D&D 4E Alignment hint about 4E...or not?

[Agamon]

I've never bothered with worrying about alignment in the games I run. So whatever and however it's get implemented in 4E, I'll continue to ignore it's existence.

I try to, but man, what a pain in the backside. Alignment is fundamentally tied into the 3.5 game. I sure hope 4E makes alignment a footnote on the character sheet rather than a label that would not be out of place hovering over the PC's head in glowing letters.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Possibly mildly off topic, but I really, really wish that if 4e retains alignments, the designers put the following text in big, bold lettering in the section discussing it:

"YOUR ACTIONS DETERMINE YOUR ALIGNMENT, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND."

I swear that half the alignment complaints I see are based on the idea of "your character can't do that because of his alignment". (The rest are mostly based on differing opinions on what is good, evil, lawful or chaotic, and what this implies in a world with objective alignment forces.)

 

[Agamon]

"YOUR ACTIONS DETERMINE YOUR ALIGNMENT, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND."

I swear that half the alignment complaints I see are based on the idea of "your character can't do that because of his alignment". (The rest are mostly based on differing opinions on what is good, evil, lawful or chaotic, and what this implies in a world with objective alignment forces.)

No kidding. Maybe they could put it on the cover. Make it a motto for 4E.

Seriously, the reason people think this way is because of class restrictions. If a player wants to be a paladin, he must be lawful good. Right there, alignment is dictated to the player and his actions need to conform to it or he'll be punished.

It looks like 4E is trying to fix this though. That's great.

 

[Gundark]

A system where alignment is determined after the character begins play is problematic, probably more so than the current system.

There could be several arguements between players and DMs over what behaviour deserves a certain alignment label.

 

[Aloïsius]

A system where alignment is determined after the character begins play is problematic, probably more so than the current system.

There could be several arguements between players and DMs over what behaviour deserves a certain alignment label.

Those arguments already happens, and they are more problematic in a system where your alignment is restricted by your class. "This is against your alignment, you lose your power" is worse than "this is LE rather than LG... You feel another voice in your head when you pray".

 

[GreatLemur]

To me, the real danger is that players end up creating characters with alignment in mind, and thus come up with very similar characters. Any person should have more complicated goals than "acting good and acting by the rules". Alignment does not take that away, it doesn't do anything bad in theory.
But in practice, characters made with Alignment in mind tend to be quite a lot blander.

Yep. Also, there's a tendency towards over-emphasis of alignment traits, to the point of completely unreasonable character behavior. A codified alignment system seems to suggest to a lot of gamers that their character's chosen alignment should be played to the greatest possible extremes and represent the entirety of the character's world view. I suspect Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Neutral, and Lawful Good characters exhibit the worst of this.

For my 4e game, I'll almost certainly ditch the alignment system (from all we've heard, it'll be pretty much optional, anyway). And I've kinda been thinking about replacing it with a Spirit of the Century / Fate-style aspect system...

My theory is that alignment will exist but will no longer be tied into game mechanics. That has a lot of implications, but the absence of alignment from stat blocks and character sheets seems to point to just that.

I think that's actually been explicitly stated somewhere, hasn't it? At least, I've been assuming this would be the case based on the stuff we've seen.

Still, in spite of what Jonathon Tweet says, I'd be really, really surprised if the PHB didn't include the familiar nine alignments.

 

[thundershot]

What about the Chaotic Neutral Copper Dragon?

 

[Kunimatyu]

I'd love it if alignment completely went the way of the dodo, with the exception of some extraplanar entities.

 

[XCorvis]

The way your character acts (or even the description of how your character acts), and the cosmic tangibles Law, Chaos, Good and Evil should be totally separate things, and I think they've suffered from the overlap in 3.5. Detect Evil should detect Cosmic Evil, not the petty little evil of an embezzling accountant or power-tripping bureaucrat. I hope the "designation of a PCs moral compass" is made totally independent of Cosmic alignment.

Then again, if they totally removed all game mechanical effects of alignment, I wouldn't miss it.

 

[Betote]

I actually like the D&D ethics, where your goody-doer can kill baby orcs without remorse just because "they are evil" and those kind of extremes. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if they dropped alignments on 4E. It's an easy thing to rule back in.