D&D (2024) One D&d and alignment: new approach

[d24454_modern]

I am not a fan of alignment. IME there have been three primary uses of alignment in games:

1) Paladins using their canon-justified position as exemplar of "good" to commit war crimes
2) "Chaotic Neutral" characters who act in random, unbelievable, and violent ways, causing great damage to the party and the world
3) Players justifying war crimes against "always evil" races

I don't think it has historically been good for the game and it often enables toxic behavior from both players and DMs. Something like "devotion" could be good, really anything that is more about examining the motivations and needs of characters rather than "you got the good/evil/chaos/law juice in your veins" would be preferable.

That excuse always sounds backwards to me since there’s no reason why the player wouldn’t act the same way even without the alignment system.

 

[Baumi]

Alignment is such an iconic D&D thing that they’ll never get rid of it. It would be like they changed the six ability scores or something. They‘re just not going to do something that out of the box.

I'm not sure if it is so iconic, after all there were quite a few iterations of it, without a big backlash. OD&D had only the Law-Chaos Axis, then later came the 9 Alignments that were heavily used by spells and Class features, then there was the 4E Version where most were unalligned and in 5E they went back to the classic 9 but without mechanical weight.

Also there were some bad blood about some humanoids who where marked as evil (like Orcs and Drow). Because of that, they changed some books, lore and the alignment of monsters. So I think that WOTC would love to get rid of such a controversal feature.

As a GM I don't even ask the players about their alignment and I am sure most haven't even even filled it out. I cannot remember that Beyond even asks for that.

But all that said, I actually like alignment for Monsters/NPCs where it tells me a lot about it with a single glance.

 

[Amrûnril]

Ultimately, I don't think it actually matters much whether the books mention alignment. At this point, it's an idea that's out in the world and that exists more or less orthogonally to the mechanical rules of D&D. Players and worldbuilders who find it helpful as description or inspiration will use it that way without being prompted, while those who don't find it helpful are free to ignore it either way.

 

[RuinousPowers]

That excuse always sounds backwards to me since there’s no reason why the player wouldn’t act the same way even without the alignment system.

Well, the LG paladin (according to Gygax) HAD to commit "war crimes" or he would lose his paladinhood for performing a NG act, until he atoned.

 

[Marandahir]

Well, the LG paladin (according to Gygax) HAD to commit "war crimes" or he would lose his paladinhood for performing a NG act, until he atoned.

Remember that Gygax took the Elric style grimdark Order-vs.-Chaos alignment system and tried to expand it into a dual-axis system. But the single-axis origins of the system remained influential: LG was far more defined by "Law" than by "Good." There's a reason that 1977 Basic and 2008 4e had 5 alignments, and B/X, BECMI, RC, and Classic had 3 alignments, again. In the early days, the idea that LE or CG could exist was really difficult to comprehend. 4e tried to return to this idea of a line, where LG is the most lawfully and most goody of good, while CE and NG were really just the same thing (less beholden to the rules but otherwise good), LE is really just the same thing as NE (evil but not destructively so), and CE is the most destructively evil of all.

Gygax associated Order and Good with each other, even after he acknowledged that CG and LE could potentially exist. So if the Laws exist, and the Laws say Orcs must be destroyed, it must be good to destroy Orcs, right? That's the sort of extremism that happens when you go down that rabbit hole of putting Law above Goodness. But the original Paladin was definitely LAWFUL good, not lawful GOOD. Good was always in service to law, and being lawful and not good was okay, but being good and not lawful was blasphemous.

Thank HEIRONEOUS that's no longer the case, and alignment is not a straight jacket. We can tell stories of Daredevil-ike Paladins that skirt the line of their faith and wrestle with whether their acts are truly good, whether they go far enough, or whether they've gone a step too far.

Honestly, in my mind, if you want to play a Paladin with atonement rules and internal struggles of what to do when, take a watch of Marvel's Daredevil show (previously on Netflix, now on D+). Given that Matt Murdock is a LAWYER by day and a non-killing-but-quite-violent vigilante by night (not to mention one with Blind Fighting, because Justice is Blind), who goes to church to confess his sins to his priest because he struggles with whether he's doing the right thing or not by beating up criminals and taking the law into his own hands - I'd say he's the perfect example of a LG Paladin.

 

[Oofta]

Well, the LG paladin (according to Gygax) HAD to commit "war crimes" or he would lose his paladinhood for performing a NG act, until he atoned.

Gygax had some strange ideas. Decades ago. The game has changed a lot since he had much influence on it.

 

[RuinousPowers]

Gygax had some strange ideas. Decades ago. The game has changed a lot since he had much influence on it.

Which just proves how alignment can be interpreted differently in every edition of the game, making it an exceedingly poor descriptor.

 

[Oofta]

Which just proves how alignment can be interpreted differently in every edition of the game, making it an exceedingly poor descriptor.

Or ... like many aspects of the game it evolved far beyond what Gygax envisioned.

We owe a debt to Gygax for helping to get D&D off the ground. But from the very start, multiple people (i.e. Arneson in the early days) took the ball he started rolling and ran with it. He planted the seed but it stopped being his game long ago.

You don't like it? Don't use it. I still find it useful for monsters and NPCs that I don't want to waste time on fleshing out in detail. It can also give me a starting point, one of many tools at my disposal.

 

[Marandahir]

Or ... like many aspects of the game it evolved far beyond what Gygax envisioned.

We owe a debt to Gygax for helping to get D&D off the ground. But from the very start, multiple people (i.e. Arneson in the early days) took the ball he started rolling and ran with it. He planted the seed but it stopped being his game long ago.

You don't like it? Don't use it. I still find it useful for monsters and NPCs that I don't want to waste time on fleshing out in detail. It can also give me a starting point, one of many tools at my disposal.

This. I don't usually like alignment as written because I want to avoid straightjacketing character's motivations. But it's a useful broad, fuzzy category to start grouping factions and threats and the internal ethical struggles that characters like Clerics, Paladins, and Monks might face.

 

[RuinousPowers]

This. I don't usually like alignment as written because I want to avoid straightjacketing character's motivations. But it's a useful broad, fuzzy category to start grouping factions and threats and the internal ethical struggles that characters like Clerics, Paladins, and Monks might face.

I would rather flesh out the religions or orders the characters belong to, rather than just paint everything with a generic brush. And if you do too, then why do you need the generic brush?