Found here. Short version: D&D’s alignment system is actually pretty useful. Then again, most internally consistent frameworks are.
3 thoughts on “My PJ Lifestyle post on Alignment in D&D is up.”
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Found here. Short version: D&D’s alignment system is actually pretty useful. Then again, most internally consistent frameworks are.
Comments are closed.
Not that it’s entirely germane, I still find some of the efforts to assign alignment and character classes to politicians hysterical.
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Dick Cheney as a lawful neutral necromancer…
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No, I don’t have anything against Cheney, good example of a guy willing to make hard choices in a high stakes situation with no pure winning moves…
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Mew
I’m of two minds with respect to D&D alignment.
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On one hand, it’s simplistic and a pain to enforce. (I’ve had the displeasure of several players who liked to go all Crime and Punishment, insisting that their evil acts weren’t really evil, and didn’t reflect on who their characters truly were.)
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On the other, it can be a darned useful touchstone for sketching out useful and workable perspectives to play around with. Especially for newbies.
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In a perfect world, I’d prefer all characters to have a carefully crafted set of psych lims that imply and reinforce a consistent worldview.
But for a beer and pretzels game where gods walk the earth good, evil, chaos and law are absolute objective things, and you’re on a predestined path to save the world (or at least your village) it’s plenty good enough.
I still think it depends on what kind of game you’re running, and what the players expect. If it’s the equivalent of a PG movie, elves are good, orcs are bad, and humans are all over the place. If it’s a hard R, there will be lots of shades of grey, and even that paladin trying to do his best may get into some messy situations.
It might be interesting to try to run a world in which there are alignment languages [a la 1st edition]. Wacky, but interesting.