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At a very broad high level, if they are doing things because they see no other options they are probably neutral.

So alignment is always separated from personality to a very large degree. Mistaking alignment for personality is one of the most common mistakes of thinking about it. I mentioned earlier the miserly shop keeper that pinched every penny, never gave store credit, and weighed every grain and...

I think it would be a mistake to think that everyone of the same alignment agrees on every issue or that everyone of different alignments have different views on an issue. In fact, some alignments are such that disagreements with members of your own alignment are probably more common than...

I also allow in my games alignment detection to be resisted by a bluff check (where the strength of your piety is a penalty on the check) which means that if you are good enough at lying you can pass even magical scrutiny about your intentions and character. And yes, it matters most for Clerics...

Well, I mean of course you won't hear "alignment" used. It's a technical term of art as used in D&D and broadly in RPGs - such as in Mass Effect where you can play as a Paragon or Renegade. So you really wouldn't expect it to be used outside this context. And granted, I don't think...

It's actually more subtle than that. The story is told from the perspective of a guest at the table who is encountering the kobolds for the first time and finds them novel and exciting. However, there are hints in the story that the long time players are less amused and prone to responding to...

I think for the most part 3e did a decent job of describing alignment with the exception that the writers didn't understand or make any distinction (in alignment terms) between self-centeredness and selfish. By that I mean the statement, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." is...

So, I should make it clear if I had not made it clear that by "playing anything but themselves" I was referring solely to the relationship of alignment between the player and the character. I say that because your response to me in completely rejecting "this" makes absolutely no assertions to...

I disagree very strongly. That's not something I see playing out in my game. In my experience, being evil is hugely detrimental and not beneficial. I've rarely if ever seen a player or a party cut their own throat or sabotage their own success through an excess of honor or kindness, but I...

As an addendum to my prior response, in general there is no social, emotional or mechanical incentive to put "Evil" on your character sheet and then play a good character. I have seen it happen once, but it wasn't because of an incentive. The player in question could only play himself and he...

I would totally support a "Come to the Shepherd God" moment in a tRPG. Repentance, maturation, wisdom, becoming disillusioned with ones former cynicism are all great story lines. I just never see them come up. No one ever plays a character that way. One reason why is that IME, only about...

In 3e the average kobold had Craft (trapmaking) +2. In 1e AD&D at the time "Tucker's Kobolds" were created they had "average (low)" intelligence and no affinity for traps. The affinity for traps was created by the legend of "Tucker's Kobolds". "Darastrixhurthi" is likewise the creation of...

https://www.enworld.org/threads/tuckers-kobolds-really-that-tough-a-challenge.248319/page-6#post-4623966

So, several things. Can the Kobolds make things that aren't represented by amount of skill implied by their stat block? In 1e AD&D this is the intelligence listed for the monster. In 3e AD&D this the Craft (Traps) skill. Are the traps made by the Kobolds in line with the sort of crude...

@EzekielRaiden: The important thing is what this does to table dynamics, not the impact it has mechanically on the game. I have seen a lot what I think you are talking about where some players, usually playing in pawn stance, whose whole approach to the game is "win by whatever means...

My game is homebrew. Rules are just a launching point for that to reduce the amount of work I have to do to something closer to managable.

I give small XP rewards for taking actions that advance particular alignments, destroying altars, holy/unholy objects, or restoring lost objects to the proper cults. For example, a minor magic item might be evil aligned. A good character gets an XP reward for destroying it rather than keeping...

As I said in my post, backstory doesn't tell you things that alignment does. The definitive example here is that each of the Seven Sentence NPCs in the classic Dragon Article could be of any of the nine alignments, have the same backstory, and yet be because the variance in alignments...

It doesn't even have to be remotely imminent. Assuming that you can grasp infinity, then all you have to teach is, "We will inevitably win in a finite amount of time." For example, an evil cult might say, "Eventually nonexistence will triumph over existence. The heat death of the universe is...

I think that Green Ronin's "Book of the Righteous" does a pretty good job of dealing with this question. I could also address this question in the terms of my campaign, which is truly polytheistic and not henotheism as is typically seen in D&D. Most characters in my campaign world are not...