D&D 5E Recent Errata clarifications

[ersatzphil]

1. It isnt.
2. It never will be again.

I've honestly come around to the idea that alignment might be a good mechanic to move to a theoretical Planescape setting book, a la piety in the Theros book.

 

[Bolares]

And to be clear.

1. It isnt.
2. It never will be again.

I'm not asking you all to be blessed with what we had in 3.5/PF1 after all. I'm simply asking that what little is left, not be removed.

Yeah yeah just dealing with the hypothetical

 

[Micah Sweet]

If thats what we are going for, those definitions are exceedingly poor, and far too short to provide sufficient guidance, which again goes back to what I have said quite a few times.

Good/Evil/Law/Chaos, these things need real definitions if folks are going to try and use them, and as @Charlaquin mentions, a whole system needs to be leaned into, to get any meaningful value out of it.

Hence the need for redefinition.

 

[Scribe]

Yeah yeah just dealing with the hypothetical

Just being clear, on my position.

 

[Kurotowa]

Means fall down, but commonly meant 'fall over dead', at least in my neck of the woods.

More or less. A "keel" is the spine of a ship that runs along the bottom of the hull, so to "keel over" literally means the ship has flipped upside down and is in the midst of sinking. From there it became a general metaphor for "dead or dying".

Sorry for the digression, I just love etymology and how words and phrases evolve. There's so much history and culture encoded in it. Like the term "whippersnapper". It comes from a point in time when the stereotyped activity for idle young folks was practicing whip snapping tricks. So the elders complaining about "young whippersnappers" would be about the same as "young skatepunks" or "lazy Millenials". Only like a genericized trademark, it became a general use term that's outlived the original fad of whip snapping by centuries.

 

[Oofta]

The Angry GM wrote an article on why 5e doesn’t need alignment back during the D&D Next playtest. It basically said, alignment doesn’t actually do anything in 5e, you can completely ignore it and it won’t have any negative impact on your game whatsoever, and because of that, WotC should really just remove it. There’s no longer any point to having it in the game, so why bother trying to pretend alignment is even a thing any more.

Then he went on to explain why he loves alignment and how he uses it, and how he thought it could best be used, if it’s used.

It was a pretty great article, and I very much agree. Either have alignments actually do something, or don’t have it at all. Either would have been a strong choice that would each have taken the game in different directions. Trying to pretend alignment is a thing without having it impact the game in any meaningful way was not a strong choice. It was a weak attempt to please everyone that has always been doomed to end up pleasing no one.

I disagree. I think alignment being just an RP aid when you want it works well. I occasionally use it to help shape attitudes of my PCs, don't care for my player's PCs and rely on it when facing monsters that are only going to matter to the game for 5 minutes.

I still don't get what problems alignment causes because in almost all cases it's because "20 years ago I had a bad DM therefore it's bad" or "I don't personally find it useful so burn it all down".

 

[billd91]

you got any examples?

Quite a few came up on the Paizo boards several years back. In Sean K Reynolds's write-up of Erastil, he was described as being a bit of an old fashioned male chauvinist while also being Lawful Good. There were also discussions about people living in a culture that had legal slavery not being able to be good unless they were actively opposing the practice (despite the potential to be killed for said opposition and no matter what other good you do). These, of course, were fodder for some pretty bitter discussions.
Basically, it ends up being a fairly common sentiment on message boards that Good's got to be perfect and not good with nearly every topic you can otherwise throw at it. One failure to be completely good on every topic, in the eyes of some observers, is utterly disqualifying. As I see it, that's just the old paladin debate writ even larger and broader.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Kind of weird how 'not being a chauvinist' or 'not supporting slavery' is 'perfect'.

These are not difficult things to do.

 

[billd91]

Kind of weird how 'not being a chauvinist' or 'not supporting slavery' is 'perfect'.

These are not difficult things to do.

Case in point.

 

[Charlaquin]

I disagree. I think alignment being just an RP aid when you want it works well. I occasionally use it to help shape attitudes of my PCs, don't care for my player's PCs and rely on it when facing monsters that are only going to matter to the game for 5 minutes.

I don’t personally think it’s very useful for that. We have much better RP aid tools that don’t cause arguments like alignment does.

I still don't get what problems alignment causes because in almost all cases it's because "20 years ago I had a bad DM therefore it's bad" or "I don't personally find it useful so burn it all down".

Do you not consider these threads that pop up every few days, devolve into bickering, and then get locked problems? Also, just because it has been 20 years since you had a an argument about alignment in person doesn’t mean this isn’t a more recent occurrence for other people. Any time you try to hard-code moral judgment like “good” and “evil” into the rules of the game, you’re going to cause arguments.