I miss CG

[Terwox]

Forget CG where's my LE. I demand my LE without it how can I have my ruthless yet honourable tyrants. You never realize how much you love somthing until it's gone

Here's how you have a ruthless yet honorable tyrant:

He's evil. Or unaligned. He acts exactly the same as he did before, but his alignment modifier is less precise. It's going to be ok.

 

[Tervin]

Alignment sucks. They should have died and gone to hell. At least some are gone now. Christ I hate CN especially. Talk about a license to act like an lunatic.

Agreed, alignment sucks. As all my D&D groups over the years have wanted to stay close to the RAW we always kept it, and many of us put a lot of work into creating playable, sane and generally popular CN characters. But I agree, somehow some people always had to go the loony way, which got old real fast.

 

[Tuft]

Strange. I always figured it was LG that represented mental problems.

That difference in perception, more than anything else, is why I'm nervous about the new alignments. Anyone who thinks adding order to good somehow makes it more good is not speaking the same language as me. Conversely, I find it self-evident that adding order to evil makes it more evil. Adding chaos to evil just makes it squirmy.

Well, it might be so that "lawful" has been redefined, so that it doesn't have anything to do with Order and Organization any more, and only means "more good"...

And I agree with your definition of the old alignments. An organized Stalin-style empire is much more scary than an run-amock anarchy of feuding warlords (using the common, non-4E definition of the term... )

 

[Mercule]

To me chaotic always meant more of individualistic and less of wacky. Or on a more analytic level, that they made decisions depending on each individual situation rather than on a pattern they had chosen.

Yup. Chaotics tended to deal in individual terms. Lawfuls in groups. A CG character would be more concerned with the well-being of each person within a town, while the LG character would think of the town as a whole. A LG person would be better able to justify the loss of one or two people, so long as the village survived and prospered. A CG person would be prone to agonize over such things to the point of risking the rest of the town.

Well, it might be so that "lawful" has been redefined, so that it doesn't have anything to do with Order and Organization any more, and only means "more good"...

Which begs the question, why carry the old term forward if you're going to change its meaning significantly -- especially when the meaning was already a source of more than a few flamewars.

 

[Wolfspider]

If alignment doesn't have any mechanical impact, I wonder how holy and unholy weapons and effects are going to work....

 

[Sojorn]

If alignment doesn't have any mechanical impact, I wonder how holy and unholy weapons and effects are going to work....

Well Holy Avengers...

Do radiant damage? Holy and unholy seem to have been split off from the concepts of good and evil.

 

[Mercule]

If alignment doesn't have any mechanical impact, I wonder how holy and unholy weapons and effects are going to work....

Bonus "radiant" damage?

 

[Wolfspider]

Well Holy Avengers...

Do radiant damage? Holy and unholy seem to have been split off from the concepts of good and evil.

Hmmm.

 

[Tuft]

Which begs the question, why carry the old term forward if you're going to change its meaning significantly -- especially when the meaning was already a source of more than a few flamewars.

Well, they have this habit of using old names for new concepts - look at the Archon, for example.

 

[jeffhartsell]

Why would you need a label for it?

We pretty much ignore alignment anyway. You're either with us or against us Unless we think you are and you're not, until we find out otherwise, then you definitely are NOT!