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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Monte At Home" data-source="post: 1509750" data-attributes="member: 1335">Are you referring to this "rant":Alignments may be unrealistic ways of looking at people, but they are extremely useful for categorizing groups of creatures when you need to. For example, one new class in the book is the champion. The champion isn't really just one class, though, it's many -- depending on what you're the champion of, two champions can actually be pretty different in abilities and approach. For example, there are champions of life, death, light, darkness, and freedom. Now, with alignments, it would be easy to give the champion of freedom powers that work against lawful evil creatures (oppressive, freedom-hating types). Without alignments, that becomes trickier. But that's good, in the end, because it forces me to be creative. Now, I'm not 100 percent anti-alignment. In fact, for a certain type of game, I think it's a great tool. However, it can become a designer's crutch. It's just too easy -- sometimes -- to give someone a +1 bonus against a particular alignment.Without alignments, I have to remind myself that concepts like "good" and "evil" are still around, they're just relative. That means that, while they don't work their way into the game's mechanics, they still have a place in the flavor of the implied setting. For example, there are still demons around, and some people make human sacrifices to appease their demon lords. That's still clearly "evil," at least from the point of view of most of the people who live in the campaign world. The difference is, the villains doing the sacrificing probably don't consider themselves evil. And if those committing the sacrifice believe that what they are doing will actually save lots of lives in the long run by appeasing the demons, who won't then bring a famine to the land, well, no one has to puzzle out how that affects the paladin's detect evil ability -- in this book there are no paladins and no detect evil spells. If you want to know whether someone's evil, you'll have to puzzle it out for yourself.That's from the design diary <a href="http://www.montecook.com/diary2.html" target="_blank">here</a>.Or the line in AU where I say: "In this world, characters make their own decisions--and they must live with the consequences. They have no game system to dictate their actions (and reactions), so they muyst take responsibility for their own behavior." Or something else? (Honestly, I might be forgetting something.)LOL! But isn't that true of any logic and r.g.f.d.?Yeah, I understand the rules. I also am just chaotic enough to be able to recognize that no matter how many times you tell people behavior dictates alignment, a huge percentage still play the other way around. It would be nice to be reminded of where that quote comes from, though.</blockquote>

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