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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6079095" data-attributes="member: 82106">The genesis of alignment in Gygaxian play was really to serve as a simple marker for who was friend or foe. Lawful creatures would potentially ally with the PCs or at least you could deal with them. Chaotic creatures were fundamentally unreliable, they wouldn't honor an agreement and were mostly hostile. Note that elves were chaotic IIRC, the fey were not to be trusted. Dwarves were lawful, they would make a deal and stick to it. Overall though the idea was just that lawful creatures were civilized and chaotic creatures were lawless and thus outside civilization and fair game for looting. It was only with the introduction of AD&D and 4-way alignment I think that the 'proper play' thing showed up (at least in print). AD&D also introduced advancement rules where the PCs advanced at a rate dictated by the DM's 1-4 point assessment of the PLAYER. This would include their adherence to alignment, etc. Not only did you have to get XP, you had to get treasure to pay for your training and the 1-4 rating was a multiplier on the cost/time to train, so it was a HUGE factor. The theory was that players would be highly motivated to play their alignment because if you got a poor rating from the DM (say a 4) then you had to spend 4 weeks training at 1,500 gp/week level. If the rest of the group got a 1, then you either didn't play for 3 game-weeks or started a new character. Getting a low rating at levels 1-3 was almost as bad as your character dying, you might as well start over.In practice I never saw the 1e advancement system used as written, most DM's were content to stick with punishing gross alignment transgressions with alignment change and the subsequent loss of a level (perhaps, that was usually ignored too). Frankly IME alignment was a fairly minor consideration. The main place it came up was with followers, who would generally be pretty unhappy with your PC if you started acting some way. Nobody was ever actually sure what behaviors belonged to what alignments, so any associated rules had few teeth. A paladin might release orc babies or he might kill them, but he could argue either way that his actions were 'lawful good' and it wasn't likely a DM that was going to survive long would argue too much with that. We had a LOT of DMs to choose from too...</blockquote>

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