Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8641788" data-attributes="member: 86653">In 5E it triggers some spell effects and magic items. Besides that, nothing. But what alignment is supposed to be for is how different factions react people of different alignments. Your PCs are all chaotic evil and you go before a lawful good king to ask for help. You can replace chaotic evil and lawful good with specific names of factions that despise each other and you get the same effect. It's short hand. But that short hand is in natural language so has a lot...a lot...a lot of baggage. We mostly get hung up on that baggage and argue about that. The trouble is that people have different moralities and everyone thinks they're good. Especially the evil people. So you end up with endless arguments about what is good and what is evil. And it's mostly down to people arguing that their own personal morality system is the objective good and everyone else is wrong. It's like the "does sales = quality" discussion only with morality. What people like they say is good or quality and they will endlessly justify that. Likewise, what people dislike they say is evil or low quality and they will endlessly justify that.Alignment is an abstraction that tries really hard to be (and people try really hard to make it into) something that's concrete. It can work as an abstraction, but it doesn't work as anything concrete. At least not with the present 3x3 grid of alignment. You could easily do a sliding scale / gradient of law vs chaos and add mechanics to that. But what it comes down to is why? What do you need an alignment system for? What does it do?It is short hand for how various factions interact with each other. You can achieve the same results with a robust faction system. Or change the names to not have real world connotations. Or change them to more explicitly descriptive...like Utterly Selfish instead of chaotic evil. Or something. But it all comes down to how others react to you. A decent DM can do that with or without an alignment system.</blockquote>

Verification