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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7598657" data-attributes="member: 4937">In these cases, it's less of a problem that an alignment system exists, than that spells which let you obtain that information are so readily available and difficult to thwart without access to magic (which itself can be a telling sign).Divination is far and away the most difficult school of magic for a GM to deal with.  First, because you have to account for its presence whenever you are writing out a mystery and craft your clues, whether to be found or thwarted, accordingly.   And second because many of the divinations spells require you as a GM to have considerable foresight regarding the future.   Crafting suitable responses to divination queries can often be challenging, and in some cases downright impossible since you as the GM can't actually predict how events will play out. I confess that in my homebrew D&D, spells like Detect Evil are subtly nerfed, both in that most mortals - even if they are evil - aren't evil enough to show up "on radar", and because detecting someone that is trying to hide their aura is an opposed skill check.  This is done partially with a view toward simplifying my life as a GM with respect to plots with a lot of intrigue and treachery, and partially with a view toward putting skill monkey classes on a more level playing field with spell-casting classes.   So similar nerfs also apply to things like "Spider Climb" so that it doesn't obsolete being able to climb, and so forth.Generally though, I find that I can always use the labels to increase complexity, rather than decrease it.  "Who you can trust" is not a simple matter of casting "Know Alignment".  Lawful Neutral characters are not necessarily more trust worthy than Chaotic Neutral ones.  The Lawful Neutral character could be a spy.  Knowing his alignment doesn't tell you where his loyalty lies, only that it lies somewhere, and if you are not his liege, then he may not have the slightest qualm about lying to protect his liege.  It might actually be right their spelled out in his code, so that he can lie with more confidence and less guilt than a Chaotic who nominally doesn't believe there is even such a thing as objective Truth.  Likewise, the Chaotic Neutral character may be loyal first and foremost to themselves, but they may be in love with you and perceive you as the most valuable thing in the world other than themselves.  A person's ethos, labeled in the simple axis provided by the alignment system, tells you something, but it doesn't tell you enough to fully understand someone.  It only gives you some very broad understanding of how they are most likely going to leap with respect to particular issues when they are under stress.Sometimes complexity comes about when players fail to consider that and simplistically imagine that you can solve all the world's problems by sorting the hats, as the above story indicates.  (Incidentally, believing you can solve all the world's problems by sorting the hats is in my game a very Lawful Evil perspective, so the players were ironically engaged in the very behavior they condemned, ironically validating the evil businessman's world view.)I try to have a campaign world which is truly polytheistic, as opposed to the henotheism normally seen in primitive D&D where every character worships a single god privately.  As such, knowing which deity a character renders homage to, doesn't necessarily tell you what they believe - only that they are engaged in an act of corporate worship, or trying to appease someone they despise, or otherwise engaged in "developing alliances and relationships".  Nor can you "detect alignment" on a deity, and while there are general perceived alignments for deities, even their own cults sometimes disagree over the particulars and nuances both of what the deity stands for, and how their dictates are best carried out.</blockquote>

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