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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 1373658" data-attributes="member: 2067">Alignment works fine, and the game would also work fine without it.It's really a choice between: do you want the people of your world to say and know that they are on Side A, Side B, Side C, Side D, or somewhere in between. Do you want Good Guys and Bad Guys? Society and Anarchy? Selfishness and Selflessness? Freedom and Restriction? And do you want these clear and defined?My campaigns adore the alignments, and play with them a lot. Of course, I also largely ignore class restrictions on alignment, for the most part, though I could certainly defend them. I like explaining how a bard listens to the order of the universe, or how a good god can have evil worshipers, or how a monk's philosophy is about rebellion and destruction more than focus and discipline.The main 'problem' most people have with alignments is by extrapolating from the Game too much to the Real World. D&D isn't meant to mimic the Real World. It's meant to mimic a world where dark threats lurk and brave heroes crush them in mortal combat day after day. The real world is never that clear-cut and defined. This doesn't mean that alignments remove all gray areas from the game. As many threads have proven, Good doesn't = ally, and Evil doesn't = Liscence to Kill. You just have to realize that the definitions can be deceptive. The adventure isn't about showing that the cleric is an evil imposter and killing her. The adventure is about convincing the townsfolk that you're not murdering an innocent person, it's about re-structuring a deeply corrupt church, it's about the fiends that take advantage of the chaos to invade from the nearby valley. It's just a situation where you need to know the powers of your PC's, and design adventures that play to those powers instead of forbid them or circumvent them.I mean, the Assassin case is just one blatant area where you make class abilities equal the sum total of the class. A class is an entire archetypal baggage. That's why there are alignment restrictions at all. In this case, it's the guild-hired murderer for hire who is trained to kill, and who does it for greed and personal gain alone. That, in the terms of the game, is Evil. It is a common villain and a specialized role that a prestige class (originally a DM tool, after all) can represent well.And there we come to another area where people don't like alignments: "I can justify a Good assassin, I wanna take the PrC, but my DM won't let me! Stupid alignments!"*shrug* Some people have inflexible DM's, and some people put too much weight on the title of a PrC. That doesn't mean alignments are a bad idea.Though a lot of d20 games tend to get rid of them, simply because of the baggage they come with....</blockquote>

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