Celebrim
Legend
I actually really like the D20 Modern concept of Allegiances. I wish that has just replaced alignment in D&D. It’s more flexible and allows you to really get to the heart of what a character’s values are in a few words with minimal interpretation.
While I like Allegiances as well and think you could quite profitably replace alignments with allegiances, I am not nearly as sanguine as you that this solves the problems you claim alignments have. In fact, I'm pretty certain the problem will only get worse.
The problem is not likely to be with loyalties to concrete things like a person or a country, although I can see some problems there with it being highly unlikely most characters - even Captain America - actually has loyalty to a person or country as their highest value. Characters that never have a problem with anything someone else does or asks them to do are imaginable, but in most cases aren't the sort of character players want to play. For one thing, that will often mean in practice being absolutely obedient to the game master in as much as the game master is responsible for impersonating those persons.
The real problem is that most people's moral code is not going to in fact be more precisely defined than broad terms like 'Good' or 'Lawful' or whatever. (And I can think of a lot of them but I'm not going to list them for fear of derailing the conversation.) And I very much then think that you are therefore multiplying the problem of ambiguity and interpretation rather than reducing it. If you want to actually avoid this at least to some extent, you have to do the work ahead of time of providing to the players a list of ethical/moral codes available in the campaign world with a detailed list of what each of those codes believes similar to what Pendragon does in the world of King Arthur. That won't fully solve the problem but then at least it will be somewhat clear what exactly a given character has allegiance to.
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