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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 1113580" data-attributes="member: 8447">Okay, my opinion on this topic is getting fairly well known on a variety of boards, but let me see if I can articulate it in terms of the original post.Alignment, as written in the PHB, is still pretty darn ridiculous.  Every character chooses and alignment; almost all monsters and NPCs have alignments attached to them.  The problem is that alignment here is two entirely different things.  In the case of monsters it is an Immutable Truth -- monsters are EVIL or GOOD (or whathaveyou) and will never vary from this.  The same is true for most NPCs as they are played -- the alignment shapes the actions.  With PCs, OTOH, alignment is something that provides broad outlines of actions you wish to adhere to; over time you may change your alignment based on your actions, thus the actions supposedly dictate the alignment.  Example:  one player in a 3.0 version of my game wrote on his character sheet "Lawful Good" for alignment.  All his actions during the course of the campaign would have labelled him as Chaotic Neutral.  Why did he choose LG to begin with?  "I thought that's what we needed for the party."  So why act differently?  "Because that's who I am."  So game mechanics versus personal tastes.  In any event he played a Wizard, so it made little difference, but with a Paladin, technically, it would have lost him all of his powers.Alignment is the last truly silly leftover from the original D&D.  It serves no real purpose, other than to artificially constrain Paladins and Monks.  Beyond that, I see no real purpose to it other than to allow those using magic to quickly determine who the good guy/bad guy is, and even that is problematic.  Actions and intentions are much more important to character development than a label.The Urbis definitions are rather nice.  This is much closer to how people are seen in the workaday world.  No strong labels with rigid definitions, but broader categories.  There are aspects of "Evil" as shown on Juergen's list that become downright admirable under the right circumstances.  Personally if there was one Sacred Cow of D&D I would do away with across the board, it would be alignment.  It is not well-defined, the mechanics on it are, at best, problematic, and it causes more confusion and disagreement than it has ever solved.So take the Urbis definitions.  Or do as others have done and drop alignment altogether.  If, after you drop alignment, someone uses Harm instead of Heal, people will know the character is evil without having to resort to artificial labels.</blockquote>

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