I can't do without the 9 alignments

[Doctor Proctor]

For those who miss the 9 alignments, ask yourself this... Why do you need them? To more easily identify the intentions of your players? I think that's not exactly a good thing... This is supposed to be a "roleplaying" game, but it's kind of hard to play that role when you're constrained in your actions.

One of the things that I found annoying about 2e was the "Nuetral/Nuetral" alignment. It made it sound like you were almost supposed to balance good and evil actions to stay neutral... ie- Killing a random person in cold blood for every captive you save from the slavers or something. That's why I like the new "Unaligned" alignment...it gives the player more freedom. Now he's not "Good" because of a compulsion, but because it serves his wants and needs at the time. A "Good" character might not assassinate someone, for example, since that would be murder...even though it might be a better option in the long term to eliminate that person and save lives.

The old alignments would take situations like that and almost dictate your path for you. Now, there's more ambiguity and thus more freedom to explore potential choices in the party.

Not to mention the other problem of alignment incompatibility within the party. Say you have someone that's CE, LG, NG and NN. How could you even come to a consensus there about how to act? The LG guy won't want to assassinate him, but that would go against the notions of the NG guy who doesn't care about the law but just wants to save lives. The CE will probably be pitching an idea to go work for the evil guy you're trying to assassinate! How do you resolve such a thing, according to the old alignment rules?

 

[77IM]

Back in 2e, alignments dictated behavior. Everybody hated it* -- it felt too restrictive, the 9 alignments aren't adequate to describe human behavior, and it led to pointless arguments in which the DM tried to tell you how to play your character.

But that way of using alignment died with 3e. In 3e, it was your character's actions that dictated alignment, not the other way around. Consider the rules for changing alignment. In 2e, they carried a nasty XP penalty. In 3e, the DM just sort of erased your old alignment, filled in the new one, and the game went on. A character wasn't chaotic good because that's what was on his sheet; he was chaotic good if that's how the player acted, and the sheet would be updated to reflect that. There's no reason not to interpret 4e alignment this way.


Of course this is terribly subjective, so what's the point? The point is that, in the traditional fantasy genre, Good and Evil are cosmic forces external to your character. Think about the word "alignment;" it indicates which side of the great conflict you are on. It isn't necessarily a conscious choice -- most evil characters don't think of themselves as evil, and yet Evil appreciates their support nonetheless. Sure, in the real world, morality is relative. But in many fantasy settings, Good and Evil are actual, tangible substances, absolutes that can be bottled in a phial or forged into a ring.


I love the way alignment works in 4e -- you can ditch it without breaking the system, appeasing all the people who prefer complex shades of gray -- but the basic framework is also there for people who want to deal with the clash of cosmic forces.

-- 77IM


* No offense meant to those people who actually like restrictive alignments -- but studies have shown that the vast majority of role-players do not like them.