Talternatively, you can say that it allows the GM to set the morals and ethical powers that exist in the game world. Seeing as world design is normally the purview of the GM, that doesn't seem at all problematic, to me.
Now, the common error would be for the GM to not discuss his or her interpretations of alignment before game begins.
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If the player knows that the character will fall after jumping off a cliff, is the player's judgement subordinated to that of the GM because the player cannot simply choose to not plummet
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Alignment, as it is written in D&D, is merely another force of the game universe. If you jump off a cliff, you will fall. If he or she commits overtly evil acts, the paladin will fall.
I think you are eliding a fundamental difference.
In effect, you are saying that (in D&D) "Good" simply means "behaviour rewarded by the gods/forces of good" and "Evil" the opposite. And hence, the only reason to act well rather than wickedly is expedience.
The only major moral philosopher I can think of who accepts an analysis of moral evaluation along those lines is Hobbes, and that is one reason why he's often regarded as cyncial (or, at least, harshly realistic). Most moral philosophers accept, rather, the argument of Plato's Euthyphro to the effect that "good" and "evil" are concepts that are independent of the will of cosmological forces - ie assuming they believe in divine/cosmological forces at all, they accept that the universe punishes evil
because evil behaviour lacks value and the universe rewards good
because good behaviour has value.
I think this has a couple of ramificaitons for D&D play:
* If you take the realist/Hobbesian approach, no one has a reason to be good rather than evil except expedience. If in fact you think the gods of evil are stronger than the gods of good, and so can give you better rewards, you have a reason to be evil! As I posted upthread, I think this is somewhat how alignment worked in classic D&D, but the game is not normally played in that sort of mode these days. This can also fit with a cynical sword & sorcery style of play, but I think a lot of D&D play is not in this mode either (eg neither FR nor Dragonlance nor Ravenloft is aimed at that style of play).
* If you take the more standard approach, and regard "good" and "evil" as labels not just of behaviour that will be rewarded or punished by certain cosmological forces but also, and primarily, as labels of behaviour that has or lacks certain value and therefore that characters have a reason to perform or to repudiate, then the issues that I mentioned come up: players have to subordinate their own judgements of value to the GM's.
For instance, suppose a GM decides that (say) inadvertantly killing someone in a context of defence of others is not evil. And then a paladin PC inadvertantly kills someone, and the player of that PC takes a different view from the GM (s/he has a stricter view about the impermissibility of various forms of non-intentinal homicide, either for real, or as part of his/her conception of his/her PC). Now there is a gap between the value framework within which the player is conceiving of his/her PC, and the value framework that the GM is applying - the player expects that his/her paladin should be subject to divine sanction, but the GM doesn't deliver. How is that improving the play experience or the depth of either character, or player's engagement with the game?
The above example is not purely hypothetical - it came up in my game. Because I don't use alignment, as GM rather than imposing my own moral judgement I followed my player's lead and made the character's response to (what he took to be) his PC's moral error a focus of play in that particular session.
Here's another example from actual play. The player of a paladin (and the other players as well), in the course of the game, form the view that the ancient pacts that had been reached between the gods, the demons and the lords of karma in order to bring stability to the heavens amounted, in effect, to an unfair sacrifice of the interests (in life and wellbeing) of present-day mortals. So they took it upon themselves to disregard the pacts, to ally with the one god who had been exiled from the heavens for taking a similar view, and to use an artefact borrowed from that god to rewrite the heavenly and karmic order to produce a new solution to the cosmological problems that also ensured that the mortal realm did not suffer as it otherwise would have.
My own view is that nothing would have been added to that arc of play (which unfolded over several years) by having me, as GM, assign an alignment to the gods (and thereby foreclose the issue of whether their decisions and agreements were good or bad) and then judging the behaviour of the PCs (including the paladin PC) by reference to that labelling of cosmological forces.
I tend to see alignment as tied to the setting cosmology, so it isn't necessrily commentary on real world ethics
For the reasons that I have just posted, I don't think you can avoid interaction with real world values.
Of course imaginative players can divorce their own judgements from the judgements of their PCs and the NPCs/gods as played by the GM - but they know it's all just pretense. So if their paladin PC is stripped of power by the gods (as played by the GM), but by the player's lights the paladin has not done anything
actually wrong, then the player is not going to believe that his/her PC was punished for a genuine wrongdoing. S/he is just exploring or imaging a world in which the gods punish people for different reasons, reasons that aren't really good reasons but nevertheless are the reasons on which the gods in that imaginary world operate.
We see a lot of posts about how verimisilitude and immersion interact. For me, both as GM and as player, this sort of play is a far, far greater burden on immersion than fortune-in-the-middle mechanics.
To give an extreme case: I can imagine playing a character who is a sincere Stalinist and KGB officer, who therefore believes that torturing and killing political opponents is a desirable and important task, and who kills dissidents and proponents of liberal freedoms as counter-revolutionaries. And I can imagine a GM who goes along with this. But why would I label this behaviour "good"? I know it is wrong. I would hope the GM could likewise see that this is so. I would expect, in the game I'm describing, that we would both recognise that I am playing a character who is
sincere but radically mistaken. I wouldn't expect the GM to say - actually, in this world what your PC is doing is good, so within the fiction you're acting rightly!
In circumstances where the gap between the PC's convictions and the moral truth is narrower, or once we get into territory where there can be reasonable moral disagreement (eg the example above about the wrongdoing involved in inadvertant defensive killing), then I wouldn't necessarily expect the player's and GM's judgements to overlap. But as a player I want to be free to react according to my own evaluative judgement, and to play my PC according to my own coneption of him/her (be that as a good person, if I'm playing my paladin, or as a fallen person, if I'm playing my KGB agent). I don't want to simply abandon my own evaluative perspective and find out what it's like to share my GM's value scheme as expressed in his/her campaign world; and when GMing I don't want my players to abandon their values and simply play their PCs in accordance with my judgements as to what is right or wrong within the fiction. That's simply not what I'm looking for in an RPG, either as GM or as player.
Yes, but it's nearly 30 years ago so I can't remember the details. In 1985 (or thereabouts) I read an article in Dragon 101 called "For King and Country" which helped me work out why alignment was hurting rather than helping my game, and I've not used it since then.
For example of play to which an alignment system would be an impediment, see the two provided earlier in this post.