Counterpoint: alignment is useful to certain players who either don't like to roleplay much and/or want guidelines for how to do so in a consistent manner.
It;s useful in a game where roleplaying isn't used at all, as a simple faction flag for 'okay to kill/not okay to kill'. It's worthless as 'guidelines for how to do so in a consistent manner' because there's no real agreement about what each alignment even means.
Possibly relevant thoughts from Jeremy Crawford in a recent interview about MMM:
Player characters are the beloved creations of our players, and again, we didn’t want to give the impression we were putting our hand on the scale and the personality and values of a player’s personal character. But again, alignment is still in the game, but as it’s always been, it’s the player’s choice and the DM’s choice.
I think this speaks to how they want alignment to be a very light touch when it comes to character personality and values.
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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!
Short answer: “as important as your table wants it to be.”
For me personally, I mostly only care about the L/C axis.
In 1e OD&D, that was the only Alignment in the game. “Good” and “Evil” were originally considered too subjective to fit into the concept of Alignment, they weren’t added until 2e AD&D with Paladins & Rangers who had to maintain Good Alignment or loose their features and get dropped to “plain Jane” Fighters.
Possibly relevant thoughts from Jeremy Crawford in a recent interview about MMM:
Player characters are the beloved creations of our players, and again, we didn’t want to give the impression we were putting our hand on the scale and the personality and values of a player’s personal character. But again, alignment is still in the game, but as it’s always been, it’s the player’s choice and the DM’s choice.
I think this speaks to how they want alignment to be a very light touch when it comes to character personality and values.
A PC’s alignment is supposed to reflect the character’s personality and values, not dictate it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “light touch” as long as its a finishing touch. People mistakenly think of alignment as a rigid slot they have to fit within, but in reality they really just have to play their character. If the character’s alignment doesn’t fit the way the player is playing the character it’s the alignment that should change to fit their play style, not the play style to fit the alignment.
In 1e, that was the only Alignment in the game. “Good” and “Evil” were originally considered too subjective to fit into the concept of Alignment, they weren’t added until 2e with Paladins & Rangers who had to maintain Good Alignment or loose their features and get dropped to “plain Jand” Fighters.
Counterpoint: alignment is useful to certain players who either don't like to roleplay much and/or want guidelines for how to do so in a consistent manner.
It;s useful in a game where roleplaying isn't used at all, as a simple faction flag for 'okay to kill/not okay to kill'. It's worthless as 'guidelines for how to do so in a consistent manner' because there's no real agreement about what each alignment even means.
I believe you've unwittingly proven my point, which is that if you want alignment to be universally beneficial, you'll be disappointed, but if you look at it on an individual level, it can be a useful tool for certain people. It is irrelevant if there's agreement about what Chaotic Neutral means - though I would argue that the little blurb you get in the character creator gives at least a vague baseline. What is relevant is that the little blurb and the individual player's understanding of it can be helpful to some when one is fleshing out a character.
I'd also contest your first argument. To claim that alignment is helpful only for people who don't roleplay or don't need nuance is reductionist and, to be rather frank, demonstrably false in my own experience. I and my entire party are huge roleplayers, delving deep into emotional, philosophical and moral questions with our characters. When playing a character whose outlook is vastly different from our own, it's sometimes helpful to have something external to refer to. No, this doesn't mean we don't let our characters evolve. No, it doesn't mean the DM says, "you're Lawful Neutral, you wouldn't do that." All it means is that on occasion, when we're not sure how our characters would respond, taking alignment into consideration can help inform roleplay choices.
In 1e, that was the only Alignment in the game. “Good” and “Evil” were originally considered too subjective to fit into the concept of Alignment, they weren’t added until 2e with Paladins & Rangers who had to maintain Good Alignment or loose their features and get dropped to “plain Jand” Fighters.
I'm pretty sure good/evil was part of 1e.
He was referring to Chainmail and such.
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"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?"
In 1e, that was the only Alignment in the game. “Good” and “Evil” were originally considered too subjective to fit into the concept of Alignment, they weren’t added until 2e with Paladins & Rangers who had to maintain Good Alignment or loose their features and get dropped to “plain Jand” Fighters.
Possibly relevant thoughts from Jeremy Crawford in a recent interview about MMM:
Player characters are the beloved creations of our players, and again, we didn’t want to give the impression we were putting our hand on the scale and the personality and values of a player’s personal character. But again, alignment is still in the game, but as it’s always been, it’s the player’s choice and the DM’s choice.
I think this speaks to how they want alignment to be a very light touch when it comes to character personality and values.
A PC’s alignment is supposed to reflect the character’s personality and values, not dictate it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “light touch” as long as its a finishing touch. People mistakenly think of alignment as a rigid slot they have to fit within, but in reality they really just have to play their character. If the character’s alignment doesn’t fit the way the player is playing the character it’s the alignment that should change to fit their play style, not the play style to fit the alignment.
Right, I kinda think that's in the same general neighborhood? Also I think my point with the quote was that even Jeremy Crawford thinks that Alignment in some ways can feel like the developers "putting a hand on the scale" and manipulating a player's choices in regards to their character's values and personality. If he feels that way, I'm pretty sure alignment is NOT going to get any stronger a presence in future books. Which aligns (forgive me) with the recent changes in alignment in stat blocks.
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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!
Possibly relevant thoughts from Jeremy Crawford in a recent interview about MMM:
Player characters are the beloved creations of our players, and again, we didn’t want to give the impression we were putting our hand on the scale and the personality and values of a player’s personal character. But again, alignment is still in the game, but as it’s always been, it’s the player’s choice and the DM’s choice.
I think this speaks to how they want alignment to be a very light touch when it comes to character personality and values.
A PC’s alignment is supposed to reflect the character’s personality and values, not dictate it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “light touch” as long as its a finishing touch. People mistakenly think of alignment as a rigid slot they have to fit within, but in reality they really just have to play their character. If the character’s alignment doesn’t fit the way the player is playing the character it’s the alignment that should change to fit their play style, not the play style to fit the alignment.
Right, I kinda think that's in the same general neighborhood? Also I think my point with the quote was that even Jeremy Crawford thinks that Alignment in some ways can feel like the developers "putting a hand on the scale" and manipulating a player's choices in regards to their character's values and personality. If he feels that way, I'm pretty sure alignment is NOT going to get any stronger a presence in future books. Which aligns (forgive me) with the recent changes in alignment in stat blocks.
But the designers don’t dictate which alignment best suits each character, the player does by their actions and the DM arbitrates it. All the designers did was generate the list. 🤷♂️ How does a butcher putting up the list of cuts equal putting their thumb on the scale?
In 1e, that was the only Alignment in the game. “Good” and “Evil” were originally considered too subjective to fit into the concept of Alignment, they weren’t added until 2e with Paladins & Rangers who had to maintain Good Alignment or loose their features and get dropped to “plain Jand” Fighters.
I'm pretty sure good/evil was part of 1e.
He was referring to Chainmail and such.
Sorry, must have missed that reference.
Nah, I misstated what I meant. (Wysp is used to my slipping on this.) I keep mentally piling AD&D1e & 2e into what I think of as “2e.” When I mention 1e I’m usually referring to OD&D. It’s a bad habit that I haven’t been able to shake since 3e came out for some reason. Before that there was just D&D, and AD&D for most folks, the 1e/2e thing was less relevant to conversations. (💩!! …I’m old. 🤣😂)
If you have played evil and good characters and felt the alignment was just tagged on then I would suggest in reality you where roleplaying 2 neutral characters.
Allignment is both super important and not important at all. It is super important because how a character acts does impact relationships, both with the world around them and with other players. If a party is stealing stuff and murdering NPCs then that will result in them becoming the bad guy of the story and the NPCs the hero’s trying to stop a bad guy who is causing them problems.
Alternatively if a single character is doing that then the party may decide to step in leading to a player vs player battle or some sort of other confrontation.
Now giving that behavior a distinct binary name is not important, a player can do all the above and not once refer to themselves as chaotic evil, or lawful good so in that way allignment had no importance whatsoever.
I have also run and played in campaigns where we just didn’t care and the players could run riot with no real come back in game because that’s the kind of game we wanted to play (linear, hack and slash with no nuance).
Now personally when it comes to monsters I ignore the allignment even more and prefer to, in my own head, decide motivations. Why is this creature behaving this way. Why is the goblin attacking the party and what does this Drow really want.
I think that a lot of people advocating ignoring alignment simply don't understand how to use it as a DM and/or haven't ever had a DM that does.
Or they just don't find it useful. You know sometimes people do know what they're doing and they just don't agree with you, that's a possibility, you know.
It never has been about defining behavior - its a characteristic of behavior. One lawful good toon could think killing evil peeps is ok - another may feel the opposite. Some may lose their temper and act alignment-contrary when ridiculed. Think of alignment as ""among these 9 options, this is the one that best describes me".
Yeah but that sounds about as specific as an astrological sign. Which I think is a fair comparison. Yes, it does split everyone up into big convenient groups, but they are so vague that they don't work by themselves as a basis for a character personality. If you do even a cursory search on these and other D&D forums you will find so many arguments about exactly how each alignment works for a character so I will posit that it's not as useful as you make it seem and that, in fact, it's almost as hindering as it is helpful. And please don't make it about people not being educated enough to use it. It is a fictional system in a fictional world, not fact. It is one of the sacred legacy systems from an old game.
Honestly I don't mind the alignment system's presence, as long as it doesn't really have a mechanical impact. So I'm not even one of the people who are saying that it has to go. I just ... wouldn't mind if it was gone. And you really don't need to defend it, really. Yes, you like it and you use it, but other people don't like or use it as much and that's just as valid.
1) A guy is joining the party and making a character, and he wants to know what the party alignments are. Do you really want to text "I'm a loner/outcast with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and I don't like to kill creatures unless in self-defense or on my holy day of OCT 23 when my deity says its OK to do so," or just simply write "CN" ? Imagine the guy that has to sift thru the former for all 6 party members.
In groups that I've played with there are generally two responses to this. Either "you have to find out what my character is like in character because we're hardcore roleplayers and we don't want to metagame anything" or "yeah let's sit down and discuss our character back stories and motivations so we can see if we can have shared histories together and maybe even plan out some possible story beats that we would like to see happen in the game."
Neither of them would care much about the 9x9 Alignment grid, though each might use it as one tool.
2) Someone casts detect evil. "Does it flag my toon? I dunno, guess we will have to go over my 3 paragraph personality write-up and decide. Hold on a sec."
Detect Evil and Good doesn't work on humanoids. It detects only the presence of certain extraplanar entities as well as desecrated or consecrated sites.
Nope. They're going to classify you according to stereotype. No one (outside of a certain fanbase who uses it at a meta level) uses a 9x9 Alignment grid to judge people. It's an arbitrary system that Arneson and Gygax et al, created whole cloth and it really doesn't need to be as gospel as people make it.
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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!
1) A guy is joining the party and making a character, and he wants to know what the party alignments are. Do you really want to text "I'm a loner/outcast with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and I don't like to kill creatures unless in self-defense or on my holy day of OCT 23 when my deity says its OK to do so," or just simply write "CN" ? Imagine the guy that has to sift thru the former for all 6 party members. \\
I would much rather reject the character based on the former rather than rejecting the character based on the latter (the character sounds like a PITA so it gets rejected either way).
2) Someone casts detect evil. "Does it flag my toon? I dunno, guess we will have to go over my 3 paragraph personality write-up and decide. Hold on a sec."
The answer is always 'no' in 5th edition, because detect evil in 5e doesn't key off of alignment, it keys off of creature type, but even in previous editions, detect evil was mostly a spell it was up to the DM to make sure never did anything useful (the obvious threats were obvious without the spell, the less-obvious threats are rendered boring and pointless if they can be auto-detected with a first level spell).
4) Because everyone sees good and evil differently, we need a common frame of reference. That orc doesn't see that toon as lawful good - he sees him as stuck up, stiff, soft, and weak. The orc doesn't view himself as chaotic evil, he thinks he is strong, practical, and a good survivor. But out of character, we need a shorthand common system to quickly id and classify them.
No, we really don't need a common frame of reference or a shorthand system to id and classify them.
Now personally when it comes to monsters I ignore the allignment even more and prefer to, in my own head, decide motivations. Why is this creature behaving this way. Why is the goblin attacking the party and what does this Drow really want.
I think that a lot of people advocating ignoring alignment simply don't understand how to use it as a DM and/or haven't ever had a DM that does. It never has been about defining behavior - its a characteristic of behavior. One lawful good toon could think killing evil peeps is ok - another may feel the opposite. Some may lose their temper and act alignment-contrary when ridiculed. Think of alignment as ""among these 9 options, this is the one that best describes me". We need this shorthand broad categorization for several reasons:
1) A guy is joining the party and making a character, and he wants to know what the party alignments are. Do you really want to text "I'm a loner/outcast with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and I don't like to kill creatures unless in self-defense or on my holy day of OCT 23 when my deity says its OK to do so," or just simply write "CN" ? Imagine the guy that has to sift thru the former for all 6 party members.
2) Someone casts detect evil. "Does it flag my toon? I dunno, guess we will have to go over my 3 paragraph personality write-up and decide. Hold on a sec."
3) Our brains are hardwired to classify others into a handful or two of categories, regardless of the deeper complexities underlying that individual. So they are gonna put you in an alignment grid, and decide what to do with you based on that grid, whether you like it or not. That orc is gonna most likely figure out rather quickly you are CG (unless you have a good Deception score) and decide you are too soft to join his raiding group. So he will never get to know the real you on your personality sheet.
4) Because everyone sees good and evil differently, we need a common frame of reference. That orc doesn't see that toon as lawful good - he sees him as stuck up, stiff, soft, and weak. The orc doesn't view himself as chaotic evil, he thinks he is strong, practical, and a good survivor. But out of character, we need a shorthand common system to quickly id and classify them. The PHB alignment system does that - it describes in rough detail what each alignment is. Like all rules, its an abstraction and simplification. But it keeps the game moving along.
OK, so your dad is a half human half goblin and your mom is a half-orc half human. Most people aren't. Sorry you don't fit neatly into the racial categories, but we gotta call you something and assign stats. Do we blow up the D and D race categories because they "don't capture the full complexity of my character"? Maybe now I decide my toon is gonna do more leg work and less upper body. Are we gonna need better a better ability score system to capture the full complexity of my character now? "Wait, would this be a lower body STR check or an upper body one?"
D and D is a game that creates an entire universe - if you don't abstract and simplify stuff, its gonna get unwieldy pretty quick. But (shrug) - play how you like.
Ok will ignore the condescending attitude here, I have been playing TTRPGs for 30 years now, all sorts, vampier/werewolf/mage and changing, warhammer fantasy roleplay, tcyberpunk, L5R, Call of Cthulhu, paranoia and many others too many to mention.
I don’t need an alignment grid or table, if someone finds it useful great, but I tend to find when actually roleplaying a character may well dance all over that grid in a single session, and, how they are perceived by others will also shift. I am lawful good may well be true, but, to those orcs you killed you are decidedly evil.
Your games may be different and less roleplay heavy but mine, when a player joins, there isn’t a character introduction. They make a character they join the table and roleplay begins, over time they will form an opinion as to their fellow characters motivations, beliefs and code of ethics and over time those will shift as the character experiences “life”. I apply the same rule to backstory, non of my players share there’s with each other unless there are a a reason to out of session, all that happens at the table in character.
Alignment will stay, mainly because the anger it will cause to remove it and, it works as a very opening intro to the idea of motivation and moral compass, but, as one astute child I once taught to play the game once said, I can’t be that good, I’m killing things that are intelligent enough to talk without talking back to them first.
As for monster alignment again I will say I ignore them in the book and am glad they are being removed, orcs and goblinoids in my world can have an established; peaceful community that trades, farms, hunts and lives and hires the party to deal with those humans causing trouble because they don’t like that kind. Or kill a dragon, or anything else a human settlement can do. If player characters can be any “alignment”, and players can be orcs, goblins, etc. then there must be “good” goblinoids out there. If it is intelligent t it can have good or bad motivations, if it is just an animal, alignment makes no sense, it just wants to eat, live, sleep or procreate and the party are threatening/going to be one of those things.
I consider it descriptive not perscriptive in characters, so it describes what they are doing rather than influencing it. If the players roleplay a characters descent from lawful to chaotic, so be it - I won't be telling them to change what they want their character to do because of an alignment.
In monsters & NPCs, I treat "Lawful/chaotic" to mean "Predictable/unpredictable" and "Good/Evil" to mean "selfless/selfish" and go from there. That's what the alignment implies to me, at any rate. a Lawful Good character you can predict to perform selfless acts, whilst a chaotic evil monster you know will have no fixed responses to things, and will act in its own interests. Neutrality I equate to apathy, so a neutral character/monster will simply do what it feels like doing, without much vindiction - it will try to eat you, and if you talk to it, it might stop, whereas a lawful monster would continue to try to eat you (it's "law" is that it's hungry, and it eats food) or absolutely stop (It's law is not to eat talking food), and a chaotic one might decide to play with you, like a cat with a mouse, instead.
I consider it descriptive not perscriptive in characters, so it describes what they are doing rather than influencing it. If the players roleplay a characters descent from lawful to chaotic, so be it - I won't be telling them to change what they want their character to do because of an alignment.
Agreed.
I found it easier to explain good & evil in terms of the creature's viewpoint on pain. A good creature wants to reduce the amount of pain in the world, seeing it as an obstacle to enlightenment and progress. An evil character sees pain as a necessary tool. It's not primarily about empathy or cruelty, but those viewpoints tend to attract the highly empathetic (for good) and sadistic (for evil). It makes a more interesting and sophisticated dimension, I think. It also makes for more evil PCs...
Reading over this thread, it looks like Alignment is as important as individuals want it to be for them—some preferring it for streamlining things, some dislike it for oversimplifying things. I can see merits to both, but I still have my preference. My preference will not override someone else's, and nobody else's will override mine.
It seems several responses here already state something similar, but I still see people trying to defend/attack something that doesn't need defending nor deserves aggression.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I see alignment as which side of the war do you want to see win in the end.
If an angel comes to you and asks you to do something for it or it's god, would you say "Yes, No, or "How Much?" If a Demon or Devil comes to you and asks you to do something for it or its god, would you say "Yes, No, or How much?"
Do you try to emulate the behavior of Angels or follow the tenant's of an upper plain god? Do you try to emulate the behavior of Demons/Devils or follow the tenants of a lower plane god?
One side is Good, the other side is Evil - With whom do you Align.
That is what the system was always supposed to represent IMHO.
Neutral, could mean apathy; but it could also mean you are dedicated to neither side gaining true advantage over the other, and finding the world to be best off if both sides remain eternally locked into a stalemate.
----
I also do not think anyone is unaware of their alignments from an internal perspective or a subjective one. i.e. Orcs aren't thinking to themselves, they are the good guys and that paladin of Pelor is evil. They know what side of the war they are on, they know upon which plane their god resides and to where their souls go upon death, and for the most part, they accept their purpose and function in the grand scheme of things; as does everyone else.
This is true of the PC's too. A PC who decides they are LG means their character wants the Angels to beat the Demons, and the gods of Celestia to rule the multiverse uncontested - and they (their characters) are choosing to (try an) live by the tenants of one or more of those specific gods. CG means you want the denizens of ...is it Elysium? to beat the Devils and rule the multiverse uncontested - and choose to live by the tenants of one or more of those particular gods.
It's "Whom do you serve? "The light, the darkness, the balance, or no-one/myself". In the case of the last one, you can write probably write undecided or unaligned.
It;s useful in a game where roleplaying isn't used at all, as a simple faction flag for 'okay to kill/not okay to kill'. It's worthless as 'guidelines for how to do so in a consistent manner' because there's no real agreement about what each alignment even means.
Possibly relevant thoughts from Jeremy Crawford in a recent interview about MMM:
I think this speaks to how they want alignment to be a very light touch when it comes to character personality and values.
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!
Short answer: “as important as your table wants it to be.”
For me personally, I mostly only care about the L/C axis.
In
1eOD&D, that was the only Alignment in the game. “Good” and “Evil” were originally considered too subjective to fit into the concept of Alignment, they weren’t added until2eAD&D with Paladins & Rangers who had to maintain Good Alignment or loose their features and get dropped to “plain Jane” Fighters.Creating Epic Boons on DDB
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A PC’s alignment is supposed to reflect the character’s personality and values, not dictate it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “light touch” as long as its a finishing touch. People mistakenly think of alignment as a rigid slot they have to fit within, but in reality they really just have to play their character. If the character’s alignment doesn’t fit the way the player is playing the character it’s the alignment that should change to fit their play style, not the play style to fit the alignment.
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I'm pretty sure good/evil was part of 1e.
I believe you've unwittingly proven my point, which is that if you want alignment to be universally beneficial, you'll be disappointed, but if you look at it on an individual level, it can be a useful tool for certain people. It is irrelevant if there's agreement about what Chaotic Neutral means - though I would argue that the little blurb you get in the character creator gives at least a vague baseline. What is relevant is that the little blurb and the individual player's understanding of it can be helpful to some when one is fleshing out a character.
I'd also contest your first argument. To claim that alignment is helpful only for people who don't roleplay or don't need nuance is reductionist and, to be rather frank, demonstrably false in my own experience. I and my entire party are huge roleplayers, delving deep into emotional, philosophical and moral questions with our characters. When playing a character whose outlook is vastly different from our own, it's sometimes helpful to have something external to refer to. No, this doesn't mean we don't let our characters evolve. No, it doesn't mean the DM says, "you're Lawful Neutral, you wouldn't do that." All it means is that on occasion, when we're not sure how our characters would respond, taking alignment into consideration can help inform roleplay choices.
He was referring to Chainmail and such.
"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
I think a good point was made in that Alignment is a label that indicates how the PC is being played rather than a ruleset to be followed.
People can choose initially to be X aligned but over the course of play it might swing one way or another due to PC actions.
"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
Sorry, must have missed that reference.
Right, I kinda think that's in the same general neighborhood? Also I think my point with the quote was that even Jeremy Crawford thinks that Alignment in some ways can feel like the developers "putting a hand on the scale" and manipulating a player's choices in regards to their character's values and personality. If he feels that way, I'm pretty sure alignment is NOT going to get any stronger a presence in future books. Which aligns (forgive me) with the recent changes in alignment in stat blocks.
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!
But the designers don’t dictate which alignment best suits each character, the player does by their actions and the DM arbitrates it. All the designers did was generate the list. 🤷♂️ How does a butcher putting up the list of cuts equal putting their thumb on the scale?
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Nah, I misstated what I meant. (Wysp is used to my slipping on this.) I keep mentally piling AD&D1e & 2e into what I think of as “2e.” When I mention 1e I’m usually referring to OD&D. It’s a bad habit that I haven’t been able to shake since 3e came out for some reason. Before that there was just D&D, and AD&D for most folks, the 1e/2e thing was less relevant to conversations. (💩!! …I’m old. 🤣😂)
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If you have played evil and good characters and felt the alignment was just tagged on then I would suggest in reality you where roleplaying 2 neutral characters.
Allignment is both super important and not important at all. It is super important because how a character acts does impact relationships, both with the world around them and with other players. If a party is stealing stuff and murdering NPCs then that will result in them becoming the bad guy of the story and the NPCs the hero’s trying to stop a bad guy who is causing them problems.
Alternatively if a single character is doing that then the party may decide to step in leading to a player vs player battle or some sort of other confrontation.
Now giving that behavior a distinct binary name is not important, a player can do all the above and not once refer to themselves as chaotic evil, or lawful good so in that way allignment had no importance whatsoever.
I have also run and played in campaigns where we just didn’t care and the players could run riot with no real come back in game because that’s the kind of game we wanted to play (linear, hack and slash with no nuance).
Now personally when it comes to monsters I ignore the allignment even more and prefer to, in my own head, decide motivations. Why is this creature behaving this way. Why is the goblin attacking the party and what does this Drow really want.
Or they just don't find it useful. You know sometimes people do know what they're doing and they just don't agree with you, that's a possibility, you know.
Yeah but that sounds about as specific as an astrological sign. Which I think is a fair comparison. Yes, it does split everyone up into big convenient groups, but they are so vague that they don't work by themselves as a basis for a character personality. If you do even a cursory search on these and other D&D forums you will find so many arguments about exactly how each alignment works for a character so I will posit that it's not as useful as you make it seem and that, in fact, it's almost as hindering as it is helpful. And please don't make it about people not being educated enough to use it. It is a fictional system in a fictional world, not fact. It is one of the sacred legacy systems from an old game.
Honestly I don't mind the alignment system's presence, as long as it doesn't really have a mechanical impact. So I'm not even one of the people who are saying that it has to go. I just ... wouldn't mind if it was gone. And you really don't need to defend it, really. Yes, you like it and you use it, but other people don't like or use it as much and that's just as valid.
It can be useful, but it's not necessary in my opinion.
In groups that I've played with there are generally two responses to this. Either "you have to find out what my character is like in character because we're hardcore roleplayers and we don't want to metagame anything" or "yeah let's sit down and discuss our character back stories and motivations so we can see if we can have shared histories together and maybe even plan out some possible story beats that we would like to see happen in the game."
Neither of them would care much about the 9x9 Alignment grid, though each might use it as one tool.
Detect Evil and Good doesn't work on humanoids. It detects only the presence of certain extraplanar entities as well as desecrated or consecrated sites.
I mean yes, sure.
Nope. They're going to classify you according to stereotype. No one (outside of a certain fanbase who uses it at a meta level) uses a 9x9 Alignment grid to judge people. It's an arbitrary system that Arneson and Gygax et al, created whole cloth and it really doesn't need to be as gospel as people make it.
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!
I would much rather reject the character based on the former rather than rejecting the character based on the latter (the character sounds like a PITA so it gets rejected either way).
The answer is always 'no' in 5th edition, because detect evil in 5e doesn't key off of alignment, it keys off of creature type, but even in previous editions, detect evil was mostly a spell it was up to the DM to make sure never did anything useful (the obvious threats were obvious without the spell, the less-obvious threats are rendered boring and pointless if they can be auto-detected with a first level spell).
Our brains aren't hardwired for anything particularly correlated with alignment (we classify as threat/not threat and the like).
No, we really don't need a common frame of reference or a shorthand system to id and classify them.
Ok will ignore the condescending attitude here, I have been playing TTRPGs for 30 years now, all sorts, vampier/werewolf/mage and changing, warhammer fantasy roleplay, tcyberpunk, L5R, Call of Cthulhu, paranoia and many others too many to mention.
I don’t need an alignment grid or table, if someone finds it useful great, but I tend to find when actually roleplaying a character may well dance all over that grid in a single session, and, how they are perceived by others will also shift. I am lawful good may well be true, but, to those orcs you killed you are decidedly evil.
Your games may be different and less roleplay heavy but mine, when a player joins, there isn’t a character introduction. They make a character they join the table and roleplay begins, over time they will form an opinion as to their fellow characters motivations, beliefs and code of ethics and over time those will shift as the character experiences “life”. I apply the same rule to backstory, non of my players share there’s with each other unless there are a a reason to out of session, all that happens at the table in character.
Alignment will stay, mainly because the anger it will cause to remove it and, it works as a very opening intro to the idea of motivation and moral compass, but, as one astute child I once taught to play the game once said, I can’t be that good, I’m killing things that are intelligent enough to talk without talking back to them first.
As for monster alignment again I will say I ignore them in the book and am glad they are being removed, orcs and goblinoids in my world can have an established; peaceful community that trades, farms, hunts and lives and hires the party to deal with those humans causing trouble because they don’t like that kind. Or kill a dragon, or anything else a human settlement can do. If player characters can be any “alignment”, and players can be orcs, goblins, etc. then there must be “good” goblinoids out there. If it is intelligent t it can have good or bad motivations, if it is just an animal, alignment makes no sense, it just wants to eat, live, sleep or procreate and the party are threatening/going to be one of those things.
I consider it descriptive not perscriptive in characters, so it describes what they are doing rather than influencing it. If the players roleplay a characters descent from lawful to chaotic, so be it - I won't be telling them to change what they want their character to do because of an alignment.
In monsters & NPCs, I treat "Lawful/chaotic" to mean "Predictable/unpredictable" and "Good/Evil" to mean "selfless/selfish" and go from there. That's what the alignment implies to me, at any rate. a Lawful Good character you can predict to perform selfless acts, whilst a chaotic evil monster you know will have no fixed responses to things, and will act in its own interests. Neutrality I equate to apathy, so a neutral character/monster will simply do what it feels like doing, without much vindiction - it will try to eat you, and if you talk to it, it might stop, whereas a lawful monster would continue to try to eat you (it's "law" is that it's hungry, and it eats food) or absolutely stop (It's law is not to eat talking food), and a chaotic one might decide to play with you, like a cat with a mouse, instead.
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Agreed.
I found it easier to explain good & evil in terms of the creature's viewpoint on pain. A good creature wants to reduce the amount of pain in the world, seeing it as an obstacle to enlightenment and progress. An evil character sees pain as a necessary tool. It's not primarily about empathy or cruelty, but those viewpoints tend to attract the highly empathetic (for good) and sadistic (for evil). It makes a more interesting and sophisticated dimension, I think. It also makes for more evil PCs...
Reading over this thread, it looks like Alignment is as important as individuals want it to be for them—some preferring it for streamlining things, some dislike it for oversimplifying things. I can see merits to both, but I still have my preference. My preference will not override someone else's, and nobody else's will override mine.
It seems several responses here already state something similar, but I still see people trying to defend/attack something that doesn't need defending nor deserves aggression.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I see alignment as which side of the war do you want to see win in the end.
If an angel comes to you and asks you to do something for it or it's god, would you say "Yes, No, or "How Much?" If a Demon or Devil comes to you and asks you to do something for it or its god, would you say "Yes, No, or How much?"
Do you try to emulate the behavior of Angels or follow the tenant's of an upper plain god? Do you try to emulate the behavior of Demons/Devils or follow the tenants of a lower plane god?
One side is Good, the other side is Evil - With whom do you Align.
That is what the system was always supposed to represent IMHO.
Neutral, could mean apathy; but it could also mean you are dedicated to neither side gaining true advantage over the other, and finding the world to be best off if both sides remain eternally locked into a stalemate.
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I also do not think anyone is unaware of their alignments from an internal perspective or a subjective one. i.e. Orcs aren't thinking to themselves, they are the good guys and that paladin of Pelor is evil. They know what side of the war they are on, they know upon which plane their god resides and to where their souls go upon death, and for the most part, they accept their purpose and function in the grand scheme of things; as does everyone else.
This is true of the PC's too. A PC who decides they are LG means their character wants the Angels to beat the Demons, and the gods of Celestia to rule the multiverse uncontested - and they (their characters) are choosing to (try an) live by the tenants of one or more of those specific gods. CG means you want the denizens of ...is it Elysium? to beat the Devils and rule the multiverse uncontested - and choose to live by the tenants of one or more of those particular gods.
It's "Whom do you serve? "The light, the darkness, the balance, or no-one/myself". In the case of the last one, you can write probably write undecided or unaligned.
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All the personality stuff is largely incidental.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.