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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 9738836" data-attributes="member: 2013">I like the idea of the cosmic wheel and a campaign where moral forces can be capitalized - a few creatures (outsiders) are avatars/incarnations of a particular supernatural expression of a moral force and can be "capital letter" Good or Evil or Lawful or Chaotic (or Neutral), but for the vast majority of mundane creature, alignment is good or evil or lawful or chaotic or neutral - a useful shorthand for "motivation" (be it selfish, individualistic, altruitstic, group-focused, etc.) but not one that carries mechanical weight. In the same way "level" can mean a lot of different things in different editions ("a fifth level wizard, who is limited to casting third level spells, might encounter a second-level monster on the fourth level of the dungeon") I think alignment should be understood as having different meanings; a being actively committed to a particular moral force has Alignment (which can carry mechanical consequences), while a being not actively committed to a particular moral force has alignment (which is a general shorthand for "motivation" but does not carry mechanical consequences).Let's take as an example a "holy" weapon that deals extra damage against evil-aligned creatures. I would read that as "Evil-aligned" creatures so a demon (incarnation of Evil, thus is actively committed to Evil) takes extra damage when struck; the evil (small "e" alignment) orc does not - the "evil" there is "motivation shorthand" and not "active commitment."This reading DOES mean, however, that I am in favor of "thou shalt not act thusly" restrictions on a paladin (and some other classes)... specifically because the character's power is derived from devotion to a particular supernatural expression of a moral force. To me, it's pretty much ANY divine caster (so clerics, too) though one could argue depending on power sources, Warlocks might fall under this as well... because your power is not your own; it's owned by another being which is Aligned with a moral force and can be revoked because you are not acting in a manner your sponsor agrees with (it's not revoked because you "violated your alignment" per se independent of your sponsor, it's revoked by your sponsor because you acted outside of the parameters your sponsor has set for accessing their power). This also means that clerics dedicated to an Evil god would be considered Evil-aligned creatures and take extra damage from holy weapons.I suspect the reason alignment has fallen out of favor with most players is that the DM is generally the arbiter of what is "Good" and "Evil." There are vestiges of the "adversarial" relationship between DMs and Players which means there is an Ancestral Memory of the DM trying to set up moral dilemmas not as a way to explore complex questions of morality, but instead as a means to "take away your player's powers if you make the wrong choice" (with "wrong" defined as "what the DM expects") - i.e., DMs abusing the trust of their players. On the other side of the coin, there is also the Ancestral Memory of players that wanted to play a LG paladin for all the "kewl powarz"  they got but with absolutely no intention of acting either good nor lawfully and then rules lawyering or complaining about loss of powers - in other words, players abusing the trust of the DM and other players.In my opinion, it is unfortunate that the solution to "trust gets abused" was not to reinforce "having a discussion about expectations before the game" so the DM knows the player of such a character may not want to be handed a constant stream of "do the right thing or lose your powers" scenarios - they want a campaign cast in clear moral shades of "Good" and "Evil" and the player knows that there will be a certain level of standard of behavior their character will be asked to live up to as someone that has committed to an alignment... but instead to lose the discussion entirely by adopting a "there are no rules, there is no Good and Evil, everything is gray, anything goes." Any power we stripped from bad faith actors by taking away the "I'm just acting my character's alignment" abuse of trust is offset by the power we stripped from the rest of the table to say, "that's not consistent with the way you the player agreed your character should act."(There are other behaviors that are problematic, like the loner that doesn't WANT to adventure with a group or an adversarial group of players that think "player agency" means that when the DM sets out a clear plot hook East, another plot hook North, and a third plot hook West and askes the players to choose from among the plot hooks, the players pick "South" as a "screw you" to the DM's preparation... but by taking away alignment and the discussion that should result in Session Zero about what can be expected in the game, how much shades of gray we want, what a "good" aligned character will do, and so on, we reduce our ability to talk about differences in expectation prior to running afoul of those differences in game when feelings have already been hurt.)To me, that's also a much less interesting campaign and especially diminishes the role of the divine, the cosmic wheel, and anything else that is Alignment-based. The game becomes purely an exercise in "Power" with almost no ability to have a grand "Good versus Evil" or "Law versus Chaos" theme, and I think the game suffers for it (not that you MUST have those themes in your game, but I think a game is richer when the span of POSSIBLE themes in the game includes those). I have to deal with questions of "are we the bad guys" often enough in real life, I'd rather relax that muscle in my games and know for a few hours that  yes, I am the Good Guy.</blockquote>

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