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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8616854" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Okay, so, you keep saying things like this. And I just don't get it.Two-dimensional alignment has two dimensions along which cosmic conflict can occur: A-Z and 0-9, if you like.Not using alignment has as many dimensions as you want it to have. You have groups or associations defined by history (e.g. "Bane was the general of the armies of the Astral Sea during the Dawn War"), or by situations (e..g allies of convenience, "the enemy of my enemy is my ally," etc.), or by philosophical principles that cannot be simplified down to any kind of axial anything (e.g. Bahamut or Ioun, where the former is a god of Justice who advocates mercy and vehemently opposes tyranny, while the latter is a goddess of knowledge as a pursuit of enlightenment with less but not zero concern about things like ethics), or pure personal relations with no material association required (e.g. my headcanon that Bahamut and Kord are lovers, which is why Kord is couch-surfing in Celestia despite it being the domain of two extremely straight-laced, by-the-book deities).Law/Chaos vs Good/Evil gives you two, and only two, axes. Sure, that gives nine alignments, but honestly, the vast majority of the time only one axis is going to be particularly relevant.......and it's usually going to be Good vs Evil. You get some Blood War stuff, but 4e has the Blood War too, because "Evil can't get along even when it really should try" is a trope significantly older than the Great Wheel. Ultimately, the alleged huge diversity of the two-axis system boils down to one of four conflicts:Pure Law vs pure Chaos (which most Good beings will sit out because their Good-ness will force them to seek reconciliation)Pure Good vs pure Evil, sometimes with purely-aesthetic touches to make it look like LG-vs-CE (e.g. soaring white cities vs. leather-clad blood-crazed barbarians) or LE-vs-CG (spike-laden hyperindustrial cities vs forest elf hippies)Evil vs Evil (which, as already noted, substantially predates two-axis alignment; it's a very old trope, e.g. Assyrian mythology)Neutral vs Whatever (which is extremely boring because "neutral" is always either a non-alignment or batshit crazy)So. You keep talking up all the directions you can go with L/G/C/E. But there's really not that many.Even the Great Wheel encodes one conflict as higher than the others: the upper planes are Good, the lower planes are Evil...but there's no term for the opposite axis, is there? No "starboard" and "port" planes, or whatever one might call them. Ultimately Law and Chaos take a backseat to the good-vs-evil dichotomy even in the cosmology itself. It's just that Evil has faction issues, while Good can get along despite differences.</blockquote>

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