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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9740387" data-attributes="member: 2067">Alignment as a restrictive rule that one must obey (as originally conceived) is borked. It was the GM's job to police your behavior, penalize you for playing out of character, and, honestly, the whole system was more than a little evocative of some racist genetic determinism nonsense. Alignment hasn't been that way for 25 years, though, and as it sits in 5e, I think alignment is fine and basically a positive addition to the game. IDK, I've always been pretty OK with how 3e defined alignment. I may not be remembering some things, though...I am OK with characters debating fantasy ethics and allegiance to cosmic forces, if that's where the players want to go.This wasn't really my XP. Evil enemies could be smote with evil-smiting things. Some evil enemies could return the smitings. The players that liked to be Han Solo types could kind of sit it out. The big benefit of alignment is that it is a roleplaying mechanic. It helps players -- especially new ones -- answer improv RP questions like "What does my character do?" or "How does my character react to this?"  or "What does my character stand for?"It also helps differentiate antagonists, to some degree -- what do demons want vs. what do devils want vs. what do necromancers want or whatever. This is part of why I think it's smart to not tie combat mechanics or class mechanics to alignment. Which, for the most part, is a rule 5e follows. I'm also a big fan of alignment as part of D&D's Multiverse. I'm a big Planescape fan, and part of the fun of that setting is playing with the concept and expectations of alignment. In a setting where monsters are characters, saying something is Lawful Evil doesn't really tell me if I should kill it or make friends with it, and PS loves to play in that space, where angels can be villains and demons can be allies, where alignment is only one aspect of a creature's personality, and usually not the most important one. The multiverse being defined according to the nine-point alignment scale gives that a real juxtaposition, between "always lawful good  being on a literal reality built of lawful good" and "well, this one is a rebel because it thought too hard about what it means to be lawful good and came to a different conclusion." I can get on board with the idea that it's simplistic (that's kind of the point - it's VERY newbie-friendly) and that it's lousy to try and ENFORCE someone to act according to an alignment, and that it's not great to tie classes and mechanics too tightly to alignment. But I think it's worth holding onto for the two reasons above. It's a powerful RP mechanic, and it helps provide interesting play hooks for D&D's multiverse.Of special note here is 4e's alignment system, which was very unique, and probably wasn't the most successful of experiments. But it was a decent system -- just not maybe a system that was good for D&D.</blockquote>

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