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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4002269" data-attributes="member: 42582">I know. That's part of my point.This is not the case in canonical PoL, as set out in W&M, which discusses the role of the different points of light as safehavens for all members of PC races. (Thus the importance of the removal of inherent enmity between races.)The need to protect all these safehavens is what (on my analysis) gives the PCs a motivation to adventure together despite their diverse origins.In the canonical descriptoin of PoL this is not the case.Part of the conceit of PoL, as set out in W&M, are that there are no such organisations. Thus, protection depends upon small bands of adventurers doing heroic things. Thus, we can explain the motivation of the PCs to band together, despite their diverse origins, without needing to appeal to alignment considerations.So do I. What I like about PoL is that it explains how this diversity is not an obstacle to a small group of adventurers banding together to invade dungeons.But what you describe is alignment working in the metagame sense I am talking about. The fact that (as you observe) most players ignored Law vs Chaos is part of what made it work.Actually I haven't said anything about how I run my campaigns. My account of the role of alignment is based mainly on what is said about it in some of the earlier D&D texts, such as the 1st ed PHB and DMG, early White Dwarf articles by Lewis Pulsipher, and the extensive discussions in articles and forum letters in the first 100 or so numbers of Dragon.In my own games I don't use alignment and try to set up real social relations that will bind a party together (recongnising the metagame imperative for this). But I haven't tried the PoL way, and as a result my games tend not be classic D&D games but more political/social games. What I think is very clever about the PoL design is that it uses the ingame social situation to drive a classic D&D game. This has never been done before in a published D&D text that I'm aware of - it was almost always alignment-driven (ie the GM in guise of Elminster or whomever says "As Good PCs you surely have no choice but to go and smite these Evil entities").The traditional difficulty that alignment resolves is the following: why does this group of close friends spend its time engaged in acts of murder and robbery? And how did they become friends in the first place, given their disparate racial and social backgrounds? Alignment, by positing the boon companions as Good and their victims as Evil, provided a short-hand answer to both questions.Obviously the game has outgrown that explanation, and this creates pressure to downplay or disregard alignment. But other fantasy RPGs that have done this (RQ, RM in some versions, Pendragon, Chivalry and Sorcery, Ars Magica< HeroQuest, The Dying Earth) also do not support classic D&D dungeon-raiding play. As already stated, PoL is the first attempt I know of in published D&D material to reconcile the abolition of alignment with traditional D&D play, by instituting an alternative (and in my view much more clever) metagame device. (It may be that I should be crediting Eberron with this achievement rather than PoL, but I don't know it well enough, and all the reviews I've read of the first few Eberron modules suggest that they were pulpy railroads rather than classic dungeons.)</blockquote>

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