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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 9736771" data-attributes="member: 467">Alignment started out simply as Faction. In AD&D it morphed into a moral and ethical description, which later got subsumed into an attempt to describe personality. It is important to remember what was happening in the broader TTRPG world at the time: more and more games were claiming (sometimes succeeding) to deliver on the ROLE-playing part. Even the original Fantasy Heartbreaker Palladium built their alignment system specifically around beliefs and personality traits. One need only go back the Dragon magazine forum pages to see how different people understood and used alignment differently.I was never a big Planescape fan, but I think that setting helped re-establish Alignment as primarily about factions. Alas, PS was late in 2E after its death, 3.0 seemed to double down on the moral, ethical, and descriptive aspects of Alignment. By 5E, alignment is neutered mechanically and pretty strongly reviled, or at least ignored.I prefer alignment to represent one's place in the metphysical universe -- kind of like a zodiac sign. I think it should come with some real mechanical weight for it to matter, to. But as it is, we mostly ignore it in our 5E games.</blockquote>