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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5360047" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't find fantasy generally that interesting with out it.  It's the reason for playing fantasy.  Otherwise you might as well, and probably should, play sci-fi or superheroes.I find all the talk about alignment and all the derision it recieves to be amusing.  It always follows certain particular patterns that mirror the alignment grid itself, and I've found that in large part how a DM/player approaches the question of alignment tells you alot about the real person.  In games without alignment, inwardly I'm just laughing, "Aha.  Well, at least, we know the alignment of the DM now."  Granted, you can take such thoughts too far, but when I find myself thinking about the ways in which that is wrong, I realize that I'm just expressing my own alignment.  And of course, it's precisely those people who hate alignment the most which are most offended that I might credit it with some kernal of truth.  My beliefs in that regard are experimental.  I doesn't take me very long after getting to know some one for me to predict which alignments that they'll gravitate to in play, and for those that I have ended up playing with I have nearly 100% accuracy in this internal prediction.(I don't really want to go into the method for fear of killing the thread, but here's a hint.  Consider it axiomatic that Tolkien is Lawful Good without judging where 'law' or 'good' is worthy and correct, taking it merely as labels for a particular mode of thought and behavior and not necessarily affirming that mode's moral correctness.  I choose Tolkien mostly because he so well described (and self-described at that), so well known, and because he's already couched his thought in fantasy terms - but really we could use anyone as a starting point.  Given that, what particular thing could we look for in a person's philosophy that would allow us to arrange them in the other points of the grid.  If you know enough Tolkien, that should give you enough to go on.)And for myself, alignment is a useful simple tool to help escape the trap of only being yourself, and helps me imagine mental frameworks by which other people might view the world and not be utterly shallow and unsympathetic.  I try my best to frame each point on the grid in the most favorable terms, just true adherents and celebrants would.   So, maybe oddly and maybe not, alignment makes my heroes and villains - whether PC or NPC - far more well rounded to my mind, which is exactly opposite the experience with it that those that don't use it or rapidly abandoned it claim to have.  Evil, if it's only its the scene chewing 'God of Eating Babies' or 'The Tentacled All-Consuming Horror' is hardly so deep as to imagine why anyone would be interested in it.  Before evil is any much use to a story at all except as an 'other team', it must be attractive enough that people are willing to call evil good and fight for that cause as if they were absolutely and unquestionably right.  And this is to me the really interesting thing about D&D alignment.  Turn the grid how you will, it's symmetrical.   If we lost the labels, how exactly would we know how to put them back?  Or worse yet, what if we long ago lost all the labels and now we have them all wrong?  That to me is a very deep question, and it's a deep enough question that it utterly evades in the long run any short turn problem that 'Detect Evil' might raise (to say nothing of how easily you can thwart such utility even without recourse to magic).One thing I do agree with absolutely is that much of the discussion made in official D&D sources about alignment is useless or worse than useless.  I do blame it for much of the myths about alignment and many of the horror stories that I've heard which, for some reason, I've managed to largely escape.</blockquote>

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