LIfe Without Alignment

[Steely Dan]

And what does 'evil-curious', which is mentioned several times in the preview books, mean, exactly?

-Double-Gated

-Sometimes plays for the other team.

-Not evil, but sometimes help them out when they're busy.

 

[hamishspence]

Evil-Curious Heroes

I got the impression it was aimed at necromancers, warlocks, etc, who wield dark powers, but do good things. The "Dark Hero" archetype. That seems more directly useful. For the players who say:
"I don't like that animate dead is evil when you can use it for good purposes"
Similar with summoners of fiends.

Does that make sense? The idea that some unaligned characters are heroic and brave but their powers are too dark for their alignment to be good.

 

[LoneWolf23]

For example, demons with DR that can only be overcome by Good or Lawful weapons. That's fun, that's cool, that's one of the ways D&D 3E used "alignment".

A simple solution would be consolidating "Good" & "Lawful" (as damage types) into a more generic and useful "Holy" damage. This damage would roughly mean "blessed by a God", and could be granted by any deity from Pelor to Lolth*. That'd satisfy the game mechanical need for certain creatures only being hurt by divine weapons, while ditching the behavioral connotations of "Good" or "Lawful".

Such a concept would actually work with the "Points of Light" setting concept, since it's basic mythology is based on the Gods fighting the Primordials, or "Order" vs "Chaos".

 

[Crazy Jerome]

As far as I'm concerned, minimizing alignments is the correct design decision for one reason only: It's much easier to add alignments to a system for a particular campaign than it is to remove (embedded) alignments for a particular campaign. (You could run Arcana Evolved with alignments far easier than you can run D&D 3.5 without them.)

I enjoy running both style campaigns. I do hope that they include, in the DMG, or at least a later DMG, advice to new DMs on how to add them back in, as they were in traditional D&D. Because some people enjoy running that way, and I'd hate to see it disappear entirely.