D&D General Do you use Alignment in your D&D games?

[LuisCarlos17f]

I use some litle house rules.

I mix aligment with allegiance(race, country, family, clan, tribe, religion, guild, brotherhood..), and the spells (and other possible powers) with aligment key can hurt enemies with same aligment but different allegiance, for example a drow cleric vs an orc shaman). Then being neutral doesn't help to avoid worse damage.

And I also allow characters with opposite/contradictory aligment-allegiance, for example a chaotic sherif who breaks rules to defend law and order(for example the characters The Shield tv-show or Bervely Hills Cop), or a zealot doing evil actions in the name of the supreme good (Magneto and the mutant brotherhood, or the "friends of the humanity). And the effects of the spells? Easy, they hurt enemies and help allies. They are neutral for magic without sentient spellcasters, for example magic traps.

My idea of chaotic aligment is different, more about to be atunned with the Nature or primal forces.

 

[Yora]

A very heartfelt No from me.
I think that was the worst concept D&D ever elevated to a key feature.

 

[Burnside]

Not everything needs to have a mechanical effect to have an impact in the game.

Alignments are only guidelines but they have a purpose. Without them, players are free to act whatever manner suits them best at the moment. For some players, this is not a problem as they have clear ideas about who their characters are and how they want to portray them. Others, not so much. If it's a free-for-all kind of campaign, no problem. But if its a heroic campaign where the players are expected to be heroes of some sort, then it helps to have some guardrails in place even if its just to remind players how to be good people. That's more important to me than mechanical effects. In this day and age, I think we need that now more than ever.

Got it. I think I do the same thing re: outlining general expectations about PC behavior, I just don't really use Alignment to do it. I have a session zero document with some boilerplate stuff in it along these lines. Unless I specifically alter it, my stipulations are:

"Create characters who, while not necessarily saints, are on board with the key dynamics of being willing & able to work as part of a group, and being willing and able to go on adventures, and ultimately behave in a more-or-less heroic manner most of the time."

I find this always works, and I run for an average of 20+ different players per month. If I had a player who really couldn't deal with that, then I don't think I'd really continue to play with them - I don't think reminding them of their Alignment would help.

 

[Li Shenron]

Yes, as an internal roleplay aid, not as a binding choice. You can choose something from the traditional 3x3 grid, a color from MtG, one or more identifying ethics/morality label or adjective, a Planescape philosophy, a combination of any of the previous or nothing at all. It's an out-of-character choice in the sense that it's for the player's benefit and the character doesn't need to know (it might in fact have a wrong opinion on what its own alignment really is).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No, of course I don't use it. It is an utterly terrible and incoherent system that serves no reasonable purpose and only dumbs down the discourse.
I have always found it to be truly bizarre, almost no other game (unless a D&D derivative) uses anything of the sorts.

 

[DarkMantle]

"Yes always" and "Other"
I use Alignment but I don't enforce it with players and we use it very loosely.
The concept of alignment still exists "externally" which I took as meaning that alignment is like a quantifiable force in the fantasy universe, like the way the Planar Wheel is divided by alignments.
Not a huge fan of Alignment, but just going with what WoTC has provided.

 

[nyvinter]

Nope. Never.

They don't make sense because everyone has their own take on it, and reading Gygax views on some of them I noped out as fast as I could because nothing good will come out of it.

And I know this will sound heretical, but I love Planescape but even so the alignments for the factions are too unnuanced for interesting play.

 

[Scribe]

No, of course I don't use it. It is an utterly terrible and incoherent system that serves no reasonable purpose and only dumbs down the discourse. I have always found it to be truly bizarre, almost no other game (unless a D&D derivative) uses anything of the sorts.

They don't make sense because everyone has their own take on it, and reading Gygax views on some of them I noped out as fast as I could because nothing good will come out of it.

Yet, 1000's, indeed 10's if not 100's of thousands, of people have used it over decades, and the world had yet to implode.

Odd.

 

[Cadence]

I haven't been in one of the games I'm running (I think the players wrote it down on their sheets).

In the other another, it was being used as broad individual descriptors for the PCs and monsters (and there were a few deities on the side of LAW and a few on the side of CHAOS) - until I noticed some of the clerics in the temple of chaos had objects that particularly interacted with good.

 

[Lyxen]

And I know this will sound heretical, but I love Planescape but even so the alignments for the factions are too unnuanced for interesting play.

And here I thought that the factions had little to do with alignment. Of course some factions probably lean towards some alignements, but I don't think there are hard and fast rules there...