D&D General The Problem with Evil or what if we don't use alignments?

[Maxperson]

If alignment is so useful when used correctly, then why are there so many reports of people using it incorrectly?

The vast majority of those reports are just bad DMs or players. I looked at a Reddit thread someone used to try and show a thousand horror stories. I read the first 5 or 10 and all of them were bad DMs or Players, and those are going to be bad regardless.

The vast majority of the valid reports are from 13+ years ago and involve alignment mechanics. Those are entirely irrelevant today.

Usually it's a bad player who wants to be disruptive, so he takes CN or something as an excuse. You know what happens if there is no CN? He still is disruptive but comes up with a different excuse. That's not an alignment issue, it's a player problem. The vast majority of DM's abusing things are the same.

These go back decades, the alingment options. Lawful Stupid paladins and 'Batman is every alignment' are ancient memes for reasons.

Going back decades is a Red Herring. Alignment today is not the same as alignment decades ago, and hasn't been for 13 years. If you want to show that alignment is a problem now, you need to show 1) actual alignment problems and not DM/Player problems, and 2) they all need to be since 5e came out.

 

[Mistwell]

I'm sure WOTC has the data.

I mean we D&D fans have to be consistent. We can't say "WOTCC didn't add or change X because they have the data and the data states pro-change isn't the majority." AND "WOTC is changing Y but they don't have the data that Y needs changing nor that pro-change is popular."

I am not sure at all that WOTC has the data. We know how they gather data, it's been used consistently for 7 years now, and they didn't use that method to gather the data. There has been no survey, no hint of those questions, in any of their solicitations of feedback from the consumer base. There hasn't been a beta playtest set of questions about it either. There hasn't even been a casual poll through D&D Beyond, or even comments section on a video.

So yes, I am being consistent. Past major changes to the game always went through a process which this one didn't go through. The consumer base has had no opportunity for input on this one, while there was an opportunity for input on all prior major changes like this. In fact there's been input on much smaller changes than this one in addition to larger changes. This one stands alone in terms of major changes which did not receive a single survey question from the consumer base.

Anecdotally, I've seen many times in real life and heard many stories of on the net of people using alignment poorly.



That stuff was just the last straw.

Lawful Stupid Paladins, Flipfloping Druids, Destructive Chaotic Murderhobos, DMs stripping divine powers off of strict readings, Lolth Drow being a nonsense civilization, and CE savages being musclebound yet nothaving basic agriculture needed to fuel their raids have been examples of poor usage of alignment for decades.

All of that is just personal conjecture and anecdotal notes. None of that is real, organized data from WOTC.

It's an easy problem to prove.

Alignment is a tool with a poor instruction manual and many end up using it wrong and upsetting themselves.

Solution: Teach DMs and Players how to rassing frassing use alignment, when to use it, and when to use deeper descriptions.

That does not prove there is a prove, it simply proposes a solution to a problem which hasn't been shown to exist.

Why are D&D fans so anti-teaching?

I'm not. I am against major changes to the game without there being a proven problem that needs to be taught.

Oh and the problem with Orcs isn't the real world implications.

Says you. A lot of people disagree with you on that.

The problem is that you are telling my that a race of humanoids 125-200% the mass of humans can go around raiding constantly for wealth and food and not starve due to their lack of farms and not be genocided by a focused effort by noblemen to wipe them out.

Warhammer Orks sprout from the bloodied ground. Warcraft and M&M Orcs build cities. All three of them farm.

D&D Orcs are so Chaotic and so Evil that their nation shouldn't even be able to function.
At least Demons have the energy go back to the Abyss to regenerate.

None of that is a common complaint about orcs. In fact it's one of the very rare times those issues have ever been raised on this message board.

And let's not get into the "Everybody was Backstabbing Everybody Else" Drow who somehow produce enough drow after assassinations and betrayals to manage several slave empires underground.

Again, this is a nearly unique complaint you have about drow, and I am failing to see how it relates well to this discussion about alignment.

 

[Minigiant]

Why would you assume that they have that data when they haven't done anything to get that data from the public?

To be consistent.

They made Paladins have oaths, and some people have Oath Stupid Paladins. Strip alignment away and you still have "chaotic" murderhobos. There is no reading in the PHB that allows DM's to strip divine powers based on alignment. Lolth Drow still happens without alignment. Take alignment away and nothing changes unless you actually attend to the real problems.

That's my point.
The problem isn't Alignment.
The problem is TSR and WOTC never taught people how to use alignment.

And... they themselves do not know how to use alignment.

How can fans use alignment right if WOTC still does it wrong?

How? It has no mechanical impact at all.

It has story impacts. And that's where people screw up.

Who said D&D "fans" are? You guys have been saying to get rid of alignment that it has no use, not that people should have better instruction. Perhaps if you had responded positively like that, instead of arguing to take alignment away for 30 pages, you'd have gotten a better response.

I'm not against alignment. I want it to stay. I'm for it being taught.

But the Pro-Alignment side is full of people who say "It works for me. Too bad for bad players and DMs. Don't do anything."

According to the people arguing in the other threads and WotC's response, that is the problem. They just then incorrectly blame it on alignment, rather than the lore write-up.

Exactly. WOTC doesn't know how to express alignment in their lore.

And if you do that, it's 100 times worse if it is attributed in any way to anything in real life.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

If they really do get rid of alignment completely (which I'm still skeptical of), they'd have to ditch the Great Wheel cosmology and the lore concerning what happens to creatures' souls after death. A large section of the DMG would effectively need to be rewritten, too.

If this brought back the World Axis cosmology, though, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

 

[Mecheon]

Usually it's a bad player who wants to be disruptive, so he takes CN or something as an excuse. You know what happens if there is no CN? He still is disruptive but comes up with a different excuse. That's not an alignment issue, it's a player problem. The vast majority of DM's abusing things are the same.

Leaving a rusty nail in the open, because folks can walk around it, still leaves open the possibility of someone falling on it.

But, to echo Minigiant on this, its not just players. Its Wizards themselves who've made faults in it, and frequently. Hell, as recently as the Theros book I complained about the alignments in that putting a god mostly known for murdering a protaginist out of fear her fame would usurp his as "Lawful Good".

Sure, a few people can get the tool to work. But, well, just because I can use a pair of scissors as a screwdriver doesn't mean I think we shouldn't get a screwdriver instead

If they really do get rid of alignment completely (which I'm still skeptical of), they'd have to ditch the Great Wheel cosmology and the lore concerning what happens to creatures' souls after death. A large section of the DMG would effectively need to be rewritten, too.

Hardly need to. "This is the crazy stuff in the planes where people go by this stuff. This doesn't apply to the mortal realm and is purely the domain of the nonsense outside reality". Boom, sorted.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Personally, I expect Van Richten's lack of alignment was a last minute change done in haste, same as the Pathfinder AP released last year about playing fantasy cops where they hastily wrote in things like "PCs are incapable of dealing lethal damage".

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Strip alignment away and you still have "chaotic" murderhobos.

Campaign 2 of Critical Role didn't utilize alignment in any visible way (in fact, one of the players in the campaign 2 wrap-up video said he doesn't like alignment), but the adventuring party was still a bunch of chaotic murderhobos. Most notably, one of the later episodes involved the party monk force feeding a sleeping human guard acid while the wizard was crushing other human guards with gravity-manipulating spells (although to be fair one of the cast members jolted as soon as the words "I'm gonna take out my vials of acid..." came out of his co-star's mouth). Plus one of the other characters made pretty liberal use of charm person, dominate person, and modify memory (at one point kidnapping a fleeing gnome NPC and forcing him to stay with the party through mental domination).

Also they once used Sovereign Glue to make a lady have a carved stone phallic symbol permanently stuck to her hand.

Imagining this as things that happened to real people would be disturbing, but in a game it's no big deal. I can kill lots of monsters that don't really exist in a game and be against harming real living things in real life that can actually experience suffering.

 

[ccs]

How? Why can't you just decide their personality? I simply don't get this, the GM needs to improvise all sort of stuff all the time. How do you manage to improvise the décor, the staff and the clientele for a tavern the players randomly choose to enter without the tavern having an alignment?

Who says my taverns DONT have an alignment?
•Wich one you walk into determines the general AL of the occupants you'll find there....
•The tavern (or other local) slowly attunes to the AL of those present.
This is how you get "evil places", etc. Or at least one of them.
•This in turn draws similarly aligned individuals to the place.

But in answer to your 1st question about NPC personalitities?
•Sometimes I do just decide.
•Sometimes I roll on a chart. (I've got all manner of charts)
•Sometimes I just glance at the AL tag & spin it from there.

And yes, I use random encounter charts. Great fun has spun out of them at times!
9 Hells, I even have an adventure written up that's fueled by 3 100 card decks of (themed) random!

Even more amusing is that I use random treasure charts. Those results have sometimes yielded even more amusement than the random encounter

 

[Maxperson]

To be consistent.

You consistently assume that they have data that they've done nothing to gather?

That's my point.
The problem isn't Alignment.
The problem is TSR and WOTC never taught people how to use alignment.

And... they themselves do not know how to use alignment.

How can fans use alignment right if WOTC still does it wrong?

Er, I just pointed out how if you remove alignment entirely, all the problems still remain. That means that it isn't either alignment or a failure to teach properly. It's primarily problem people and fluff lore. I agree that they should teach better, but that doesn't make that the issue, either.

It has story impacts. And that's where people screw up.

I don't necessarily agree with that, but I'm open to teaching better anyway. I think if it was taught better, some of those currently finding no use would finally get it.

But the Pro-Alignment side is full of people who say "It works for me. Too bad for bad players and DMs. Don't do anything."

In the context of, "My opinion is that it has no use, remove it!!!!!!!" As I said above, if people just advocated for a better explanation rather than removal, they'd get a lot of support.

 

[Maxperson]

Leaving a rusty nail in the open, because folks can walk around it, still leaves open the possibility of someone falling on it.

There is no rusty nail, though. Only rusty people.

But, to echo Minigiant on this, its not just players. Its Wizards themselves who've made faults in it, and frequently. Hell, as recently as the Theros book I complained about the alignments in that putting a god mostly known for murdering a protaginist out of fear her fame would usurp his as "Lawful Good".

That's pretty bad. LOL I haven't read Theros much.

Sure, a few people can get the tool to work. But, well, just because I can use a pair of scissors as a screwdriver doesn't mean I think we shouldn't get a screwdriver instead

Bad analogy. The tool we use is a screwdriver(alignment) on a screw(alignment as intended). Some players and DMs choose to take the screwdriver(alignment) and shove it in a light socket while holding onto the metal table everyone is playing at. It's not the fault of the screwdriver(alignment) when everyone gets shocked. If there were no screwdriver(alignment), they'd simply grab the scissors(some other excuse) and shove it in the light socket.