Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5826252" data-attributes="member: 42582">Many real world religions distinguish between various categories of deity, on moral or ethical grounds no less, without using the concept of alignment.Much fiction - literature and movies - distinguishes righteous paladins from malevolent blackguards without any system for defining those different aspect of personality and belief. Sometimes it is sufficient to describe one as righteous and the other as malevolent!As far as philosophers with clubs are concerned, the world has contained, and continues to contain, many examples of politically motivated conflict, without the need for anything analogous to an alignment system to explain what is going on.Now you might retort that, if we are using ordinary language and real-world moral and political analysis, a certain type of demonstrability is lost. I say, for example, that the Syrian opposition are justly fighting for their freedom from an oppressive state; while you reply that they are in fact pawns of foreign interference; and who is to say which analysis is correct and which not?But my retort to this retort is that you can't make these disagreements about morality and politics go away by sticking alignment labels on things. As is being debated in another current thread in General, if the players think that extrajudicial killing is murder, the GM can't make them change their minds just by insisting that in her gameworld sometimes such behaviour is Good.I haven't done this since the mid-80s. It nearly wrecked a game then, and luckily around the same time an article in Dragon #101 showed me how I could run my game better without alignment.Palladium has alignment. Rolemaster flirts with alignment. And of the various versions of D&D, only AD&D has an alignment system that purports to be a general framework for moral classification. Both Basic and 4e use alignment to represent a particular cosmic conflict that is the focus of D&D game play. No claim is made that it is necessarily universal in significance, or that it bears especially strongly on real-world moral concerns.</blockquote>

Verification