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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7974315" data-attributes="member: 42582">I did post an answer upthread, which hawkeyefan has noted: in the earliest mode of the game, playing Lawful is harder because of the constraints it imposes on you when your goal is to rob dungeons and collect treasure; but you also get benefits of trustworthiness and access to healing and resurreciton magic.This is also where alignment can serve a second purpose: it is a simple device for telling you who the legitimate targets of your violence are. It lets you play a dungeon-raiding game without having to swallow the possible implication that your character is a vicious mercenary rather than a hero.Both the "challenge" rationale and the "morally justificatory overlay" rationale work best with a single axis, to set up good vs bad. And they can work well alongside one another.It's clear in Gygax's AD&D PHB and DMG that "playing your alignment right" is meant to have some sort of impact on your class progression, though there are technical inconcsistencies between the two books: in the DMG, which came out later, "poor" alignment play affects both training time requird and hence the gp cost of level gain, and also can cost you XP/levels if you undergo alignment change.I think this (third) function of alignment is not a good fit with the other two: once a playaer of a NE or CN or whatever character faces the same strictures on "good roleplay" as does the player of a LG character, there's no particular strategic decision involved in choosing one rather than the other alignment. And once you have two axes of conflict, the alignment framework no longer provides a simple justificatory overlay of the violence inherent in the game. If people start playing games that don't necessarily involve violence as a default mode of resolving conflicts, the "moral justificatory overlay" also becomes less relevant.Is it useful, in a RPG, to have a system of roleplaying constraints that has been adapted from an earlier system with a different purpose, and that is rather notorious for generating conflict at the table by inviting people to foreground rather than background their differences of moral opinion? Probably this is something on which opinions differ!</blockquote>

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