While i agree with this take a lot more, I would like to believe that in some situations a lawful character would 100% break the laws if they believed them to be unjust. Order is important, but a corrupt order is worse then pure chaos. Like i'm imagining a kingdom where because the lord owns the land, and the peasant works and lives on that land, the lord basically owns the peasant and is legally allowed to do with them as they see fit up to a certain point "i can't kill you for simply existing, but i can sure a shit can have you beaten daily because i don't like the color of your hair/the shape of your nose/etc..."
And just to take the point a little further, a Lawful Good Cleric could consider their deities version of the 10 Commandments to be the epitome of order. A paladin might live by a code, such as: "I will protect the weak, judge fairly, and never refuse a call for help from the oppressed." If they live by that code, they are a Lawful creature, even if they completely reject the laws of the land in which they have happened to travel into.
The master of a thieves' guild can be lawful, if they obey the Code of Thieves and seek to ensure that it is upheld, even if the first part of the Code of Thieves says "Only steal from those who are richer than you." Perhaps the Thieves Guild has a rigid hierarchy of Master Thieves and Gang Bosses who control specific areas of the city, and the guild master insists on seeing those rules enforced. Compare that character to Grouchy The Thug, who has no allegiance to any organisation. He just clubs who he wants, and takes their stuff. He is Chaotic Evil, because there is no prior thought to what he is doing, and the only things that can control him are violence and fear.
Even among Chaotic Evil creatures there is nuance.
Orcs are typically chaotic evil because they only respect strength. They'll act as subordinates because it benefits them, or they fear their master, but given any chance of success they'll stab the master in the back and take their stuff.
Gnolls are chaotic evil because they have no long-term thoughts, or plans. They simply exist to take what they want and enjoy it, then move on like locusts.
A red dragon is chaotic evil because it is so powerful it simply doesn't have to care about what anyone or anything else thinks. Disagree with me? I eat you!
Kind of ironic, and it has little bearing on the initial discussion, but I decided that Alignments were cosmic forces that created the gods and the planes they reside in. I offer the players the option of worshiping those forces, and they are color coded. Good if white, Evil is black, Lawful is red, Chaos is blue, and Neutral is Gray. I also offer the option to worship the Old Faith, those who worship the Forces of Nature, which don't have to be any one of the gods, but can be if they like. That's the Green.
The Alignment Faith uses a little disk for their holy symbol and it will show the colors of your Alignment. Lawful Good will be red and white, Chaotic good will be blue and while, Neutral good will usually be just white, because a grayish white is hard to tell from a normal white. Lawful Neutral with just red, Lawful Evil will be red and black, Neutral evil will be just black, Chaotic Evil will be blue and black, Chaotic Neutral will be blue, True Neutral will be just gray, and Druids will usually be Green, Rangers might be, and Barbarians could be.
Most of the common folk will be gray, a lot of the priests of the Alignment Faith will also be gray to show that they believe that all gods should be worshiped equally, and pretty much everyone else will be something else. I've had very few characters who worshiped the Gray Faith in my games. Usually, if they have a god at all, they will ignore the color system entirely, and the few who do chose to worship the Alignment Faiths will be some other color or colors.
In any game that doesn't color code the alignments, and I haven't seen one yet, this kind of metagamy. In mine it works, and it's kind of fun. If you see a guy in heavy armor with a checkered red and while shield, and a little disk that's red, that's probably a Lawful Good Paladin who focuses primarily on the law. If you see a guy with a bow and arrows and light armor, and a little green disk, that's almost certainly a Ranger, but you won't have a clue what Alignment. If you see a guy in studded leather arm with a wooden shield and a club with a little green disk, that's almost certainly a Druid, but again, you won't know what Alignment. People in fancy dress who want to show their alignment will show it somehow, maybe they will die their hair, show it in the color of their clothing, or wear jewelry that matches. I don't care what player character do themselves, but it's kind of neat to have a non-magical version of the old Know Alignment spell or the Paladin's Detect Evil, but of all the Alignments, probably the ones who are Evil are the least likely to show it. So in my games, Bad Guys Wear White so they can fool people into believing they are the Good Guys.
I have always enjoyed playing lawful ev characters in good parties. It gives you the motivation and drive to move your character and the campaign forward while also allowing you to put yourself as your #1 concern. You follow the rules and work with others but won't rush off to help others for no reason. I really enjoy playing LE heavily armored clerics or paladins as deathknight type characters. Honorable to a fault but not a nice person and you put yourself and your goal first. The party is just the best way to get there so you work with them and aid them.
I have always enjoyed playing lawful ev characters in good parties. It gives you the motivation and drive to move your character and the campaign forward while also allowing you to put yourself as your #1 concern. You follow the rules and work with others but won't rush off to help others for no reason. I really enjoy playing LE heavily armored clerics or paladins as deathknight type characters. Honorable to a fault but not a nice person and you put yourself and your goal first. The party is just the best way to get there so you work with them and aid them.
Exactly. I'm playing a LE Warlock with the Noble background. Our party has found nobles to be boorish and self-serving, so my character seems typical of what they expect. His noble ties and renown have helped the group plenty of times though, so they see the benefit. The fun part is finding the opportunities to chase personal goals, but knowing team goals does take precedence. When you can do both at the same time; that's some high level gaming.
I personally only use alignment as a baseline of how a character behaves and am not strict about it (i.e. No, you are Neutral Good, your character wouldn't stab the merchant in the face with a soldering iron.) That being said, the only alignment I don't allow for PCs is Chaotic Evil, for the simple fact that most people can't role play it properly (and those that can are probably sociopathic schizophrenics). It just leads to the party breaking up and the game falling apart. I do allow the other evil alignments and let the player know that publicly performing evil actions will have consequences, either from local law enforcement, the public, or even other party members.
just caught this. I feel like i wouldn't want to micro manage my players but i probably would be like "no, just no. Your Neutral Good character may NOT go on a freaking murder rampage. Especially not without major consequences. I don't care that the merchant kind of ripped you off, because you rolled a 1 while haggling."
just caught this. I feel like i wouldn't want to micro manage my players but i probably would be like "no, just no. Your Neutral Good character may NOT go on a freaking murder rampage. Especially not without major consequences. I don't care that the merchant kind of ripped you off, because you rolled a 1 while haggling."
I know that is tongue in cheek but thats a whole other issue there, if the player rolled a 1 then they have no way of knowing, any time soon, they got ripped off. Maybe, a day or 2 later for hilarity I might have the same item on sale in a store for half the price :).
The thing with this is that Good alignment players go on murder rampages all the time, we just turn a. blind eye because the things they are murdering are green skinned, or worship an evil deity, or are trying to resurrect the dead god by killing a bunch of people. This is why I find the idea of sticking to Alignment so funny in a medieval fantasy world, you can't kill people unless they are the right people for the right reason, the reality is always shades of grey.
You can definitely kill people and have a good alignment.
If the bandits are planning an attack on a village of innocent villagers, and they have a history of having done so before, then attacking them first and wiping them out isn't an evil act because the bandits are forcing the decision. Your good character would rather have left them in peace. They may even try to reason with them first, but good =/= pacifist. You can be a pacifist who fights when necessity forces them to.
Alignment is more of a general way of describing a character, and I'm not aware of many instances of it having much impact outside of items like talisman of pure good or talisman of ultimate evil.
One of the things that I have found is that every time the world "reality" or "realism" comes up, I should be suspicious. One of the important points of my campaign is that Alignments are cosmic forces, and that they created the deities and the planes of existence they reside in. Good versus Evil, Law versus Chaos are part of what make up the theme of my game.
So I don't want shades of gray. I want people in my game to be able to judge right from wrong and have the ability to be correct. If you find a way to figure out someone's Alignment, and I have rules for that, you know where you stand. NPCs will make assumptions, some will decide to judge you on your actions, others will act according to their biases, just like in the real world. I don't require my players to behave strictly by their Alignment, it's just a guideline outside of a few magical effects, and of course, that's kind of the point of magic. Everyone has quirks that influence their reaction, and I'm trying to build a list of them so I can let players pick them for their characters, and I'll use them on significant NPCs and Monsters.
I believe that part of why people play roleplaying games is to escape from reality, and I don't care to drag them back into it with rules to enforce reality in a fantasy game..
i think a lot of it, for me, comes down to how "out of left field" is the action, and how much does it change the story if I allow it. Like to continue using the merchant example; i can see a person telling the merchant to "go f*** yourself" when the merchant is upcharging by 50-100% (they only know because they've bought this kind of item before, something like a health potion being a good example). I don't really see them driving a sword through the merchant's guts and then attempting to "leave no witnesses".
Trust me i'm all for diving into the moral quagmire that is "why am i celebrated for killing a tribe of goblins, but sentenced to death for wiping out a town of halflings?" But i'm trying to focus the example around a situation where the player was friendly-ish with someone, then that person mildly insulted them so..... "time to make your insides, your outsides"
Hm... We take for example a True Neutral merchant who is greedy enough to try to overcharge people. ( I consider Greed to be Neutral. That's a form of self-interest and is part of how I define "Neutrality")
Lawful Evil. It may be legal to overcharge, but I'm going to do the best I can to make things right somehow. I'll either argue that price all the way down past the base price, or report this guy to the law. If I do have any authority, I'll use it. I might go get someone else, but I'm malevolent, and the legal authorities probably wouldn't make that merchant suffer enough. Time for some cutting if I can get away with it.
Neutral Evil. He tries to overcharge me. So? I'm going to do something about it if I can't get the price down to what I think is a reasonable markup, if I can't, I don't give a crap what the law says. Slice and dice.
Chaotic Evil. He tries to overcharge me? How dare he! Death. Right now. I might or might not take all his stuff and burn the store down.
You know what would make this less of an issue; the players don't choose their alignment. They just play their character. The DM keeps track of it, and if relevant it comes up in game. Would eliminate the "this is how my character would act". They just act. Often the folks who are aligned as Good do stuff that is morally on the fence, but they have their justifications. In a game where you kill things, that is going to be in play. And if a DM did this, then the OP question of allowing evil PC's in the game is more a question of "do I allow players who put their personal goals above team goals in my game". I've seen players of all alignments attempt to bend the game to what their character holds as important.
just caught this. I feel like i wouldn't want to micro manage my players but i probably would be like "no, just no. Your Neutral Good character may NOT go on a freaking murder rampage. Especially not without major consequences. I don't care that the merchant kind of ripped you off, because you rolled a 1 while haggling."
I would just say "Your alignment isn't actually neutral good". D&D alignment, at least in 5e, is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
My worry there is you end up with the player who is all over the place. One session they are helping build an orphanage, another session “I killed everyone, the men, the women; the children. I killed them all”, and in another they are aggressively haggling with the local nobility and farmers to help build a trade Coalition
My worry there is you end up with the player who is all over the place. One session they are helping build an orphanage, another session “I killed everyone, the men, the women; the children. I killed them all”, and in another they are aggressively haggling with the local nobility and farmers to help build a trade Coalition
That's not an alignment problem. That's a roleplaying problem (or rather, a lack of roleplaying problem). Players should give their characters a personality and RP that personality.
You know what would make this less of an issue; the players don't choose their alignment. They just play their character. The DM keeps track of it, and if relevant it comes up in game. Would eliminate the "this is how my character would act". They just act. Often the folks who are aligned as Good do stuff that is morally on the fence, but they have their justifications. In a game where you kill things, that is going to be in play. And if a DM did this, then the OP question of allowing evil PC's in the game is more a question of "do I allow players who put their personal goals above team goals in my game". I've seen players of all alignments attempt to bend the game to what their character holds as important.
This is how I try to run it, in fact in character creation I don’t mention alignment, I ask players what their value structure is and then over the first 5-10 sessions I let them just play in the space and work out who they are and how they will react to things, the only exception are clerics I let them work out which god they want to worship and then work with them to determine the minimum expected behaviour that god would expect.
The funny thing is that "value structures" are something you can sum up in D&D with just two words. They call that "Alignment". Good and Evil are about your morals, they are how you treat people, Law and Chaos are about ethics and how you fit into society. Neutrality is when you only care about yourself and what you can get out of life.
The funny thing is that "value structures" are something you can sum up in D&D with just two words. They call that "Alignment". Good and Evil are about your morals, they are how you treat people, Law and Chaos are about ethics and how you fit into society. Neutrality is when you only care about yourself and what you can get out of life.
We are going to have to disagree on how we run our games and that is ok, I run realistic moral questioning campaigns that make players think, that giant you killed, you find a large baby rattle in its pocket, somewhere you have just made a baby lose a parent. That orc you kill, you find out his tribe is starving and he just wanted to help them survive.
My world is shades of grey because those are the most fun stories to tell, everyone loved the concept of game of thrones because there was no real outright hero or villain really. My players, and I have run many campaigns for many many people love them, but then they also love Grimdark universes like the world of darkness, 40k, Cthulhu, warhammer. They like tales where there is room for that good character to have a moment where they torture someone to death slowly over several days because they know where their family is, or where the evil guy can have a moment where he does good acts because it makes sense.
In these cases the alignment system really doesn’t work, it is too fixed to one dimensional, even the gods in my world are dynamic, a lawful good god will seem evil to someone else, Asmodeus in many ways is good because he defends the planes from the abyss. I actually just revealed to my players that, in my world, Tiamat and Bahamat once fought side by side to help overthrow the Aboleth and the Primordial gods. Goblins and orca and all other greenskins, it will be discovered, are oppressed and have been fighting a war against eradication brought about by the evil empire that wants the land they peacefully ruled 300 years ago. I am inspired by the treatment of native north and South American tribes and civilizations by Europeans.
So no in my world there is not a subscribed alignment because I can’t square that circle in my head that a lawful good person goes out and happily kills and maims without suffering any moral or emotional or mental side effects.
Yes there are evil people and bbeg, but like Thanos, even they can seem reasonable and good from a certain perspective.
We got the Law and Chaos axis from Michael Moocock's Eternal Champion stories, and that was basically where the theme of Alignments being cosmic forces came from, and may have been what started the entire concept of Alignment in D&D. He tried to replace the "Good vs Evil" thing that appears in so much fantasy fiction with something more interesting and make it so sometimes deities who were obviously Evil might work together with ones who were clearly Good. D&D kind of fused what he was trying to avoid into his system. It makes things a little weird because of that.
I don't really disagree with you so much as I think the system works just fine and shouldn't be junked. It's only a problem if people take it way too far. As long as people remember that nobody ever varies in their behavior sometimes, and that there are few mechanical game effects about it, it's a handy roleplaying tool and nothing more.
We got the Law and Chaos axis from Michael Moocock's Eternal Champion stories, and that was basically where the theme of Alignments being cosmic forces came from, and may have been what started the entire concept of Alignment in D&D. He tried to replace the "Good vs Evil" thing that appears in so much fantasy fiction with something more interesting and make it so sometimes deities who were obviously Evil might work together with ones who were clearly Good. D&D kind of fused what he was trying to avoid into his system. It makes things a little weird because of that.
I don't really disagree with you so much as I think the system works just fine and shouldn't be junked. It's only a problem if people take it way too far. As long as people remember that nobody ever varies in their behavior sometimes, and that there are few mechanical game effects about it, it's a handy roleplaying tool and nothing more.
I think it also depends where you entered Ttrpgs from, I am relatively new to DnD/pathfinder systems, 15 years or so. 30 years ago I started out in cyberpunk, vampire and werewolf and warhammer fantasy roleplay which where far grittier, I mean my first ever character was a vampire who kept human “cattle” and enjoyed changing peoples flesh, and that was one of the good guys lol. I then had a character so jacked into tech he had lost part of his humanity and so had no morale center abut killing. These were games where the concept of alignment was very very different and I suppose it shapes how you run and play games.
Alignment does have its place, I always run through it with brand new players as an intro to types of characters but over the years I have found with my core play group we just leave the box blank.
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And just to take the point a little further, a Lawful Good Cleric could consider their deities version of the 10 Commandments to be the epitome of order. A paladin might live by a code, such as: "I will protect the weak, judge fairly, and never refuse a call for help from the oppressed." If they live by that code, they are a Lawful creature, even if they completely reject the laws of the land in which they have happened to travel into.
The master of a thieves' guild can be lawful, if they obey the Code of Thieves and seek to ensure that it is upheld, even if the first part of the Code of Thieves says "Only steal from those who are richer than you." Perhaps the Thieves Guild has a rigid hierarchy of Master Thieves and Gang Bosses who control specific areas of the city, and the guild master insists on seeing those rules enforced. Compare that character to Grouchy The Thug, who has no allegiance to any organisation. He just clubs who he wants, and takes their stuff. He is Chaotic Evil, because there is no prior thought to what he is doing, and the only things that can control him are violence and fear.
Even among Chaotic Evil creatures there is nuance.
Kind of ironic, and it has little bearing on the initial discussion, but I decided that Alignments were cosmic forces that created the gods and the planes they reside in. I offer the players the option of worshiping those forces, and they are color coded. Good if white, Evil is black, Lawful is red, Chaos is blue, and Neutral is Gray. I also offer the option to worship the Old Faith, those who worship the Forces of Nature, which don't have to be any one of the gods, but can be if they like. That's the Green.
The Alignment Faith uses a little disk for their holy symbol and it will show the colors of your Alignment. Lawful Good will be red and white, Chaotic good will be blue and while, Neutral good will usually be just white, because a grayish white is hard to tell from a normal white. Lawful Neutral with just red, Lawful Evil will be red and black, Neutral evil will be just black, Chaotic Evil will be blue and black, Chaotic Neutral will be blue, True Neutral will be just gray, and Druids will usually be Green, Rangers might be, and Barbarians could be.
Most of the common folk will be gray, a lot of the priests of the Alignment Faith will also be gray to show that they believe that all gods should be worshiped equally, and pretty much everyone else will be something else. I've had very few characters who worshiped the Gray Faith in my games. Usually, if they have a god at all, they will ignore the color system entirely, and the few who do chose to worship the Alignment Faiths will be some other color or colors.
In any game that doesn't color code the alignments, and I haven't seen one yet, this kind of metagamy. In mine it works, and it's kind of fun. If you see a guy in heavy armor with a checkered red and while shield, and a little disk that's red, that's probably a Lawful Good Paladin who focuses primarily on the law. If you see a guy with a bow and arrows and light armor, and a little green disk, that's almost certainly a Ranger, but you won't have a clue what Alignment. If you see a guy in studded leather arm with a wooden shield and a club with a little green disk, that's almost certainly a Druid, but again, you won't know what Alignment. People in fancy dress who want to show their alignment will show it somehow, maybe they will die their hair, show it in the color of their clothing, or wear jewelry that matches. I don't care what player character do themselves, but it's kind of neat to have a non-magical version of the old Know Alignment spell or the Paladin's Detect Evil, but of all the Alignments, probably the ones who are Evil are the least likely to show it. So in my games, Bad Guys Wear White so they can fool people into believing they are the Good Guys.
<Insert clever signature here>
I have always enjoyed playing lawful ev characters in good parties. It gives you the motivation and drive to move your character and the campaign forward while also allowing you to put yourself as your #1 concern. You follow the rules and work with others but won't rush off to help others for no reason. I really enjoy playing LE heavily armored clerics or paladins as deathknight type characters. Honorable to a fault but not a nice person and you put yourself and your goal first. The party is just the best way to get there so you work with them and aid them.
Exactly. I'm playing a LE Warlock with the Noble background. Our party has found nobles to be boorish and self-serving, so my character seems typical of what they expect. His noble ties and renown have helped the group plenty of times though, so they see the benefit. The fun part is finding the opportunities to chase personal goals, but knowing team goals does take precedence. When you can do both at the same time; that's some high level gaming.
I personally only use alignment as a baseline of how a character behaves and am not strict about it (i.e. No, you are Neutral Good, your character wouldn't stab the merchant in the face with a soldering iron.) That being said, the only alignment I don't allow for PCs is Chaotic Evil, for the simple fact that most people can't role play it properly (and those that can are probably sociopathic schizophrenics). It just leads to the party breaking up and the game falling apart. I do allow the other evil alignments and let the player know that publicly performing evil actions will have consequences, either from local law enforcement, the public, or even other party members.
just caught this. I feel like i wouldn't want to micro manage my players but i probably would be like "no, just no. Your Neutral Good character may NOT go on a freaking murder rampage. Especially not without major consequences. I don't care that the merchant kind of ripped you off, because you rolled a 1 while haggling."
I know that is tongue in cheek but thats a whole other issue there, if the player rolled a 1 then they have no way of knowing, any time soon, they got ripped off. Maybe, a day or 2 later for hilarity I might have the same item on sale in a store for half the price :).
The thing with this is that Good alignment players go on murder rampages all the time, we just turn a. blind eye because the things they are murdering are green skinned, or worship an evil deity, or are trying to resurrect the dead god by killing a bunch of people. This is why I find the idea of sticking to Alignment so funny in a medieval fantasy world, you can't kill people unless they are the right people for the right reason, the reality is always shades of grey.
You can definitely kill people and have a good alignment.
If the bandits are planning an attack on a village of innocent villagers, and they have a history of having done so before, then attacking them first and wiping them out isn't an evil act because the bandits are forcing the decision. Your good character would rather have left them in peace. They may even try to reason with them first, but good =/= pacifist. You can be a pacifist who fights when necessity forces them to.
Alignment is more of a general way of describing a character, and I'm not aware of many instances of it having much impact outside of items like talisman of pure good or talisman of ultimate evil.
"the reality is always shades of grey."
One of the things that I have found is that every time the world "reality" or "realism" comes up, I should be suspicious. One of the important points of my campaign is that Alignments are cosmic forces, and that they created the deities and the planes of existence they reside in. Good versus Evil, Law versus Chaos are part of what make up the theme of my game.
So I don't want shades of gray. I want people in my game to be able to judge right from wrong and have the ability to be correct. If you find a way to figure out someone's Alignment, and I have rules for that, you know where you stand. NPCs will make assumptions, some will decide to judge you on your actions, others will act according to their biases, just like in the real world. I don't require my players to behave strictly by their Alignment, it's just a guideline outside of a few magical effects, and of course, that's kind of the point of magic. Everyone has quirks that influence their reaction, and I'm trying to build a list of them so I can let players pick them for their characters, and I'll use them on significant NPCs and Monsters.
I believe that part of why people play roleplaying games is to escape from reality, and I don't care to drag them back into it with rules to enforce reality in a fantasy game..
<Insert clever signature here>
i think a lot of it, for me, comes down to how "out of left field" is the action, and how much does it change the story if I allow it. Like to continue using the merchant example; i can see a person telling the merchant to "go f*** yourself" when the merchant is upcharging by 50-100% (they only know because they've bought this kind of item before, something like a health potion being a good example). I don't really see them driving a sword through the merchant's guts and then attempting to "leave no witnesses".
Trust me i'm all for diving into the moral quagmire that is "why am i celebrated for killing a tribe of goblins, but sentenced to death for wiping out a town of halflings?" But i'm trying to focus the example around a situation where the player was friendly-ish with someone, then that person mildly insulted them so..... "time to make your insides, your outsides"
Hm... We take for example a True Neutral merchant who is greedy enough to try to overcharge people. ( I consider Greed to be Neutral. That's a form of self-interest and is part of how I define "Neutrality")
<Insert clever signature here>
You know what would make this less of an issue; the players don't choose their alignment. They just play their character. The DM keeps track of it, and if relevant it comes up in game. Would eliminate the "this is how my character would act". They just act. Often the folks who are aligned as Good do stuff that is morally on the fence, but they have their justifications. In a game where you kill things, that is going to be in play. And if a DM did this, then the OP question of allowing evil PC's in the game is more a question of "do I allow players who put their personal goals above team goals in my game". I've seen players of all alignments attempt to bend the game to what their character holds as important.
I would just say "Your alignment isn't actually neutral good". D&D alignment, at least in 5e, is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
My worry there is you end up with the player who is all over the place. One session they are helping build an orphanage, another session “I killed everyone, the men, the women; the children. I killed them all”, and in another they are aggressively haggling with the local nobility and farmers to help build a trade Coalition
That's not an alignment problem. That's a roleplaying problem (or rather, a lack of roleplaying problem). Players should give their characters a personality and RP that personality.
This is how I try to run it, in fact in character creation I don’t mention alignment, I ask players what their value structure is and then over the first 5-10 sessions I let them just play in the space and work out who they are and how they will react to things, the only exception are clerics I let them work out which god they want to worship and then work with them to determine the minimum expected behaviour that god would expect.
The funny thing is that "value structures" are something you can sum up in D&D with just two words. They call that "Alignment". Good and Evil are about your morals, they are how you treat people, Law and Chaos are about ethics and how you fit into society. Neutrality is when you only care about yourself and what you can get out of life.
<Insert clever signature here>
We are going to have to disagree on how we run our games and that is ok, I run realistic moral questioning campaigns that make players think, that giant you killed, you find a large baby rattle in its pocket, somewhere you have just made a baby lose a parent. That orc you kill, you find out his tribe is starving and he just wanted to help them survive.
My world is shades of grey because those are the most fun stories to tell, everyone loved the concept of game of thrones because there was no real outright hero or villain really. My players, and I have run many campaigns for many many people love them, but then they also love Grimdark universes like the world of darkness, 40k, Cthulhu, warhammer. They like tales where there is room for that good character to have a moment where they torture someone to death slowly over several days because they know where their family is, or where the evil guy can have a moment where he does good acts because it makes sense.
In these cases the alignment system really doesn’t work, it is too fixed to one dimensional, even the gods in my world are dynamic, a lawful good god will seem evil to someone else, Asmodeus in many ways is good because he defends the planes from the abyss. I actually just revealed to my players that, in my world, Tiamat and Bahamat once fought side by side to help overthrow the Aboleth and the Primordial gods. Goblins and orca and all other greenskins, it will be discovered, are oppressed and have been fighting a war against eradication brought about by the evil empire that wants the land they peacefully ruled 300 years ago. I am inspired by the treatment of native north and South American tribes and civilizations by Europeans.
So no in my world there is not a subscribed alignment because I can’t square that circle in my head that a lawful good person goes out and happily kills and maims without suffering any moral or emotional or mental side effects.
Yes there are evil people and bbeg, but like Thanos, even they can seem reasonable and good from a certain perspective.
We got the Law and Chaos axis from Michael Moocock's Eternal Champion stories, and that was basically where the theme of Alignments being cosmic forces came from, and may have been what started the entire concept of Alignment in D&D. He tried to replace the "Good vs Evil" thing that appears in so much fantasy fiction with something more interesting and make it so sometimes deities who were obviously Evil might work together with ones who were clearly Good. D&D kind of fused what he was trying to avoid into his system. It makes things a little weird because of that.
I don't really disagree with you so much as I think the system works just fine and shouldn't be junked. It's only a problem if people take it way too far. As long as people remember that nobody ever varies in their behavior sometimes, and that there are few mechanical game effects about it, it's a handy roleplaying tool and nothing more.
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I think it also depends where you entered Ttrpgs from, I am relatively new to DnD/pathfinder systems, 15 years or so. 30 years ago I started out in cyberpunk, vampire and werewolf and warhammer fantasy roleplay which where far grittier, I mean my first ever character was a vampire who kept human “cattle” and enjoyed changing peoples flesh, and that was one of the good guys lol. I then had a character so jacked into tech he had lost part of his humanity and so had no morale center abut killing. These were games where the concept of alignment was very very different and I suppose it shapes how you run and play games.
Alignment does have its place, I always run through it with brand new players as an intro to types of characters but over the years I have found with my core play group we just leave the box blank.