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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2120604" data-attributes="member: 7240">I would say it's just as possible but not just as legitimate. I think a more logical assumption is that diverging alignments radiate out in two dimensions rather than one because alignment is a two-dimensional system. By suggesting one-dimensional radiation, you're implicitly deciding that the Good-Evil axis is more fundamental than the Law-Chaos axis.Your theory seems good to me. I wouldn't mess with it. However, we can only really talk about what the rules say. Because I'm not an American, the "what the framers intended" has always struck me as weird in constitutional argument. Again, I have no dispute with this policy and positively endorse it. But I think the reason that you find the idea of your PCs killing creatures that are not irredeemably evil stems from your interpretation of how to apply alignment to the PCs. Because killing non-evil creatures is very problematic under the RAW, you have to make most of your NPC monstrous humanoids pure irredeemable evil because the consequence of doing otherwise would be your PCs being unable to sustain their good alignments. Because I am more relaxed about PC alignments, I can have a lot more slate grey adversaries in the world.Well, like nearly everyone in the world, you're more comfortable with modernity seeping into your D&D. I like games that evoke times when you didn't need to dehumanize something in order to justify killing it. Maybe (and this thought has just crossed my mind now) the reason I dislike D&D alignment so much is that it demands that something/someone be dehumanized before killing it is okay. I agree here but I think that you're assuming that we have only two options: (a) the game is morally simple in that it is centred on killing/harming dehumanized things, (b) the game is morally complex in that it is centred on killing/harming essentially human/ensouled things. The games I run are ones in which (c) the game is morally simple even though it is centred on killing/harming essentially human/ensouled things. If one picks option (c), one has to evoke a non-mdern moral order in which killing/harming ensouled creatures is not ethically murky provided it is done in the correct way.No it doesn't unless one adopts your moral system in a transcultural, transhistorical way. I like to leave this ethical system and step into one where the Hurons conceived of animals as being like other tribes of humans -- sometimes allied, sometimes at way, sometimes okay to kill, sometimes not. I like to run games in which people like Charlemagne and Cortes are comprehensible as both heroes and as villains. Unfortunately, the D&D alignment system unmodified attempts to thwart me at every turn so I turn alignments into Cold War style allegiances -- crucially important but just barely meaningful.A former GM of mine, developed a theory of "three kinds of evil" for his setting and wrote cool tracts about it. In my view, what 4E needs is a modular alignment system that one can use part or none of, the way 3.0 MOTP writes about the effects of removing different planes of existence.</blockquote>

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