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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grainger" data-source="post: 7488406" data-attributes="member: 6779234">Oh yeah, I forgot about those stories. I did know about it once, but, scarily, had completely forgotten about it! Which is shocking given how much I've read about the history of D&D, and fairly recently, too. I guess that aspect just interests me so little that I didn't retain it.I get that alignment is descriptive, but what I'm saying is: "so what?". Just do and say stuff - play to your character concept. Why do you need to have it written down? And do the characters in aforementioned stories each have "an alignment"? That's taking it much further than living in a cosmically-ordered world. Characters (and people) just don't work that way.Also, what about worlds that aren't cosmically ordered in such a way? I've never run D&D like that, different flavours of D&D have handled alignment and cosmic balance differently anyway, so why not open it up (as I believe 5e has to some extent by side-lining alignment)? DMs who want a cosmically ordered world can have that anyway. Those who are going for another feel then don't. Yes, DMs can drop alignment, but it seems odd to me to have a mechanism in the game that applies only to one world type. For me, D&D simply isn't about law and chaos.Then again, D&D is quite specific about worlds in many ways - far more than I'd like. I get quite irritated when I read Monster Manual descriptions that drone on about "Orcs were forged by Fargle in the pits of Zargle" or whatever. I'll be the judge of that, don't tell me the cosmology of my game (and in any case, how Orcs were "made" comes so far down the list of world-building priorities that I am literally never going to think about it) - just give me monster descriptions and stats. I would rather the game was as agnostic as possible about the campaign world itself (except in campaign setting books, obviously). But in addition to the above, alignment is sometimes problematic at the table - DMs applying it prescriptively is the main issue - and that's good enough reason to do away with it. As I said above, DMs can still have a world with a cosmological war between law and chaos if they like. It just doesn't have to be a standard field on every character sheet.</blockquote>

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