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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2165451" data-attributes="member: 30001">Yes, it certainly spilled outside of that.  The original poster called his players behavior barbaric, callous, and reprehensible.  I think at that point it became less about how alignment is defined in the game, and more about how real people are going to treat each other during a roleplaying game.  The original poster would have probably been better served with a discussion about why not to call real people that play role-playing games "reprehensible" based on the activities of their imaginary characters. Distancing alignment from real-world discussions between DM and players IMO is helpful because then the players don't think you're making some sort of comment on their real-world morality.  Plus, designing an alignment system based on the real world is like designing a combat system based on the real world.  I don't think you can really get the results you want in one lifetime. I think the best treatment of alignments in a real-world context would be to drop them completely.  IMC I treat alignments as elements were in medieval thought, where a person is a mixture of all of them in different proportions.  Demons, for example, are treated as "chaotic evil elementals".   If the real world had something like the know alignment spell, I think the real world would have nine different countries.  Debates about morality that have fueled the political and religious history of the real world would be resolved with the casting of a few spells.  You could never simulate anything like the Crusades with the DnD alignment system.  An old dragon magazine article basically describes this. Also - Something I strongly recommend is that people avoid handing out bonuses based on alignment.  That's a hold-over from old-school DnD, where being a paladin got you all kinds of bonuses that made you better than a fighter (or at least that was the perspective).  So people were taking the paladin character class for the power and then constantly skirting the line of what was Lawful Good.  As long as being good within the system gets you benefits in the game, people will always have their characters try to be labelled as good regardless of what the DM thinks of their character's actions.  The best way IME to reduce the number of arguments is to reduce the incentive for players to want to claim their character is something that it's not.</blockquote>

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