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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 8292976" data-attributes="member: 6677017">Just read the OP, and I thought there were some good ideas in it, but a central problem in the post is that it reinforces something from earlier editions of D&D, which 3e and 5e changed to a way that makes sense and works way better.In early editions, the “average” (NPC) human was Lawful. Maybe even Good. This was a complete mess, because then we having varying degrees of divergence from the norm. No wonder there is a lot of confusion about what counts as Neutral versus being Evil (or Chaotic) when the differences are just matters of degree away from the norm (meaning the norm most players, presumably being human, would be familiar with) in the same direction!3e revised it so that the average human alignment is Neutral (on both axes).This is huge. This means that the baseline is what players are going to be familiar with, and variance towards Good or Evil (or Law or Chaos) is going to be moving away from it in opposite directions. As a gross oversimplification, you can decide whether a character is Good, Neutral, or Evil, by asking yourself “Are they noticeably more Good or more Evil than the average person?” None of this trying to fit Neutrality as this thin awkward band between the norm and the clearly-not-norm.And since there is a wide range of variance in individual and societal alignment, you can reasonably imagine what societies that don’t hew as closely to the average are like. Nazi society seems like a great example of LE. A hippy commune might be CG or CN depending on the group. We can all think of other examples, and while we might disagree on particular assignments, there is going to be much less disagreement then when you have awkward philosophical constructs involved rather than the common sense impressions which this method enables.As I’ve said before, 3e already did all this, and 5e alignment is like a quick summing-up of 3e.</blockquote>

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