Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="D+1" data-source="post: 1904092" data-attributes="member: 13654">What is the purpose of having alignment in the game?  It isn't to allow the DM to control your PC, telling you how you now have to play your character because he's been keeping track of things and his charts and graphs have determined that your character will now behave this way or that way.Alignment, as of 3rd Edition, is purely a descriptor.  That's really what it should have been through all the previous editions but for various reasons power was repeatedly left to the DM to control, punish, and enforce aspects of PC alignment and behavior.  You, as the player who controls your character are not obliged in ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM to have your character do a freakin' thing the way the DM thinks you ought to, or the way your alignment suggests you should.  You, the player, have control over what your character does and says, and WHY he does and says it.  Alignment remains as a means to gauge that behavior.  Players then can use alignment as a means to better roleplay their character should they want or need to rely on that description rather than their own ideas.  DM's can use alignment as a fast, easy means of determining actions and reactions without having to fully develop PC-quality background information like religious outlook, philosophy and attitude - just use the easy alignment reference and flesh it out from there.IMO then, detailed tracking of alignment has only one purpose - allowing the DM to continue to exert control over what player characters do by micromanaging the moral/ethical values of everything that character does - and DOESN'T do.  The information is largely pointless otherwise.The exception is those characters who have classes, abilities, skills, etc that rely upon a specific alignment.  But you don't need to micromanage an alignment "score" or "position" to keep things in line.  You can if you like, but it's definitely unnecessary for any character that DOESN'T have alignment restrictions.  If communication is open between DM and player - and more importantly each knows how the other feels about alignment restrictions WELL AHEAD OF TIME (knowing what behaviors are allowed or disallowed before there is opportunity for an argument about "violations" of alignment) - then there's no need to burden yourself with charts.  Unless, of course, for some reason you WANT that control over the players characters.When a DM feels that a character is getting close to changing alignments or that an action would change alignments then he should mention it immediately to the player.  Then, because they have intelligently worked out their "philosophical" differences about alignments ahead of time <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />, they can have a brief discussion if needed about the change and its ramifications, and then just change the alignment as appropriate and proceed with play.  That is ALL that is needed and eliminates the impossible job of attempting to be coldly analytical about things which are HIGHLY subjective.</blockquote>

Verification