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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 3199036" data-attributes="member: 1465">I can only say it depends how you play it.The worst possible way the play alignment IMHO is to make it a matter of factions and nothing else. Like &quot;good&quot; and &quot;evil&quot; are labels, but then good characters behave just like the evil ones, driven only by opportunity and what they can gain from their actions.The system is a simplification, and this can often cause problems. A fairly common mistake for example is to treat all &quot;good&quot; or &quot;evil&quot; the same, ignoring that there is quite a range to each alignment. One doesn't have to be saint to be good, nor to be a murderous sadistic villain to be evil.Another bad habit IMO is to treat someone neutral as someone who is &quot;sometimes good and sometimes evil&quot;.And finally, the system sort-of implicitly suggests to treat the law-chaos axis in the same way as the good-evil, but this again it seems to me just wrong. Particularly, there are hundreds of possible behavioural choices which can move you between lawful/chaotic: lying, respecting the law, surrender to vices, keeping your promises, respecting authority, foster tradition... If you treat law/chaos just as good/evil, you may be tempted to think that the behaviour of a character should be consistent with ALL those choices at once. The result is players who for example believe their PC cannot lie because they have chosen to be lawful, or has to lie at least now and then if they are chaotic, thus treating the alignment as the reason rather than the consequence.But then besides these possible problem, the alignment system can work quite well after all. It depends also on what is the game style you want to have in a certain campaign. If appropriate, it is ok to just ignore the system and adjudicate alignment-based things (like spells) on the fly.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 3199036, member: 1465"] I can only say it depends how you play it. The worst possible way the play alignment IMHO is to make it a matter of factions and nothing else. Like "good" and "evil" are labels, but then good characters behave just like the evil ones, driven only by opportunity and what they can gain from their actions. The system is a simplification, and this can often cause problems. A fairly common mistake for example is to treat all "good" or "evil" the same, ignoring that there is quite a range to each alignment. One doesn't have to be saint to be good, nor to be a murderous sadistic villain to be evil. Another bad habit IMO is to treat someone neutral as someone who is "sometimes good and sometimes evil". And finally, the system sort-of implicitly suggests to treat the law-chaos axis in the same way as the good-evil, but this again it seems to me just wrong. Particularly, there are hundreds of possible behavioural choices which can move you between lawful/chaotic: lying, respecting the law, surrender to vices, keeping your promises, respecting authority, foster tradition... If you treat law/chaos just as good/evil, you may be tempted to think that the behaviour of a character should be consistent with ALL those choices at once. The result is players who for example believe their PC cannot lie [I]because[/I] they have chosen to be lawful, or has to lie at least now and then if they are chaotic, thus treating the alignment as the reason rather than the consequence. But then besides these possible problem, the alignment system can work quite well after all. It depends also on what is the game style you want to have in a certain campaign. If appropriate, it is ok to just ignore the system and adjudicate alignment-based things (like spells) on the fly. [/QUOTE]

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