Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 6407238" data-attributes="member: 16760">Sheesh, I leave you guys alone for a week and you turn a moderately interesting thread into yet another endless alignment pit!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />My take:  Alignment is virtually useless as a categorization of characters, and uninteresting and overdone as a determinant of cosmology.  The game would be better off without it, and I welcome 5e's downplaying of it.A large part of the reason of its uselessness for categorization is that the Law/Chaos axis has always been utterly incoherent, with no two gamers and no two game texts agreeing on just what it means.  And then there's the added absurdity, as Pemerton has ably argued, of pretending it is equivalent and orthogonal to the Good/Evil axis.You disagree that the Law/Chaos axis is incoherent?  Well then.  Describe for me, let's say, "a chaotic act" (which paladins used to be penalized for, recall) without any reference to good or evil.  No fair smuggling in words like 'ought'!  That's a moral category, after all, that's used precisely to delineate goodness!In essence, one has to tell the paladin, "You ought not to do 'chaotic' things."  Which is simply to say that those 'chaotic' things are actually evil.  Which means that 'Chaos' is just a word for a particular subset of 'Evil'.  And in fairness, one could doubtless say that it might be a word for a particular subset of 'Good' too... but in that case, how is one justified in saying that one ought not to do those particular 'Chaotic' acts, since they are in fact good?In the end, 'Law' and 'Chaos' are a grab-bag of unrelated concepts that are lumped together Because Gary Said So, and because Gamer Tradition Hath Hallowed Them.  Like, 'entropy' and 'love of liberty' are both associated with 'Chaos' in different degrees by different people, even though they have nothing at all to do with each other!Just consider the fact that in real life, 'love of liberty' generally reaches whatever fulfillment it can find in 'the rule of law'...EDIT:  And here's another example.  Robin Hood is pretty much the archetypical example of 'Chaotic Good', right?  What is it that makes him Chaotic?  Apparently that he's a rebel against the established social order.Yet why is he a rebel against the established social order?  In the story, it's because King John is a wicked king who has unjustly dispossessed him, outlawed him, and oppressed the people.  Robin isn't hanging out in the woods because he likes the free country life, that's for sure!  (I doubt most peasants feel very 'free' in their subsistence farming, either...)In other words, he's a rebel only because the established social order is evil.  Given the chance, he'd be happy to be a baron again under good King Richard.  Is he still Chaotic Good if that happens?If he is, if you define 'Chaotic Goodness' as 'being willing to rebel against evil', then you've just subordinated 'Chaotic' to 'Goodness'.  And pretty much made hash of any coherent attempt to then turn around and describe 'Chaotic Evil' as 'Chaotic' in the same sense.</blockquote>

Verification