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Message: <blockquote data-quote="uzirath" data-source="post: 7598637" data-attributes="member: 8495">I get that peeve. It's obnoxious when people manufacture overwrought arguments for simply getting what they want.I love hearing other people's perspectives about these things. It's easy to imagine that our experiences are universal, but it just takes a few minutes on these message boards to see how it's not so. The gamer circles that I moved through in high school and college generally had no problem with alignment in standard dungeon crawl games. It was a great shorthand to remind you what type of character you were playing. And, if you wanted to be Chaotic Neutral, nobody would stop you (unless maybe the rest of the PCs eventually kicked you out of the Scooby Gang for being a self-centered git). We found it more of a hindrance in games where there was a lot of social complexity: political factions, different motivations, people making do, striving toward heroism and sometimes failing, etc. It was fun to roleplay through the complexity, learning who you could trust and who you couldn't, developing alliances and relationships, occasionally having to choose the lesser of two evils, etc. For these games, having a spell tell you that so-and-so was this alignment or that alignment just felt goofy. We didn't want you to be able to check the alignment yellow pages to find out whether this god/religion was good or evil or lawful or chaotic. You had to make your judgments based on your interactions with them. This is not to say that PCs weren't held to a consistent ethos. They were, and XP was on the line if you diverged from your ethos with no reason. Eventually, this led me to GURPS and its system of advantages and disadvantages to describe a character's motivations, aspirations, and weaknesses. But a number of the folks I gamed with back then stuck with homebrew D&D variations or jumped to other systems.</blockquote>

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