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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rassilon" data-source="post: 2637623" data-attributes="member: 15065">The thing about alignments is . . . they establish a baseline. Alignment may be an active hinderance to your game, and hey, I've played with different ideas myself - but alignment does produce a general idea of what certain fantasy archetypes consider reasonable bounds of behaviour.I don't think that alignment is really (anymore at least) intended to produce an advanced socio-political, and more importantly philosphical index of the moral and ethical spectrums in the real world. I do think that alignment is supposed give an idea of what the Evil Wizard, or Honourable Fighter, or Good Cleric will do in the 'average' behaviourally challenging situation.  Also, a bit like laws (or conventions) alignment gives some common ground to integrating player and DM expectations of the moral/ethical motivation of a character. Of course, I know (and have had) those huge disagreements over whether the LG Monk will be 'nice' or 'nasty' in response to a given stimulus. However, given how much argument can be had over the minutae and differing world views on alignment, consequence, and just interpreting what the given situation is, alignment is valuable exactly to restrict the argument within certain parameters. For example: although the player and DM may disagree over what LG means, they can both turn to the book and have a common arena to discuss in, and contrast LG with CE to see exactly what LG won't do, to help refine what LG will do.  If your group doesn't find it valuable, ditch it! I think that even if every group develops in such a way that it chooses to use something other than alignment as written, alignment will stil have been valuable to provide a set of base undertandings (a 'discourse') from which to develop alternative systems tailored to the individual group.Rassilon.</blockquote>

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