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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5434337" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think you might have missed my point here. I'm not talking about a situation in which a player decides to play a PC whose values are different to the player's. This is fine (at least in principle - in practice, sometimes it can be a little tricky depending on the values in question).I'm talking about a situation in which the player believes that what her/his PC did is good, but the GM insists that it is evil. This is not just the GM passing judgment on the PC. It it also the GM telling the player that s/he cannot tell good from evil behaviour in the circumstance in question.It seems to me pretty obvious that this is a good part of the reason why arguments about alignment, both in play and on message boards, become so heated.This is a misdescription. I am talking about the player determining whether or not his/her PC lives up to that PC's moral code. And why would I want to do that? Because it produces interesting gaming, and it doesn't start any fights.Well, in my OP I noted that in a hardcore gamist game things might be different, although I also suggested that personality disadvantages aren't a very good mechanism for balancing in a hardcore gamist game.But the balancing point is also a bit of a red herring. Paladins in 3E are already one of the weaker classes. They don't need a personality disadvantage as a balancing factor. And in all the thread discussing CoDzilla, I've never seen it suggested that alignment constraints impose much balance. And the reason for this is pretty obvious, because if I want to play CoDzilla I just pick LN, TN or (perhaps) NG as my alignment and go from there. These are alignments that (in my experience) only rarely cause trouble at the table.Perhaps, yes, depending on what else is at stake. If the player paid PC build resources to get that oath or pact, then definitely yes. (Again, subject to the proviso that if the whole point of the game is for the GM to use that oath/pact to throw adversity at the PC, then perhaps not - but this does not describe any edition of D&D as written, and I've never seen D&D used to play this sort of game, in part because alignment is a huge impediment to it.)</blockquote>

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