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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nemesis Destiny" data-source="post: 6098483" data-attributes="member: 98255">Insightful post; basically confirms my feelings on the issue. [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION] does a decent summary of my feelings on the issue of Alignment in D&D, and especially in AD&D:Especially the last sentence. Alignment is ALL stick and ZERO carrot, by RAW, especially AD&D. There was always the ad hoc xp awards for "good roleplaying" that very few DMs I gamed with ever seemed to use, but all this did was encourage a player to play their PC within their alignment, not for pushing the limits of their character. I wouldn't learn why I hated this tired old routine that seemed embedded in the game until much later, but now it's obvious to me. If I use alignment at all, part of what I use it for is to help guide the arc of character development, which usually gets interesting and fun, when the character crosses the line into a different alignment. To me, that's a huge part of character development, to others, particularly AD&D traditionalists, that's you failing to play your character properly. That causes a huge mental disconnect for me; people aren't allowed to change? The game punishes them for doing so? Yep. Thanks, Gary & Dave.Some of my favourite PC & NPC story arcs have been defined by alignment shifts caused by external circumstances, but I was only able to really pull that off after finding (and marrying) a DM that was sympathetic to allowing characters to do this sort of character-narrative exploration. Two early examples: I had a grey elf mage who started chaotic good with a hate-on for the orcs who burned his village to the ground and killed his family, who gained greater power and embarked on a genocidal quest (becoming evil in the process), who later realized the folly of his ways and settled into a more believable Neutral. I played a LG noble military brat, trained in tactics and leadership but basically green (a warlord if ever there was one in AD&D), who was put in charge of increasingly difficult missions that eventually required her to decide between following orders and her concern for the welfare of her troops; she went from naive to neutral good after a couple of these, and became a bard after earning her own followers (hitting 9th as a fighter).By the book (and at every table I'd played at to that point), there would be several lost levels and experience point penalties. You should be getting bonus experience for this sort of thing, not a penalty. I understand why the game was written that way; Gygax was a afraid people would game their alignments, since there were several powerful magical items that had alignment-based functions. "No, you can't turn evil just to read the Tome of Eternal Darkness so you can gain that bonus level, then switch back when it's all over!" Given that those were the assumptions of the game, it's little wonder that nobody else I played with tried this sort of thing, even when I ran the game and tried to encourage it.I was overjoyed, to say the least, when I learned 4e had officially simplified the restrictive alignment system, and absolutely thrilled that there were no longer alignment restrictions on class. That was one sacred cow long overdue for the slaughter.Sorry, I got a little sidetracked - it wasn't my intent to turn this post into a rant about alignment in D&D - but it's something I feel pretty strongly about.</blockquote>

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