D&D General Which edition handled alignment best?

[Minigiant]

No alignment is obvious unless you spend a good amount of time in the person's presence. Especially since alignment isn't a straightjacket and people can and do often step outside of their alignment. If you do spend a lot of time with someone, they are all pretty apparent, because you can see how that person generally behaves.

And that's my point.

Alignment is too basic for in depth personality roleplay.

Alignment is better for devising alliances, allegiance, and initial reaction. And only LG, G, E, and CE are in your face on how they act outside of alignment fanaticism.

When I'm creating a rebel, I am going farther than CG. I am determining why they fight authority, how far they go, which laws they follow, tec.

But CE gnolls? Nope. They are just slaughtering people for the demon lord. You see the gore around them. There is little attempt to hide their evil and chaos. It's all around them. I don't need to go deeper as they are likely dying before I have to care.

 

[GrimCo]

DM interpretation of when things went too far caused people to stay in the lane and not really deviate.

This is big one, DM's interpretation vs players interpretation of what is too far or how many times is too many times. Pair it with decent chunk of classes and prestige classes that have alignment restrictions, spells and items that target specific alignments or require them to use and for good measure add races with "always evil or always chaotic evil" and you can see where this can lead to ( using Geneva convention as toilet paper). It's not good system for developing nuanced and complex characters that will do in the same day great acts of altruistic goodness and then commit war crime or two.

 

[Theory of Games]

This is big one, DM's interpretation vs players interpretation of what is too far or how many times is too many times. Pair it with decent chunk of classes and prestige classes that have alignment restrictions, spells and items that target specific alignments or require them to use and for good measure add races with "always evil or always chaotic evil" and you can see where this can lead to ( using Geneva convention as toilet paper). It's not good system for developing nuanced and complex characters that will do in the same day great acts of altruistic goodness and then commit war crime or two.

And that's my point.

Alignment is too basic for in depth personality roleplay.

Alignment is better for devising alliances, allegiance, and initial reaction. And only LG, G, E, and CE are in your face on how they act outside of alignment fanaticism.

When I'm creating a rebel, I am going farther than CG. I am determining why they fight authority, how far they go, which laws they follow, tec.

But CE gnolls? Nope. They are just slaughtering people for the demon lord. You see the gore around them. There is little attempt to hide their evil and chaos. It's all around them. I don't need to go deeper as they are likely dying before I have to care.

Best practices: don't use alignment

 

[GrimCo]

I don't ever since 5e playtest came out way back in 2013, and we also ditched bonds,flaws and ideals along the way. Best thing they did is removed mechanics tied to alignment. In 3.x you kinda had to use it since you know, items, classes, spells, DR's and similar stuff were all baked in mechanics.

I get that some people like mechanics tied to alignment. That's awesome. If they made it modular (as promised) so one can pick and choose how they wanna use it, it would be awesome.

 

[payn]

And that's my point.

Alignment is too basic for in depth personality roleplay.

Alignment is better for devising alliances, allegiance, and initial reaction. And only LG, G, E, and CE are in your face on how they act outside of alignment fanaticism.

When I'm creating a rebel, I am going farther than CG. I am determining why they fight authority, how far they go, which laws they follow, tec.

But CE gnolls? Nope. They are just slaughtering people for the demon lord. You see the gore around them. There is little attempt to hide their evil and chaos. It's all around them. I don't need to go deeper as they are likely dying before I have to care.

Alignment isnt "in depth personality" its a general philosophical view of culture and the individuals place in it. How you view community, and the things you are willing to do to achieve goals within them. Thats it.

You want in depth personality look at BIFTs and how much of a big whiff it is. Nobody wants detailed paragraphs on your PCs personality. They want to see it enacted at the table during RP. Thats where you get specific not with a general overview that serves as short hand for the other players and GM.

 

[BrokenTwin]

I've never really liked Alignment as a morality tool, but I did appreciate how 4E handed it, with the vast majority of people explicitly being Neutral and having an Alignment at all was treated as more of a conscious decision to uphold those ideals. Being Good didn't mean you were generally a nice person, it meant you were someone who proactively strove to "do Good things".

 

[el-remmen]

I think the degree to which alignment has a mechanical aspect should depend on the setting not the generic edition ruleset.

I happen to like some mechanical heft to alignment, so I reintroduced it on the Law/Chaos axis in my Vanity Frankenstein 5E homebrew project, borrowing my take from the stuff mearls is working on on his patreon. Essentially, individual characters and factions can be aligned cosmically with Law or Chaos, but ethical alignment - good vs. evil - is a personal choice (or perhaps a nurtured attitude) about how to pursue the agenda of the side you are aligned with.

There are spells that effect you (more or less or at all) if you are cosmically aligned with one versus the other, and ones that effect you (more or less or at all) if you are not aligned with a cosmic force.

 

[payn]

I've never really liked Alignment as a morality tool, but I did appreciate how 4E handed it, with the vast majority of people explicitly being Neutral and having an Alignment at all was treated as more of a conscious decision to uphold those ideals. Being Good didn't mean you were generally a nice person, it meant you were someone who proactively strove to "do Good things".

Oh thats a good one! I never viewed alignment as a value system, but many did. Which is why assassins to me were always evil. Their first choice to resolve problems is murder. Sure, you could have a character with a code to only kill real bad guys, but they are still a person with no compunction against murder. Evil doesn't mean twirly mustache or edgelord by default.

 

[Minigiant]

Best practices: don't use alignment

Well that's my point.

Alignment is only good for forming factions and reaction rolls

Evil Hobgoblins won't align with CE gnolls because the hyenamen might eat or betray them in battle in a way the death cultists won't.

 

[payn]

I think the degree to which alignment has a mechanical aspect should depend on the setting not the generic edition ruleset.

I happen to like some mechanical heft to alignment, so I reintroduced it on the Law/Chaos axis in my Vanity Frankenstein 5E homebrew project, borrowing my take from the stuff mearls is working on on his patreon. Essentially, individual characters and factions can be aligned cosmically with Law or Chaos, but ethical alignment - good vs. evil - is a personal choice (or perhaps a nurtured attitude) about how to pursue the agenda of the side you are aligned with.

There are spells that effect you (more or less or at all) if you are cosmically aligned with one versus the other, and ones that effect you (more or less or at all) if you are not aligned with a cosmic force.

Yeah, I was kinda hopeful there would be an alignment module for 5E, but we know that idea went up in smoke after NEXT ended.