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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6727734" data-attributes="member: 37579">Originally posted by wrecan: This has nothing to do with "alignment", since -- in your example -- the "Paladin" gains and loses his powers from "the gods". This seems more suited for rules about gods granting and yoinking powers, not alignment.  Alignment is an impersonal, cosmic definition of good, evil, law and chaos, hardwired into the physical laws of the universe. Not a system of ethics decreed by a subjective deity who enforces it through conscious effort of divine power. Your example deals with the latter, not the former.  Care to try again? No, you didn't. You didn't use alignment. You used deific mandates.  Then your hypothetical also fails on the entirely separate reason that it doesn't comport with the rules for 4e alignment. A paladin does not "lose it all" in 4e simply because he fails to follow his alignment.Alignment was created for two reasons, neither of which, in my opinion, justifies its existence.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Arnesonian Reason. An easy tool for inexperienced DMs to prevent inexperienced players from turning a game about being heroes into a murder spree. PCs had power. In Basic and AD&D, most benevolent NPCs were 0-level PCs who existed mainly to convert the PCs' treasure to cash and to beg the PCs to stop the advancing hordes of orcs, goblins, giants, dragons, etc. But the designers feared that some parties would realize that this results in low-hp NPCs with tons of cash and little ability to defend themselves. So amoral parties could easily raze a village and take their cash. But rather than simply tell DMs "Tell your players not to be jerks," Arnseon developed alignment so the DM had a rules-based justification for telling his players not to be jerks. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Gygaxian Reason. Gygax loved Moorcock and Poul Anderson, which set up worlds of universal morality that was bigger even than the gods. He thought it created a fascinating template upon which to run a Cold War style morality play. He liked the inequity of a universal morality system. It created dilemmas for the players to work through. So he designed lots of classes and spells and races -- and the entire Great Wheel of the outer planes -- around this concept, which was a core concept of his game world. That's why Greyhawk is so intertwined with it. And once Arneson was pushed out of the development of D&D, the rules of D&D -- particularly AD&D -- were simply Gygax' campaign notes stipped of locations and individuals. So alignment, which was hard-coded into so much of what he wrote, stuck because it would have been too much work to remove it. </li> </ul>Dave Arneson included it because he saw a problem to solve, and Arneson almost always solved problems with mechanics. Gary Gygax kept it and expanded it because it gave him an interesting basis for a campaign world (Greyhawk) and the first edition of the game was basically his campaign world made a tiny bit more generic.It should be noted, however, that Gygax and Arneson's uses of alignment differed. In Blackmoor (Arneson's campaign), alignment wasn't universal. Alignment and alignment-based effects were rarely seen. He used alignment simply as a kludge to keep players in line. In his world, PCs were lawful (aligned with civilizaton) against chaos (demons and savagery). It was just a tool to stop people from sacking the local church of goodness.In Gygax' world, however, alignment was pervasive, but he encouraged people to be neutral, because it gave you freedom. His portrayal of extreme alignments made them all pretty horrible, with lawful goof portrayed as judgmental and self-righteous, lawful evil and Snidely Whiplash types, chaotic good as capricious pranksters, and the chaotic evil people being cartoonish villains. Only chaotic good and neutral people had it going on, which is why his signature character from the world -- Mordenkainen -- was basically the personification of "true" neutrality, in both the campaign setting and in the Greyhawk novels. For him, alignment was a backdrop, the premise of the campaign world. There were mechanical consequences only to enforce the world physics. The first problem was that Arneson solved a narrative problem with unneeded mechanics. He could have just told DMs not to let players be jerks and ruin the game. The second problem was that Gygax' hardwiring of alignment rules in the game forced people to have to justify why all of their D&D campaign worlds had this universal overarching morality system, or spend time excising alignment from the game, which was often difficult.People just came up with new ad hoc justifications for the rules they were required to accommodate. But there's nothing that alignment provides that couldn't be better managed narratively or through the acts of deities.Unless you want to run a Greyhawk campaign, because alignment is the premise underlying Greyhawk.And to forestall debates about who made alignment and why...[sblock]<a href="http://jovianclouds.com/blackmoor/Archive_OLD/rpg2.html" target="_blank">This article</a>, written by Dave Arneson himself, explains that alignment was developed to prevent rogues from stealing from and betraying their own party. (Thanks "Chuck and John", for being such jerks that Arneson had to come up with alignment.)I glean Gygax' Cold War alignment metaphor from all the thirty years of Greyhawk material I've gathered over the years. But <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~chris.s/greyhawk.html" target="_blank">this article</a>, which has Gygax' description of the City of Greyhawk as a sort of meeting place for the various alignment factions does a good job at giving the flavor. Other indications, inlcude the fact that Gygax, in his World of Greyhawk boxed set, gave nations alignments, and then had them ally with one another on that basis. Mordenkainen's Circle of Nine was dedicated to maintaining the delicate balance between good and evil, law and chaos. The balance was the only thing keeping each side from unleashing its most powerful magics on the other, which would surely destroy the world. (Cold War metaphor, anyone??)[/sblock]..."jsCall();" id="jsProxy" type="hidden" /></blockquote>

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