NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 8051298" data-attributes="member: 6777454">I don't really like alignment because it is rarely a good metric of anything at all. If you take a character with enough stories written about them like Batman, for example, one could argue them to be just about any alignment even though the character has consistent motivations. No character who is not artificially trying to adhere to the alignment system is going to demonstrate a consistent alignment at all. One could argue that "Captain America" is Lawful Good, but the moment the U.S. government he is so patriotic for and loyal to decides that they want to properly register and track people who have super powers for the safety of the general populace, he goes rogue.A character who is perfectly consistent acting on the same goals and motivations is often going to act Lawful when it is laws they generally agree with and Chaotic when it is laws they disagree with, and any character who is generally socially conscious is going to act good as long as it is pretty easy to act good and they will receive emotional support for doing so and once a situation turns to "put yourself first or you and those you care about die" they will begin acting evil.And so much of good and evil comes down to just personal opinion. Which is good-- refusing to kill anyone if it can be avoided, including psychopathic serial killers who will go on to kill again and again so long as they live, or someone who riddles people with bullets over the most minor violations of the law with the belief that anyone who would violate any law would surely violate all laws. Those two point of views cannot be rectified by just the lawful and chaotic spectrums, if they encountered each other they would clearly believe each other is fundamentally evil and do everything in their power to end one another.That is why I have always seen alignment as quite stupid-- a consistent character is going to be consistent about why they are doing things than whether their actions fit into an arbitrarily decided grid of law/chaos and good/evil. Any decently written character is naturally going to shift their "alignment" based entirely upon the circumstances presented to them while being perfectly consistent as to what goals they are aiming to achieve (and, of course, those aims could change due to experience).</blockquote>

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