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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7865912" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that the confusion that alignment measures personality is a big part of the problem with the acceptance of it. If you've been taught that alignment is personality, then yes, it's terrible as a measure of personality.One of the classic Dragon magazine articles is, "The Seven Sentence NPC", C.M. Cline, published in Dragon #184. If you haven't encountered it, and you are a RPer of any sort (and a GM certainly) it is well worth your time to track it down.At the end of the article Cline gives three or four sample NPCs whom he's given his seven sentence treatment. Each one has a clear cut personality.But none of them have an alignment. Thus a personality can exist independently of an alignment.However, while none of the NPCs are given an alignment, if one of those NPCs - say the tough Baron - is given an alignment then it tells us a great deal about the character and how he is likely to behave when faced with difficult choices which the personality itself does not tell us. Interestingly, most of those NPCs can reasonably be given any of the nine alignments, and the result is nine very different NPCs with very similar personalities but very different characters.Thus one may prove that alignment isn't a measure of personality per se, but is something like a measure of allegiance.</blockquote>