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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bardolph" data-source="post: 4372683" data-attributes="member: 2304">Actually, I like alignment as a roleplaying tool.  I just don't like it as a rule set.I've always been the DM.  I'm really just expressing a personal bias.  Every time I've tried to figure out how to use Alignment to "measure" a person's morality, I've come up empty.  Mainly because, when it gets down to it, morality is relative.  Darth Vader could be Lawful Good, if you look at him from the Empire's point of view.Another thing that I've always found cheesy is when a player chooses an alignment strictly for its perks, with no intention of actually roleplaying the alignment, or even better, trying to redefine the alignment to suit convenience.  Case in point: a player wants that Holy Avenger, and chooses Lawful Good just so he can get one.  Besides, if anyone ever tries to challenge someone on their alignment, the argument gets really silly really fast, where all you have to do is come up with some kind of strawman justification for matching alignment to actions.  "I thought they were about to do something evil" becomes a blanket excuse for any kind of behavior.However, using Alignment as the cause rather than the effect really solves a lot of problems.  It becomes a shorthand for choosing how to react to a certain situation, if you want to.  If anything, alignment is much more important to the DM than it is to the players, since it gives a two-second crash course on how a certain type of creature ought to behave.  When it comes to PC actions, you decide how you want to act, but your alignment informs how you make those decisions.  The concept of "Unaligned" means if you don't want to look at things through the black-and-white lens of alignment, you don't have to.Alignment should be chosen for its flavor.  Not its perks.</blockquote>

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