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Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean but I am genuinely puzzled by the thought that evil isn't "wrong" in D&D. The core rules define Good as "morality" which has a dictionary definition of "virtue," suggesting there's pretty much a complete correspondence between Good and "right" in D&D...

Honestly, my preference would be to get rid of the neutral alignment from the game entirely. If the point of alignment is to give you some idea of what a person values, and the answer is "none of these," then it makes more sense to just call them "unaligned". Sure, there may be occasional...

Yeah, me too. However it is worth pointing out that 5e goes a different route than editions past in that it first defines good/evil/law/chaos and then provides examples of the sorts of behavior you could expect from the nine alignments. The definition part says: "Alignment is a combination of...

Great post and I completely agree that personality traits like random behavior, judgmentalness, and poison-using shouldn't appear in a law/chaos alignment writeup any more than, say, vows of poverty should appear in a good/evil alignment writeup. Heading too far down that road risks turning...

The real question is whether you start from the presumption that "working together" helps the weak or inevitably becomes the vehicle of their oppression. You are totally right that if you claim to believe in personal freedom but think the collective good is best served by putting that aside...

When 4e design lead Andy Collins was asked about that, he said chaotic individuals care about freedom because they are self-interested which is just a 30 degree pivot from selfishness. Lawful characters on the other hand care about the collective which he saw as being just a 30 degree pivot...

People understanding the "basic concept" is probably the right way to put that: lawfuls like following the rules, chaotics like doing their own thing, goods like helping people, evils like taking from people. My recollection is that when WotC last asked why people pick the alignment they do...

I think alignment is both better and worse than the way other RPGs do it, if that's a permissible answer. "Better" because it provides a broad statement of principles that applies no matter what situation or even campaign world a character finds himself. "Worse" because it doesn't actually...

I think most people are saying it is you who is free-styling an alignment system most of us do not recognize as being consistent with the core books, by developing idiosyncratic interpretations of phrases like "following your conscience" and "having a code of conduct" and then claiming those who...

No, it is not. The whole point of CG is that you do what you consider right at the time no matter what any previously agreed upon rules might say, whereas someone LN follows their previously agreed upon code/ruleset even when their heart tells them otherwise. If you see strict adherence to a...

As long as they are ADDITIONAL options, rather than replacements for current options, I'm all for that.

PF2 abolishes flexible 3e-style multiclassing and replaces it with 4e-style feats. The ruleset does call those feats "multiclassing" but I don't know many players who would agree it should be considered as such, though that's admittedly a judgment call.

That's what I thought about Pathfinder. :(

My understanding is that the team is split on whether they want to keep multiclassing at all, so yes they are absolutely wanting to gauge the popularity of various alternatives. (And I say that as someone who personally hopes they do keep multiclassing in the game.)

I am struggling to understand how it harms the game for "monsters" to have motivations beyond simply being evil. When has D&D even been a Diablo game where you mow down foes rather than role-playing your interactions with them? That said, the beauty of Jeremy's comments is that you are 100%...

This is exactly what I took Jeremy's post to mean. As far as I can tell, he was simply saying that when you see an alignment entry in a book, feel free to use/delete/bypass it as your campaign warrants rather than typecasting an entire demographic group because you believe RAW requires it.

I think that is precisely why so many players like the idea of doing it. :)

I am struggling to understand why so many people feel slighted by the idea that people can pick their own alignment regardless of what it says in the Monster Manual entry for their species. That isn't political in the least, it's just role-playing, which I thought was the point of playing D&D...

I am very puzzled by this as well. The only thing Jeremy actually said is something everyone who's read a Salvatore book or played BG/BG2 already knows -- people can choose their own alignment irrespective of the race that is written on their character sheet. If a reminder that people have...

Depending on your gaming table, you definitely see players justify evil behavior by claiming it is being done for the greater good. But the claims don't actually make it so.