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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7670844" data-attributes="member: 42582">In AD&D, devils can cast Know Alignment. In 3E, an Imp, Quasit or Succubus can cast Detect Good.When one of these creatures self-scans, and gets the answer back, which indicates (at a minimum) that they are not good, what do they do? Reject the accuracy of their own innate magic?(You might say they have no incentive to self-scan. Let's suppose that, for the sake of argument, they do. Maybe they lost a bet, or got curious, or tried to scan someone else but got reflected by a ring of spell turning!)Or: the PCs have been hanging out with a friendly shopkeeper in a Planescape game, and eventually get around to casting Detect Evil, and the shopkeeper - being, it turns out, a devil - registers as strongly evil. What do the players have their PCs do?D&D has a mechanism - of writing down alignment labels, and then of giving characters abilities to read those labels within the fiction - which allow evaluative truths to be ostensibly detached from any sort of supervenience base. It can lead to weird results, like the shopkeeper who is never harsh or brutal to everyone yet registers as chaotic evil because that's what's written in the alignment entry for demons.D&D's traditional way of handling the issue was to use a very broad-brush conception of the supervenience base in question, and to make sure that the character's behaviour conforms to that. Which, as has been observed upthread, can lead to fairly stereotyped or broadbrushed villains. This won't work very well if the the game participants want subtlety, especially if that subtlety is going to touch on points where they themselves don't fully agree on what features of the supervenience base make someone good or evil.The way that nearly every other fantasy RPG out there handles the issue is to drop the idea of alignment labels. 4e went part of the way - it dropped the character abilities and the classic scheme of the outer planes, meaning that alignment labels are simply a metagame shorthand.5e has mostly dropped the character abilities, but retains the classic outer planar scheme. Which means that it will be vulnerable to the same problem with subtlety as classic D&D is.</blockquote>

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