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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4268143" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, they are the sorts of ideals I had in mind when I introduced the political analogy to try and defend the team approach.I already noted this in my earlier post - they are conflicting over ideals that are not dictated by their team membership. Likewise, two social democrats might conflict over environmental policy.You can stumble into orientation, perhaps even into commitment, but I'm not sure about dedication. Again, I don't think this is how the 4e system is meant to work (based on my reading of the excerpt). The implication of your position, for example, is that an Unaligned character who keeps acting in a heroic self-sacrificing fashion may, inspite of him- or herself, end up being Good. I don't think that that can happen unless the character expressly chooses to align him- or herself with Team Good.I like an alignment system that follows my approach for two reasons:*It leaves it up to the player to decide whether or not his or her PC takes a side in the moral conflict of the game universe, without that decision constraining his or her local decision-making with respect to his or her PC*It means that there is no need to try and locate every moral choice or moral outlook within a purportedly total set of alignment descriptors - which is one of the main sources of alignment conflict at the gaming table.From the extract:This is not very ambiguous, so I don't think any question of interpretation arises. What you suggest is a flaw is a deliberate feature of 4e alignment.I don't think that it leads to absurdity, if we realise that this is nothing like a general moral theory but rather the express embracing of certain genre assumptions.I don't think it's so much an issue of giving the words variant meanings, but rather creating stories (and relying upon genre assumptions) that ensure that only a narrow set of meanings needs to be considered.I already agreed that the ideals of Evil are the hardest to discern from the extract. But I think it can be done in a more-or-less consistent fashion (as I did in my earlier post).As to your dystopia/"road to hell" scenario: this could be true - an unaligned person might find that their good intentions lead them to be Evil (eg by making a diabolic pact). But I do think that, in D&D, at that point the character cannot be a tragic figure. They have become a "card-carrying villain".Putting it another way - the dystopia, in D&D, must have a certain form (eg involving devil worship, human sacrifice, lots of orcs, etc), such that when we get there everyone, even its instigator, can realise that it's evil. At that point the instigator (hitherto Good or Unaligned) either repents (remaining or becoming Good) or embraces it (becoming Evil). D&D and its alignment system is not intended to be used for the sort of contemporary dystopia (eg cyberpunk) in which moral ambiguity abounds.I have never believed that alignment systems are suitable for conveying moral complexity or moral tragedy. My preference for the new system over the old rests primarily on the fact that the new system does not purport to be a total moral theory, but rather to address the salient moral questions that arise within the high fantasy genre - which are not question in which there is moral ambiguity, complexity or tragedy.If one wants to play D&D without those genre assumptions, then just drop the alignment system.I think that what you see as absurd conclusions only follow if one tries to apply the alignment descriptors (i) as a total system of moral classificaiton and/or (ii) outside the genre assumptions of heroic fantasy. I think that 4e is written under the assumption that both (i) and (ii) are not the case.</blockquote>

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