What If Alignment Had Been Explicitly About Allegiance To An Outer Plane?

[Clavis]

What if 1st Edition AD&D had made it explicit that Alignment referred to what side your character was on in the eternal war between the various Outer Planes? Rather than write something like "Lawful Good" or "Lawful Evil" under Alignment, you would have written "Seven Heavens" or "Nine Hells". Perhaps your character didn't care or was opposed to the war itself, in which case they would be "Neutral". Alignment would never have become a description of personality, but been clearly a designation of what cosmic army your character was allied with. How would that have changed the game? Would it have been beneficial or detrimental?

 

[Celebrim]

Alignment would never have become a description of personality...

When was alignment ever a description of personality?

but been clearly a designation of what cosmic army your character was allied with. How would that have changed the game? Would it have been beneficial or detrimental?

I think the main difference I can foresee is that it unifies the planes in a way that is not implied by the text. A close reading of the planes finds nothing in the way of 'an Army of the Seven Heavens' or 'an Army of Limbo'. Each of the powers of the outer planes, while loosely allied with each other, also contends with each other over influence and small matters of interpretation and practice. There is no one single being over any of the planes nor one single heirarchy beneath them. Even in the Lawful planes, the planeborn represent just one power of probably many in the plane. It also sets up an explicit tension not necessarily found in the game to make everything so explicitly a team, and it potentially pits say Olympus versus the Happy Hunting Grounds versus the Seven Heavens in a more explicitly adversarial role than they otherwise have.

 

[El Mahdi]

Well, first off you'd have to have the established conceit in the game system that assumes everyone knows about and cares about this "war". That sounds like a rather campaign specific conceit, not a universal one. Otherwise, attempting to apply this in a universal manner where not everyone knows about or cares about this "war", you'd likely end up with something very similiar to the way alignment currently works in 4E. Which wouldn't have been bad at all, IMO (it's one of the parts of 4E I actually like).