D&D 5E Do you find alignment useful in any way?

[Maxperson]

The problem is that as you note both 'lawful' and 'chaotic' can have various traits, and the alignment does not tell you which of those traits the creature actually has. If a creature is lawful,

Not only doesn't it have to in order to be meaningful, it's not supposed to. That's the entire point of a non-straightjacket system. It's just a guide, not a set of rails.

this doesn't tell you whether they're law abiding, honourable or organised and methodological or perhaps all of those things.

So what. If you as a player want to use lawful, YOU get to pick any or all of the lawful behaviors to follow. When I as a DM get a lawful monster, I get to pick. I know within a second of reading a monster alignment entry how it will generally act.

And same applies to chaos and of course people can have traits from both law and chaos.

Yes it does.

Like if a person has Lawful trait A and chaotic trait D are they lawful or chaotic? Who knows! A character with the exact same traits could be described either as lawful or chaotic. How on Erath is this an useful system?

Now you've run aground. It's not about X lawful trait and Y chaotic trait. It's about where your character's behavior falls most of the time. If the chaotic trait you've picked is 70% of the character's behavior and the lawful one is 30%, which alignment do you think he is?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No. That's not what that means. Something can mean different things to different people and you can convey useful information that way.

Your sentence would eliminate all art in the world of all kind if it were true. It would mean all music, all paintings, all photographs, sculpture, theater, everything artistic in life conveys nothing because it can mean different things to different people.

It's OK for a element of a game to convey different things to different people, and still be of value for the game over all.

You don't need rules for that. Have a line for 'Personality & Ethics' and people can write what they want on it. The issue is trying to pretend that some sort of objective system could govern a thing that if subjective.

It is true though. But, let's be clear. When you say it cannot be true, and others say that's how they've been using it, you're calling them a liar. If you disagree, tell me how you're not calling people a liar when they say they've been successfully using it that way and you say it cannot be true?

If you make claim that seems to be logically incoherent and that is pointed out, you can explain how the logic of your system actually works. Alignment proponents can not do that beyond shouting 'it just works'.

Right, we only go with the elements which a meaningful number of people find useful. Which includes alignment. See every poll ever taken on the topic, which always shows a minimum of what I think we can all agree are a "meaningful number" of people. Which makes it "not nonsense."

The game has been the most successful version so far, and it's not commonly called a bloated incoherent mess because alignment was in it. So that's empirically false.

Yet a lot of people have spoken against it for decades and WotC seems to finally getting the message too as alignment has vanished from newer stat blocks.

I have yet to see your replacement system?

On the first part of this post. Seriously, alignment is a bizarre thing that mostly exists only in D&D and derived games. Rest of the RPGs have done without it just fine for decades.

 

[Maxperson]

Have a line for 'Personality & Ethics' and people can write what they want on it.

You don't need rules for that, either. This isn't about rules, though. It's about what's a useful aid to people in playing their characters and both alignment and what you describe easily qualify.

The issue is trying to pretend that some sort of objective system could govern a thing that if subjective.

The only ones trying to pretend this is the case are you and the others on your side trying to claim and failing to prove that alignment is useless. By pretending that it's true, you seem to think that you have some sort of solid objection to alignment.

If you make claim that seems to be logically incoherent and that is pointed out, you can explain how the logic of your system actually works. Alignment proponents can not do that beyond shouting 'it just works'.

There is no incoherence. Again, that's a failure to understand alignment. Nothing is actually in opposition with what you described a few posts ago.

Yet a lot of people have spoken against it for decades and WotC seems to finally getting the message too as alignment has vanished from newer stat blocks.

The vocal minority is as it always is...............loud. The vast majority of people who are happy with something don't go out of their way to say so. It's human nature to speak up to complain far more often than to compliment. It's a serious mistake to assume that people who complain loudly and SEEM to be in the majority, really are.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Not only doesn't it have to in order to be meaningful, it's not supposed to. That's the entire point of a non-straightjacket system. It's just a guide, not a set of rails. So what. If you as a player want to use lawful, YOU get to pick any or all of the lawful behaviors to follow. When I as a DM get a lawful monster, I get to pick.

But as you still need to decide what lawful or chaotic actually means in this instance, what was gained by having it in the first place? Like if I need to decide if my character being lawful means that they're law-abiding, honourable or organised and methodological or all of that, why I need to know that they're lawful in the first place? Why cant I just decide that they're organised and methodological?

I know within a second of reading a monster alignment entry how it will generally act.

How? You have yourself said that lawful (and chaotic) can manifest in various differnt ways. Where does that extra information of how it happens to manifest in the context of that specific monster come from? It certainly is not relayed by those two letters.

Yes it does.

Now you've run aground. It's not about X lawful trait and Y chaotic trait. It's about where your character's behavior falls most of the time. If the chaotic trait you've picked is 70% of the character's behavior and the lawful one is 30%, which alignment do you think he is?

Neutral? I don't know, I don't care, nor I see why it would matter. If I already know those traits, I know how my character behaves and no additional insight is gained by labelling that trait package in some restricting and possibly misleading way.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Here are two examples of real world ideologies that would be referred to as Chaotic in alignment terms:

While social anarchism puts emphasis on society and often supports a political economy that socialises the means of production, libertarian anarchism is mostly concerned with ensuring the maximum amount of liberty for the individual. Here, the will of the individual is considered to be more important even than a harmonious and egalitarian society.

So social anarchism is Chaotic Good, while libertarian anarchism might be Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Evil depending on the will of the individual.

Anarchism in general can be described thusly:

Anarchism is a process whereby authority and domination are replaced with non-hierarchical, horizontal structures, with voluntary associations between human beings. It is a form of social organisation with a set of key principles, such as self-organisation, voluntary association, freedom, and autonomy.

I likely would have never bothered to learn anything about anarchism at all if not for alignment.

 

[Maxperson]

But as you still need to decide what lawful or chaotic actually means in this instance, what was gained by having it in the first place?

Time savings. Like a LOT of it. I know what the alignments can mean as I've used them for decades. It takes me a brief second to figure out how to play a monster based on alignment. It would take far longer to learn traits that would be much less useful as each trait can be played in drastically different ways or to read a stat block to learn the creature. LE tells me far more, far faster.

Like if I need to decide if my character being lawful means that they're law-abiding, honourable or organised and methodological or all of that, why I need to know that they're lawful in the first place? Why cant I just decide that they're organised and methodological?

You don't. John and Dave over there do. We're all different and just because YOU don't need something or can't see the use, doesn't mean that the same holds true for everyone else. The solution isn't for you to ruin things for John and Dave. The solution is for YOU not to use alignment.

Neutral? I don't know, I don't care, nor I see why it would matter.

And THAT is your problem. You don't care to actually learn, so you don't see what you need to know in order to take an informed stance on the topic. If you aren't going to get informed, you shouldn't be taking any stance at all.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And THAT is your problem. You don't care to actually learn, so you don't see what you need to know in order to take an informed stance on the topic. If you aren't going to get informed, you shouldn't be taking any stance at all.

No, explain to me what the additional information actually is. If I already know what the personality traits and beliefs of my character are, what is gained by counting what percentage of them are 'lawful', 'chaotic', 'good', or 'evil' and assigning an alignment to them accordingly. If I do that what do I know about my character that I did not know already? You can't just say 'it works' you must be able to explain how it works for me to seriously consider your position; otherwise it just seems like magical thinking.

 

[Maxperson]

No, explain to me what the additional information actually is. If I already know what the personality traits and beliefs of my character are, what is gained by counting what percentage of them are 'lawful', 'chaotic', 'good', or 'evil' and assigning an alignment to them accordingly. If I do that what do I know about my character that I did not know already? You can't just say 'it works' you must be able to explain how it works for me to seriously consider your position; otherwise it just seems like magical thinking.

It has already been explained to you Ad Nauseum and you still don't get it, because you don't care to really try to understand.

 

[Cadence]

No, explain to me what the additional information actually is. If I already know what the personality traits and beliefs of my character are, what is gained by counting what percentage of them are 'lawful', 'chaotic', 'good', or 'evil' and assigning an alignment to them accordingly. If I do that what do I know about my character that I did not know already? You can't just say 'it works' you must be able to explain how it works for me to seriously consider your position; otherwise it just seems like magical thinking.

It's two characters, so I can get a fast initial screening in a number of online searches, or going through the MM a lot faster looking for two characters than reading brief descriptions or paragraphs.

 

[Malmuria]

The game has had alignment for nearly 50 years without this "problem" being a problem. I've never heard of arguments breaking out at gaming tables over alignment regarding "real politics." It's certainly not a problem so common you'd change rules over it. In fact, in all the discussions of alignment over the many years here at EnWorld it has not been a problem to discuss it with respect to real world politics dominating the conversation.

Has this been a problem at your D&D table and if so could you describe in broad strokes what happened?

Not real world obviously, but in terms of arguments at the gaming table, what about the whole "orc babies" situation? Will they grow up to be evil? But you can't kill babies, right? Let's stop playing dnd and chat about this for 30 min...