What Alignment system do you use now?

[weem]

We have had plenty of time now with 4e to get a feel for the Alignment system - our likes/dislikes, etc and so I was curious... Do you use the system as per RAW or no, and if not then what are you doing about it?

 

[Rechan]

As a DM, I just let my players decide their alignment, and then I simply ignore it.

 

[The_Gneech]

I pretty much go with RAW on alignment, but everybody ends up either "unaligned" or "good". My particular campaign setting ignores it for the most part anyway, but if I was trying for a more "traditional D&D" flavor, I'd definitely add CG and LE back in.

-The Gneech

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

We use the 4E alignment system. But it doesn't come up that often, except when it's also related to religion. That are typically characters that seem to deal a little more with such philosophical questions.

Amusingly, the strongest where I noticed that was in the Eberron adventure we have been playing recently. There is a Paladin and an Invoker of the Silver Flame in the party. Often, the talk is about how "we don't do that anymore" when it comes to burning people or generally performing witch or werwolf hunts and all the fun religious stuff the church might have used to do.

 

[Stoat]

Nominally, the traditional 9-point system. Essentially none.

I'm happy that alignment in 4E has no mechanical impact on the game. I don't know what alignment the PC's in my game are, and I don't really care. I tend to think of NPC's in terms of the good/evil and law/chaos axes, and there's a fair amount of law/chaos tension in campaign, but it's all flavor and no crunch.

Which is fine by me.

 

[delericho]

Were I running 4e, my first house rule would be to drop alignments entirely. For me, it fills the same category as the "favoured class" and "Monk and Paladin multiclass" rules did in 3e - the rules that the designers should have taken out but, for whatever reason, neglected to do so.

When running 3.5e, it really depends on the setting and the campaign. Mostly, I use alignment in a purely descriptive manner (that is, I track PC alignments for spell effect purposes, but otherwise don't mention it). Some campaigns favour removing it entirely (slightly harder in 3e than 4e), while there are very occasional cases where it actually makes sense to enforce alignments. Very occasional cases.

I haven't managed to find time to read Pathfinder yet. My suspicion is that it will work the same as 3e, but I'm not sure yet.

 

[Wepwawet]

Clerics and Paladins choose alignment according to rules and write it on the character sheet.

Then we ignore alignments completely.

When it comes to divine characters and their actions there's "WW<divinity>D?"
No deity is completely good or evil. Lot's of grey areas around.

 

[Umbran]

When I play 3.x, I use the 3.x alignment system.

When I play 4e, I use the 4e alignment system - since the 4e alignment system has no mechanical impact, I find this equates to not having an alignment system at all.

I actually like having a system that has no real alignment to speak of, and another in which morals and ethics are palpable forces in the universe. It gives me a choice of flavors.

 

[Shroomy]

We're playing 4e and we use the RAW alignment system. It hasn't come up much, as except for our cleric, we're all unaligned and there hasn't been any in-game impact.

 

[the Jester]

I use the 4e system in my 4e game, which I find works well, as at the end of my 3e campaign Chaos won the Great War of Ethics, which leads to a breakdown of alignment in general. Heck, Chaos' victory is all the justification I need for a lot of the changes that 4e brings forward!