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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4229713" data-attributes="member: 42582">A small problem: perhaps the greatest philosopher of classical liberalism is John Stuart Mill, who was a utilitarian. And (at least according to the 1st ed DMG) the utilitarian credo of maximising the good is a precept of Lawful Good, not Chaotic Good.First, Law vs Chaos is not obviously Security vs Freedom. At least, this is not how AD&D and 3E paint it: security is generally associated with the satisfaction of preferences, which is turn generally associated with Good, not Law. Law tends to be associated with some sort of notion of compliance with a code, either internal (honour) or external (government).Second, OD&D and Basic/Rules Cyclopaedia D&D used a single alignment spectrum of Law/Neutrality/Chaos. So 4e is actually returning to something more like that.That makes no sense - the game has always assumed that the entire range of conceivable personalities and motivations is part of the gameworld, and 4e is (as far as I can tell) no different. It's just that no longer is any attempt being made to shoehorn that range of motivations into a total system of alignment descriptions.So a character who has extreme motivations or personality traits that are not best described as either G (or LG) or E (or CE) is obviously unaligned. This description does not ential that the character in question is uninteresting, or non-extreme, so I don't see that any information has been lost, nor that the character literally cannot exist.But if a character is neither Good (or extremely so) or Evil (or extremely so) then s/he is unaligned. The description fits. No shoehorning is taking place.No choices have been removed as far as character personality and motivation are concerned. There's just no attempt to locate all such phenomena within a purportedly total descriptive system. Hence the removal of the straitjacket, by more narrowly defining the task of alignment description (which, by all appearances, is to locate characters on the hero-villain spectrum of heroic fantasy).Because LG identifies the purist/most honourable (who are distinctive figures in heroic fantasy) while CE identifies the most psychopathic and horrible (who are distinctive figures in heroic fantasy). Your LE tyrant is simply Evil. Your ruthless demon-worshipper is Chaotic Evil.I've given some reasons above. Another - which has been put by other posters as well, contrary to your suggestion that no on is defending the changes - is that it will reduce pointless alignment debates in which people who frequently have little training in moral philosophy or psychology are forced by a game they are playing in order to have fun to locate every conceivable range of personalities and motivations within a poorly thought out moral and ethical framework.</blockquote>

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