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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8936863" data-attributes="member: 75787">Yes, but alignment is more about them being knowably evil. in our world, people can support one leader and say they are great for the country. Others can say he is evil. But because the latter is subjective, it’s not knowable. If you were able to know, with certainty, that a leader was evil, how would good people support him?In a D&D campaign, evil leaders tend to be attacked and killed, and the generally good population and organizations cheer for the heroes who killed Sauron, dispatched the Dark Overlord, or whatever. The focus is on the fun of doing the action, not on questioning the morality of the leader. But when I ran Mindjammer, most missions required cultural re-alignment or meme-engineering, where the goal was less to defeat the leader than to render them unfollowable. Alignment is a short-cut that says that we are happy with the GM and the world setting deciding the bulk of our moral decisions. Many people like that short cut. Ah, that’s the old-school roots of D&D saying that players and opponents should follow the same rules. Not a huge fan of it myself either.Interesting. I’ve never afforded shopkeepers any especial status in my games. In fact the last one I statted out was killed by the players because he had been hiring employees specifically to feed to a vampire. In fact, the way I run games, it’s probably evil guards that are the safest profession from PC retribution. Not sure this is anyhting more than a personal ng, though.That’s not the way I or my players approach alignment at all. I tend to start thinking of characters in terms of Numenéra descriptors or Fate attributes — even if they are D&D character. So my conception of a character is likely to be “a young half-elf woman on the run from her family to avoid an arranged life”, or “a cleric dedicated to the good of his flock”, or “a Drow assassin who isn’t sure this is what she wants to be”. The alignment comes from my conception, not from any desire to “win”. I’m pretty sure that my players think similarly (or, occasionally, pick a deity because they want to choose Righteous Rage of Tempus as a feat. grrrr)But putting both on communicates even more! Or how about “my alignment is Unaligned, but I follow Pelor”? Very different from the LG follower of Pelor! Of course, the more you describe, the better. LG is the minimum, “LG follower of Pelor” is longer and more useful, but “LG follower of Pelor who believes blind faith is wrong” is even better. Yes, but only because you know the setting! The setting has already conveyed that hell is uniformly evil, so all you are saying is “if you have a well detailed setting, use it” which is hard to disagree with. But this is also the same as your last argument, which I don’t disagree with; the more description the better. “evil” is the minimum. ”evil inhabitant of hell” is better, and “evil inhabitant of hell who years to live somewhere else” is better still.it’s probably rare for hell not to be uniformly evil, but I’m sure you can find examples of other areas where you might debate that. Are the Pits of Isengard uniformly evil? Are Death-Eaters? Is the Injustice League?I’m not sure I can think of a common example where knowing that my enemy is evil makes it harder for me to play from an action-oriented viewpoint. Maybe an example?</blockquote>

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