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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tuxgeo" data-source="post: 4939912" data-attributes="member: 61026">To answer your "vocal minority" question first: No, it's not just a vocal minority; many people really have problems with it. (Personally, I like alignment, but I do have problems with it, so I've had to edit this post many times before submitting it.) People bring their own inner understandings of alignment concepts with them to the gaming table, and those understandings do inform their intuitive grasp of the alignment system in-game: that which is intuitive to one person may not be equally intuitive to another. Ethics is a branch of Philosphy that has contained disagreements about the natures of Good and Evil for thousands of years. Not even the professional editorial prowess of WotC can distill the concepts of Good and Evil (or even Law and Chaos) into a few sentences that everyone can agree on, because people disagree (and have always disagreed) so greatly and deeply about the underlying concepts. (I would love to see a game-playable definition of Good written so well that everyone could agree on it. I don't think that will happen in my lifetime.) Many posters in this thread have already said some very good things (posts saved for future reference!), particularly ProfessorCirno (that alignment promotes interesting and varied roleplaying situations), Umbran (that alignment can be likened to enduring association), and Cadfan (that alignment is problematical because people understand morality from different ethical positions). Personally, I like to have alignment available as a way of further delineating the playing field; but I do agree that some of the 3E alignment spells went strangely overboard in attacking Neutrals. (This Lawful attack spell hits both Chaotics and Neutrals? Why? Isn't it wiser to give those who are potential allies enough wiggle-room to join your side gracefully, without losing face, honor, or self-respect? Isn't it wiser to hope that those who err will see their eventual conversions to your position as a natural outgrowth of their own inclinations? Will attacking those who err lead them to seek forgiveness from a vengeful champion?) (Of course, this itself is yet another Alignment problem: the fanatics do believe that "if you're not with us, you're against us," and that conversion by the sword or mace is still conversion; but I would have preferred that to be an option, not the default.)</blockquote>

Verification