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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 5426785" data-attributes="member: 40166">But in real life it stands only as your personal evaluation. If there is anything in reality that bears any relation to alignment, it's not controlled by you. Certainly to the extent that other people react to you based on your "alignment" it's based mostly on external reputation, not your personal evaluation. You're taking it out of context; it was a response to a statement that having certain evil acts have mechanical consequences was bad, that there's a distinction between fluff and real mechanical actions, and that blurring the line made things more gamy. Alignment is probably the wrong tool to use if you want to do complex moral questions, and if you do, you need to use an alignment system that doesn't punish players for honestly making hard choices.If a fellow player decides to play out some sort of mental/moral collapse in this fashion, what he goes on to do is going to be predictable; the character is going to fight the rest of the party, hopefully die, and then the rest of the players are going to discuss what happened and what they're going to do with the body. (Some of my more sociopathic character may just ask him to leave the party; once you've started throwing babies out of windows, it's just not sane to travel with you any more.)Frankly, I don't want another player to play out some sort of mental/moral collapse. Game-wise, they're going to be chewing up game time with internal monologues and hamming up their character instead of group play. In-world, they've just done something that's a hanging offense virtually everywhere and everywhen, and still sparks very high on the outrage table. If that action didn't make us outlaws from civilization, the next one may. And there's a certain moral opprobrium to working with people who throw babies out of windows.It's going to make them play with certain behavioral limitations if they want to keep their powers. It's entirely possible--and consistent with historic paganism--that the gods don't care about sincerity, just what the characters do.</blockquote>

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