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You may note that I have not cared a ton for alignment as a structure in most editions. And that's entirely because the convenient shorthand is actually really misleading and gets people to think in far too rigid terms about things that should be much more complicated (not to mention flexible?)...

Well I mean back in 4e it was perfectly possible, because the lore wasn't structured to make gnolls just the worst and instead making it so some of them could be cool. So the answer is "don't blame us for WotC deciding to make gnolls horrendous rapacious monsters"? I mean don't they have to do...

Agreed. Jack is a whimsical dude who loves freedom and hates the rigid hierarchical structures of most social order, which is why he chooses to live as a pirate. He's also smart and cunning (two related but separate things). Hell, when we learn what got him in a bad way in the first place, he...

Impersonations are fine...just don't become the mask, m'kay?

I mean, I don't think it's THAT stupid of a move, mostly because, from all data I've ever had access to, it turns out most people favor being good, even if it is less beneficial than choosing something wicked/bad/un-good. It's not like anyone's ever been able to force you to not do evil stuff...

I don't see that as indicating being ruled by one's whims and emotions. This says what they do do, or at least are willing to do without a qualm, not that they are constantly and chronically backstabbing, burning bridges at every single turn, etc. Indeed, it specifically says, in the party you...

"LotR" is the poster child for high fantasy. I know that in close reading it's got only a tenuous relationship with such a thing (e.g. the hobbits' lives are pretty damned mundane), but in the grand scope it has some extraordinarily powerful beings. No surprise given it's directly inspired by...

And I still reject the idea that CE has to be bound to such a behavior type that means it is necessarily the Inherently Stupid Alignment.

You...did pick out the one and only example I gave that could be analyzed that way...

I mean, I think there's a pretty clear difference between HYPER HYPER magical setting, where nothing more than vaguely like IRL urban environments exist, and HYPER HYPER modern-urban setting, where nothing more than vaguely like magical things or events exist I would not classify Ravnica as...

I just see this as a needlessly stupefying take on Chaos. Chaos does not need to be so utterly enslaved to whim that it cannot organize; it just needs that organization to be one that always justifies its legitimacy to the individual. So you can have an organized group of freedom fighters (aka...

While this is true in the abstract, a pattern of behavior can still indicate that consequences are being ignored so often, it would be unlikely that the perpetrator understood them. I'll get to an example just below. Perhaps. I would say the most chaotic evil thing someone can do is maintaining...

Well, you have to articulate an idea of both Chaos and Evil that actually coheres. "Chaos" is usually depicted as sloppy, slapdash, shambolic; to be of Chaos is to self-diminish because you can't get your poop together. To overcome this, we need a conception of chaos which is self-reinforcing...

I've been around the block on this sort of thing for a while now, on various other entertainment-media subjects. I know what this is. This is a combo of trend-chasers trying to be trend-setters, and people reading tea leaves way ahead of any actual....developments. So, you know me. You know I'm...

Oh, God, what have you done? You've given me a reason to blather. Oh boy. Gonna be burning the midnight oil for this...or not. I promised my best friend I wouldn't. But you'd better freakin' BELIEVE you're gonna be seeing heightened maximized quickened wall of text!

So anyone who writes "Druid" on their character sheet is automatically an ass? That seems kinda harsh.

And here we have the "well everyone plays the way I do, so this cannot be a problem".

In my experience? No, no it does not "quickly reveal it", unless it's something so horrendously stupidly broken that even the person DOING it will usually admit how broken it was and accept that it was a one-time-only thing. Instead, for the vast majority of it, it builds up slowly, one brick...

I mean, a cohesive vision would also have resulted in somewhat less content being made, right? Like...that's kind of the point of having a cohesive vision. To cut down on the chaff and increase the wheat. And my response is and will always be that anything which starts from "the PHB" is...

The single most powerful feats in all of 3.5e--Leadership and Natural Spell--are both available in the PHB. Leadership is the single most banned feat, period. But, just as you say, there absolutely, unquestionably are features in later books which are more powerful than the average power level...