Monster Alignment

[Obryn]

In 4e, alignment has about the same the mechanical effect as hair color.

In short, I can't really bring myself to care much, but inasmuch as I do care, I like the idea of unaligned metallics.

-O

 

[Agamon]

In short, I want gold dragons to be LG because it makes my D&D games play better.

Maybe it's because I hate alignment and ignore it at every oportunity, allowing personalities of all types for everything and look at things in shades of grey, but what do you mean by this?

Making orcs Evil (or ar they Chaotic Evil, no idea, don't really care) isn't my cup of tea, either, but it doesn't make my game play any worse.

 

[hexgrid]

110% Archetype.

D&D, for me, more than most things, is a game about fantasy archetypes. The strong warrior, the stout dwarf, the brilliant wizard, whatever. D&D tends to hodge-podge and throw in a few of its own, but rarely is a fantasy archetype ever expressly written out.

The "good dragon" is a fantasy archetype. The dragon of light and purity, aloof and defending the innocent. This is a fantasy archetype, contrasting with the evil dragon of smoke and fire, it is a dragon of sunlight and maybe even 13-year-old "I want a dragon buddy!" ideas. It's Falco from The Neverending Story. It's, heck, half of dragons in fantasy these days, because people want to be buddies with heroic dragons. D&D may have even had a hand in creating this archetype!

"Oh, but you can't really fight and kill it!" is a horrible reason to violate archetype. For me, this isn't a game about fighting and killing things. I don't care if I can't fight and kill very many LG gold dragons. They don't exist for me to fight and kill, generally speaking. They exist to help my group tell our story, to make our world more interesting and engaging, to add a variety of challenges and allies to the mix...a dozen good reasons for a dragon of pure goodness to be present in the rules.

The fact that they should exist and should be dragons of pure good is also more fuel for my "Mosnter Manuals should not just be stat blocks" point, too.

In short, I want gold dragons to be LG because it makes my D&D games play better.

Yet another stat block to reduce to 0 hp doesn't really do that.

And, yes, I know it's "easy to change for your campaign," but that's not really the point, now is it?

How is this not the point? We're talking about 10 characters in a stat block, that have no effect on the monster's mechanics or it's description- let alone the description of the NPC you would be creating to use in your game.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I wonder if a lot of the alignment issues many of us have with 4E would have been solved if the choice of alignments had instead become: Lawful, Good, Unaligned, Chaotic, and Evil.

If they were going to toss out the importance of alignment in this edition (instead of throwing it out entirely) they should have made it even more general than they did.

Unaligned has become too much of a catch-all.

(Note: The following should be read as tongue in cheek.)

Actually, I think I'm starting to grok the purpose of this alignment system WRT monsters/NPCs:

Good: Things you really shouldn't kill
Unaligned: Things you can kill if you want to.
Evil: Things you probably should kill.
Chaotic Evil: Things that need to be killed as soon as feasible.

Lawful Good's tricky to fit into this scheme, although in Dragonlance and other Balance-centered campaigns, it probably mirrors Chaotic Evil.

 

[avin]

DISCLAIMER AGAIN: I'm not a 4E basher, I'm a 4E DM, but, as any other edition of D&D, it has things that are flaws in my concept:

RANT
Let's be clear here: 4E loves GOOOOOD vs Evil, so designers changed metallic dragons from Good to Unaligned to avoid mommies being shocked when they figure out their little heroes are attacking good aligned creatures. The heroes MUST be good!
/RANT

Wizards should have taken the bold way and removed all alignments for game.

 

[Obryn]

Wizards should have taken the bold way and removed all alignments for game.

I agree, FWIW. But instead, they did the next best thing and mechanically neutered it. Completely excising it from 4e takes zero effort, from a DMing standpoint. Heck, I told my players to put down whatever they want on their character sheet - Chaotic Good, Selfish, Libertarian, Socialist, Animal Lover...

As I said in the other thread, it's so meaningless that I wouldn't even call changing it a "house rule." It's no more a house rule than announcing that, in your world, goblins have blue skin. It's a flavor change, and that's about it.

This is somewhat different from previous editions, IME. In 1e and 2e, excising alignment took a little bit of work, but mostly it was just a few spells here and there. In 3e, it was a bit more work because of tighter mechanical integration, but still not impossible. Amazingly enough for what's otherwise such a flexible system, I found 3.5 to be the most-constrained edition, with regard to alignments. It influences a ton of spell effects - more than just a Protection spell here and there - and even spreads its tendrils into the magic weapon and damage reduction system. I found this to be a hurdle when using core 3.5 stuff in my alignmentless Arcana Evolved game.

Anyway, I'll quit rambling here.

-O

 

[Mistwell]

Wizards should have taken the bold way and removed all alignments for game.

I agree. Red dragons are described as evil in their description. Gold dragons are described as good in their description. Why does the entry for alignment really matter? I say do away with alignment altogether. Actions describe alignment better than a single word entry on a character sheet or monster list.

 

[Cam Banks]

Lawful Good's tricky to fit into this scheme, although in Dragonlance and other Balance-centered campaigns, it probably mirrors Chaotic Evil.

You realize you're a one-man band when it comes to this particular issue/problem, right? And that nobody actually considers you a heretic or apostate or similar religious-flavored label? And that people have messed around with this sort of thing with regards to Dragonlance without being half as worried about it?

Cheers,
Cam

 

[ryryguy]

What I find interesting when reading the MM2 is that the actual descriptions of Dragon behavior have not changed; gold dragons are still noble and silver dragons (and couatl) still crusade for good. The designers apparently did not change the creatures, they changed the goalposts. They put the bar higher for a creature to be considered good.

I think it's not a matter of the bar being higher exactly, but yes, the goalposts have moved. In 4e there is the idea that an alignment represents "picking a side" in the great cosmic battle. Granted, this concept may not be applied with total consistency. But it's there.

Viewed from this angle, I think it makes sense to move the metallics to unaligned. I don't see dragons as serving a cause - a dragon is a cause unto itself. Even for a "goodish" dragon like a gold or silver, I can see its behavior focused around itself doing good and being a shining beacon, etc. Not so much serving a greater cause.

I don't know, maybe this is a stretch, but it makes some sense to me. Of course by this logic the chromatic dragons should also probably be unaligned.

 

[Stogoe]

Then the debate turns to history and "core assumptions". Won't someone please think of the children?! The poor new players won't play DnD the same way I've been playing for 30 years. In that 30 years the sophistication of storytelling has improved greatly. Even young people can handle some light moral ambiguity. They don't care about what came before and are going to play the game how they want to play it.

The 4e world, if you could call it that, is not the same thing from 30 years ago. I used to hate DnD because it was so black-and-white. It still is to a certain extent, but it's a lot better and worlds like Eberron showed you can do DnD without being a good vs evil slugfest.

Once, just once I would like someone to tell me why the old fluff was worthwhile beyond "it's the stuff I remember from my childhood".