The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[dragoner]

What the heck is alignment language though? Somebody was smoking with that one.

 

[Ryujin]

What the heck is alignment language though? Somebody was smoking with that one.

A secret language, known only to others of your alignment, that you never speak for fear of giving away your alignment? Yeah, never used it.

 

[payn]

Has there literally ever been a thread discussing alignment where everyone came to an agreement about what it actually meant and what each of the alignments are actually representing? Because if discussions like that exist, I've never seen one. Which is a major reason why I don't use alignment.

Online? No, unfortunately I have not really seen it either. I do like alignment and have not had issues at my table since high school. My gamer friends and I have a love of philosophy and alignment feeds into that. I know many gamers take things literally, and it makes it a very incendiary topic. Likely, its for the best that its really just a placeholder at this point and not a stronger element in D&D.

 

[dragoner]

A secret language, known only to others of your alignment, that you never speak for fear of giving away your alignment? Yeah, never used it.

It works with the whole cosmology of D&D, but yeah, it's weird.

 

[Parmandur]

Has there literally ever been a thread discussing alignment where everyone came to an agreement about what it actually meant and what each of the alignments are actually representing? Because if discussions like that exist, I've never seen one.

A major reason I don't use alignment is that no one can agree on what the hell it even means.

Alignment is Chaotic Neutral.

 

[niklinna]

Alignment is Chaotic Neutral.

So meta

 

[Parmandur]

for the most part there wasn't so much industry speculation, lawsuit ogling, or pedantic trollery and outright threadcrapping.

I mean, that sounds fun to me?

Part of it is maybe that 5E has made build discussions rather prosaic: everyone can pretty much figure out how to build a particular theme, and there are many points to fiddle with.

And storyline or distance play have been overtaken by online streaming. Why play by post when we can play over Twitch and build a ranbase, sort of thing?

 

[J.Quondam]

I mean, that sounds fun to me?

Part of it is maybe that 5E has made build discussions rather prosaic: everyone can pretty much figure out how to build a particular theme, and there are many points to fiddle with.

And storyline or distance play have been overtaken by online streaming. Why play by post when we can play over Twitch and build a ranbase, sort of thing?

Well, yeah. That's what I mean by "stuff changes."

 

[Cadence]

It works with the whole cosmology of D&D, but yeah, it's weird.

I... the idea of having it fit with the language of the nine outer planes just struck me for the first time ever. (Of course, I don't use alignment or the standard out planes anymore, but anyway, I'm disappointed it never crossed my brain before).

 

[Parmandur]

What the heck is alignment language though? Somebody was smoking with that one.

A secret language, known only to others of your alignment, that you never speak for fear of giving away your alignment? Yeah, never used it.

Gygax's original idea was, first of all, that there were only three alignments: Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic. And the idea was that those three Alignments would be morally Grey Religous groupings. So Lawful people would speak psuedo-Latin in their pseudo-Catholic religous context, Neutral people would speak pseudo-Celtic in their Druidic religous context, and I'm not sure I want to know what he thought would be emblematic of the Chaos religous tradition but I have my suspicions.

Then he expanded to nine alignments, divorced religion from Alignment and still kept it for some reason.

Basically, AD&D is bonkers.