(How) did you ditch alignment?

[Psion]

Didn't. Never saw the difficulty.

The only very minor tweak is that I use my own definitions of law and chaos, defining them in terms of respect for tradition and social authority. (IMC, law and chaos are specifically NOT self-discipline or insanity, though an insane character may have enough of a disconnect from any notion of social order that they are chaotic.)

 

[shilsen]

I use core alignment. I run a "black, white and many shades of grey" campaign. Yes, they are very compatible.

 

[Vrecknidj]

I use the core alignments, but I also use the Myers-Briggs personality types to get a more robust accounting of an individual's personality.

Dave

 

[diaglo]

we are playing OD&D.

3 alignments.
Lawful
Chaotic
and Neutral.


so how can we ditch the Good-Evil axis if we never added it to begin with???

 

[Hand of Evil]

Still playing the old alignment rules, just defining good and evil, law and choas takes care of itself.

 

[Fenes]

We use alignements as in the book, but we use other definitions for it - mainly, few non-outsiders are good or evil, and lawful means you are more bound to handle by principles, and probably have a more strict code of behavior while chaotic people are more spontaneous. Most of the population across the player races is neutral, even most criminals.

 

[PJ-Mason]

I'd like to see the results of a poll that asks where people would keep using alignments if they weren't entrenched in the game system (spells, items, class abilities, damage reduction, the stupid cleric class, etc).

I don't use them in my D&D games, as i see them as the single most silly and embarassing part of D&D. I'm also used to playing so many other games that don't use them, so it seems doubly silly to use suddenly then use them when we switch to D&D on and off as we do.

How do we do it? Probably much like anyone else who decides not to use them.

Spells like Detect (alignment) is switched to Detect (demon, angel, human, oranges, metal...all chosen as the spell is cast).

Items have their alignment taken away. "good" weapons don't exist, but a weapon that might hurt demons that touch it still do.

Class abilities like Detect Evil get changed to Detect (whatever the campaign dictates as the baddie - demons, tax collectors, frenchmen, etc)

Damage Reduction 10/Good and Cold Iron would get changed to Cold Iron and maybe Magic, or even Angelic depending on the campaign/setting.

Things like that. Not that hard really. Course, my group is used to playing without alignments, or at least playing with alignment-lite games.

 

[Seeker95]

DM Assignment

My players do not use alignment.
I do.

Alignment is not something the player chooses, like height or race or class. Rather, I assign alignment based on character actions. Starting at first level, all of the PCs are neutral (lowercase n).

At third level, I assign probationary alignments (lowercase letters). Up to this point, nobody has class dangers except paladins. (For paladins, the restriction on "an evil act" is independent of alignment.) This third level assignment gives the players an idea of where their characters sit with respect to alignment. If they want (or need) to change, they have one more level to establish consistency.

At fourth level, alignment is given capital letters, and all alignment-based effects kick in (reaction to certain spells, items, classes, etc.)

No single act will change alignment as the game progresses, but I keep track of behaviors, and adjust alignments accordingly.

 

[fusangite]

I use the nine alignment system not so much because I am happy with it but because too many other parts of the game hang off this mechanic. In order to make it function, though, I basically wall off the law-chaos axis from behaviour and run it like Communism and Capitalism in the Cold War. You can be aligned with either force but it makes almost no difference in terms of behaviour. Kind of like Saddam Hussein in the 70s and 80s: sometimes he was on the Communist side of the Cold War; sometimes he was on the Capitalist side but how he ran the country never really changed. While good and evil remain real in my games, law and chaos simply function to align you with a group of people not because you act like them but because you share some vague goal whose actual implementation got lost in the shuffle a long time ago.

 

[Kemrain]

Though we refer to alignment to describe certain characters, it doesn't matter in our game. Type has become much more important.

We're running with Elements of Magic revised, and so every creature has an Elemental Type (most living things being of the Life element). We've gone a step further, and assigned an Alignment Type to everything that didn't have one. Balance.

The Prime is Neutrally Aligned, and so are it's inhabitants. If you pick up a different Aura (Paladin, Cleric, Blackguard, etc.) your Alignment Type changes. Divination detects your type (not all that useful for detecting living things on the prime, which radiates faint balance all the time) and Abjure Balance keeps Prime Material critters away (except for the undead, strongly aligned religious types, native outsiders, etc.) It's worked out so far. A good way to scare PC's is to change their Alignment Type without explanation. Freaks 'em out good, heheheh.

- Kemrain the [Chaotic] [Evil].