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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5435313" data-attributes="member: 54877">Perhaps this is why I've never had any issue with alignment, at least not on the level you are discussing. (Sometimes I've had games were it wasn't particular useful. So it was ignored or at least downgraded. But that's campaign specific.)&nbsp;If the people sitting around the table haven't come to some kind of rough consensus on what is &quot;good&quot; (or at least some limits), then most likely, I don't want to be at the table. Because my experience is that what I'll get is one of these:&nbsp;1. It will be almost entirely silly, hack and slash, or otherwise not focused on any kind of ethics whatsoever. I like a certain amount of lighter things in my gaming, but not entirely devoted to it.&nbsp;2. There will be one or two jerks (posting guidelines prevent me from using a more accurate noun), who assume that they know what &quot;good&quot; or &quot;evil&quot; or whatever is, and that &quot;every correct-thinking person&quot; of course agrees 100% with them. They'll not infrequently use &quot;gray is more interesting&quot; as a synonym for, &quot;me getting away with something that I know I can't justify if asked to spell it out.&quot; And even if such talk is supposed to be removed from the table, they'll still feel compelled to &quot;share&quot; their opinions as some kind of tribal marker or loose and useless commentary on current events. They'll confuse &quot;everything is grey&quot; as being &quot;nuanced&quot;. They'll espouse appreciation for sophistication, and be very simplistic in their arguments. Basically, sophomoric college philosophy nonsense. No thanks!&nbsp;Alignments are a jargon. And like any jargon, they only usefully communicate as long as all the participants largely agree on the definitions. Whether I use a version of D&amp;D alignments or not, I want the agreement on the definitions--if only to tell where the agreements fall short.&nbsp;BTW, that's why so many alignment discussion degenerate so rapidly. People are fighting over semantics in order to assert that something IS good in reality, or they are staking out territory in the jargon in order to make it a prescriptive tool to get the game they want. Which is exactly backwards to anything useful, as near as I can tell. &nbsp;tl;dr: If I'm sitting at a table where the DM and a player had a terrible falling out over, say, a paladin, his actions, and the alignment consequences--then I'm sitting at a table with at least one person that I don't want to be gaming with. The solution to this problem has nothing whatsoever to do with alignment. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue&nbsp; &nbsp; :p"&nbsp; data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5435313, member: 54877"] Perhaps this is why I've never had any issue with alignment, at least not on the level you are discussing. (Sometimes I've had games were it wasn't particular useful. So it was ignored or at least downgraded. But that's campaign specific.) If the people sitting around the table haven't come to some kind of rough consensus on what is "good" (or at least some limits), then most likely, I don't want to be at the table. Because my experience is that what I'll get is one of these: 1. It will be almost entirely silly, hack and slash, or otherwise not focused on any kind of ethics whatsoever. I like a certain amount of lighter things in my gaming, but not entirely devoted to it. 2. There will be one or two jerks (posting guidelines prevent me from using a more accurate noun), who assume that they [B]know[/B] what "good" or "evil" or whatever is, and that "every correct-thinking person" of course agrees 100% with them. They'll not infrequently use "gray is more interesting" as a synonym for, "me getting away with something that I know I can't justify if asked to spell it out." And even if such talk is supposed to be removed from the table, they'll still feel compelled to "share" their opinions as some kind of tribal marker or loose and useless commentary on current events. They'll confuse "everything is grey" as being "nuanced". They'll espouse appreciation for sophistication, and be very simplistic in their arguments. Basically, sophomoric college philosophy nonsense. No thanks! Alignments are a jargon. And like any jargon, they only usefully communicate as long as all the participants largely agree on the definitions. Whether I use a version of D&D alignments or not, I want the agreement on the definitions--if only to tell where the agreements fall short. BTW, that's why so many alignment discussion degenerate so rapidly. People are fighting over semantics in order to assert that something [B]IS[/B] good in reality, or they are staking out territory in the jargon in order to make it a prescriptive tool to get the game they want. Which is exactly backwards to anything useful, as near as I can tell. tl;dr: If I'm sitting at a table where the DM and a player had a terrible falling out over, say, a paladin, his actions, and the alignment consequences--then I'm sitting at a table with at least one person that I don't want to be gaming with. The solution to this problem has nothing whatsoever to do with alignment. :p [/QUOTE]

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