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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 4942010" data-attributes="member: 32740">Yep. That early approach to handling alignment still colors attitudes to its potential usefulness today. When first introduced it really had no purpose. As it developed its purpose was clarified as bearing on roleplaying, but WOEFULLY misguided in how to implement that - encouraging subtleties of characterization by shooting players with a hammergun. It may be anecdotal evidence but it's a fair volume of it that suggests when those aspects of alignment were ignored or treated contemptuously is when people found it of use in characterization. And MY point is that they shouldn't necessarily be expected to. You can indeed arrive at the same characterization by many different avenues - but it CAN be alignment that would be used to actually achieve the characterization. It DID provide roleplaying guidance. Descriptions of the alignments are used to provide various moral, ethical, philosophical beliefs that might be held and practices that might be evidenced. It frequently doesn't matter that these might be scattershot or even implausible combinations, they provide SOME kind of framework for a player to base his characterization upon as needed/desired. If a player has a clear idea how and why a character would act in a certain way WITHOUT referring to alignment, well good on ya. But for a player who is not a good roleplayer, or is a lazy one who is more in the game for the dice rolling, etc. basing moral, ethical, etc. actions of the character on what his alignment suggests is FAR better than either having completely absent characterization, being compelled to work up lengthy details of philosophy, religion, etc. and attempting to extensively portray them, or perhaps worst of all - seeing the characterization naturally slide to the lowest common denominator and having the character behave in the basest fashion he can get away with but without having any motivation for doing so. Yeah, I think designers have repeatedly missed the boat in not removing the in-play tentacles of alignment, shifting it squarely into a meta-game factor and being more specific in HOW and WHY to use it as a roleplaying guide. For example, the discussion of alignment is inherent in the discussion of the behavior of paladins, but I think that determining in-game what paladins should and should not do would be FAR better handled just by more extensive, detailed vows instead of leaving DM's with the irrational idea that simply having a paladin PC being played meant they could and should be routinely creating morality traps for them and then whacking them upside the head with the alignment stick.</blockquote>

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