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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8045509" data-attributes="member: 18">That's a different Unaligned though, which serves a different though useful role. But NN is an actual viewpoint, which is why it's not great - most people just don't have strong views, but care about their friends, feel empathy and remorse, and so on - they're not actively trying to stay in the centre in a strange way as NN often is. The only thing I wasn't keen on was retaining LG and CE as separate things. They should have had G, L, Unaligned, C and E as the alignments, with most beings being Unaligned, and only those actually dedicated to a viewpoint having an alignment (I seem to recall some d20 fantasy RPG taking a similar approach with some success).If you did G, L, U, C, E, you could actually make it so everyone defaulted to Unaligned, and picking another alignment was an actual committment, with some consequences. Ironically that would probably have allowed you to make alignment mechanical again in a good way, because if you commit to being &quot;Good&quot;, to this specific cause, not just being a decent person (which 4E Unaligned absolutely can be), then you can justify that being detected, impacting spells, and so on. Many &quot;bad guy&quot; NPCs would simply be Unaligned, because they hadn't committed to Evil, so you still couldn't just go around detecting them.I guess a crude way to look at it is that 5E returns to a sort of &quot;Sorting Hat&quot; approach to alignment - you must have one - you will be assigned to Griffyndor or Snaketown or Ravenclever or Nicebutdim or whatever based on the nature or behaviour of your character, not based on an active choice to commit to anything.You are right that it's a dead man walking though, and I think it part because it returned to the Sorting Hat approach. I literally don't know the alignments of any of the other PCs in the current party I'm in. That's probably a first. It just doesn't matter and hasn't come up. I sort of assume they're all CG from their behaviour.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8045509, member: 18"] That's a different Unaligned though, which serves a different though useful role. But NN is an actual viewpoint, which is why it's not great - most people just don't have strong views, but care about their friends, feel empathy and remorse, and so on - they're not actively trying to stay in the centre in a strange way as NN often is. The only thing I wasn't keen on was retaining LG and CE as separate things. They should have had G, L, Unaligned, C and E as the alignments, with most beings being Unaligned, and only those actually dedicated to a viewpoint having an alignment (I seem to recall some d20 fantasy RPG taking a similar approach with some success). If you did G, L, U, C, E, you could actually make it so everyone defaulted to Unaligned, and picking another alignment was an actual committment, with some consequences. Ironically that would probably have allowed you to make alignment mechanical again in a good way, because if you commit to being "Good", to this specific cause, not just being a decent person (which 4E Unaligned absolutely can be), then you can justify that being detected, impacting spells, and so on. Many "bad guy" NPCs would simply be Unaligned, because they hadn't committed to Evil, so you still couldn't just go around detecting them. I guess a crude way to look at it is that 5E returns to a sort of "Sorting Hat" approach to alignment - you must have one - you will be assigned to Griffyndor or Snaketown or Ravenclever or Nicebutdim or whatever based on the nature or behaviour of your character, not based on an active choice to commit to anything. You are right that it's a dead man walking though, and I think it part because it returned to the Sorting Hat approach. I literally don't know the alignments of any of the other PCs in the current party I'm in. That's probably a first. It just doesn't matter and hasn't come up. I sort of assume they're all CG from their behaviour. [/QUOTE]

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