[Venting] I feel a bit dirty...

[The Human Target]

Augury is right.

Alignment systems, as a general rule, are straight jackets for roleplay, and D&D's in particular is responsible for amazing amounts of completely retarded character behavior. All it adds to the game is a system that allows morality to impact game mechanics, and that's something I could do without.

Vancian magic is at the top of the list of things that have always felt wrong about D&D, since I was a kid with a Red Box and a bunch of hand-colored dice. It's an interesting and flavorful variant of a magic system, but as the dominant paradigm of all core-class spellcasting, it really, really needs to go.

Classes are the other big reason I favored other RPGs over D&D for most of my gaming history. I'm not interested in recreating traditional fantasy archetypes, or filling specialized roles in hyper-efficient dungeon-delving teams. I want a flexible toolset that I can use to make a wide variety of characters. D&D 3E brought me back with feats, skills, and multiclassing rules that weren't completely insane, but things could still be more flexible. I'm not really asking for fully point-based characters, though. For D&D, I'd say True20's style of generic classes makes the most sense.

It's still basically a race-and-class character system. Honestly, D&D is more flexible than World of Darkness, these days.

I don't think accuracy to the real world is quite the issue, here. The problem is that the alignment system fails to do the very thing that it's supposed to do: Classify and describe the philosophies and moralities of interesting fictional characters. The very fact that people can't agree on what "Chaotic Neutral" means indicates that the system isn't working.

Pretty much what I was going to post.

 

[Hussar]

On the alignment thing.

Meh, the simplest answer I've found for using alignments is to make them objective. The universe doesn't care about your motives, only your actions. In order to be anything other than neutral requires constant action on the actors part in that direction. Simply being a generally nice guy who helps people for rewards makes you neutral. To be good, you actually have to go out of your way to actively be good.

Works for me. Means that most people you meet are neutral. Only those with strongly held convictions that are acted upon actually gain any particular alignment. Thus, the evil guys, really are evil. The good guys really are good. And so on.

Then again, I don't play with people who deliberatly try to screw with the system.

 

[Arkhandus]

There was an interesting alignment thread recently on rpg.net.

It does highlight one implication of the D&D alignment system: it is tricky to properly classify the alignment of someone who is strongly in-group loyal, but out-group hostile.

Not really. Evil people can have friends too. Especially lawful evil or neutral evil folks. Lawfulness does not necessarily equal respect for the law of the land, or whatever, just consistent behavior and some degree of honor or responsibility or adherance to a code. Whether that's working within the law to accomplish personal, evil goals, or following a knightly code that harshly discriminates against most other races/nations, it's still Lawful behavior in D&D.

Now, chaotic evil people may have difficulty with keeping friends, but even so, they might find another crazy person of like mind. :\

Neutral alignments in D&D are also applicable to people who are good or loyal to their friends, family, or organization, but otherwise spiteful or unconcerned towards anyone outside that circle of allies. As long as they're not genocidal or something (well, towards any race that isn't very evil; genocidal intent towards orcs in most settings probably wouldn't qualify as evil, since orcs in most settings are the vicious creatures of Gruumsh), they just might be neutral.