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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 6273178" data-attributes="member: 16726">The 1e/2e/3e alignment system took as its starting point the notion that things shouldn't be as simple as "Team Good" and "Team Evil."  LG and CG characters differed significantly in important respects ranging from honorable behavior to the proper size and scope of government, and could easily find common ground with like-minded members of Team Evil to advance those principles even to the point of battling other members of Team Good.  4e recast player characters as isolated adventurers united in their efforts to protect "points of light" against a sinister world, saying explicitly in the alignment definition section of the PH that the various stripes of goodness "get along just fine." The notion that G and LG characters would definitionally be deemed so similar has probably been the biggest point of contention around our gaming table as far as alignment goes, with some of our players seeing this as a useful boiling-down of the old alignment system to its most important precepts and others seeing it as a dumbing-down that reduces rather than enriches the role-playing experience.  I've played every edition over the years and think each has its selling points, but what I most hope 5e will do is clearly relegate alignment to the "flavor" portion of the game -- no alignment detection spells, no alignment-based class entry requirements, nothing.  If there are specific behaviors on which one might want to condition class entry, such as not using poison, fine, but most of the "problems" from alignment seem to come about when there are mechanical consequences from writing a particular alignment on the character sheet.  (And from changing it, which used to result in level loss.)  I personally think the old 9-alignment formulation plus a separate none/unaligned category is the way to go, but as long as alignment isn't mechanically part of 5e, then it doesn't necessarily matter much to me what the 5e team does (and I won't introduce mechanical problems into my game if I decide to go a different route).</blockquote>

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