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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 4229888" data-attributes="member: 16726">You guys are missing the broader point, I think, on the alignment issue.  CG and LE haven't disappeared because the designers made an arbitrary decision to excise from the game.  Rather, this is all a logical consequence of the 4e design directive that the game promote good-versus-evil encounters.Once that decision was made, then any secondary alignment dimension(s) had to be eliminated too or else they could conceivably provide a pretext for good-evil teamups, which as previously stated are deemed undesirable in the new regime.  And once that decision was made, then the designers needed to get rid of order/freedom and creative/reliable and all the other parts of Law and Chaos that don't correspond to real-world notions of virtue and vice, leaving only honorable-behavior elements like lying and poisoning that just about every value system would regard as sinful.What does that have to do with the designers' decision to scrap CG?  Simple, really.  In a world where Chaos is defined as lying/poisoning/backstabbing to get ahead, which is what I think it's going to mean in 4e, Chaos becomes little more than a wholly owned subsidiary of Evil.  Which doesn't mean the Chaotic Good heroes most of us think about from 3e "have no place" -- but it does mean they jettison the "chaotic" part of their alignment and become generically Good in 4e.It's a disappointingly trite and shallow alignment framework, to be sure.  As others have pointed out, an order/freedom system would have been much more interesting, especially given the many real-world debates in recent years over how much liberty we're willing to sacrifice in the name of security.  But it was not to be...</blockquote>

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