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<blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6783375" data-attributes="member: 7635">It dawned on me that this conversation would go down exactly the same way if it had been changed to &quot;Do alignments have concrete meaning in your game?&quot;For some, the notion of alignment being rigid and knowable is ludicrous: people don't conform to one inflexible view of the world and its nearly impossible to KNOW what that view would be; even the people themselves wouldn't think in terms of Lawful Good or Chaotic Neutral. Therefore Alignment must be a metagame construction to quickly assign a &quot;starting personality&quot; to a PC in terms easily understood: &quot;Lawful Good&quot; gives us a general view of the PC's attitude like &quot;Paladin&quot; does his abilities.BUT WAITAlignment IS a tangible thing in the D&amp;D rules. You can detect it magically using spells and abilities. Magic Items attune to only certain alignments. The outer planes are manifestations of these alignments. In days of yore, some alignments powered certain classes (LG Paladins, TN Druids) and alignments even had unique languages. Lawful Good wasn't an abstract moral concept, you could speak it or visit it! A paladin or wizard could tell yours with magic. It was a tangible force that made magic stronger or weaker for you, or even opened up certain abilities. Even behaving against your alignment could penalize you in XP loss or (if your class adhered to a certain alignment) loss of powers or class.However, it never stopped endless debates as to what alignment WAS. And as the editions rolled on, the concept became more and more muted. Certainly, the effect of alignment in 5e is much lower than that of 3e or even 1e. And 4e, for all intents and purposes, rendered it so vague and unimportant that it practically was a nonentity to most characters (4e did the same to classes IMHO). However, I'm sure we could sit here and probably have the same argument, verbatim, on alignment as tangible or metagame as we are with classes.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Remathilis, post: 6783375, member: 7635"] It dawned on me that this conversation would go down exactly the same way if it had been changed to "Do alignments have concrete meaning in your game?" For some, the notion of alignment being rigid and knowable is ludicrous: people don't conform to one inflexible view of the world and its nearly impossible to KNOW what that view would be; even the people themselves wouldn't think in terms of Lawful Good or Chaotic Neutral. Therefore Alignment must be a metagame construction to quickly assign a "starting personality" to a PC in terms easily understood: "Lawful Good" gives us a general view of the PC's attitude like "Paladin" does his abilities. BUT WAIT Alignment IS a tangible thing in the D&D rules. You can detect it magically using spells and abilities. Magic Items attune to only certain alignments. The outer planes are manifestations of these alignments. In days of yore, some alignments powered certain classes (LG Paladins, TN Druids) and alignments even had unique languages. Lawful Good wasn't an abstract moral concept, you could speak it or visit it! A paladin or wizard could tell yours with magic. It was a tangible force that made magic stronger or weaker for you, or even opened up certain abilities. Even behaving against your alignment could penalize you in XP loss or (if your class adhered to a certain alignment) loss of powers or class. However, it never stopped endless debates as to what alignment WAS. And as the editions rolled on, the concept became more and more muted. Certainly, the effect of alignment in 5e is much lower than that of 3e or even 1e. And 4e, for all intents and purposes, rendered it so vague and unimportant that it practically was a nonentity to most characters (4e did the same to classes IMHO). However, I'm sure we could sit here and probably have the same argument, verbatim, on alignment as tangible or metagame as we are with classes. [/QUOTE]

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