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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4004151" data-attributes="member: 42582">No worries.I guess so, yeah, but I'd add: and PoL explains why those allies spend their time going into ancient caverns killing and looting. It's rationalising this second bit that has always been tricky for D&D (and which I think was what alignment intended to do, at least in early editions of the game).Agreed that the excitement is the motivation for the players. What I am saying alingment did was allow us to identify an ingame motivation (so as to preserve verisimilitude and thereby change the game from a pure miniatures game to an RPG).Now (I am contending) PoL does the same thing, but better.Exactly.I've also played in those sorts of games, both in D&D and in other systems. What I've always found difficult is to find ways, in such a game, to stop loyalties to other groups getting in the way of adventuring. These could be loyalties to mentors, to organisations, to cultures, or whatever, and they tend to be exaggerated by the pseudo-historical-feudal character of the typical fantasy gameworld.I think that alignment was intended to stop this happening by setting up an overarching system of loyalties and obligations (complete with secret languages like secret societies). Without being too presumptuous (I hope), I will posit it didn't do this for you because (among other things) you seem to have backgrounded it as an ingame phenomenon. This is a IMO a good thing to do, because IMO alignment is an unhappy mechanic for all sorts of reasons (both philosophical and to do with gameplay). But then the problem of clashing loyalties still rears its head. In my experience the most common reconciliation of those loyalties with adventuring, absent alignment, is simply to make those political/social connections the focus of the adventure - thus giving rise to a political/social game. (Actually, perhaps a more common way is for the mentor/Elminster figure to give instructions to the PCs - but as a plot device this is really casting verisimilitude to the four winds.)I like PoL as an idea because it sidelines alignment without generating pressure towards a political/social game. Now maybe you'd already worked this out - I don't know. Maybe I could have worked it out if I'd thought harder about it, but I never tried. Whatever the case, PoL struck me as pretty clever. Perhaps I'm just easily impressed!Not wanting to be too repetitive, but canonical PoL is prepared to diverge from history to make the game more interesting: W&M p 15.Which brings me to your second point:Now I agree with you that in Runequest or The Dying Earth that would be boring. But in (what I am calling) classic D&D it is a plus. Strange towns are places where you go to rest. Adventures happen out in the darkness (unless you actually look for trouble in the safe places: W&M sidebar p 20).Not only does this facilitate dungeoneering as the principal focus of D&D play, I think it can also help with rules for the passage of time in a campaign. I'll try to explain why.For reasons of verisimilitude, it is bad if a PC goes from 1st to 30th in 1 month of life. But given the mechanics of combat and other challenges, XP etc it probably only requires 1 day of adventuring for a PC to gain one level. The reconciliation of this mechanical fact with the verisimilitude constraint requires that a lot of time pass between adventures. This in turn requires that PCs can easily make there way to places where this will happen, that is, places which are not adventuring locations and thus in which players are happy to agree that time passes without having to play out that time. The points of light are these places: you don't have to worry about adventuring there unless you go looking for it.If I am right about this time issue, it raises (at least) one difficulty: how does a GM handle revenge/ambush attacks by old foes? In my experience this is a very tricky issue, because if the players think that such attacks are on the cards then they never let their PCs spend un-played-out gametime, as they will spend all their time on alert, preparing defences etc. But this in turn can cause play to slow to the pace of dripping treacle.I've never really found a good way to solve this in my games short of letting the PCs rest in utterly safe places (the Heavens, in our current game, or Towers of High Sorcery or impenetrable Imperial palaces in earlier games). I'm hoping that 4e will offer me some good advice on how to handle this for a game that doesn't have the sort of narrative control or stakes mechanisms that would let the players put the risk of ambush on the table, or take it off, at the pure metagame level.</blockquote>

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