Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 382349" data-attributes="member: 4937">There is certainly no restriction that says 'no you can't do that', but I do think that the alignment absolutes often represent good advice and should be broken only by an experienced DM with an experienced party, or only rarely, or both.The alignment absolutes are there to provide structure to the game - especially to young players.  They help the players understand what is going on and divide the sitatuation up neatly into 'teams'.  Eventually, players are going to mature to the point that they have thier own good grasp of good and evil and you don't need to divide the teams up so explicitly and absolutely.  But even so, I've found that DM's who are quick to shift around the alignments are often as not consciously or unconsciously stating either 1) that some alignment other than 'good' is actually the 'better team', or that 2) that there really isn't anything difference between being good or evil (which is actually a special case of #1).  Typically that degenerates down to 'us vs. them', which to me isn't a particularly interesting philosophical problem.Even a mature player, nay especially a mature player, is going to interpret behavior as clues to which 'team' the monster is on.A problem that can also occur when you start taking some creature with a lifestyle that forces on it a certain sort of morality (or rather immorality) and then change the alignment without changing the lifestyle.  A lawful good werewolf is going to have to stop living like an average werewolf if the alignment is going to be anything other than a arbitrary classification into teams. And also, if the alignment of everything becomes mutable, say we have a temple protected by lawful good zombies, the world is going to become so grey that you lose the ability to apply those sharp visual distinctions between good and evil that is a hall mark of heroic fantasy.  As someone else in the thread suggested, in fantasy worlds, the content of your character IS reflected in your form and appearance.  This is not to say that sometimes it isn't interesting for the good thing to be ugly and the bad thing to be evil, but that often, for non-humanoids at least, it is a better solution to have the ugly good things appearance be the result of some curse, and the beautiful evil things appearance be the result of some illusion.For instance, if I wanted an good red dragon in a story, I'd probably create a back story that the dragon hadn't always been a dragon.  At one time the dragon was a human paladin, and he has been polymorphed into a red dragon as the result of offending some powerful force.  Or if I wanted an evil gold dragon in a story, I'd probably have the gold dragon not be a gold dragon at all, but an evil dragon using an illusion to disguise its appearance so as to allow it to work greater evil than it could otherwise.</blockquote>

Verification