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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 471400" data-attributes="member: 99">Well, I've read what has been written and given the whole thing some thought and figured I'd chime in.First, I'd like to say that while I fancy myself a bit of a "redneck intellectual", the thoughts presented so far have been right at the edge of my ability to assimilate.  So kudos to you guys who are clearly ahead of me in the philosophy category.That said, I think that the Fox/Hedgehog idea is as good a way to categorize schools of thought as any I've seen (although I must admit that the actual analogy to a Fox and Hedgehog is a bit tenuous to me).  At the surface, it seems a more easy categorization to make than the Law/Neutral/Chaos spectrum in D&D.  However, for the sake of fairness, the D&D spectrum has 3 somewhat smaller boxes to fit people into rather than 2 somewhat larger ones.The issue that I have with this idea and alignment in general is that personalities are very complex and I think it is completely possible to be "Foxlike" in some ways while being very "Hedgehogesque" in others.  The same clearly goes for the Law/Neutral/Chaos alignments.  That being the case, I think that calling someone a Fox or Hedgehog or Lawful, Neutral or Chaotic is only useful in tracking a tendency in their behavior dictated by the majority of their thoughts or actions.I think this is one reason that we don't have many arguments about alignment in our games.  Those in our game group seem to be of the opinion that "one chaotic act does not a Chaotic alignment make".  But just because we allow a fairly wide lattitude in interpreting alignment doesn't mean that we find it useless.  Clearly there are game mechanics that relate to alignment and by keeping the alignment system (and using the mechanics that apply to it) but interpreting it fairly loosely, we are sort of having our cake and eating it too.Back to the Fox/Hedgehog discussion, I make this observation (and note that while, like Pielorinho, I'm going to mention religion but I'm making no value judgements about it):  Living here in the south, it isn't hard to find someone who is a Christian and who puts great stock in what is written in the Bible.  You might say that they relate their thoughts, actions and experiences back to that one central reference point and are therefore Hedgehogs.  But many of these same people will hold beliefs that run contradictory to what is in the Bible and might make no attempt at reconciling these disparities (often the best course of action when you disagree with the divine).  My question then becomes, "In your view, does that make them Foxes or merely Hedgehogs with Foxlike tendencies in a few areas?"</blockquote>

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