D&D 5E (2014) RIP alignment

[Zardnaar]

What will be will be.

She'll be right.

 

[Zardnaar]

And my orcs are not humanoid either. They are more related to the Warhammer40k type. But it was lost on you as you read what you wanted to read. There are different kinds of orcs. Some are people others are not. It all depends on the campaign setting.

Consider them like the bugs in starship troopers. Or even demonic being but you insist on applying your orcs to my campaign.

In my Ebberon campaign I have orc Paladins of the Silverflame that are quite honorables and righteous. You decided to ignore the context of the campaign.

You juge me on wrong assumptions by your wrong standards but that is ok. I am old enough to take it and not caring about it. Maybe we should have a private chat so that you'll stop bringing the subject on the table and move on forward.

Your orcs are bioengineered sentient fungus?

 

[Aldarc]

Nice non-sequitur. Very cool.

You mean like every doom-saying complaint about WotC updating Ravenloft, Planescape, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance in this thread? People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

This is... probably the dumbest, most reductionist and ignorant take on the idea ever. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it racist and reducin it to "white people" is an reductio ab adsurdam. There is nothing racist in the alignment system, that's plain and simple. The system is not designed to oppress and suppress a minority. That’s a real world concern. Not a fantasy one.

My point is not that alignment is racist - not even in the slightest - but hats off to your ability to argue against that strawman and get Internet points from similarly minded people who missed the point that asking the majority about whether "alignment is racist" doesn't necessarily prove anything, particularly from people who may have their own prejudices, biases, blind spots, and invested interest in the status quo, tradition, etc. Whether the majority of the players think that alignment is racist is probably about as useful as asking whether White People think that they are racist. How many people would you think would say "yes" to that question? Likely none, because not even racists think of themselves as racist, which is generally regarded socially as "bad." We can certainly debate whether alignment is racist, which I don't really think is really the issue, but it seems that it would be far more useful to debate it from the actual merits of the various respective arguments rather than appealing to circumstantial strawpoll majorities.

 

[Helldritch]

Your orcs are bioengineered sentient fungus?

Demonic spawn to be precise.

Edit: They come from a demonic dimension where they act a lot like the 40k version. A mix between true demon and mortal beings. They're like a plague of locust, retreating to breed to come back stronger and more numerous if they fail an invasion. But that is only one campaign that I ran. For some reasons, Flamestrike decided that I was a deviant for playing such orcs... Flame completely ignored my other campaigns where I have standard orcs as PC. But again, that is ok.

 

[Zardnaar]

Demonic spawn to be precise.

Fair enough. Spawn types usually safe to kill. I'm fine with a lot as long as DM says this is what I'm doing and how.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm not the biggest fan of how Alignment works in various iterations of this game. I would not necessarily want it to be either Descriptive or Prescriptive of cultures and mortal creatures.

If I were to rework Alignment in this game, I'd prefer that it was actually more cosmologically meaningful and reflecting mortals actively aligning themselves to certain cosmological factions and forces of the Outer Planes. I would also prefer to simply alignment to five (pick one*): Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, or Unaligned.

* Possibly two. But you would not be picking Chaotic Neutral, but just "Chaos."

For example, Orcs would not be inherently, usually, or whatever other qualifier of CE or LE (depending on the edition). They would be Unaligned unless they are actively choosing to sign-up, align themselves with, and advance the interests of Chaos, Evil, Law, or even Good. Outsiders who are composed of the essence of these forces would still be Evil or Chaotic or whatever.

But then put in a system where aligning yourself with Chaos, for example, and advancing the interests of Chaos gets you more Chaos points, but also puts more heat on you from the forces of Law. You can go Unaligned and avoid any heat, but you also get any "Unaligned points" for doing nothing.

 

[clearstream]

I'd prefer that it was actually more cosmologically meaningful and reflecting mortals actively aligning themselves to certain cosmological factions and forces of the Outer Planes. I would also prefer to simply alignment to five (pick one*): Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, or Unaligned.

This looks like a promising thought. Albeit, perhaps the five should be: Celestial, Devilish, Demonic, Aberrant, Unaligned. That's not quite there, but something like that might allow more nuance in the meaning of said "alignment".

It seems potentially neat to take alignment in the literal sense of "aligned with": the options for which can then vary by campaign setting.

 

[HJFudge]

I'm a huge fan of aligning with factions. I think 13th Age does this in a great way with their Icon system. You can have positive, negative or complicated relationships with the major players in the world. This actually adds to the game in a way that 'good/evil' just really cannot. IMHO.

So if they wanna replace good/evil/netural/etc with an alignment system that focuses on relationships with powers that be in the game world, I'm 100% behind this.

 

[Imaculata]

And my orcs are not humanoid either. They are more related to the Warhammer40k type. But it was lost on you as you read what you wanted to read. There are different kinds of orcs. Some are people others are not. It all depends on the campaign setting.

Consider them like the bugs in starship troopers.

That is probably not the comparison you want to go with, as the bugs in the movie Starshiptroopers are the victims of a fascist human regime.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

And my orcs are not humanoid either. They are more related to the Warhammer40k type. But it was lost on you as you read what you wanted to read. There are different kinds of orcs. Some are people others are not. It all depends on the campaign setting.

Then why do we need to have the MM set a so-called default that is so often wrong?

Consider them like the bugs in starship troopers. Or even demonic being but you insist on applying your orcs to my campaign.

So...you do realize that the bugs in Starship Troopers do actually have a society and a structure, as implied by the existence of the "brain bugs," and reducing them to just the soldiers fighting their war with humanity is literally the very thing you just got upset with someone else for doing?

Good Lord the irony is thick in this thread.

In my Ebberon campaign I have orc Paladins of the Silverflame that are quite honorables and righteous. You decided to ignore the context of the campaign.

You juge me on wrong assumptions by your wrong standards but that is ok. I am old enough to take it and not caring about it. Maybe we should have a private chat so that you'll stop bringing the subject on the table and move on forward.

Again: if this alleged default is so often wrong, what purpose does it serve? It doesn't actually tell people what things are, and it doesn't reliably describe how campaign settings actually work. It isn't even a pattern. It's, as I have said repeatedly, something enforced. It's a white picket fence, nuclear family, "marriage is one man and one woman" type, TELLING people how things SHOULD be rather than SUGGESTING what MIGHT be.

It fails as a default. It fails to solve arguments. It fails to facilitate common understanding across groups. Literally the only trait anyone has shown it to have is the ability to just go "eh, lemme find something CE to throw in here. I guess an orc will do." If alignment's only reliable virtue is "I can turn off my brain when I use it," you have pretty well shown exactly why there's a call to drop it.

And, again, that YOU find it clear and simple and useful is not in any way representative of whether it is for any group of any size other than YOU. If you want to trot out the "silent majority" argument, then congratulations, we've hit the no-discussion-zone yet again because NO ONE in this thread has the faintest clue what the "silent majority" thinks or does, and if you're going to require that as a standard for others to make an argument, it should apply just as much to your own argument.