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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 2031511" data-attributes="member: 3146">Ah, someone dug up one of my old posts.To answer the question, I have used option 1 in my games and it's worked fine. (Actually, I just tell players that I don't attach any objective meaning to law or chaos and that, while they can write it on their character sheets if they want, it will have no game effect). Doing it successfully requires a few things:A. Removing Law/Chaos effects from the game. No Protection from Chaos or Chaos Hammer spells. No Axiomatic or Anarchic weapons. No Dictum spells. No Detect Law or Detect Chaos spells.B. Altering the cosmology to account for this difference. Fortunately, this requires less work than you might think. If you like Slaad, all you have to decide is whether they're good, neutral, or evil and give them the appropriate DR and spell like abilities. (You could leave those alone and just let their Chaos Hammers effect their enemies fully, but this would represent a marginal strengthening of the slaads with such abilities). Even removing the strong distinction between demons and devils need not change much about the cosmology. If you like the blood war, it's just as possible to have the Blood War between the rebel angels and the twice-fallen (who also reject the Adversary's authority) as Sepulchrave does as it is to cast it in terms of a cosmological law/chaos split. Removing cosmological significance from the conflict doesn't really alter it much.C. Live with a few otherwise impossible multiclass combinations such as barbarian/monk, barbarian/paladin, monk/bard, and paladin/bard. None of them particularly bother me though it would notably expand the archetypes available to the monk. If you don't like them, you can ban them on the grounds that paladinhood or monkhood requires an internal discipline and commitment to emotional control that prohibits rage.D. Either embrace a more robust interpretation of good and evil than the gruel-thin pop utilitarianism of the PHB, or embrace a kind of relativism about good and evil (as Sepulchrave seems to do). Without the "it's not good or evil, it's just chaotic," you'll actually have to decide whether stealing and lying, etc are evil or not. (You know, you'll have to make up your mind on the same issues that you do in real life moral philosophy).As for redefining law and chaos, I think that such an attempt would be doomed to fail because of the connative meaning of good and evil. As I said in the above post, it distorts our understanding of ethics to say that Aquinas, Plato, and Peter Singer disagree about the value of law or chaos rather than to say that they disagree (or agree) about what makes something good and what it means for something to be good.It's certainly possible to define law and chaos--the leading candidates are probably flexibility vs. adherence to strict principles, civilization vs. nature, and order vs. chaos (small c chaos). However, I don't think it's possible to convincingly include them in some kind of two-axis ethical system. Ethics is about right and wrong, obligation and prohibition (as well as "we're not sure" and "neither obligatory nor prohibited"). Such standards will inevitably take a position on things categorized as lawful or chaotic as well as good vs. evil.If you really really want to save the two alignment axis system, you could probably work it out by maintaining all nine alignments but labelling it a one-axis system with detection/smiting, etc. being a matter of opposed alignments rather than opposed axes. (Thus a priest of a lawful good god would call lawful good "good" and chaos and evil would equally be departures from it and would both show up on a detect evil spell and a lawful evil priest would call lawful evil "right" and chaos and good would equally show up as weakness when he did an alignment detection).</blockquote>

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