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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 3971031" data-attributes="member: 8863">Replying to the entire thread as a whole:Personally, I like the alignment system.  I suspect most of the people who hate it either are moral relativists to begin with who reject the idea of good and evil, or they're people who got rule-stomped by a DM over alignment issues.  The second group I understand; back in the old days, the paladin was an overpowered class balanced only by the rarity of random dice rolls, and when one did appear it was still unbalanced.  Bad DMs would rule-stomp the paladin often on alignment ground, because then the paladin would be nothing more than a fighter.  There was other rule-stompings going on, but paladin seems to be the most common anecdote in alignment rule-stomping.   Unless someone is playing a paladin or cleric, the DM doesn't need to rule-stomp on alignment anyway. As for seeing it as a matter of morality; I'm not a moral relativist, I view things as good and evil, but I'm also mature enough to understand all the shades of gray in between.  I can accept law and chaos in D&D, because I also view things in terms of order or chaos.  Law and chaos isn't just funny names Moorcock used for good and evil; it's part of human culture as well, even if we don't recognize it.  Ancient myths are much more about order vs. chaos than good and evil, the world is created from the nothingness of chaos, the gods defeat ancient being that represent the chaos, bring order to the universe, and impose their laws upon it.  I see it as a reflection of the rise of civilization; humans becoming less at the mercy of natural forces and being able to shape the world around them.  I also see it as part of human nature, as we're tempted by our instincts while being aware of the consequences of our actions, basically Freud's idea of the id vs. the superego.  But like Dausuul said, law vs. chaos is more complex and abstract than good vs. evil, and I think it makes them harder to understand. Even when people do understand them, there's conflicting ideas on how to interpret them.  And even though I don't really agree with Wyrmshadows, he's right that balancing law and chaos is more sensible that balancing good and evil.  It's kind of hard for me to put it into words exactly.  Maybe because I think humans do have an innate tendancy towards good, since it benefits us more as social animals, but law and chaos can be equally beneficial in their own ways, and so we're always choosing between the two.  Another problem is viewing them as absolutes WRT mortal humanoid races in the game.  A race that tends towards chaotic won't necessarily have no laws at all, they'll just have the fewest the need to function as a society and they'll resist more.  OTOH, a lawful race won't be totally conformist, there'll still be individuals, even if they're not as free-spirited or spontaneous as a chaotic society.  It's the races that embod the alignments themselves, like modrons or slaadi that are going to be the extreme cases.The biggest problem goes back to conflicting views of alignment between players and DMs.  Most of the time, it's really a matter of a bad DM using alignment against the player.  Some old-school players might not like it, but WotC looks like they're trying to make the rules as concise as possible to prevent DMs from using the rules against the players, since that harms the hobby over the long run.  Subjective rules like alignment have to be reined in to do this properly.So while law and chaos or alignment as a whole doesn't bother me in the game, I can understand de-empasizing the rules, since they have always been rather subjective and a source of conflict for too many players.  I would probably keep it in my campaign; I like having it, and I've never used it to rule-stomp.</blockquote>

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