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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 9526270" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I'm not sure when we last used alignment in our game. At least, not for PCs. I'm sure if I looked at most of the characters in our recent campaigns, the alignment section would be blank. I know it would be for mine.I definitely think alignment is no longer particularly useful as a concept. It's primarily useful as a DM shorthand for whether or not the PCs are intended to talk to the creature, or whether you should immediately skip to rolling initiative. That original wargame distinction meaning you had to build an army from lawful or chaotic forces, with neutrals being recruitable by both seems like the most functional the system ever really got.More recently, I've thought that only deities, celestials, and fiends should have alignments. And that "alignment" for deities really was just a function of their domain. I do think alignment-based cosmology is one of the weaker aspects of the game in terms of functional utility towards storytelling. The game struggles with free will for celestials and fiends, but fallen angels and redeemed fiends are very common trope characters. It's frustrating that the game is forced to hand-wave the fact that an angel is literally fabricated from the ideology of law and good made manifest and that it can be made. In cosmology terms, this should be like making fire cold or water dry. Maybe not matter and anti-matter, but it's a rejection of the fundamental nature of a being that does not make literal sense given the game's stated cosmology.The complete lack of mechanics at the PC level for alignment, and this friction between cosmology and narrative purpose kind of brings the purpose of alignment as a world-building tool into question. What should it be for, now? It's not fun at all when it's a straight jacket for players. So, what can we do with the idea?I've begun to think of alignment as primarily a tool for describing a culture. A culture of a nation, a village, a church, a group, etc. It's not necessarily one of the nine traditional alignments, either. A church of the healing god is aligned towards providing care for the sick and injured. Providing that is the alignment of the organization. Individuals in the organization are still individuals, of course, but the organization as a whole bends towards that goal. A kingdom might be aligned with conquest or war. Whether that means they're out fighting in the untamed wilderness to expel the current population so they can colonize and exploit the natural resources there, or whether they're focused on destroying the neighboring kingdom of the undead, that focus on war and conquest is still part of the culture in the kingdom. That kingdom might be described in shorthand to be Lawful Neutral or Neutral Evil or Lawful Good, but knowing the actual cultural inclinations really tells you so much more. It's not really a new way of thinking about things, but letting alignment expand beyond a tic-tac-toe board into anything that's an encapsulation of the general behavior of an organization or social structure as though it were a character itself.I've also had some thoughts that maybe alignment should be important, but only in the sense that it means a being has a cosmic duty. A duty demanded by the multiverse that does not permit free will. Deities, then, are limited by the fact that they are Aligned beings. The god of healing will heal anyone that asks because that deity is Aligned toward healing. They are as in charge of the concept of healing on a cosmological level. It's similar to how the character of Death is often portrayed in comics and media. Death does what they do because the universe demands that Death do so and the universe breaks if Death stops doing their duty. As a result, truly Aligned beings are terrifying because they're uncontested within their domain but they don't have free will to act because they're a part of the mechanism of the universe. The nice thing I like about this is that it gives a good place for non-divine powers to live in, as well as giving mortals a solid reason for why they're so important (the gods need them to get things done because mortals are unaligned).</blockquote>

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