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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 4228396" data-attributes="member: 30936">Gah...This thread is pretty much a text book case of why moral philosophy generally tries to avoid the words good and evil like the plague.If whoever wrote the original alignment system simply called it moral/amoral/immoral it would have prevented all sorts of arguments and whining over what good and evil really mean. Of course it would have led to generations of gamers whining and butchering moral philosophy directly rather then indirectly so it'd probably be a wash.The other axis doesn't have handy phrases, since what in practice and fluff it's talking about isn't ethics but philosophy of law. So to better name it you'd want something like positivist/interpertivist/naturalist. Sadly though, as accurate as that is I think they're bad choices, I just can't think of what would be better. Legalist/pragmatist/autonomist sounds better, kinda.Ethics is tricker because they're inherently tied to setting, but the honor system in Oriental Adventures/Unearthed Arcana is a workable mechanical system for it if a DM feels a need for it. However this is all properly in the roleplaying and world building part of the game. Although for some games it would be appropriate to allow those choices (which mechanically should be as meaningful as hair color or handedness or complexion) to have an indirect mechanical through a reputation system. However, the classification system is really more meaningful for groups of actors rather then for an individual moral actor. Not to mention that D&D is really not the game to drag moral, ethical, and legal philosophy into. I'm sure there's some Indy Forge game out there aimed at philosophy majors that no one's ever heard of that handles it better. Or maybe not, since most of the ones I knew in college would rather beat each other over the head with the verbal equivalent of half bricks until only one remained.Getting back to the issue of the new alignment system... Fundamentally ever since they were introduced alignment acted as a targeting marker. That's all it ever really did mechanically. Well, and it gave the DM a way to penalize a player whose character deviated from or grew away from the alignment they picked first thing and gave people an excuse to be jerks. So the real question isn't where did the four alignments go, but why did LG and CE stay?On the face of it, targeting good or evil seems more central to the game since twice as many things will be effected by Protection from [Moral Alignment] as will be by Protection from ['Ethical' Alignment]. Especially since the 'ethical' targeting now means the same thing as the moral one. Based on what we've seen, only the good and evil tags are significant, so why not just call alignment good. unaligned, and evil? And (since I haven't been paying that much attention) if we know that good and evil no longer function as targeting variables for the magic system, why keep alignment at all?</blockquote>

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