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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7974344" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not really. Look at Gygax's description of True Neural in both his PHB and his DMG. It is a very natural alignment for a wise hermit type. In some campaigns such wise hermits might be druids or mages, but monks also fit very well.And Gygax characterises Chaotic Good as the belief that individual self-realisation is the key to human wellbeing. This is an outlook that is easy to fit to some standard presentations of martial-arts oriented fantasy.In the Jet LI film Tai Chi master, the protagonist undergoes a profound shift in world view that - in AD&D terms - could be framed as moving from a Lawful alignment to a Chaotic one. But this doesnt hurt his martial arts skills - quite the contrary!I've not read the whole of Le Morte d'Arthur, but have read bits and pieces of it and other Arthurian stories in various compilations over the years. And also have my beloved Excalibur (John Boorman's 1981 film).I'm not 100% sure I'm following your post, but to me you seem to have switched things around: you're brining some conception of good from outside the stories and applying it against the knightly heroes. Whereas what I think you have to do, if you want the D&D alignment system to fit with a broadly romantic fantasy game, is set it up by reference to the paradigms the genre provides us with.To give a concrete example, and going from memory: I think it might be in one of Chretien de Troye's stories that Lancelot rescues Guinevere and kills 6 kinghts (? anyway, a relatively large number of them)  in the process. Through a contemporary lens many would judge that as murder. But in the context of the story it's permissible consensual violence - it's knights doing what they do, and the number killed is as much a literary marker of Lancelot's prowess as anything else.If the literary paradgims on which the paladin is based don't count as good, then playing a paladin becomes impossible except as an exercise in irony or deconstructionist criticism.As I've already posted, I disagree fairly strongly with your reading of LotR.At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, no prisoners are taken. That is extreme even by the standards of the Eastern front in the Second World War.Eomer, who is undoubtedly a paradigm of good in the story, pronounces Death take us all! when he discovers that his sister is fallen, and not long after again falls into a battle lust when he thinks that the soldiers of Rohan will be defeated by the Southrons (just before it is revealed that the black-sailed ships are Aragorn's and not the Corsairs').The attitude to permissible violence in LotR is very close to Arthurian tales (unsurprisingly, given that JRRT was inspired by and self-consciously emulating to a degree the premodern works that were the objects of his study).And that's before we get to LotR's theory of just rulership which, as I said earlier, would make even Franco blush.I'm not really sure where you're going or what you're arguing for or against.It's a long time since I've played or GMed AD&D in any serious way. My last serious D&D campaign was a 4e one. We used the 4e alignment system because it provides some useful, or at least mostly harmless, labels for the game's cosmological conflict. The difference between Evil goblins and hobgoblins and Chaotic Evil gnolls manifested itself in play on both player and GM sides. We have four Unaligned PCs and one Good one. There was not a great deal of looting - 4e uses a "treasure parcel" system of wealth-based advancement and a challenge-oriented system of XP-based advancement and the two only need to connect in the sense that overcoming challenges => acquiring wealth. But the acquisition can be by way of gift, divine blessing, discovery, etc as much as looting.If you're saying that the play of a typical D&D game makes it (near-)impossible for the PCs to be good, then that would be a sad indictment of the alignment system. I don't know enough about the typical play of the current edition to adjudicate the fairness of any such indictment.</blockquote>

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