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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8038263" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Every Red Dragon depiction that I have seen pulls on the imagery of a ruler. They are presented as Kings and Empresses. They are isolationist, but they also create spy networks and utilize slaves to defend it. Amusingly, the next page over is the Green Dragon, the decietful manipulators who seek to twist kingdoms and realms into dark mockeries of themselves, spreading fear, despair and ruin. Green Dragons are Lawful Evil.See, that is part of the problem though. Alignment is seen as mattering, it is seen as telling us soemthing about the creature, but we keep finding example after example where the alignment isn't useful information. And this is all focusing on Monsters. Alignment also appears on the player side, and it is equally as useless in my experience. After my very first character where I spent hours trying to work through whether they were lawful or chaotic because they held a personal code of honor, but would not necessarily respect the law of the land, I never bothered with an alignment for my characters again. Sure, they tend to be good, but beyond that, it isn't helpful. What is helpful is telling people about my characters bonds. For example, I had an Ancient's Paladin who was part of the City Guard in Neverwinter, mostly retired because of his political views and dislike for Lord Neverember. He was the type of person to think about the proper authorities, to make reports and send information up the chain. He was also married, and would have burnt down the world in vengeance if someone harmed his wife. Sure, I could have written LG on the sheet. Might have even been mostly accurate most of the time. But instead of worrying about and tracking how lawful or how good I was, I focused on other aspects. Former Cop still integrated with the Force. Defender of the City from the Cataclysm. Married man with a beautiful wife he loved more than anything. Those gave us more hooks, more information, and was more accurate in shaping how my character would act, than LG ever would have been. But, a lot of people look to alignment, write down something like "LG" or "CN" and act like that is their character's personality. And I think if it were removed, then they would instead look first towards tying their character to events, phrases, or people.Oh, I love messing around with creatures and figuring out how they fit into the world an why they work. I just don't think alignment does anything at all to help with that. It is too broad and too vague. Heck, I was able to find Neutral Evil monsters that exactly fit someone's definition of Chaotic Evil.Why do I feel like if I say "I'm trying to show the problems with alignment and why it doesn't help us as DMs or Players" you are going to turn right around and say "Well, you are looking for problems so obviously you will find them, but if you were objective you would see the system actually works and isn't broken"?Instead of having that conversation, how about this. Stop assuming that I am pointing things out because I lack understanding of the subject matter.Let me ask you this, to establish a line of thinking. If a person dives into a collapsing building to rescue someone asking for help, and that person asking for help turns out to have been a demon in disguise, who proceeds to lay waste to the surrounding countryside, is the person who risked their life to save them, with no knowledge of their nature, Good or Evil? I think we can all agree, they would be Good. Because, it is not the result of your actions that matter, but the intent and the action itself. A person's alignment does not turn Chaotic Evil because they saved a serial killer, and thus perpetuated more Chaos and more Evil into the world. The PHB tells us that the Law and Chaos axis is how they interact with the concepts of Society and Order. Chaotic Evil creatures, we are told, "act with arbitrary violence, spurred by their greed, hatred, or bloodlust." However, if the King says "if you speak in my prescence, I will kill you. And you speak, and then he kills you, that is not arbitrary. He set a rule and a consequence, that rule was broken, so you suffered the consequence. Look at the other Chaotic alignments: "creatures follow their whims, holding their personal freedom above all else." "creatures act as their conscience directs, with little regard for what others expect."None of that speaks to building a society, setting rules, enforcing consequences. People usually point to Barbarian tribes as being chaotic, but a barbarian who follows a set of traditions and laws, such as owing a life debt to someone who saves their life, is not chaotic. If they were, then they would not feel they owed a debt. They would hold their personal freedom above that tradition and refuse to bow. Chaotic alignments are explicitly stated to be anti-society, so you cannot have a Chaotic Society. It is a contradiction. Look at elves, how often are we told Elves are "Chaotic good". This would mean that they are against society. We also have a long tradition of Elvish royalty and nobility, and they respect traditions, in fact they tend to be "unchanging" to a degree. Right, because we can't have discussions, that would waste time. Better to just declare ourselves right and move on.And yes, most people were aware of alignment, mostly because we debate about it so often.</blockquote>

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