I admit I have not read every post in this thread throughly.. I’ll start there.
I think I run things at my table a bit differently because while I think Alignment is important, it has been very rare that I even asked a player..”Are you sure..?” Because I thought as DM that their actions would radically change their alignment.. In my fourtysome years of playing.. maybe five occasions.. Mostly I let players play the personality they feel best fits their character. I encourage everyone at the start to pick an alignment that best fits their perception of their charter and give me a brief (A few sentences is fine,) reason why they se themselves that way.
And then I write down in my DM notes what I think their alignment is.. and that is where I track it. I have often made notes or adjustments to a character’s alignment in the context of my game without telling the players. The reason is that as a DM, what I am tracking is how the players are generally perceived by the World they live in.
Mechanically in 5th edition I have not run into any situation where alignment of a player had a huge impact. In the context of framing the tales I am telling, it helps me to plan how events might unfold & be received by those inhabiting the world the players live in. This way their actual alignment, and how Society sees their alignment,, may not exactly match up.
I know that is not the games intent, but I have found it has been what works best for me and my group.
The Orcs behaviour may not actually be "evil" if the people that they are attacking have taken away the land they lived in and hunted on and killed there people then there actions are simply the acts of an oppressed, invaded people. This is not a world where people "sit down and talk through" there issues,
Well, this is what their mythology tells them is the case. As far as I know, it's only ever actually been true in the published works in the Red Hand of Doom campaign where Elsir Vale did used to belong to the Hobgoblins, Orcs, and others et al once upon a time who were displaced by the younger races. Even if they are in the right for seeking to reclaim their ancestral holdings however, if you do not stop them, then the campaign ends by a portal to Avernus being opened and a horde of devils being loosed upon the world. The devils will fulfill their contract by helping the Red Hand to finally destroy the city of Dennovar - the last Bastian of human resistance left in the vale after about 3 months of progress made by the Red Hand forces; then be free to move on from there to the rest of the world (the devils, not the Hand). If you do stop them, it is presumed the Red Hand forces will be defeated at Dennovar having really spent the last of their strength to take the preceding (Capital?) city of Brindol; the fifth settlement to be eliminated by the Red Hand.
Well, this is what their mythology tells them is the case.
It's somewhat irrelevant whether their beliefs are true; the point is that the answer to "do the orcs believe they're evil" is "no".
Ah, no, Ophidimancer hit the nail on the head about my treatment of Orcs et al. I totally "80's cartoon villain" them. They know they're evil like Skelletor and Hordak do and the prince from Voltron, and Gargamel, and Duke Igthorn, and all the rest; Rita Repulsa - though she's live action...and I think perhaps 90's , etc.
I don't know if you are familiar with 80's cartoon villains, but they were always laughing about how evil they were and boasting of it and making plans that failed because they weren't intended to be smart plans, they were intended to be e-e-evil plans; i.e. what I consider to be the 'fun' evil villains, not the serious treatment ones that post 3rd millennium properties use.
Everyone took their art real dark in the past 20 years; but I never found the real fun villains to be the 'serious' ones but rather the goofier over-the-top ones. Likely for the same reason Opidimancer et al doesn't like: that it didn't feel bad to watch Batman et al beat those villains and foil their plans, and put them in jail, etc. A lot of modern takes on villains, make them come off so sympathetic, you find yourself rooting for the villain to actually win, or at least escape the situation without having to face punishment.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Ah, no, Ophidimancer hit the nail on the head about my treatment of Orcs et al. I totally "80's cartoon villain" them.
You know, I think I wouldn't have (as much of) a problem with this if your fiction was as bloodless as 80's children's cartoons. If all your foes are "defeated" but not killed or tortured. This would help signal to me that it is meant to be a silly cartoon. It still probably wouldn't be my favorite, but it would at least not make my skin crawl.
nods; hence alignment restrictions such as good characters never torture or murder; but fair enough, even honorable battles still do usually kill the opponents. I never gave it too much thought because the game already includes resurrections and souls going to their corresponding outer plane and continuing on rather than 'disappearing' etc.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Just because race alignment is removed, does not mean class alignment or monster alignment is.
As Ophidimancer mentioned, Class alignment is not a thing anymore. And monster alignment isn't even essential, you can just as easily use any monster without its alignment. I've run angels as villains and devils as allies in different campaigns. Alignment didn't matter then, and it shouldn't with how you use monsters.
It is essential in the lore
Nope. Not at all. Not essential in Eberron, Exandria, Ravnica, Theros, Strixhaven, and many other settings. Literally only in the Forgotten Realms (in 5e, at least).
and outer planes
Literally only in one cosmology in the whole D&D multiverse. Eberron, Dark Sun, Nentir Vale, and the Magic: the Gathering settings do not use The Great Wheel.
and roleplaying.
Nope. You can roleplay just fine without alignment (in my opinion, in many circumstances roleplay is actually better without alignment). Other TTRPGs don't have alignment, and they still roleplay all the time. Alignment is not essential at all to roleplay. It is not essential to it, and is often detrimental to it (when a fellow player or DM says "your alignment is X, should you be saying things like Y?").
A really cool thing in Tomb of Annihilation is the nine gods conflicting alignments. There is even a puzzle where the characters have to make an alignment chart to open a door.
As someone that really dislikes alignment . . . I actually really like this part of the Tomb of Annihilation. But it really only works in extreme cases like that, where the entities that the characters are bonded to are alien and don't follow human logic.
Alignment is part of D&D.
It doesn't have to be, and it is not essential to playing D&D, any D&D video games, reading any D&D books (when has it ever came up in a Drizzt book?), or watching any D&D-based movies or TV Shows (like the upcoming D&D movie or Critical Role TV Show).
And it being a part of D&D doesn't necessarily make it good. This is the "status quo" argument, which is a logical fallacy. I've run whole campaigns without mentioning alignment a signle time, and it hasn't negatively impacted them in literally any way.
I will say in campaign 1 of Critical Roll Matt does reference it, Vex's alignment os changed by him from good to neutral after several things she did, the last of which was stealing a magic broom from another guest character. Later on he then made an event of changing her alignment back to Good after she rescued 2 assamir children from being eaten by a devil. He said that several actions leading up to that had been shifting her alignment.
It didn't impact the game at all, I think it was mainly done to show there was an impact to her actions. In campaign 2 Alignment hasn't been mentioned once, the group have formed as a group of friends living and surviving in a hard world, dealing with the problem in front of them and becoming reluctant heroes that none of them actually wanted to be.
The Orcs behaviour may not actually be "evil" if the people that they are attacking have taken away the land they lived in and hunted on and killed there people then there actions are simply the acts of an oppressed, invaded people. This is not a world where people "sit down and talk through" there issues,
Well, this is what their mythology tells them is the case. As far as I know, it's only ever actually been true in the published works in the Red Hand of Doom campaign where Elsir Vale did used to belong to the Hobgoblins, Orcs, and others et al once upon a time who were displaced by the younger races. Even if they are in the right for seeking to reclaim their ancestral holdings however, if you do not stop them, then the campaign ends by a portal to Avernus being opened and a horde of devils being loosed upon the world. The devils will fulfill their contract by helping the Red Hand to finally destroy the city of Dennovar - the last Bastian of human resistance left in the vale after about 3 months of progress made by the Red Hand forces; then be free to move on from there to the rest of the world (the devils, not the Hand). If you do stop them, it is presumed the Red Hand forces will be defeated at Dennovar having really spent the last of their strength to take the preceding (Capital?) city of Brindol; the fifth settlement to be eliminated by the Red Hand.
And this is the problem, you are saying Orcs are always Evil in one specific world, I am saying they can be any alignment in any world, have never run a single game of DnD in any of the published worlds, I run them in my own world where things are generally all shades of grey. Alignment being removed from the MMM is because of this, because a player sees, oh all orcs are evil so they then interact with them in game with that defined mindset. I would imagine that most players play in a homebrew world, even with published campaigns.
In session 0 I make clear to tell my players that in reality there is rarely such a thing as an "evil" race, Drow are probably an exception, but there are outliers fro that race who have tried to escape. Duregar are actually a great tradegy story, an entire clan mind controlled, abused for centuries, finally escaping enslavment and then shunned by there own people. In the modern era that to me is such a powerful tale of a people that can be ascribed to so many real world situations.
If you want to go to published content, Wildermount there are Orcs who are intelligent, bookish and peaceful. There is an entire clan of them. They are also not inherently Evil.
The Orcs behaviour may not actually be "evil" if the people that they are attacking have taken away the land they lived in and hunted on and killed there people then there actions are simply the acts of an oppressed, invaded people. This is not a world where people "sit down and talk through" there issues, Original DnD it is a world where those who are "different" are hunted down and killed because they are "evil".
You can do it both ways, in a sense. Imagine orcs that aren't predisposed to a particular alignment. Then Gruumsh comes along. Gruumsh is evil to the core. He's a supernatural entity that is fundamentally cruel and violent. He finds a tribe of orcs that's in trouble. This tribe is poor, weak, without strong leaders. Gruumsh speaks to the top members of the tribe. "Follow my ways," he says, "and I will grant you power." What are Gruumsh's ways? To be "evil," of course. Embrace aggression and cruelty. Become savage and violent. Reject empathy. Cull the weak, promote the strong.
So this tribe follows Gruumsh. And it works -- the tribe begins to prosper, mainly by attacking their neighbors. But orcs, as a race, aren't inherently cruel, violent, or psychopathic. Some are, just like with all sentient creatures, but many are not. Upholding the will of Gruumsh becomes a tribal value. It takes effort. Those orcs that take to such things naturally find themselves moving up in prestige and power. Those orcs that are naturally inclined to be nonviolent or empathetic are ostracized (or worse). Over time, naturally evil orcs displace naturally good orcs in the tribe. Orcs with nasty, cruel, violent temperaments become the norm, and this tendency is reinforced with the cultural value of revering Gruumsh. After a few generations, this tribe of orcs has become deeply, inherently, truly, and probably irredeemably evil. And many of them may not really even know why, or think of it as a choice or as something that varies by person. They just know they follow Gruumsh and Gruumsh tells them to embrace their inherent viciousness. They may even mock the idea. "Oh, yes, we're soooo evil. Now shut up and die you simpering goody-gooder!"
IMHO, alignment serves an important part in the game if used. I agree that alignment can not be used and is often not used all the time and the same can be said for a creatures int and wis scores in combat and RP situations.
If you just include a outlook section for each monster then IMHO you are essentially doing the same thing as alignment but hopefully in a bit more detail.
In general having a note saying "this is the general alignment or outlook of the creature and in some cases it would be/might be different". Might be is vastly different then a great number of would and or could be. ie my dog does not bite me and my friends dog does not bite me, there for all dog's will not bite me is an untrue statement on earth at this time and in the past and treating all dogs as not being able to bite or automatically biting me is problematic.
I read above about orc's from X and orc from Y settings and IMHO I have found it better to change the name of one of the races to make things easy for me and the players.
Alignment is not mechanically important anymore; there aren't affects that key on being 'evil' or 'good'. It is still provided for monsters, and is potentially useful for understanding their behavior, but I've always found the definitions of the alignments too crude and vague to serve much purpose.
I couldn't disagree more. Character and monster alignment is both relevant and mechanically relevant in 5th Edition D&D as it was back in 1st Edition D&D. How a DM or adventurer uses alignment just like any other feature in any D&D adventure is purely up to the player. As an example, I mainly the DM for the group of friends I play with. I incorporate runes, items, weapons and some engagements with monsters or NPCs where there must be alignment checks to use, engage or bypass. What does this mean? That yes, depending upon the DM he/she has chosen to mechanically place alignment-based items in their quest.
Alignment is not the only question here about what a DM places in their quests. As an example, I still use class restrictions on who is skilled/trained to disable/place traps (rogue or artificer, sometimes a ranger). Some rules or options are there as our D&D founders spoke of to use as we choose. In closing it is certainly not accurate to say that alignment important anymore; it most certainly is if the DM puts it in their campaign.
I couldn't disagree more. Character and monster alignment is both relevant and mechanically relevant in 5th Edition D&D as it was back in 1st Edition D&D.
1e had spells that keyed off of alignment (detect evil, protection from evil, holy word, etc). 5e keys those spells on creature type and ignores alignment. There is no way to call that anything but 'removing mechanical relevance to alignment'.
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-Nods, sorry.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
I admit I have not read every post in this thread throughly.. I’ll start there.
I think I run things at my table a bit differently because while I think Alignment is important, it has been very rare that I even asked a player..”Are you sure..?” Because I thought as DM that their actions would radically change their alignment.. In my fourtysome years of playing.. maybe five occasions.. Mostly I let players play the personality they feel best fits their character. I encourage everyone at the start to pick an alignment that best fits their perception of their charter and give me a brief (A few sentences is fine,) reason why they se themselves that way.
And then I write down in my DM notes what I think their alignment is.. and that is where I track it. I have often made notes or adjustments to a character’s alignment in the context of my game without telling the players. The reason is that as a DM, what I am tracking is how the players are generally perceived by the World they live in.
Mechanically in 5th edition I have not run into any situation where alignment of a player had a huge impact. In the context of framing the tales I am telling, it helps me to plan how events might unfold & be received by those inhabiting the world the players live in. This way their actual alignment, and how Society sees their alignment,, may not exactly match up.
I know that is not the games intent, but I have found it has been what works best for me and my group.
Well, this is what their mythology tells them is the case. As far as I know, it's only ever actually been true in the published works in the Red Hand of Doom campaign where Elsir Vale did used to belong to the Hobgoblins, Orcs, and others et al once upon a time who were displaced by the younger races. Even if they are in the right for seeking to reclaim their ancestral holdings however, if you do not stop them, then the campaign ends by a portal to Avernus being opened and a horde of devils being loosed upon the world. The devils will fulfill their contract by helping the Red Hand to finally destroy the city of Dennovar - the last Bastian of human resistance left in the vale after about 3 months of progress made by the Red Hand forces; then be free to move on from there to the rest of the world (the devils, not the Hand). If you do stop them, it is presumed the Red Hand forces will be defeated at Dennovar having really spent the last of their strength to take the preceding (Capital?) city of Brindol; the fifth settlement to be eliminated by the Red Hand.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
It's somewhat irrelevant whether their beliefs are true; the point is that the answer to "do the orcs believe they're evil" is "no".
Ah, no, Ophidimancer hit the nail on the head about my treatment of Orcs et al. I totally "80's cartoon villain" them. They know they're evil like Skelletor and Hordak do and the prince from Voltron, and Gargamel, and Duke Igthorn, and all the rest; Rita Repulsa - though she's live action...and I think perhaps 90's , etc.
I don't know if you are familiar with 80's cartoon villains, but they were always laughing about how evil they were and boasting of it and making plans that failed because they weren't intended to be smart plans, they were intended to be e-e-evil plans; i.e. what I consider to be the 'fun' evil villains, not the serious treatment ones that post 3rd millennium properties use.
Everyone took their art real dark in the past 20 years; but I never found the real fun villains to be the 'serious' ones but rather the goofier over-the-top ones. Likely for the same reason Opidimancer et al doesn't like: that it didn't feel bad to watch Batman et al beat those villains and foil their plans, and put them in jail, etc. A lot of modern takes on villains, make them come off so sympathetic, you find yourself rooting for the villain to actually win, or at least escape the situation without having to face punishment.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
You know, I think I wouldn't have (as much of) a problem with this if your fiction was as bloodless as 80's children's cartoons. If all your foes are "defeated" but not killed or tortured. This would help signal to me that it is meant to be a silly cartoon. It still probably wouldn't be my favorite, but it would at least not make my skin crawl.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
nods; hence alignment restrictions such as good characters never torture or murder; but fair enough, even honorable battles still do usually kill the opponents. I never gave it too much thought because the game already includes resurrections and souls going to their corresponding outer plane and continuing on rather than 'disappearing' etc.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
I will say in campaign 1 of Critical Roll Matt does reference it, Vex's alignment os changed by him from good to neutral after several things she did, the last of which was stealing a magic broom from another guest character. Later on he then made an event of changing her alignment back to Good after she rescued 2 assamir children from being eaten by a devil. He said that several actions leading up to that had been shifting her alignment.
It didn't impact the game at all, I think it was mainly done to show there was an impact to her actions. In campaign 2 Alignment hasn't been mentioned once, the group have formed as a group of friends living and surviving in a hard world, dealing with the problem in front of them and becoming reluctant heroes that none of them actually wanted to be.
And this is the problem, you are saying Orcs are always Evil in one specific world, I am saying they can be any alignment in any world, have never run a single game of DnD in any of the published worlds, I run them in my own world where things are generally all shades of grey. Alignment being removed from the MMM is because of this, because a player sees, oh all orcs are evil so they then interact with them in game with that defined mindset. I would imagine that most players play in a homebrew world, even with published campaigns.
In session 0 I make clear to tell my players that in reality there is rarely such a thing as an "evil" race, Drow are probably an exception, but there are outliers fro that race who have tried to escape. Duregar are actually a great tradegy story, an entire clan mind controlled, abused for centuries, finally escaping enslavment and then shunned by there own people. In the modern era that to me is such a powerful tale of a people that can be ascribed to so many real world situations.
If you want to go to published content, Wildermount there are Orcs who are intelligent, bookish and peaceful. There is an entire clan of them. They are also not inherently Evil.
You can do it both ways, in a sense. Imagine orcs that aren't predisposed to a particular alignment. Then Gruumsh comes along. Gruumsh is evil to the core. He's a supernatural entity that is fundamentally cruel and violent. He finds a tribe of orcs that's in trouble. This tribe is poor, weak, without strong leaders. Gruumsh speaks to the top members of the tribe. "Follow my ways," he says, "and I will grant you power." What are Gruumsh's ways? To be "evil," of course. Embrace aggression and cruelty. Become savage and violent. Reject empathy. Cull the weak, promote the strong.
So this tribe follows Gruumsh. And it works -- the tribe begins to prosper, mainly by attacking their neighbors. But orcs, as a race, aren't inherently cruel, violent, or psychopathic. Some are, just like with all sentient creatures, but many are not. Upholding the will of Gruumsh becomes a tribal value. It takes effort. Those orcs that take to such things naturally find themselves moving up in prestige and power. Those orcs that are naturally inclined to be nonviolent or empathetic are ostracized (or worse). Over time, naturally evil orcs displace naturally good orcs in the tribe. Orcs with nasty, cruel, violent temperaments become the norm, and this tendency is reinforced with the cultural value of revering Gruumsh. After a few generations, this tribe of orcs has become deeply, inherently, truly, and probably irredeemably evil. And many of them may not really even know why, or think of it as a choice or as something that varies by person. They just know they follow Gruumsh and Gruumsh tells them to embrace their inherent viciousness. They may even mock the idea. "Oh, yes, we're soooo evil. Now shut up and die you simpering goody-gooder!"
IMHO, alignment serves an important part in the game if used. I agree that alignment can not be used and is often not used all the time and the same can be said for a creatures int and wis scores in combat and RP situations.
If you just include a outlook section for each monster then IMHO you are essentially doing the same thing as alignment but hopefully in a bit more detail.
In general having a note saying "this is the general alignment or outlook of the creature and in some cases it would be/might be different". Might be is vastly different then a great number of would and or could be. ie my dog does not bite me and my friends dog does not bite me, there for all dog's will not bite me is an untrue statement on earth at this time and in the past and treating all dogs as not being able to bite or automatically biting me is problematic.
I read above about orc's from X and orc from Y settings and IMHO I have found it better to change the name of one of the races to make things easy for me and the players.
MDC
I couldn't disagree more. Character and monster alignment is both relevant and mechanically relevant in 5th Edition D&D as it was back in 1st Edition D&D. How a DM or adventurer uses alignment just like any other feature in any D&D adventure is purely up to the player. As an example, I mainly the DM for the group of friends I play with. I incorporate runes, items, weapons and some engagements with monsters or NPCs where there must be alignment checks to use, engage or bypass. What does this mean? That yes, depending upon the DM he/she has chosen to mechanically place alignment-based items in their quest.
Alignment is not the only question here about what a DM places in their quests. As an example, I still use class restrictions on who is skilled/trained to disable/place traps (rogue or artificer, sometimes a ranger). Some rules or options are there as our D&D founders spoke of to use as we choose. In closing it is certainly not accurate to say that alignment important anymore; it most certainly is if the DM puts it in their campaign.
Fizikal
For the King!
1e had spells that keyed off of alignment (detect evil, protection from evil, holy word, etc). 5e keys those spells on creature type and ignores alignment. There is no way to call that anything but 'removing mechanical relevance to alignment'.