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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMScott" data-source="post: 1110349" data-attributes="member: 11734">The best alternative alignment system given that you find alignments constraining is no alignment at all (at least, for PCs). Any system developed to mimic the effect alignments have will almost certainly have the same constraint problem as alignments. Biggest problem with going the no alignment route is spells - a few approaches I've tried:1) Only outsiders and undead have alignment. This leaves a lot of the spells and class abilities intact, since it's still plenty useful - arguably more useful - for Detect Evil or Protection From Evil to work on demons, devils, vampires, etc. You probably need to come up with codes of behaviour for alignment-restricted classes such as Paladins or Monks, but many DMs do that even with an alignment system. 2) Replace alignment-type spells with spells that operate on enemies. So instead of Detect Evil, you have Detect Enemy which detects creatures who are hostile towards you. Holy Word affects those hostile to the religion of the caster, and so on. This allows a fairly easy conversion for many spells, so it's not a hugely difficult conversion. And in some settings, it leads to some neat effects, like Paladins of opposed religions detecting each other as enemies. 3) Just get rid of magic that detects alignment in any way. This takes a fair number of spells away (especially from Clerics) and removes a bread-and-butter Paladin ability, so it requires the most work to make balance adjustments appropriate for your campaign. I only really recommend this if you plan to make some big changes anyway - for example, Arcana Unearthed has no clerics, so no alignments and no alignment-based magic is just a subset of what AU's doing.</blockquote>

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