D&D literature is full of characters struggling with their morality, and even questioning the moral assumptions and perceptions of the world. "Dark Mirror" By RA, Salvatore was released in 1993. It is a piece of fiction that is older than some D&D players.
"but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" is the attitude that leads why we have Orcs as a player race, and the game is a damn sight better for it than it was in the 90's. If you think that is a stretch, then look at Obould I Many-Arrows, who while still pretty evil through most of his appearances, wanted to make a kingdom of Orcs who could have a homeland and need not be raiding brutes to survive. (Forgive any inconsistent bits i read these a long time ago.)
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He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player. The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call To rise up in triumph should we all unite The spark for change is yours to ignite." Kalandra - The State of the World
Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality or making a point of disclaiming that they are actually going to follow it is, because that reads to me like a table might get something like your own earlier example of a character that swings between far extremes to the point it makes other players uncomfortable or dissatisfied. It might not be their deliberate intent, but personal experience says that people- including myself when I was getting started- can be really bad at judging the difference between "nuance" and "it sounded fun at the time".
We have orcs as a player race because a) Warcraft, b) the general desire of the player base as a whole to have more options and c) the acknowledgement that classifying fundamentally human-analogous beings as categorically Evil has a lot of bad implications, especially with all the secondary coding to orcs.
And "they did this in a novel and it worked" is a limited talking point for what makes for good player characterization in a D&D game. A novel typically has a single guiding hand that knows everything that's going on and stage manages all the actions, responses, and consequences, and at the very least has the ability to go back and edit where needed before publication. A campaign has neither option, which is why a number of classic tropes that play well in novels like lone-wolfing or extensive antagonism between party members are generally considered to be bad play- as noted in the DMG.
Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality..
A player being unwilling to commit to a description of their personality is certainly a flag. A player who describes their character's personality but does not want to assign an alignment because it doesn't cleanly fit into any of the alignments is not a flag.
"because this is not some unique failure point of alignment. It's part and parcel of the system, "
Actually, alignment IS unique in the ruled because it has no objective definition, and there is nothing to point to that can help determine RAW as far as alignment is concerned.
I would say this is why alignment has almost no game mechanics in 2024 rules compared to first edition rules that "paladin must be lawful good or lose powers" nonsense, because player might do something they see as good, dm says they just went evil and nerfs the player. And there is no way rules can provide anything specific enough to help determine RAW or even RAI in any partucular situation.
The player thinks they acted lawful good. The DM says "no" and nerfs them. And there are literally NO rules to point to to determine if the dm is railroading or not.
Alignment tied to mechanical game effects kills nuance, immediately, and its entirely dogmatic.
"Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality or making a point of disclaiming that they are actually going to follow it is"
Ok. The dm says they want to start a "good" campaign. Everyone agrees to play as "good". Session zero, everyone establishes lines and veils, and everyone agrees what is explicitely off limits for ingame actions.
Then level 4, the fighter decides to do something to an npc, and the bard thinks its evil. Or the DM thinks its evil. The action doesnt violate any lines or veils. The fighter thinks the cost is worth thr payoff. Maybe the fighter sees the optiond as one innocent npc is murdered to save a thoudand lives, and sees that as "good". But it is some action that isnt specifically covered in any rules because campaigns and players end up in rather unique situations.
. But the bard (or dm) thinks "good" means you can never murder an innocent person, even if a million people die as a result. The bard (or dm) invoke thr alignment chart, say the fighter is no longer behaving "good".
Invoking the alignment chart at this point does nothing to help the situation. It only obfuscates the issue that "good" is entirely subjective,
And more importantly, "good" is completely different from "lawful". If anyone points to some alignment rule that says "do this and you are not good", then they are actually making an argument for what is "lawful".
So, all the players start the campaign committing to being "good" but the moment the players and/or dm have a "stop the campaign i want to get off" moment, invoking "alignment" gets them nowhere. It doesnt help. It best it might point to what is lawful, but "good" is something different.
So, sure, alignment is maybe helpful at the start for some things, but it will not help establish where the very fuzzy boundaries are. And invoking it to regulate another player is almost always a descent into dogma.
Ace: "insists on a "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" caveat at creation, that's a flag for me that this could be someone who's operating on the "no real consequences, so just do whatever I feel like in the moment" mentality."
I dont understand if you completely missed the many times i said the dm should give individual players consequences for their actions, or if you just ignored it.
But i think this conversation is a great demonstration of my point: alignment is a great starting point for beginners, but almost always turns into pointless dogmatic arguments the moment 2 people disagree on what it means.
Alignment with mechanical consequences (first edition paladin must be lawful good or be nerfed) is absolutely terrible game design.
Alignment used to cudgel players into compliance has never ended well.
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Eh, the Empire as presented in the larger EU would probably offend a typical LN, assuming they saw the full picture: it was rife with corruption and often badly managed. An LN is likely to be utilitarian about the means of government structure and enforcement, but belief in Lawfulness generally requires that the system works.
Fixed that for you. Alignment- particularly for humanoids or other "meant to exist in a way roughly analogous to people IRL" creatures is a general trend, not an absolute boundary. Small, singular acts don't invalidate an alignment, but going back to the example above, hardcore sadism isn't just "oh, they're a nuanced character"; torture for personal gratification- as implied by "genuine sadist"- is a defining character trait/act. Nuance is "the Good character gives his word to let a bad guy go free in exchange for important info, then goes 'I lied, you're still facing justice' after"; although it can be worth expanding on the implications for future interactions if the character's integrity was considered significant and people learn what they pulled, it's not something that most DMs would say redefines them as Neutral.
Nah. Im fine with the original.
Maybe alignment gives a player or dm a starting point for a character, but the moment one person says "a good character woukdnt do that" and another person says "yes they would", you have passed the usefulness of alignment.
Alignment has no fixed definition. Philosophers have been arguing about what is "good" for thousands of years. Two people playing make believe arguing over whether the "good" paladin can do something another player or dm doesnt want thrm to do, it completely falls apart.
Alignment is only useful until the first disagreement, at which point it is not only useless, but actually harmful because alignment disagreement means someone is trying to use impossible to define rules to control another players CHOICES.
If its the dm, they're railroading the player. If its another player trying to impose what is "good" for another player, then its party breakdown. In this situation, the idea of "alignment" can only make things worse. Because everyone has a different place where they draw the line as to what is "good". No two people will agree 100% on what is "evil". And the notion of "alignment" will be weaponized to enforce mmotality on another.
At which point nuance is gone.
I would grant that alignment might be useful as long as no one talks about what it means in game. But at the first sign of disagreement, it actually turns into a hindrance. The most poorly writteb rule with no universal objective meaning. And everyone thinks their interpretation is the correct one.
I remember early edition paladins losing their class features because the dm didnt agree with the players drfinition of "good". That was alignment with game mechanics consequences. And it almost never went well.
Alignment is useful as a suggestion for a starting point for roleplaying. But the moment it is used to control someone else's actions, or even someone to worry about how they themselves "should" behave because their alignment is "whatever", its causing more harm than good.
If a table can't handle "the first sign of disagreement"; then there's some much larger problems than alignment that are gonna bring it crashing down.
Nuance is realizing that good/neutral/evil is waaay too black/white for any moral system.
No, the original is more accurate. Trying to fit all moral behavior patterns into nine bins most certainly lacks nuance, and if you add enough detail so you aren't doing that, you're also adding enough detail that you don't need the alignment in the first place.
Thats exactly NOT what i said. If a table is running into the "first sign of disagreement" thats normal. Players and dm should have a conversation.
Dm should allow players to have some freedom to do what they want without consequences impacting the other players. If one player is a murderhobo, the dm should have the city watch and the angry mob go after that player, not the party. That way, the players dont feel the need to police other players actions every step of the way. Things like that.
But the moment someone brings "alignment" into the conversation, it will only make things worse because no one will agree on what alignment means and everyone who invokes alignment thinks their definition and interpretation is the mozt accurate.
Theres no such thing as just "alignment" at that point. There's Bobs version of alignment. There's charlies version of alignment. If Bob says that was not "good" behavior, thats his version of alignment. Maybe charlie has a different version.
Arguing about iwont help.
At that point the best thing the dm can do is try to isolate Bobs consequences from Charlies consequences so that Bob doesnt feel like he has to police Charlie.
If the problem is the dm invoking their definition of alignment, then the player might as well find a different group. Unless a player can convince the dm to give up alignment and instead focus on consequences, theyre just going to be railroaded and the dm will think alignment justifies it.
Which us why alugnment makes disagreements worse. Alignment becomes dogma that players or dms can use to cudgel others.
So, at the first sign of trouble, a table and its players and dm should have a conversation about how they want to play and how the dm can allow differences in players to only affect the players actions.
But the moment anyone invokes any term from an alignment chart, that conversatiom just went off on an hour long tangent that has no resolution. Thats not good. Yes it is. No it isnt. Yes it is. Repeat forever.
Arguments arounf alignment are never "we both agree this is "evil" and we disagree on whether we should do evil" rather they are always "i think the consequences of this action are worth the payoff, but Bob thinks its evil and we shouldnt do it".
The only way out of that is to stop talking about alignment and focus on who gets what consequences. The dm should try to let consequences fall on individual players as they deserve, rather than colllectively punishing thr party for one murderhobo.
So if charlie lies to someone to extract info, and bob doesnt agree they should do that, have any good or bad consequences of that torture fall on charlie so bob has less incentive to police everyone.
Make it about individual consequences and remove arguments about what the party "should" do morally speaking.
Furthermore, despite whatever one may think is good or evil on some alignment chart, the campaign should have started with a session zero to define limits of play. Even in an all-evil party, if session zero indicates some specific evil act is off the table, then it is out of bounds.
So, impose limits during session zero for what is off the table. Focus on individual consequences. And make alignment irrelevent.
The alternative is charlie does something bob doesnt like and Bob invokes a moral alignment argument and the table goes ariund in circles for ten minutes.
Respectfully, the GM's definition of alignment is what matters for a table. That was one of the things that made paladins so unplayable in older editions: a tendency for GMs to insist that they had to be Lawful Stupid.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I think there is one other place where alignment can play a role for the good of the game, and that's with players who are actually new to the idea of "role playing", but actually want to do it. There is nothing wrong with a player asking themselves if this action is something their character would do. Those that want to play as someone else, but have a tendency to simply play themselves (with magic, sometimes) can use alignment to guide their actions and decisions.
I do agree, however, that outside imposed alignment is often more harmful than not. That said, I've integrated a third axis to my world, so I guess I'm a hypocrite...
Is the D&D alignment system useful for a discourse on IRL philosophies? No, much like how one won't find much of use for how the body copes with trauma in the HP system, and so on and so forth. Is it useful for implementing classic narrative tropes such as "Good vs Evil" and "this powerful being has supernatural awareness that allows it to promptly evaluate someone's moral character"? Yes, very much so.
At the end of the day, if you want your system as a whole to be able to engage with PC characterization without being wholly dependent on the GM to figure out how from scratch, you need to make some labels and draw some lines. Obviously you can't perfectly describe a "real" or "plausible" or whatever set of parameters in a text of... well probably any length, but definitely not something practical for a gaming manual. Thus the DM adjudicating. Will DMs' interpretations not play well with the table sometimes? Yes. Kinda like how DMs might make a ruling the table isn't happy with for pretty much any other facet of the game. The abstract "but it might happen" isn't a useful talking point, because this is not some unique failure point of alignment. It's part and parcel of the system, and the actual breaking point is if the table can't reconcile their disagreement, which comes down to fundamental table dynamics more than poor design. Especially in 5e where alignment is more descriptive/informative than anything else.
Also, quite frankly, if someone refuses to pick one segment of the alignment chart to generally define their approach or insists on a "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" caveat at creation, that's a flag for me that this could be someone who's operating on the "no real consequences, so just do whatever I feel like in the moment" mentality. Which is not inherently a Wrong Way to Play, but is something a person should be open about and ideally find a table who are all looking to just stomp around in the sandbox rather than try to play the "well it's what my character would do" card for it.
Ace, It sounds a little like you are the "Badly managed Alignment is the death of nuance." that you 'corrected' Sunisgettingreallow's statement to if you see someone trying to be Nuanced with alignment as a red flag.
Not everyone who does that is trying to pull a "No consequences for my actions" they just as easily, and in my experience, often are, saying 'here is an avenue for interpersonal conflict to drive roleplay.'
People can " pick one segment of the alignment chart to generally define their approach" and "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" at the same time, those are not mutual exclusive. They are in fact coherent together. Someone who tries to be good but has flaws that make them do or be tempted to do things considered outside of their general alignment is still "generally defining their approach."
D&D literature is full of characters struggling with their morality, and even questioning the moral assumptions and perceptions of the world. "Dark Mirror" By RA, Salvatore was released in 1993. It is a piece of fiction that is older than some D&D players.
"but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" is the attitude that leads why we have Orcs as a player race, and the game is a damn sight better for it than it was in the 90's. If you think that is a stretch, then look at Obould I Many-Arrows, who while still pretty evil through most of his appearances, wanted to make a kingdom of Orcs who could have a homeland and need not be raiding brutes to survive.
(Forgive any inconsistent bits i read these a long time ago.)
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality or making a point of disclaiming that they are actually going to follow it is, because that reads to me like a table might get something like your own earlier example of a character that swings between far extremes to the point it makes other players uncomfortable or dissatisfied. It might not be their deliberate intent, but personal experience says that people- including myself when I was getting started- can be really bad at judging the difference between "nuance" and "it sounded fun at the time".
We have orcs as a player race because a) Warcraft, b) the general desire of the player base as a whole to have more options and c) the acknowledgement that classifying fundamentally human-analogous beings as categorically Evil has a lot of bad implications, especially with all the secondary coding to orcs.
And "they did this in a novel and it worked" is a limited talking point for what makes for good player characterization in a D&D game. A novel typically has a single guiding hand that knows everything that's going on and stage manages all the actions, responses, and consequences, and at the very least has the ability to go back and edit where needed before publication. A campaign has neither option, which is why a number of classic tropes that play well in novels like lone-wolfing or extensive antagonism between party members are generally considered to be bad play- as noted in the DMG.
A player being unwilling to commit to a description of their personality is certainly a flag. A player who describes their character's personality but does not want to assign an alignment because it doesn't cleanly fit into any of the alignments is not a flag.
"because this is not some unique failure point of alignment. It's part and parcel of the system, "
Actually, alignment IS unique in the ruled because it has no objective definition, and there is nothing to point to that can help determine RAW as far as alignment is concerned.
I would say this is why alignment has almost no game mechanics in 2024 rules compared to first edition rules that "paladin must be lawful good or lose powers" nonsense, because player might do something they see as good, dm says they just went evil and nerfs the player. And there is no way rules can provide anything specific enough to help determine RAW or even RAI in any partucular situation.
The player thinks they acted lawful good. The DM says "no" and nerfs them. And there are literally NO rules to point to to determine if the dm is railroading or not.
Alignment tied to mechanical game effects kills nuance, immediately, and its entirely dogmatic.
"Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality or making a point of disclaiming that they are actually going to follow it is"
Ok. The dm says they want to start a "good" campaign. Everyone agrees to play as "good". Session zero, everyone establishes lines and veils, and everyone agrees what is explicitely off limits for ingame actions.
Then level 4, the fighter decides to do something to an npc, and the bard thinks its evil. Or the DM thinks its evil. The action doesnt violate any lines or veils. The fighter thinks the cost is worth thr payoff. Maybe the fighter sees the optiond as one innocent npc is murdered to save a thoudand lives, and sees that as "good". But it is some action that isnt specifically covered in any rules because campaigns and players end up in rather unique situations.
. But the bard (or dm) thinks "good" means you can never murder an innocent person, even if a million people die as a result. The bard (or dm) invoke thr alignment chart, say the fighter is no longer behaving "good".
Invoking the alignment chart at this point does nothing to help the situation. It only obfuscates the issue that "good" is entirely subjective,
And more importantly, "good" is completely different from "lawful". If anyone points to some alignment rule that says "do this and you are not good", then they are actually making an argument for what is "lawful".
So, all the players start the campaign committing to being "good" but the moment the players and/or dm have a "stop the campaign i want to get off" moment, invoking "alignment" gets them nowhere. It doesnt help. It best it might point to what is lawful, but "good" is something different.
So, sure, alignment is maybe helpful at the start for some things, but it will not help establish where the very fuzzy boundaries are. And invoking it to regulate another player is almost always a descent into dogma.
Ace: "insists on a "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" caveat at creation, that's a flag for me that this could be someone who's operating on the "no real consequences, so just do whatever I feel like in the moment" mentality."
I dont understand if you completely missed the many times i said the dm should give individual players consequences for their actions, or if you just ignored it.
But i think this conversation is a great demonstration of my point: alignment is a great starting point for beginners, but almost always turns into pointless dogmatic arguments the moment 2 people disagree on what it means.
Alignment with mechanical consequences (first edition paladin must be lawful good or be nerfed) is absolutely terrible game design.
Alignment used to cudgel players into compliance has never ended well.