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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8293056" data-attributes="member: 82106">Actually, if you were to take all of what Gygax states about playing alignment in the 1e DMG seriously, then alignment becomes a pretty serious RP mechanic, almost on the level of stuff that is in DW. I would still fault it heavily for being a cumbersome mechanism that is unclear, subject to too much DM judgment, and hard to consistently communicate from GM to GM for any sort of consistent implementation. Still, it advises the player in terms of ways they should act, and their alignment can easily be 'tested' by fictional circumstance. Properly following it has no benefit though, which is one problem. Breaking your alignment is punished, and I don't really like that model. I think PERHAPS Gary might have thought of 1e's RP rating and training system as a more 'carrot like' and finer-grained approach, but it wasn't very workable (and is still fundamentally all based on GM whim). So, one might argue, that at least by the time 1e was written, which is the first time the 2-axis alignment system is fully explicated and taken as the official rules (though it was known somewhat before then) that alignment is an ATTEMPT to figure out a way to develop a deeper tie between fiction and character mechanics. I don't know if Gary had anything else to say on that topic later. 2e decrees itself to be a game about stories, but it doesn't really do anything new in this direction. Alignment remains basically moribund, and even today in 5e it hasn't ever taken on any more sophisticated character or better mechanics. The training system was pretty much stillborn, Rob Kuntz told us recently in a thread Gary himself wrote it but never used it. IME it was not really a practical system.It would be interesting to see what OSR people thought of a bond type system applied to classic D&D, lol. It seems like it would work, if a reasonably significant XP award was attached to it. A DW-style alignment statement system seems like it would work too. You'd have to decide how exactly to modify XP to get it all right, and there's the problem that thieves would be rewarded much more than anyone else (along with clerics for some reason, I guess that part maybe makes sense) but I suppose it could be expressed as a % of what you need for your next level. It would maybe work best in a 2e-style XP system.</blockquote>

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