Is character alignment essential to the D&D experience?

barsoomcore said:

Am I the only person here who sees value both in using and in not using alignment?

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Not at all. I agree with you, AL is a tool and, like any tool, you use it in the appropriate circumstances. Some games work better if you pay close attention to alignments, while others are better if you can ignore or muddle them.

For another angle, take a look at Oriental Adventures. The Rokugan setting doesn't use the traditional D&D AL, relying instead on Honorable/Dishonorable as it's measurement. While still a form of 'conduct' mechanic, it's not quite as entangling and still works.

I suppose it's both a matter of taste and a matter of what you need to run your game.

barsoomcore said:

Am I the only person here who sees value both in using and in not using alignment? The vast majority of posts on this issue are "I like/don't like alignment and here's why," which are all pretty much rehashing the same arguments over and over.

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Well, using the aligment system as is and exploring the possibilities inherent in it is philosophically intriguing. But it creates a lot of artificial issues that have nothing to do with morals and ethics as we treat them in real life and that is what bothers me.

One example would be the often lamented ability of the paladin to unfailingly identify the bad guys - and the question if this justifies outright killing or severe discrimnation of "evil" people, even if they haven't actually done anything evil.

Why I dislike the alignment system is that the game designers integrated such a controversial mechanic into the game without going into detail with respect to consequences and difficulties. A campaign that takes this issues seriously would be very different from the way D&D is usually played - not uninteresting but also not to everyone's taste, I believe.

I (when I DM), and my regular DM both use alignment the same way in our games. For the vast majority of characters in our worlds (both PCs and NPCs), it's for the most part a roleplaying guide only. The only time it comes in to play as a game mechanic is when we are dealing with extraplanar powers. These beings are absolutes, being the incarnations of certain moral and/or philosophical viewpoints, and are the only ones affected by detection/protection spells. I include aligned magic items in that group as well since they are not truely living characters, but "forces". This seems to work well for us as it keeps alignments from "straightjacketing" players, but still allows epic struggles against the nefarious forces of "true evil". Heck, even my LE fighter doesn't like "true evil" He actually worships a LG god. He's just a little bitter about life

Even for paladins alignment can be only a guide as it's actually the Code that a paladin follows, not an alignment. That making sure the Code is LG is the DM's job, then all the player has to do is follow it. In regards to the paladin's ability to detect evil, it only works on beings who are incarnations of evil (demons, devils, etc...) or magical creations powered by negative energy (evil weapons, undead, etc...). These are the only beings that paladins are allowed to destroy on sight anyway, according to my campaign's Paladin Code. In our game, alignments are as relative to the characters as they are to us players in real life...no one talks about paladins being "lawful good". They describes paladins as honest, faithful, generous, forgiving, humble, etc... because IMC that's what the Code requires of paladins.

Used this way, the alignment system seems to work just fine, so my vote is for "Yes, for reasons other than those stated"

Alignment is good for balancing things Many spells in the game are based on alingments and as such it would be to much of a truble to remove or change all those powers. And hey since the game is based on good and evil as powers that can directly affect people it is nice to know what these things do to them. I just see alignment as a timesaving way to deal with this problem and it doesn't really affect the roleplay since morale is a question of action related to surroundings/situation. Do you often act a special way your alignment(balance) can change.

Alignment is just a status Que description. Not a guideline on how to roleplay.

Most people find Good vs. Evil fairly natural and easy to explain. How many people feel the same way about Law vs. Chaos? And how many people feel you should have both Good vs. Evil and Law vs. Chaos in the same game world?

First, let me say that there are many campaign concepts in which alignment would work well. I don't run any of them, however.

My main problem with the alignment systm is it makes no distinction between personal and public policy. A person could choose to live life by a strict personal code (lawful) that encourages a maximum amount of personal freedom (chaotic), or be very generous within one's ethnic group (good) while being completely xenophobic with outsiders (evil).

I realize that all of these issues can be finessed to some degree, but they are issues on which reasonable people don't see eye to eye. That makes the alignment system cause as much confusion as it dispels.

If I am running a world where good and evil matter in a material way, I'm much mor likely to use some sort of corruption mechanic (like the insanity system of Call of Cthulhu or the dark side system from Star Wars).

In my opinion, alignment should have been introduced as a campaign mechanic in a campaign in which it made sense rather than as a core mechanic of the game. It can work, if your campaign supports it, but it shouldn't be so integrally tied mechanically to spells and classes and such, forcing you to either house rule like crazy or use it anyway. I suspect that alignment was one of those "Sacred cows" the game designers spoke of that they would have loved to change, but they feared the player's reactions to it.

Personally, I have no use for it. Then again, I kinda like the WoT classes or Star Wars classes. Not only do they have the low-magic feel I like, but they have absolutely nothing to do with alignment.

All right, time to board the "Alignment Defense" Train:

1. The original Question was: "Is Alignment essential to the D&D experience?" (When talking about alignment, ALL alignment issue must be considered, because it is not just to use one standard for the characters on this issue, and one with the NPC's.) I believe the answer is "Yes," because alignment is very useful to both new roleplayers who wish to understand how to act within a given code, rather than just do what is correct from a 'metagaming' standpoint. It would also remove the component of "good vs. evil" that makes the game quite clear-cut. It can be played in a more morally ambiguous fashion, but it was very clearly established in chapter 6 of the new game that this was a staunch part of the direction that the designers wished it to go: It is a game that is meant to be a little more clear-cut, and therefore more escapist version, than real life. From this standpoint, it has been a part of the D&D "mission statement" as it were, from the time alignments were introduced, onward.
2. Many people have often prescribed alignment as being both limiting and too unrealistic. This argument sees aligment as something more like a municipal building code than a descriptor.
   Imagine your tax return tells the IRS that "you make $50,000 a year." Does this mean that you fail as a person if you cease to make this amount of money? No, this statement would change as soon as you lost your job, or gained a newer, better-paying job, or were layed off and got temporary unemployment. It is not a prescriptive statement, but a descriptive one.
3. Alignments can exist in a number of ways, the 1E Dragonlance way being one of my favorite. The "Triangle" of Good, Neutrality, and Evil played a major part in that story, and without alignment, the story of the Dragonlance saga would have been fundamamentally altered. For that matter, Vampire:the Masquerade has alignments, Star wars has alignments, Feng Shui has alignments (though not easily recognized), and even Planescape has an internal system of alignments without even using law, evil, chaos, good, and neutrality! They are just known as different things, after all.
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   In closing, I have to question one other thing: Why would any DM who would feel fine with rewarding individual experience have qualms about keeping track of a player's alignment? How is keeping track of alignment any different from Dark Side Points in SW, Experience points in d20, Humanity scores in Vampire, or quirks in GURPS? They all serve very similar functions: Are you with US, or are you with THEM?
   
   Oops, train's stopping... gotta go now...
   
   
   
   "Now departing for Anaheim, Azuza, and KOOK-a-munga..."

I'd like to see alignment as an optional system in the future.

Experienced players don't need alignment to help them roleplay their characters, and inexperienced players don't understand the alignment system.

Alignment languages are now a thing of the past, so perhaps alignment will slowly go away as well.

I just look at the D&D alignment system (the whole x-y axis thing) as being totally redundant. It's like, when I first saw it (about 15 years ago when I started playing) I thought it was a really cool way to capture 'morality,' basing it along 2 axes, law-chaos, and good-evil.

Now I just see it as confusing. Why would a world need to identify law and/or chaos at all, when it already tracks good and evil? I still don't quite understand what a "chaotic good" person stands for, much less a "lawful evil" one. Chaotic neutral? Give me a break.

Star Wars, and other games which use an honor system, have systems that work better because they only resolve morality along a singular axis. The reason alignment is so confusing is because they made it a 2-dimentional grid, and it's not.

I think a better way to use it would be simply to get rid of (either) one of the axes, (I would probably get rid of the good-evil one), and then break it down numerically.

Having a scale from 1 to 100, with one representing ultimate chaos, and 100 representing ultimate law, would clean things up I think.

And heck, if you really want to keep the 2-D grid thing going, then use them both; but still scale it.

Just have it break down like this:
lawful = 71-100
neutral = 31-70
chaotic = 01-30

good = 71-100
neutral = 31-70
evil = 01-30

That way, one "lawful[100] neutral[59]" person could be totally different from the next "lawful[71] neutral[31]" person.