D&D 5E What do you think should be done with alignment?

[Micah Sweet]

H

If the game was to keep alignment in some fashion, then you might as well stick with the current 9 alignment system. Going back to 4E's five alignments or OD&D's three alignments is pointless, because the issue with alignment has nothing to do with how many alignments there are, but rather what alignment as a system is doing as a whole.

The issue is that alignments are defaulting creatures of all types to a baseline of how they behave. For some monsters, obviously that isn't as much of a big deal because their entire existence is predicated on said thing-- undead, devils, demons, celestials, aberrations etc.

But any intelligent native race to whatever setting you are using does not and should not have default alignments because any representative of said race can be anything they want. You have evil humans. You have lawful elves. You have good orcs. You have chaotic dwarves. So with no real baseline to any race's alignments, there's no reason to write them down as thought they have one.

Yes, I know some people want to treat certain monsters like orcs to basically be mindless automotons to be mowed down willie-nillie with no thought to any sort of morality for killing them as though they were nothing but zombies... but quite frankly we are passed that point. Orcs in D&D are not mindless evil to be killed just because they exist anymore, and the game doesn't want to do anything that might make people think otherwise... and putting 'Chaotic Evil' in front of their statblock certainly does that. Like it or not... putting 'Chaotic Evil' in a statblock makes players think that destroying them is completely fine, no questions asked. But orcs and drow et. al. are not the same as demons anymore, and thus the alignment system should not run counter to it like it does right now.

Here's a question: what degree of cultural description is acceptable? You may not have alignment per say, but the description next to the statblock usually does a pretty good job of letting you know what the alignment would be (see Relentless Killer, et al). Since one of the concerns regarding alignment is that it pigeonholes behavior (despite the MM intro being very clear that it doesn't), wouldn't you need to change the monster descriptions as well? If so, what do you write? Just physical description, since everything else is up to the individual campaign? Since any race can be anything, how would you describe a gnoll, or a halfling, or a goblin?

 

[TheSword]

Incidentally this is one of the polls where I would only have allowed one answer.

 

[Maxperson]

Trying to get some more insight in to what people think about alignment, building on Mistwell's poll at D&D 5E - Do you find alignment useful in any way?
Reading that thread made me change my gut reaction -- thanks to everyone who commented over there!

I picked #1 and #2. I like 3e's alignment descriptions much better than 5e's one sentence, but I like 5e's distance from mechanics.

 

[Cadence]

Incidentally this is one of the polls where I would only have allowed one answer.

I could see people torn between two - but in retrospect one might have been better. I guess the percent on each is a lower bound on the % that would be just fine with that choice?

Would it be better if there was a way to get the weighting by part of vote cast (choose two, you count as half a person each).

 

[Jack Daniel]

Alignment comes from Chainmail. Two opposing fantasy armies, Law and Chaos, eternally duking it out as grognards play out fantasy battles based on Tolkien and Anderson and Moorcock. It works in a wargame.

It works there, and it should be left there.

 

[Bacon Bits]

It's fine in 5e. It's probably the best version of alignment so far. 4e's is fine, but like it or not the 9 category alignment system is one of the most significant tropes in D&D even if it has no teeth in the modern game.

That said, I would never call any version of alignment "solid". It's flimsy and unreliable under the best of circumstances. It's a quirky shorthand that you should absolutely not take seriously. It crumples like tissue paper under the barest scrutiny because morality and ethics are not absolutes even in the presence of divine moral authorities. You should avoid keying it to game mechanics except for fiends and celestials, and even then be willing to discard them at the drop of a hat.

 

[Thunder Brother]

I would dump alignment in favor of turning Traits, Bonds, and Flaws into a more robust system.

Keep it as an optional, legacy system. But if there's no actual mechanics behind it, then why have it in the first place?

 

[Oofta]

I would dump alignment in favor of turning Traits, Bonds, and Flaws into a more robust system.

Keep it as an optional, legacy system. But if there's no actual mechanics behind it, then why have it in the first place?

Because it's a much quicker reference and tells you things that traits, ideals, bonds and flaws don't.

 

[Rabulias]

I voted to keep 5e's alignment system, but that does not preclude enhancing it further with more detailed descriptions, or tying into Ideals/Bonds/Flaws.

I like the addition of unaligned (added in 4e, and carried forward into 5e) into the alignment system. Some creatures (like normal animals for example) should always be listed as unaligned, IMO.

 

[Thunder Brother]

Because it's a much quicker reference and tells you things that traits, ideals, bonds and flaws don't.

Things that are often up to interpretation, and therein less-than-helpful.