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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7743688" data-attributes="member: 17607">I've browsed through the last few pages of discussion on alignment, and it surprises me that nobody has noticed that Fifth Edition has basically abandoned the field on alignment. You can use alignment in 5E, but the kind of weirdness that results from doing so pretty much convinces most DMs to just abandon the concept, which seems to be precisely what the designers of the game intended when they minimized its role in game mechanics.Yes, the Player's Handbook does have that paragraph about 'evil creatures being created by the evil gods to serve them', but that really isn't supported within the fiction of the D&D cosmos. Drow elves are evil according to the Monster Manual, but Driz'zt still canonically exists. Players are explicitly allowed to create orc, goblin, hobgoblin, and yuan-ti heroes (based on their inclusion in Volo's Guide), and no rule requires those characters to be of evil alignment. (The only restrictive rule on monstrous player races that exists in 'official' D&D, in the Adventurers League, only restricts monstrous races based on what factions they can join, and explicitly forbids at least one 'evil' race from being evil by preventing it from enlisting in any faction that allows evil alignments -- kobold PCs, for example, can't be evil in Adventurers League, because all kobolds must belong to the Emerald Enclave, which doesn't allow evil members.) Heck, if hints relating to planar races are true, there might well be planar PC races in an upcoming book (supporting the old Planescape setting) that explicitly go against the Player's Handbook assertion that planar races are exemplars of their alignment type -- that, if a devil stopped being evil, it would stop being a devil. (Or perhaps the 'planar races' in that book will be treated as tieflings in the Player's Handbook are -- not actually 'planar', but simply variant humans with a planar being in their ancestry.)This leads to one of a handful of conclusions:1) The DM could run the game as-written, where NPC races identified as evil in the Monster Manual are hated and feared for that reason, unless the race happens to be played by a player, in which case none of that animosity spills over to the player character because of the giant 'PC' sign floating above his head everywhere he goes. (Interestingly, you could hardly ask for a better game-mechanical implementation of the concept of 'privilege' in an RPG.)2) The DM could enforce the PH admonitions on alignment onto player characters as well as NPCs, justifying it based on the explicit text of the Player's Handbook's alignment rules. When taken alongside the same book's stated call for tolerance for PC choices related to sexuality and gender identity, this leads to a very odd ethical 'mission statement' for 5e D&D: Sexism bad, racism surprisingly OK.3) The DM could simply ignore what the PH has to say on alignment, which is much easier than it would otherwise appear based on alignment having been removed from just about every other mechanic related to the game. Previous editions of the game restricted character classes by alignment (the paladin, monk, and even ranger are examples, depending on what edition you're looking at), but 5e removes these. Previous editions had spells (from divinations like detect evil and know alignment to spells that actually damaged or hindered characters based on alignment like dictum and dispel evil) and magic items (from the robes of the arch-magi that appeared white, gray, or black depending on which alignment they buffed to weapons that did extra damage against enemies of specific alignment types) that explicitly interacted with alignment; nearly all of these interactions have been removed for 5e. (I'd say 'all', but I can't be certain that at least one spell or item still maintains some legacy interaction with alignment, simply based on it being the path of least resistance to publication.)Of course, if the DM is ignoring alignment as-written in the PH, then all arguments on in-game morality or ethics based on a character's or monster's alignment are irrelevant, because, without explicit mechanics in the rules and without a DM's adjudication, alignment has no meaning in a D&D game -- it simply becomes yet another empty justification (akin to "we've always been at war with Eastasia") to allow players to act out violent fantasies and yet still maintain the illusion of being a hero.I think that last bit is why both Chris Helton and I would be curious to see what John Tynes would do with a 2.0 version of Power Kill, and especially what it would say about how much that illusion of heroic violence has begun appearing in everyday life, rather than just within popular fictional narratives.--Pauper</blockquote>

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