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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tovec" data-source="post: 5828536" data-attributes="member: 95493">I'm going to be honest, I wasn't looking at my copy of the 4e PHB when I posted this. I have had a look, and yes there are 5 alignments as you describe. I find it silly that U is not between G and E and I feel everything I did say about G, N, and E in that respect still stands but I will admit there are not 6 as I had said.I was referring to this in terms of big N Neutral as a concept I thought still remained in 4e. But my problem is having an alignment which is unaligned. An unaligned alignment, the terminology in 4e makes me dizzy at the complexity they used in creating it. It is like having a non-rule rule, unaligned alignment.The broken comment had to do with going from 9 alignments to 5, for people who were used to a system with a NG and NE (and CG and LE) who were suddenly assigned E or G because those 4 no longer existed. If you were CE before, you remained CE, if you were LG before you remained LG... all others changed. Well, I suppose CEs and LGs changed too because their alignment no longer resembles what it was either... because Law was now good and Chaos was now evil, no esceptions.Also, what does stuff about the planes have to do with this?Now.. Was it coherent, yes. Necessary? That is debatable. My problem is that they have a no-specifics-setting motto with the stuff in 4e, then they put very specific things like gods vs primordials and eladrin coming from the feywild.Indeed it excited mine when I first heard about it. Then I heard more and it started to confuse. To me, it turned very much into a setting as opposed to new, non-confusing, rules. I do not like my eladrin being elves, I do not like my primordials replacing all the nice fluff we had for years - if you want specifics of what I mean here I'll have to go find the post that used to exist on the WotC boards about the history of the lower planes.I enjoyed the new cosmology too, in fact on my setting which is far removed from both 3.5 and PF (my two preferred systems) I use something much closer to 4e's model as opposed to the traditional great wheel. (I have kept a lot of great wheel elements because I find them very descriptive and very helpful for planar interactions and for the ease of player use.)But they did, very clearly, move away from the "established" settings of Greyhawk, FR and even Eberron and tried to have a generic module or adventure only description talking about the Nethir vale (I think its called) in a world dealing with Points of Light. The problem is in what they ignored, or the jumps they made and assumed people followed or automatically accepted. As I said before, the Eladrin coming from feywild, having feylike abilities and otherwise just being high elves.. now that isn't a problem as long as it is accepted that this is a full fledged setting (or sub-setting) and when it assumes to have the same kinds of rules. However, when this vaguely supposed to be "plot into anywhere" and you have references to the war between the gods and primordials (on a cosmic scale) or ancient tiefling empire and dragonborn empire then you start to get very hazy and very "boggly" for me.Now I'm getting into much more of the fluff as opposed to the deals with alignments but it came down to them suddenly changing things without reason or explanation and just hoping and assuming people got it. Or that half-assed listings in the PHB to be enough.It makes me think what would happen for people trying to convert to Pathfinder without the conversion document to explain exactly what was changed (often why it was too). It is a new game, with a new alignment system, not the same game with a modified alignment system as I (and many others) expected to encounter.Right, back to the topic - I'm NOT saying 9 alignments is the only way to go, but I AM SAYING don't do 5. 5 to many of us feels like a broken form of 9, especially when the descriptions are not different enough. And especially without an explanation of where Lawful comes from (when talking about Lawful-Good). I know it would have bothered me less, if it was 3 (G,N,E) or even if they added Vile (for CE) and Exalted (for LG) or something similar so that we immediately understood it was SUPER-good/evil and something new. Not the same system we expected with 4 less alignments.</blockquote>

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