DISCLAIMER: I am NOT trying to start anything here. This is just a question to help me understand things better.

So, I've been playing D&D since right before 3rd ed. came out (I still have bad memories regarding AD&D: Skills and Powers!). Alignment has been a part of the game since at least that time (I don't claim to know how "morality" was handled in 1st ed. -- or if it was even a concern at all). Over the past several years there has been a definite move toward eliminating (or, at least ignoring) alignment. In and of itself this does not bother me. I play plenty of other games (Shadowrun, Werewolf, etc.) that make no effort to "define" morality with a mechanic. For me, alignment in D&D has always been quaint, but also a defining part of the game. Unlike many of TTRPGs, D&D was about heroes and villains. It seems like that aspect is being swept aside by erasing alignment.

Now, is this bad? Not necessarily. After all, if you want your D&D game to be more "realistic," it becomes hard to quantify morality. The world is one of shades of gray. There are few absolutely evil or good things. Still, I've always played D&D with the idea that my character can be that paragon I'm too weak to be in real life. In real life, I am no hero. But in the game...

So, I wonder (my preferences aside) why does there seem to be a move toward eliminating alignment? And when I ask this, I am not commenting on certain species being any particular alignment because of its stat block. I have no issue with removing alignments from species and critters. I am talking about the definite trend towards eliminating the idea of good and evil themselves, like there can't / shouldn't be a standard of absolute good or evil. I get a sense that a belief in good and evil is considered a sign of immaturity. Am I misreading that? Is there another reason good and evil in D&D are being erased?

Again, let me please be clear: removing alignments from D&D is not inherently a bad thing, in my opinion. It is different from the past. I'm interested in the psychology that has led up to this trend.

So 5th isn't getting rid of alignment, and the latest UA which came out today proves that. 

What 5th is getting rid of is blanket stereotypes on creatures by adding the word "Typically" and getting rid of lore that can become harmful to people.  Alignment is still in the game.

I didn't mean to imply the mechanic is gone... just that there does seem to be a trend toward, at the very least, ignoring it.

I can say at my table I generally ignore alignment because I find it uncomfortable to "enforce" alignment. It's just weird to say "your character wouldn't do that since he/she is lawful good." Actions, and their motives, need to be part of the players' agency. Consequences are how anyone learns to "make nice" ... if you're a murder hobo, no one cares what your alignment is. They just want you to stop being a murder hobo.

Quote from FossMaNo1 >>

I didn't mean to imply the mechanic is gone... just that there does seem to be a trend toward, at the very least, ignoring it.

I can say at my table I generally ignore alignment because I find it uncomfortable to "enforce" alignment. It's just weird to say "your character wouldn't do that since he/she is lawful good." Actions, and their motives, need to be part of the players' agency. Consequences are how anyone learns to "make nice" ... if you're a murder hobo, no one cares what your alignment is. They just want you to stop being a murder hobo.

I don't tell my players what they can or can't say either.  For me as the DM to go "Your character wouldn't do that" isn't taking agency away from that player - It's just straight up taking that character away.  I'm not that player, I don't know what is going through their mind at every second.  A chaotic evil character can have a change of heart and try to repent, and a lawful good character can fall.  Alignment shouldn't doesn't stop that, but hopefully the roleplay supports it.

I think D&D, thanks in large part to live play shows like Critical Role(and this isn't a bad thing) is that people are seeing that they can play nuanced characters who aren't one dimensional sheets of paper.  Heroes and Villains still exist, and I would wager that when the Critical Role adventure drops in a week, we will see another example of that.  We've see it in prior released adventures, like Rime where you are obviously going up against an evil threat as a group of saviors.  

If you come from an old school mindset, like I do, you can sit there and justify how a Paladin used to work and that if a Paladin doesn't follow their Oath they lose their powers.  5th kind of has that with the edgelord Oathbreaker subclass, but by and large there aren't mechanical consequences for breaking your Oath, and honestly I like that.  It makes it so the consequences are up to the DM to figure out and roleplay in game.  Penalizing a character like AD&D 2nd did for alignment shifts was a bad table mechanic, because it meant a player couldn't grow beyond what they were.  

Good insight.

Alignment has been around since the beginning. I once heard, and I don't know if it's true, but I remember thinking at the time it was a reputable source, that it was a growth out of Gary and Co.'s wargame. The good guys were Lawful and the bad guys were Chaotic. There was no role playing, it was just basically a faction identifier of which team you were on. Then there was this other group, which got plugged in as neutral.

Then when they took a character out of the wargame to turn them into a D&D PC, their faction identifier stayed with them, so they were typically Lawful, so the words ended up taking on a different meaning than they had originally. Where before they were pretty much arbitrary, they turned into personality characteristics. And then they went and added mechanics to it. In 1e for example, an evil cleric could turn a paladin (when all paladins had to be LG). And there were restrictions, Paladins had to be LG, I don't think thieves were permitted to be lawful, druids had to be true neutral, that kind of thing. And a spell like protection from evil buffed you, but only against evil creatures, or protection from law buffed you only against lawful creatures. Over time, I think its become more of a role-playing aid, to help you remember how your character is and to behave consistently. Like your good character deciding its just easier to let the orphanage burn down, is a no-no. Because in the early days, when the game wasn't really about a plot or character development, you kind of needed that reminder. 

Now it seems like they are moving away from that, as you've noticed, but its been going on for a long time. Every edition seems to use it less than the one before. Mechanically, I think there's a few magic items that have an alignment requirement, but that's about it for 5e. I do think that there's been a realization that behavior doesn't really fit into a neat 9x9 box, is one reason they've started moving away from it. And as others have said, it doesn't really allow for a lot of complexity, and now people want their characters to be able to grow and change over time.

I do remember times in 1 and 2 e, where someone in the party would want to do something really out of character, and someone else would say "alignment check" as a reminder that their character would not really behave that way. I don't remember if it was in the rules, or if it was more of a house rule thing we did, though. At the time, no one was bothered by it, but it wouldn't fly now. (And I don't mean that as this newfangled way is bad and kids are thin-skinned. I much prefer the more current version of letting people change their character.)

Alignment to me is a limiting factor. But in a good way. Can't do something your stats and abilities don't allow. Can't do something out of alignment. Or not repeatedly and for no good reason anyways. Paladin falling from grace is trope itself. No alignment no fall from grace or rise up from evil doing. Lawful evil could create a utopia for their citizens. With them at the top and the whole thing fed by the blood of conquest. Fallback if you don't like alignments is chaotic neutral. Do what you want when you want. Get stuck in a rut and you may end up changing alignment.

Quote from FossMaNo1 >>

Still, I've always played D&D with the idea that my character can be that paragon I'm too weak to be in real life. In real life, I am no hero. But in the game...

Then be that paragon? Even if 5E had completely done away with alignment you could still play a character with a strict and pure morality. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem concerned with alignment as a label, as some kind of official stamp of character. One of the reasons for removing mechanical consequences of alignment is that such labels have proven to be difficult to ascertain and confusing for players, leading to arguments and frustration. Without those mechanical consequences it doesn't really matter if my DM thinks my char is TN, I think my char is NG and the other players think my char is LN. The label becomes a personal interpretation and a possible roleplaying tool, without being a constant source of disagreement.  

There's one place where alignment really shines, and it's as player-order-form. When you pick good as your alignment, you're clearly telling the GM the kind of story your character can be motivated to take part in. I think other posters have done a good job of explaining why alignment should fall by the wayside. It's limiting in un-constructive ways, and with the addition of character traits in 5e, we now have much better tools for talking about the essence of a character. Yet before I get too carried away by jumping on the bandwagon, I want to point out that systems other than D&D also use the same kind of mechanic--whether it's Whitewolf's Virtue/Vice and Morality track, FATE's aspirations, or Shadowrun's contacts. There are plenty of ways to do it, and perhaps alignment was the worst option, but having a way to create a moral, ethical, and motivational contract at the table has a lot going for it.

Quote from Xalthu >>

I do remember times in 1 and 2 e, where someone in the party would want to do something really out of character, and someone else would say "alignment check" as a reminder that their character would not really behave that way. I don't remember if it was in the rules, or if it was more of a house rule thing we did, though. At the time, no one was bothered by it, but it wouldn't fly now. (And I don't mean that as this newfangled way is bad and kids are thin-skinned. I much prefer the more current version of letting people change their character.)

I think like most tools, they've just evolved.

Alignment checking in prior editions really was a way to start a conversation about "Are you sure you want to do this", but like myself and others have brought up and then reinforced, mechanical consequences basically made it so that if you wanted to evolve how you wanted to play your character?  Too bad.

"Ideas, not rules." -Xanathar's Guide to Everything

It seems that each errata and new source keeps having to remind people of that: options and suggestions. Heck. That sentiment was already in the original publish of the PHB and DMG, but it seems that too many people either missed it or just don't understand it.

"What do the official rules say?"
"How much does it really matter?"

It's situational on how much it matters, but I have some doubts on the importance people have placed upon certain rules as written.

Yes. Players should be able to have some expectations on the rules of the game, and willy-nilly changing said writing can be frustrating. Yet, there's also the matter of interpretation which can itself be frustrating as well as "How much does it really matter?" which can lead to unnecessary frustration.

If things in the game are upsetting you, I recommend taking a step back and thinking carefully about the game, the ideas, the rules enforced at your table (not other people's tables), and your options rather than condemning the game itself for presenting ideas, not rules.

Arguments for and against alignment are as varied as the people making them, and different people want alignment kept/reinstated/gone for different reasons.  I'm notr a researcher with broad-based data on the subject and can only speak from my own observations and experiences, but from what I've seen the most ardent/vicious arguments around alignment often end up centering, one way or another, on the idea of moral absolutism.  That is, the idea that Good exists, Evil exists, both are independent of/uninfluenced by human behavior and norms, and it is the job of society to discover Good and uphold it whilst avoiding/suppressing Evil wherever they find it.  One's stance on moral absolutism - whether they think it's a splendid ideal we should all strive towards, a childish fantasy unable to withstand the real world, or a dangerous road to harmful fanaticism - often informs their opinion on the alignment system, as alignment is basically moral absolutism packaged up in a conveniently memable 3x3 grid.

Outside of that whole philosophical debate and its various tangents though, arguments 'for' alignment usually include tradition and simplicity.  For many people, alignment is as much a non-negotiable part of the bedrock of D&D as the Six Sacred Scores, the d20, and other absolute system fundamentals.  A D&D without alignment is simply not D&D, so they object to alignment being de-emphasized and argue against interpretations of the game where alignment is unessential.  Arguments for alignment also often include how easy it is to use.  The system is baked into collective nerd consciousness, DMs rarely have to explain the alignment system to anybody who knows enough about D&D to ask for a game anyways, and because it's baked into collective nerd consciousness people tend to agree on what the definition of each box is - at least, in broad scope.  There have been legendary flame wars about the precise definition of each box, which mostly just proves that moral absolutism is bullshit there isn't really a single, fixed definition that can be pointed to.  Not even the ones Wizards prints.

Which leads into arguments 'against' alignment, namely that it is extraordinarily prone to causing issues at the table.  Disagreements over alignment can fracture tables, and alignment is very bad at capturing/tolerating any degree of nuance in a character, or allowing for characters with deep inner conflicts at the table.  Example: ask three different people which alignment Batman should be and you'll get four different answers and a fistfight. Try it sometime, it can be a delightful party game provided you've got enough space to back up.

Many people argue that alignment, by its fundamental nature, funnels people into dismissing exceptions and thinking of the entire world in terms of over-reductionistic stereotypes and tropes.  They assign people to one of nine five buckets (remember, the three 'Evil' buckets are forbidden to everybody but the DM, and True Neutral has pretty much never been a real alignment) and presume that knowing which bucket a person loosely fits into is all they need to know about the person.  Combined with the equally pervasive idea that alignment is imposed from outside the person - that someone's alignment is only ever chosen for them once, before they were born by some outside force, and they can never change that alignment without egregious suffering - and you get a recipe for a whole bunch of really sketchy things that have caused a multitude of twenty-page tire fires the mods have locked and dispensed with forever.  Many of those who argue against alignment do so because they've had extremely bad experiences with it, or because they don't want any of that crap at their table.

One of my favorite stories concerning alignment came from Keith Baker, who had to deal with the issue of hard-coded moral absolutism embedded in the bedrock of D&D 3.5 when he was first creating Eberron.  Eberron is a world of greys, a place where there's no such thing as moral absolutism.  No Shining Perfect heroes, and no Despicable Irredeemable Villains...and yet, any divine spellcaster could determine whether a given person was 'Evil' or not in the space of a few seconds, without any room for doubt.  If the paladin of Bahamut the Silver Flame says you're Evil?  You're Evil.  No getting out of it, no getting around it.  It was an issue that threatened to ruin the whole world and make Eberron nonviable as a setting.  Keith's answer?

"Just because you're Evil doesn't mean you're a bad guy."

He told a story of a tax collector NPC in Eberron that any alignment-discerning effect would reveal as Evil.  The tax collector loved his job.  He savored the misery he inflicted, he enjoyed nothing more than prying his kingdom's due from the hands of sobbing citizens.  He was an unrepentant sadist, and his enthusiasm for the work made him very good at his job.  he was always careful to stay strictly within the bounds of the law, observing every rule and governnance imposed upon his position down to the letter, but within the letter of that law he was ruthless, vicious, and utterly without mercy.  The guy was Evil through and through, he enjoyed being Evil, and he had no intention of ever being elsewise.

If the PCs used an alignment-discerning spell on this tax collector they would learn he was Evil.  If they then killed the tax collector for being Evil?  They would be pursued, arrested, and tried for murder.  If they argued that the killing was justified because their Silver Flame paladin had revealed that the tax collector was Evil, the answer would be "So?  He was a tax collector!  Of course he wasn't a nice person, nice people don't last in that position!  Do you have evidence he was committing a crime, or indulging corruption?  No?  Then you're guilty of murder!"  

That story is one of the reasons I love Eberron as a setting so much - the idea that every alignment, even CE, has its place in society and even if you can assign someone to a bucket, that bucket has no impact on the person.  Absolutely everything in Eberron is relative.  For some people, that makes Eberron an annoying over-complicated mess that has no business being a Proper D&D Setting.  For others, that makes Eberron wonderfully deep, fluid, and real in a way the Forgotten Realms simply cannot ever be.

Anyways.  I suppose that's enough tangent for now.  Hopefully something in there was worth reading.  @_@

Alignment is a problem.

What is it good for?

It's good for a shorthand. If I don't know anything about, say, Gnolls (which, prior to D&D I'd never heard of), then I can see their evil alignment and know that I can use them as an adversary without messing up the lore of the game. It communicates the fundamentals of the race or character without spending pages teaching me all the lore and background of said race. It's not the ideal, but it does the job.

The problem is that it presumes the fairytale morality - heroes and good and charming, villains are evil and brutish. Our more modern view is that a good villain or antagonist isn't fundamentally evol, they're the hero of their own story. Goblins aren't sitting in a cave waiting for poor innocents to wander into their trap so they can kill them because....they're evil? Instead, maybe they're demonised and outcasts from society and forced into banditry to survive. They're not evil...just doing what they have to in order to survive, which puts them at odds with the party.

As such, there isn't really any such think as "evil", so what does evil even mean? If there are no evil creatures, what does it mean to have good creatures? The morality side of alignment falls apart upon inspection.

The order-chaos side of alignment is better founded, but...it scores own goals and is confusing. What does it mean to be lawful? I asked that a while ago on here, and the results were telling. Some insisted that it mean that a person had a personal code and followed it. No two ways about it. Others were equally adamant that it meant that you followed the law. Two mutually exclusive views (what happens when the law contradicts the personal code?). Both sides equally convinced that they were right and the others wrong. The official description doesn't help - to memory, LG describes it as following the law, while LE describes it as having a personal code. 

The order side of alignment could be useful, but it needs fixing and properly delineating. They need to explain what it actually correlates to.

The arguments I've seen to get rid of it are threefold:

1. It's not a good tool. I disagree that that's a reason to abolish it. It needs some work and fixing, but it could fixed and made useful. 

2. It's limiting. To view it as a mandate on how a character must act for the test of the game is a gross misunderstanding of how it works. Someone who is a devout opponent of the law and thinks that it should be abolished because everyone should be able to figure out morality for themselves isn't going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly think that all laws, no matter how petty, should be enforced. Alignment is there to remind you of that. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that over the years that the adventure takes place over and the experiences that your character has wouldn't have an effect. My character started out as LG  but after a friendly fire incident in which he was told to take out some apparent enemies that turned out to be innocents that were taken prisoner, he has changed to Chaotic Good instead as a result of the lessons he's learned.

3. It's redundant. The problem is, it's redundant if you fully understand the culture and history of the people. Unfortunately, that's only good for people who are very familiar with the subject matter. For those of us still learning, a lot of  the time, all we have to go on are statblocks and a very brief introduction. That's not enough to understand how the creatures are meant to behave. We don't have time to spend hours researching each and every race and character, alignment at least gives us something to work with. It tells me if that Gnoll would at least in principle be likely agree with the goal of the party and whether they'd be likely to agree with the methods employed, and whether they'd disagree on those points.

Alignment is significantly flawed and needs a rework, but it can be a useful tool - at least for new DMs and players who don't have the time to research everything to thoroughly understand everything before playing a game.

So I think this is where a lot of these arguments/discussions go south.

Alignment isn't a problem, but the way it's been presented for decades is.  Don't blame the tool, blame the implementation.  When it gets presented as a problem the people who love the concept of alignment immediately are taken aback and get defensive. 

As presented in current 5e, alignment isn't flawed the way it was.  The rework is here.  You can be an evil cleric who follows Lathander mechanically.  There is nothing stopping you mechanically(the dm still has latitude, of course).  Some will say this presents problems, I say it gives the DM freedom to explore an interesting roleplay relationship.

The best parts about alignment to me are where the arguments happen on where people fall.  To Keith Bakers tax guy, he could have very well thought himself as a GOOD person.  Sure, he didn't have a heart and was very by the book, but otherwise?  He was doing his job, and it was a job that needed doing.  Why does that have to flag evil?  Just because you inflict pain on someone doesn't mean you are bad, the world is just a shitty place and you got caught up on the wrong side of it.  That being said, you AGREED to those things.  You bought the house that had taxes, or ran the shop that has to be taxed.  Why is the accountant now a bad guy for doing his job?  Five people will think he is the epitome of scum, and five will think he is just a government bureaucrat.  /shrug?

It also steps from how a person actually sees morality, which is why it can never be clearly defined the way people want.  We had a player at my table who was playing a Warforged Monk who worked for a seedier person.  Monk did a lot of good things, but then would get in town, go to work for the guy and break peoples legs if they didn't pay the loan shark.  Sure, he cleared out a kobold nest that was going to attack the town, and then later fought literal demons that were attacking helpless civilians, but then he'd go back to town and break some more legs.  To me?  That dude is Chaotic(some would argue lawful?) Evil.  He legitimately saw himself as Lawful Good.  To him, he was just a bloke with a job and was just forcing consequences on people and then went to help more people.  To me, he was a guy who destroyed countless lives because now those people with broken legs have no chance of repaying that loan shark who was already a predatory person, and it's just going to get worse from there.  The help he did give people?  He was being paid to do it.  Just like the loan shark, so this is just a job.  He wasn't being good to be good, he was being good for coin.

It was issues like this that got Alignment into a lot of trouble because now someone had to make a determination on what alignment that person was, and if it caused a shift it could lead to XP loss.  If that person was a divine caster, it could lead to them being cut off from their powers, which isn't a character punishment.  It's a player punishment. 

Perception is key, and punishing people for having a different perception sucked, and that in turn created table drama.  By and large, those mechanical detriments are gone, as there are very few things in 5th that are alignment based.  A few magic items, some spell lists, etc.  

I like Alignment for aid in storytelling... when I'm creating a character, I try to think of what Alignment they are based on the personality I wrote for them, and figuring out where they land on the alignment chart is helpful for getting an idea for how they should function. Sometimes it even helps me make decisions... like, as a player, I want to succeed at tasks, avoid trouble in town, etc., but seeing that little "Chaotic" adjective on my character sheet helps me get out of the "Videogame Character trying to Win the Game" mindset and get back into the game.

That said... yeah, Alignment is hot garbage. Ask 5 different people what "Chaotic Neutral" means and you'll get 5 different answers... well, maybe 3 different answers, but the point is, what each alignment necessarily means isn't universally agreed upon. Most characters won't fit neatly into any one category, and being forced by a DM to adhere strictly to their interpretation of what your alignment says is extremely limiting. Like, some people take "Lawful Good" to mean literally that your character must obey all laws and can never be mean to others... I remember one example I saw (I think it was in a Crit Crab video, but I might be misremembering) was a Lawful Good player attempting to kill a slaver and rescue all the slaves... but within that particular location Slavery was legal and the DM wouldn't let them do it. I forget how it resolved, but the important thing is that "Lawful" is really hard to pin down for some people.

I'm not against de-emphasizing alignment for races and creatures, but I still kind of miss it. I thought it was a helpful guide for character creation... I feel the same way about the Ability Score boosts that were tied to Race before that started getting dropped. I think it's helpful to have some idea of what personality is common for a group, then you can decide as a player if you want to emphasize that aspect or if your character is unique because they have very different beliefs than most of their people. I often go by the principle that what makes you an Adventurer is what's different about you from the rest of the people in the world. I also kind of like having off ability scores, since it does provide a little more variety in character builds, but I also understand why they're dropping that so players don't feel obligated to only play as whatever Race provides a boost to the primary skill of whatever class they're playing.

Quote from TransmorpherDDS >>

I'm not against de-emphasizing alignment for races and creatures, but I still kind of miss it. I thought it was a helpful guide for character creation... 

Isn't that what Ideals, Bonds and Flaws is though?  Honestly, I really wish this was ULTRA expanded on.  Having 6 options RAW per thing isn't enough.  Crank that shit up to 20 and give a lot of good cookie cutter options that do flesh out what a character wants to do.

For me, alignment has never had that much value. 

For PCs I guess it can be a decent short hand DESCRIPTION of a character, but not a good way to DEFINE a character. It just feels overly simplistic to me. It could be useful perhaps to say 'my character is lawful neutral because they acted in this way.' Less useful for me to say 'I decided my character is lawful neutral so I should have them act in this way.' I'm glad honestly that 5E seems to have generally removed most of the mechanical impact of alignment as well. This is just my personal perspective, if someone does use alignment to define their characters they aren't D&Ding wrong or anything, I just don't find alignment personally compelling for this purpose. 

For monsters/enemies, it also falls short for me. My go to examples for this are goblins and succubi. Both 'neutral evil' beings that behave in very different ways. If all you want is something 'evil' to throw at your players, without getting into the behavior or motives of what the party fights, that's fine, but you could just throw anything in there like that if you just need a quick obstacle to the party. 

All this before the fact that alignment seems to just largely spawn arguments. I kind of prefer the way the Star Wars 5E stuff defines things. Light = needs of others outweigh yours, dark = your needs outweigh those of others, balanced = well, a blance of the two. And then lawful = means are as important as the ends, chaotic = ends justify the means, neutral a middle ground. 

For racial ASIs, I think a good middle ground could have been 'suggested ASIs' while still letting players pick. IE 'elves are normally dexterous, consider choosing +2 to dexterity if you want to be a typical elf.'  I also don't think alignment does any harm on monster stat blocks, though I'm fine with them stepping away from things like 'this entire race is evil by default.' I just won't really miss it because it was always too bare bones to really give me a feel for the creatures. 

I think it's up to players to determine how they want to (or not) interact with alignment. It's always been more is a roleplaying tool with a few mechanics attached meant to enforce/reward roleplay, such as items that could only be wielded by characters of a certain alignment, boons from deities and such, but it all comes back to how the players want to roleplay.

If we accept that the purpose of alignment is to aid in roleplay, then it makes sense that its prominence has diminished since the beginning of the hobby, when roleplay was more of a foreign concept and needed more in-game mechanics and incentives to encourage roleplay. Now, in almost the 5th decade of ttrpg's, and in a media landscape where the previously stigmatized sci-fi/fantasy genres have gone more mainstream, players are more familiar with the concepts of roleplaying, and have more morally nuanced examples to draw inspiration from for their characters as more complex narratives are in vogue. 

That isn't to say that we've somehow evolved past the need for alignment through sheer big-braininess. Rather, I think we just use it different than we used to. I like to use alignment as a starting off point during character creation, thinking in terms of alignment to develope personality and behavior and building from there even if I don't keep exactly to it. I recommend new players to consider alignment and try to stick to it when creating their fist characters because it remains a very useful shorthand to people not fully conformable or familiar with roleplay to start with. I find it useful in those contexts, and think it still has a place in the game, maybe just not a rules-mandated one. 

Outside of alignment's original purpose as a roleplaying aid however, it's also become a tradition in gaming. One of the reasons players hold onto it so much, maybe without even realizing it, is that tradition of alignment existing as this somewhat clanky thing that's always been around, doesn't work perfectly, and we're not 100% certain what it does anymore, but it's always been here and is part of the fabric of the game and would be kind of a bummer if we got rid of it.  And I don't think it's a bad thing. Alignment is a tradition I really like, BUT as a tradition, you shouldn't use it to justify itself and force people to play a certain way. Players should be free to buck tradition if they want, and therfore you start seeing alignment take more of a backseat. I think it's a natural consequence of players' roleplay ideals growing past the complexity is a 3x3 gridsquare.

Alignment as a hard rule to penalize the player is too limiting, and seems too arbitrary to enforce fairly.

Alignment may have its uses sometimes, especially in shorthand and stat blocks. There are a myriad of abbreviations that we use in the game, alignment is just another one. Granted it may get less use than "AC" and "HP", but that is most of the alignments job nowadays.

In the beginning of the hobby it helped define certain aspects and tendencies of PCs, NPCs and monsters in an era that had no way to define those things concisely. The hobby and the world have changed to encompass the more subtle and nuanced things in roleplay. The mere fact that we can hold a discussion of real or imagine things without having mass volumes of words describing the general thing that we mean seems to say that, while imperfect, alignment has had and still has some purpose if for no other reason than to get the notion of complex ideas explained so that we can get to the meat of the questions that want to be answered. It helps put an idea in the reader/listener's mind without  the use of many, many more words.

How you use alignment at your table is an answer for your table. As a very broad brush it works well enough to keep it in the mix of tools at ones disposal. For fine detail, like most things, it breaks down at close inspection and probably can create more problems than it solves. There are flaws. That may not be Alignment's fault. The world, even a game world, is a complex place that defies simple explanations. A moral code/outlook is not one that is easily defined, but only in broad strokes, in people that we think we know well. Why do we expect the alignment chart to do that any better than we can?

Alignment is a sort of vestigial rule in my view. Character traits, bonds, flaws, etc. are much more suited to filling out a character than alignment. When I look at the way alignment is inconsistently applied in 5e, I cringe. Take, for example, the Book of Exalted Deeds. This is an early 5e magic item that explicitly uses alignment in its mechanics in the way that you'd see in 3e or 4e. In 5e, it just doesn't fit well, and begs the question of who arbitrates a character's alignment.

Monster alignments have been argued to death. I'll say that I never understood the argument for their continued existence. If you don't know the lore of the Forgotten Realms, then it may(?) be helpful for running FR games. Otherwise it's just more bloat on a stat block that doesn't really help you use the monster. I'd have replaced monster alignments with monster roles from 4e, which were much more useful to a DM.