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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remus Lupin" data-source="post: 5706074" data-attributes="member: 12760">I dunno. Alignment discussions are difficult precisely because there are these differing understandings of how alignment is intended to function, and the degree to which a character's alignment is intended to convey something important about the character.If my DM says "no evil characters in my game," he's doing more than objecting to a combination of letters on a characters sheet. He's saying that he expects the characters in the campaign to uphold a level of moral and/or heroic behavior that is indicated by the lack of an "E" at the end of their alignment abbreviation.This means (perhaps unfortunately), that when you write CN on your sheet, you're not just tracking the cumulative nature of the character's decisions, you're making a declaration that the character can be expected to act in particular ways. Minimally, you're saying that, whatever else the character does, he/she is not going to act in a way that can reasonably be described as "evil." And this means that at some point you may need to have a conversation about whether an act is in fact evil.All that said, I agree with you that an individual evil act doesn't really tell us very much about the character's overall disposition, and won't necessarily have an effect on play unless the character has alignment restrictions. That said, one way that it can have a POSITIVE effect on play is if the character reflects on the morality of his/her actions and role plays the effects and outcomes of that decision.Thus, when as above the character fireballs into a crowd of allies, and then says, "why should I care about those lowly NPCs," that could be a great opportunity for role playing. And then it could result in some real alignment shift on the character's part. And if the party has a paladin or a cleric of a good God, it may affect their role playing as well (as in PALADIN: "You fiend, they were our allies! My religion forbids me from associating with villains such as yourself, and my code requires me to take my leave of you!")</blockquote>

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