The warlock alignment requirement of being Evil or Chaotic, a good or bad thing?

[Moon-Lancer]

its about time a chaotic class came around. Paladins were hogging all the golory.

for every chaotic prc, their are 3 lawfull prc's. its just soo ug.... so i guess i like the warlock being chaotic mostly out of spite.

 

[MarkB]

I think that unless you're opposed to any alignment restrictions in base classes, the ones for warlocks are no worse than any other.

I've tended to visualise the alignment restriction as a sort of "power corrupts" effect. Mortal forms weren't meant to contain such fundamental eldritch powers, and doing so places a strain upon their minds. Either the power masters them, in which case they become obsessed with power at the expense of all else and move towards evil, or else they constantly struggle against the power's influence, and become fixated on freedom from control, pushing them towards chaos.

 

[GQuail]

Why tether it to Chaos at all? Unless they're resurrecting the Chaos=Evil wierdness from decades back. *confused*

To be fair, whilst the L/N/C alignment scale did sometimes equate Law with Good and Chaos with evil, (even in the black box I got back in 1995 or so ) it didn't use those words in place of Law or Chaos for a specific reason: D&D's early planar view is all about the Moorcock-style universe where Law and Chaos are real forcesl, and good and evil are just relative. (Tellingly, BD&Ds detect evils pell just detects someone who seeks to do you harm, doesnt it?) While I prefer the nine point scale, the old three point is perfectly valid if you wanna do a world like that.

Back on topic: I don't mind the alignment restriction because it makes sense to me. Warlocks ain't a cheery name, nor do Eldritch Blasts sound like something I'd want to see an Exalted character packing. It's a class which gets power from pacts made with decidedly un-LG sources. Howerver, this is all flavour rather than rules, (the invocations in Complete Arcane do tend towards more suspect spells, but notihng a Warlock would do would be intrinsically evil) so if you really wanted to play a Warlock as someone who made a vow with an Archon or something, then I'd be inclined to house rule an exception.

Like the Bard or the Monk, it's not hard to think up exceptions from legend or novels which would fit the archetype but violate the alignment. That doesn't make the alignment restrictions useless to me.

 

[delericho]

Definately negative.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that base classes shouldn't have alignment restrictions. Where the flavour of a class doesn't require those restrictions, they should just be dropped. Where the flavour of the class does require the restriction (specifically, the paladin), then the class should be a PrC.

However, my big objection is to the specific restriction. I have played with at least one player who would immediately leap on that class if it were allowed. He would then proceed to use the alignment restriction as justification to run his character as a bad caricature of CE behaviour, regardless of what the alignment on his character sheet was.

Consequently, that class was banned from my game the moment I saw the alignment restriction, and will remain banned permanently. Which, to me, suggests the alignment restriction is negative.

(Incidentally, during character generation, I only allow characters to be created with a Any-Good alignment. Once play begins, alignment can shift as appropriate to the circumstances of the campaign. I have no problem with Evil characters... but I don't want the game starting out that way. That being the case, the Hexblade is also barred from my games, so that's another alignment restriction I don't like.)

 

[Starman]

As several others have mentioned, I am also not a fan of alignment restrictions on base classes.