Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9736598" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Modern versions of D&D and it's "D&D-alike cousins" seem to veer further and further away from the alignment system- I can admit, I don't really miss it, as I've never had a positive experience with it as a mechanic.  Even in older versions of D&D, while the cracks in the system were never officially addressed, you'd often see NPC's with "tendencies" towards an alignment other than their own, showing that people are often more complex than can be placed on the C/L+E/G axes.  Yet on the player side, mechanics were very firm that thou shalt not act outside of one's alignment, like a commandment from on high, from xp penalties to the loss of class abilities!The first time one sees a session fall apart due to a debate over fake fantasy ethics (which alignment was never supposed to be, as I understand it- it's more of an allegiance to cosmic forces beyond mortal ken), you'd think people would instantly shuck the system out the door- especially when game designers weighed in, tried to tie alignment to some kind of morality system, and made some quite dubious statements about what a given alignment can/cannot do (the 3.x era had some of the worst examples of this).Then 3.x and it's imitators thought it would be a wonderful idea to make magic effects that cared about alignment, which seemed more designed to punish the players than enforce any cosmic agenda- many foes were annoyingly neutral, making "anti-evil" powers unreliable, and the first time you get dinged by an unholy word for having the utter gall to write "good" on your character sheet, well, I stopped writing alignment on my sheet at all, unless the DM insisted, at which point I'd simply write "Neutral" and let my actions in-game speak for themselves.But despite all of this, I keep seeing people wax nostalgic for alignment, wanting it back in the game, even to the point of once again binding character abilities to following some esoteric code of conduct that no two people seem able to agree upon!So I'm asking people to explain their point of view as to why they see alignment as a good thing.  It's a + thread, so I expect people to disagree, but let's not fight about it- everyone is entitled to their own point of view!</blockquote>

Verification