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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 5899708" data-attributes="member: 694"><p>I keep seeing references here to the notion that alignment must somehow reflect, influence, describe, or otherwise involve player character behavior. This unfortunate corruption is due to the twin mistakes of adding to the game the good-evil axis and all the alignment-based sub-classes like the paladin.  As a set of "alignments", i.e. factions, Law and Chaos do a fine job of representing allegiance to either the civilized world of men or the barbaric realm of monsters (with Neutrality for nature, animals, demihumans, &c.).  But as descriptors for individual characters' private ethoi or moral philosophies, alignments are indeed too reductive, limiting, and altogether problematic.  The point I want to make here is that alignment mechanics are not inherently bad.  Sometimes you need to invent items or abilities that can only be used by, or will affect differently, the members of a faction within the fantasy world--even a broad faction, like "monsters" or "civilization" or "unaligned".  The problem comes whenever a character's alignment status is supposed to say something about individual actions or outlooks.</p></blockquote><p></p>