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

[Cadence]

With no knowledge that I'm involved in this thread, my 11yo, who is grounded from electronics and is reading his D&D books as a back-up, just informed me that Lawful Good is his favorite alignment. That might be due to a fellow player having his characters often act in ways that would align with CE if we described it (we actually never talk about PC or NPC alignment in the 5e game; but the punishments from the party and legal officials for theft - and maybe being another year older irl - seem to be bringing slow change to the player in question).

 

[pemerton]

In both systems the DM can have the gods of good appear and tell the player they aren't, right? That feels like the DM "objectively" saying what good is to me.

My own view - which I believe is a minority one - is that that would be bad GMing, and that the players should take the primary responsibility for establishing the views/commitments of those gods to whom their PCs are loyal.

But in any event, I think there is a significant difference between a system opening up the sort of possibility you describe, and a system coming close to mandating it.

 

[pemerton]

This textual analysis is fine for University level discourse, But to apply this lens to the game and it’s fictional creatures is an over reaction and not needed. Because if you apply these concerns equally, the whole house of cards comes falling down.

A university level critique will certainly find themes of colonialism, western perspective, an application of the American Dream expressed as wealth is power etc.

The problem then is if we remove elements from the game, we are left with very little game.

Why are our characters resorting to violence? Extra judicial killings are certainly relevant to today’s issues and draw uncomfortable parallels if we look for them.

Exploring tombs and taking their riches casts shades of colonialism.

<snip>

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.

For the reasons suggested by @Aldarc, I won't respond to this in much detail. But I don't agree that the whole house of cards must come tumbling down in the way you suggest.

 

[FrozenNorth]

And this is absolutely false. Any alignment arguments occur not only in a vast minority of instances of its use, but not one of them are a purpose of alignment.

This is a good illustration of my point about alignment proponents handwaving away any of the horror stories other people have dealt with.

It is very easy to pretend that the people who would prefer to have alignment removed just want to take away something other people like when you can ignore the bad experiences people have had with alignment.

 

[Cadence]

My own view - which I believe is a minority one - is that that would be bad GMing, and that the players should take the primary responsibility for establishing the views/commitments of those gods to whom their PCs are loyal.

But in any event, I think there is a significant difference between a system opening up the sort of possibility you describe, and a system coming close to mandating it.

3e and before certainly feels like it mandates it to me. 5e doesn't feel to me anywhere close to what I would call a mandate for the DM determining the boundaries of objective good and evil, but I might need to reread it. Obviously some DMs out there have taken it as such based on some of the reports on here (of what I would describe as bad GMing). I wonder if there are some explicit admonitions that could be added to 5e to head that off if alignment is kept as a rough two-character description.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Do you think it's not very helpful to the 2/3 of the people who voted that it was useful?

So you dismiss @Mecheon ‘s 7000 examples on rpghorrorstories, but accept unquestioningly a poll of 130 on enworlds?

 

[FrozenNorth]

* Themselves (e.g., John Carter of Mars) rooted in 19th and early 20th century Euro-American adventure stories and narratives with some heavy-handed racist, colonial, imperialist, and White Man's Burden overtones.

I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a series that had a Confederate civil war soldier as its protagonist might be considered racially insensitive.

 

[Aldarc]

So you dismiss @Mecheon ‘s 7000 examples on rpghorrorstories, but accept unquestioningly a poll of 130 on enworlds?

I don't think that Cadence is doing anything of the sort.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Okay. Thanks.

So I looked at the first page highlights and didn't see any groups that broke up. I took in depth looks at the top 3. Two of them had players that didn't know how to use alignment, and the third had a DM who broke the social contract and just up and killed a PC.

Given that even among those that like alignment there is a wide divergence as to how alignment is used, I don’t accept that “the party didn’t use alignment properly, so it doesn’t count” is an acceptable conclusion.

But even accepting for a moment that some of those groups used alignment wrong, a tool that frequently injures those who use it, even improperly should be reassessed as a tool.

 

[FrozenNorth]

The existence of abbreviations, summaries, page limits, word limits, etc... suggests that brevity often has its uses.

Sure, but that is a different argument. Micah argued that removing alignment was censorship because it wasn’t replaced by anything, to which I responded that the monster write-up was a replacement for a monster’s outlook and behaviour.

So I stand by my initial point, removing alignment from stat blocks is not censorship. I would go even further and state that removing alignment is not the equivalent of the Satanic panic.