D&D 5E Do you find alignment useful in any way?

[Cadence]

Sure. But I think LotR (with knights like Aragorn and Eomer) and some version of King Arthur are fairly well known by FRPGers (and at least as well known in the late 70s, when paladins were invented as a class, as they are today).

Is Anderson's 3H&3L much more the inspiration for the Paladin (with Lancelot and Galahad being up there), at least from the things listed in the 1e Appendix N.

While Eomer might be a cavalier, it feels like the inspiration for that would be the standard knight. Wouldn't Aragorn be much more the inspiration for the Ranger than the Paladin?

 

[Krachek]

Honestly they could reprint the MM without the alignement tag,
just the fluff and the picture would be enough to control any monster.

 

[Maxperson]

Is Anderson's 3H&3L much more the inspiration for the Paladin (with Lancelot and Galahad being up there), at least from the things listed in the 1e Appendix N.

While Eomer might be a cavalier, it feels like the inspiration for that would be the standard knight. Wouldn't Aragorn be much more the inspiration for the Ranger than the Paladin?

Aragorn was absolutely the inspiration for the Ranger. From 1e Rangers, Palantiri anyone?

"At 10th level (Ranger Lord), rangers are able to employ all non-written magic items which pertain to clairaudience, clairvoyance, ESP, and telepathy."

 

[pemerton]

Is Anderson's 3H&3L much more the inspiration for the Paladin (with Lancelot and Galahad being up there), at least from the things listed in the 1e Appendix N.

While Eomer might be a cavalier, it feels like the inspiration for that would be the standard knight. Wouldn't Aragorn be much more the inspiration for the Ranger than the Paladin?

Anderson's book was an immediate influence, yes, but it doesn't arise out of a vacuum. Its direct inspiration includes Arthurian and similar romantic/chivalric myth.

On Aragorn: he is the rightful king, who can heal with a touch, and confront the Undead (Weathertop, and in a different fashion Dunharrow) and whom others wish to serve and aid not out of fear but out of love (which in D&D terms seems like a 17+ CHA).

The ranger class obviously derives some tropes from Aragorn - particularly the Palantir stuff - but doesn't produce a character in play who much resembles Aragorn of Books V and VI (which, ironically enough, include his use of the Palantir).

 

[Oofta]

Honestly they could reprint the MM without the alignement tag,
just the fluff and the picture would be enough to control any monster.

If you keep the same fluff we still have the same issue, because many entries in the MM are for monsters with appropriately negative descriptions. Taking away alignment just removes a label that can be used as a quick glance and for filtering without have to study all of the hundreds of monsters available.

 

[Oofta]

This doesn't need an alignment mechanic. You could just as easily implement this as a table rule in RQ, or Rolemaster, or GURPS Fantasy, or any other FRPG that doesn't use D&D's mechanical alignment system.

I was replying to what you said "On the approach described in these posts, on the other hand, the GM gets to decide not just what NPCs think about a PC's behaviour but whether or not that PC's behaviour is, in fact, good or evil."

I don't care what a PC or player thinks. I care what they do and say. Which is something I've said repeatedly.

You're also ignoring the part of my post which specifically stated "It also doesn't really have anything to do with alignment."

So you may want to actually read what you're complaining about.

 

[Malmuria]

Exploring tombs and taking their riches casts shades of colonialism.


Of course, real world racism is bad. We can absolutely always do better with our portrayal of human cultures and ethnicities in the game. But in seeking to draw out the constant parallels and meaning and interpretations of text, it continues to create these problems.

I’m not blind to these readings and understandings of text. But on some level, for me at least, I’m happy to just enjoy them for what they are, works of fiction and the game that explores those fictitious ideas. I’d much rather spend energy fighting problems in the real world and enjoy the games for what they are.

Without going to far into 'university level discourse,' I don't think in general a strict line can be drawn between the real world, on the one hand, and representation, on the other. For example, there is the strain of dnd and pulp fantasy that takes its cue from classic adventure novels of H Rider Haggard (the drow always make me think of She (even though that wasn't explicitly an inspiration)), Conan Doyle's Lost World (recalled in tomb of annihilation, for example), and later iterations such as Indiana Jones. All of these are great fun reads and also explicitly colonial tropes that together really did inform how readers/viewers understood 'others'.

More concretely, my players include people who are indigenous and people of color. Of course we can compartmentalize 'fun story' on the one hand and 'real world racism' on the other (this is a basic survival strategy). At the same time, what counts as escapism or as just having fun does hit a bit differently. I would never run tomb of annihilation for example, because either I have to significantly change it to make it not feel weird for my group (in which case, why buy it?), or run it and see my players not have fun.

You are totally correct that if you carry some of these lines of thought all the way through you would have to change a lot of the core lore/elements of the game, at least as it exists in 5e. That's why for me rules lite osr systems are increasingly appealing, because it strips all that away and leaves you with just the most essential gameplay elements. The rest is up to you and all the super creative people out there creating beautiful indie/osr products.

 

[Krachek]

If you keep the same fluff we still have the same issue, because many entries in the MM are for monsters with appropriately negative descriptions. Taking away alignment just removes a label that can be used as a quick glance and for filtering without have to study all of the hundreds of monsters available.

The main complaint is about the humanoid race.
They can create a section : humanoids society
Evil cult driven, with the Drow as sample.
Militaristic society, Hobgoblin as sample.
Pillager society, Orc as sample.
Each humanoid race in the MM can be presented as a Sample of polarized society. With a warning that you can use any race or create a new one for those sample.
That will give a sanitized MM.

 

[Cadence]

Anderson's book was an immediate influence, yes, but it doesn't arise out of a vacuum. Its direct inspiration includes Arthurian and similar romantic/chivalric myth.

Hence my mention of Lancelot and Galahad. 1e Deities has Average Knight of Renown and Knight of Quality as fighters. Arthur was also given levels as Paladin, but the Green Knight, Invisible Knight, Knight of Many Colors, Gawaine, Lamorak, Palomides, Pellinore, and Lyoness (that is, all of them except Lance, Gal, and Arthur) are given as Fighters. Are the standard knights able to detect evil, immune to disease, cure by a touch, turn undead, or have holy swords? Simply being on horseback doesn't seem near enough.

On Aragorn: he is the rightful king, who can heal with a touch, and confront the Undead (Weathertop, and in a different fashion Dunharrow) and whom others wish to serve and aid not out of fear but out of love (which in D&D terms seems like a 17+ CHA).

The ranger class obviously derives some tropes from Aragorn - particularly the Palantir stuff - but doesn't produce a character in play who much resembles Aragorn of Books V and VI (which, ironically enough, include his use of the Palantir).

I'm guessing that none of the classes in the books match the inspiring characters perfectly. But trying to make an "Aragorn like character" from a Paladin seems bizarre if there's a ranger there. If nothing else, even if Aragorn is a Ranger with a splash of Paladin, the Dunedain feel a lot more like they'd have tracking than warhorses and holy swords and ability to divinely smite undead.

Did Aragorn turn them at Weathertop? Or was it Frodo's "O Elbereth Gilthoniel!" and the waving of torches that gave them no reason to stay after they had already left their mark on their target? Would any amount of training in any class have replaced his standing as the rightful king to do his deeds along the Paths of the Dead?

 

[Hexmage-EN]

I've taken both Sociology and Business courses in college as electives, and I'll say that I appreciate them for giving me insight into how people who might be considered Chaotic or Lawful by D&D standards think.

Both courses touched on a man named Emile Durkheim, who simultaneously advanced bureaucracy while also believing he was contributing to an inevitable "Gilded Cage of Rationality" where efficiency would trump actual human wellbeing. The Business courses focused on Durkheim's contributions to organizational management, while the Sociology courses focused on the "Gilded Cage of Rationality" part.

The Sociology courses were particularly interesting because they focused on the problems modern civilization has caused for human wellbeing. One professor referred to the idea that civilization was inherently good as "The Myth of Progress" and essentially characterized the development of agriculture as the beginning of humanity's downfall from an idyllic hunter-gatherer lifestyle where people lived in small tribes committed to the mutual wellbeing of the group to a modern civilization filled with strife, disease, oppression, selfishness, and general misery where everything is a soulless commodity.

The business professor of course did not bemoan the modern world as being in a fallen state. However, since I took the Sociology courses first it was easy for me to identify concepts the course taught about that would be dystopian to my Sociology professor, such as how management became a necessary field when artisans working from home and families cooperating on goods were forced into cramped factories where they worked on assembly lines doing the same repetitive task all day with people they don't know to make things they don't own for distant CEOs. It was astonishingly easy to spin most business concepts into being symptoms of a dystopian civilization as defined by Sociologists.

The conflict between the two fields of study even includes standardized, modular components for products. One side praised the invention, originally created by Eli Whitney (yes, the inventor of the cotton gin) to make it easier to build and repair rifles by making them all the same with standardized parts, driving artisan gunsmiths into obsolescence with the increased efficiency and production rate. The other side despairs that uniqueness and individuality have been lost in favor of soulless, cookie-cutter goods made piece by piece by assembly line workers with no love for their jobs and no ownership of the final product. The former side praises efficiency and mass production while the latter views the former as essentially valuing fast food over true cuisine crafted by a chef.

Granted, most D&D worlds are places of medieval fantasy where characters aren't going to be fighting for or against an oncoming industrial revolution, but it's easy to look at these real world disciplines and liken them to Law vs Chaos (it's also not that hard to compare poor people working in factories for the benefit of a CEO to serfs working the land of a fiefdom for a landed nobleman). However, the section I mentioned earlier about civilization itself being inherently wrong and the tribal hunter-gatherer lifestyle being superior in terms of the wellbeing of the people in it could certainly work for Chaotic characters, especially Barbarians, Druids, and Rangers likely to prefer being outside of the city. It's also easy to imagine that the devils of the Nine Hells, with their love of institutionalized evil, could infiltrate civilization and try to make misery just a normal part of life for the common person.