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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7598567" data-attributes="member: 4937">On the one hand, I have no real problem with removing alignment from your game if it isn't adding value.I just have a pet peeve regarding the claim that people removed alignment from the game because it was getting in the way of their complex exploration of morality.  This claim I find almost universally bogus, and is generally advanced because the speaker doesn't want to engage with the idea of morality in their game and feels its in some sense getting in the way to continually have to think of their characters as being good or evil or whatever when they want to be engaging in the game in some other way - such as kicking down doors, killing things, and taking their stuff or playing a game where the primary aesthetic of play was overcoming challenges through ruthless play without worrying about whether such ruthlessness labelled your character.   As you put it, you didn't want to "worry what the multiverse had to say about their moral characteristics".   That's perfectly valid.It's just all too often, I feel like - to preempt the claim that their style and aesthetics of play are some how inferior or less mature than some one else - we get claims about how the group dropped alignment because it was kid's stuff, and no serious group would engage with morality in such a simplistic and trite framework.   And while I could agree about the simplistic and trite framework, never once have I heard any group that bragged about how they dropped alignment because they were so sophisticated, actually then go on to approach questions of morality through a more complex framework.  For example, I've never heard any group drag something like Pendragon's Virtue/Vice system into D&D to replace the "simplistic" alignment, or out of their supposed concern with deep moral complexity invent something even more complex than that.Stereotypically, I refer to this argument as, "Arguing against the alignment system from within it."   That is to say, almost invariably the intellectual justification for discarding alignment tends to be that morality is subjective anyway (an alignment claim, namely Chaotic), and that things like Good and Evil are merely human created ideas (an alignment claim, namely Neutrality), and so forth.   In other words, while the real motivation is probably just, "Alignment is getting in the way of my goals of play in a dungeon crawl, which don't have anything to do with exploring morality", the intellectual claims to justify their preference are based on claims about the "real" nature of morality, that are no more complex and often less complex than the alignment system itself.  The result always strikes me as rather like an NPC in a game world trying to convince a PC that True Neutrality, or Chaotic Evil, or Lawful Good, or whatever is obviously the One True Way.  Isn't it obvious?Not saying you are doing this - satisfyingly you've actually written in a way that suggests you aren't -- but it's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, that people who drop alignment tend to be snooty about it, and claim "badwrongfun" on anyone that doesn't.</blockquote>

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