So they were being dishonest?
That's very hard to know. I can only be confident of what I've observed. Most logically, they weren't being dishonest with me as much as they were being unreflective on their own motivations. I can say that their stated beliefs did not seem to conform to my expectations regarding what would logically follow from those beliefs. That is, they didn't seem to play characters I thought were particularly nuanced and complex, much less that they were too complex to neatly fit on some grid for the purposes of certain spell effects.
Alignment was a rule - you had to choose one - and it had mechanical effects, including things the character /could/ do, items it could use, etc, as well as restrictions on it. So, I'd think, even from a purely "gamist" (not necessarily in the Forge sense) perspective, you'd want to choose the 'best' alignment for your strategy, rather than try to talk the DM out of using the mechanic, at all, since that would remove benefits, as well, and reduce the available depth of play.
Sure, but what if your estimation of the alignment that had the best mechanical effects (say "Lawful Good") conflicted sharply with your estimation of the alignment that had the most effective moves (say "Chaotic Evil"), and you decided that rather than attempting to argue with the DM that your pawn was Lawful Good despite the Chaotic Evil direction you were giving him, you just decided that the easiest approach was to claim the alignment system wasn't realistic.
Well, any restrictions on it's legal moves, it sounds like. (I'm still set on 'pedantic' from another thread, so I feel the urge to point out that no imaginary character has /independent/ wants or motivations, but that's silly.)
No, I get your point. However, much of 'acting' whether we are talking about performance acting or role-playing involves imagining being someone other than yourself, and that can include imagining having wants, beliefs, and motivations that are contrary to your own.
One thing I liked about "Unaligned" instead of neutral was just bowing out of the alignment system.
I see it as bowing out of the system only in a cursory sense, since 'unaligned' is really only a synonym for 'neutral'. In fact, it literally is such a synonym. I think that it served a purpose of letting players feel like they were opting out, but in fact 'unaligned' is just one philosophical justification for the alignment called 'neutrality'. To be neutral is to not be aligned, whether by a conscious philosophical choice or by indifference doesn't move you out of that part of the graph, just changes how willfully you are staying there.
Though, again to get a little gamist, and a little narrativist, in genre, there is /often/ a critical test of the hero that is based on morality or integrity - in D&D, that tends to be based on alignment, and the unaligned character'd be looking at a 'loss.'
Well, that depends on who is giving the test.
I think I should talk a bit about how I see WIS and INT interacting with alignment.
The higher the intelligence of the character, the more their alignment tends to require some sort of intellectual grounding. That is to say, the more they feel they need some sort of systematic justification for their beliefs. But alignment isn't the philosophical justification, but the practice of those beliefs. So you might have a low intelligence person who is intuitively self-centered and so acts to further their self-interest, but also intuitively recognizes that if they are a jerk then people won't be nice to them in return and that in the long run this will harm their self-interest. So even if that low INT person can't explain why they act like they do, they'll behave in a certain manner. A high intelligence person on the other hand will need to rationalize this behavior, both to themselves and to others, and so might (among many options) adopt the philosophical framework akin to Objectivism. In both cases, we might say that the person is Chaotic Neutral in that their moral framework is pretty much based entirely on (mutual) self-interest. (I don't mean to start a debate critical of that framework, it's just that CN is one of the easier alignments to provide clear cut examples for without grossly violating rules against discussing religion or politics.)
I don't really see 'Neutral' and 'Unaligned' as being anything but different degrees of having rationalized your belief system there in the middle of the grid. A high INT character that rationalizes that there is no good or evil in the world, but that everything is true from a certain point of view, and that in order for the world to continue there must be a balance between life and death, light and darkness is philosophically adopting a framework of 'Neutrality'. But a low INT character that simply is just trying to get by in the daily struggles of life without rocking the boat and paying no attention whatsoever to matters of morality is no less neutral than the high minded philosopher.