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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 5859043" data-attributes="member: 53980">I'm unfamiliar with Erikson, so I can't comment on his work, but I definitely think you see this in Jordan's Wheel of Time. It's just that there, instead of Moorcock's Law vs. Chaos, you have Good vs. Evil. The purportedly cyclical struggle between the The Dark One and The Dragon, Champion of the Light.There's even definitely something to be said about balance in Jordan's world. Should the Dark One be victorious, the wheel of time would be broken and the world would end. But allowing the Children of the Light to take over wouldn't be much better.That said, I can see where you're coming from. There's definitely fantasy (such as Greg Keyes' Waterborn) where there is no cosmic struggle between philosophies. However, if we are to distance D&D from the fiction that the alignment system is based on, I'd much rather see the alignment system replaced (maybe with something more resembling what the Palladium system has). IMO, the 9-point system simply carries too much baggage from what it's based upon, coloring everything else it touches (and inviting a myriad of disagreements). Even if we replace the traditional meaning of TN (balance) with the meaning of Unaligned, there are still a number of alignments unlikely to see much use by players. LN, for example. How often does anyone have a character whose goal is order above all things? I think it's much more likely that you'd see someone who's either doing so for the good of others (LG) or out for themselves (LE). LN is really a very abstract sort of ideal.I think that the alignment system makes reasonable sense when viewed through the lens of a cosmic struggle of ideologies. Assuming that they keep beings that are essentially embodied alignments (demons, angels, inevitables) I think it makes sense to have an alignment for those who try to maintain a balance between such ideologies. Because regardless of whether they have good intentions, being ruled by a bunch of fanatics is definitely not a good thing.What I'm saying is that I think if you remove Moorcock from alignment, a lot of other things in D&D (such as the Great Wheel) begin to fall apart as well. In fact, those aspects are so entrenched in D&D tradition, I'm don't even know how you'd do it while still maintaining that tradition. It's one thing to effectively do a complete reworking (as in 4e), but the Great Wheel is based upon Good vs. Evil (angels vs. demons) as well as Law vs. Chaos (devils vs. demons).</blockquote>

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