We all know the Alignment system is absolute shit

Those are only problems because you're not reading the names right. Law isn't "I have a code" and Chaos isn't "I do what I want."
Law and Chaos are two sides in a vast cosmic battle. The Lords of Law and the Lords of Chaos are locked in an eternal war, and you're either on one of those two sides, or you a poor Neutral who's caught in the middle.
Law is generally the side of civilization and man's gods, the side of order and safety and a world that makes sense. Chaos is the side of the wilderness, the treacherous faerie folk, the fiends and monsters, and the mad wizards who tamper with magic.

Forgot the image.

Basically, unless you're cutting out people's hearts as an offering to Arioch, the eight-pointed Chaos Star, you're not Chaotic. Stealing some shit and breaking a few laws once in a while doesn't count.

>wholly subjective
If you think this, you shouldn't try to change alignment.

>amastemaforants.png

Order is also stultifying mindless drudgery, absolute obedience, the tyrannical control of the gods, and the undying thankless tasking of the priesthood to inane ritual.

Chaos is the opportunity to advance through your own worth, reward for services given and punishment for failure to achieve, the creativity and generosity in power, and the gifting of new and wondrous glories to the gods through imaginative and interesting service.

Try reading Louise Cooper's Time Master Trilogy to see why Order is a bunch of dickheads.

The lesson of Moorcock's novels is that Order and Chaos are both dickheads, and the only safe place for us mortals is inbetween them, playing them off of each other.

Have you considered, a third axis?

My favorite alignment system ever was in SMT: strange journey. It was basically freedom vs order, or logic vs chaos. The lawful guys are mind raping assholes and the chaotic guys are self interested douches. In the end, neutral is the only choice, but not even true neutral, neutral incorporating both lawful and chaotic.

You realize OP posted a SMT image, right?

Oh really? I didn't notice that one of the main characters from the game was in OP's image.

Saltiness and sarcasm aside, that's why I brought it up. Not every SMT has a good alignment system, but in the context of the story, strange journey did it best.

That's what Nethack does. It's neat, I guess. Some humanoid monsters that share your alignment won't try to kill you.

What? You mean like autistic/non-autistic?

If you're following a stringent moral code that is exclusively personal and in direct conflict with the laws of the land, is it Lawful or Chaotic?

>The most popular theme in the fantasy genre is the triumph of good over evil
>Let's remove the good/evil axis

Also
>Unironically being a moral relativist

>"B-But nobody thinks of themselves as evil!"
1. They do in fantasy
2. Not an argument, Spoony

Organized crime is Lawful because they establish and perpetuate order; it just isn't the same variety of order as the conventional authority. Additionally, organized crime tends to place a great deal of importance on loyalty, following orders, and respecting deals, all of which fall under Lawful philosophies.

Similarly, a rebel government might be Lawful if they hold to the ideas of order, consider themselves to be the rightful authority, or are rebelling against a disorganized and Chaotic regime; or they may be Chaotic themselves if their first and foremost goal is merely to seize power for their party, consider rightful rulership to rest solely in the whims of the appointed ruler rather than in an ideal or persistent system, or are so broken apart by factionalization and internal strife that the group as a whole nets no coherent philosophy.

An example of a Lawful rebel government might be the French government-in-exile during WWII. A Chaotic example would be some of the factions in Syria.

Alignment is fine provided it exists ONLY as a basic reflection of actions

>We all know the Alignment system is absolute shit

ITT, idiots arguing about something they don't understand.

Like, fuck, they spell it out for you in every player's handbook. You have no excuse being this stupid.

The standard alignment system is basically unsalvagable and dumb as hell, so I replaced it in it's entirety.
Now the axis are Pure/Warped and Celestial/Infernal, your place on which is assigned to you based on how your character works
Pure is about martial and natural power. Fighters and Druids usually end up here.
Warped is about shunning the natural way and imposing your own will upon the world around you. Psionic characters and shapeshifters go here.
Celesital is about complex magical concepts like life, death, the mind, etc. Paladins and a lot of Clerics and Wizards end up here based on the magic they use.
Infernal is similar to Celestial but more focused on basic and fundamental magical concepts like fire, force, light and the like. The rest of the Clerics/Wizards end up here and are often joined by Warlocks and Sorcerors.

Obviously, there is a lot of crossover, often within a single class, so Paladins due to their holy bent and martial training usually end up Pure Celestial, while a Sorceror who throws fireballs and becomes a monster with magic ends up Warped Infernal.

I feel that this is a lot neater and also remove the "you pinged under my Detect Evil, I smite immediately" as none of these alignments actually reflect on the intent of the person.

Sword Path Glory book 2 alignment is something like this
there are 2 axies
good/bad
and something like autistic/non-autistic.

Even Megaten has two alignment axes.

Law and Chaos get coloured with Light and Dark.

Probably something like this

>nine alignments
Absolutely disgusting.

More seriously, though, I'm all for 's whole three-point "sides of a war" version. Gondor vs. Mordor, with the neutrals stuck between.

That was one of my biggest disappointments with SJ. There was very little incentive to move towards law or chaos for all but the hardest of hardliners, to the point it really wasn't a choice picking neutral.

Where would the reds in Russia fall in that spectrum?

Law vs Disorder
Good vs Evil
Cosmos vs Chaos

>implying objective morality

Probably for Paladins and similar heroes:

Fanatic vs Pragmatic
Merciful vs Just

Fanatics adhere to the letter of the law for their deity, while pragmatics are more likely to bend them if it serves a greater goal. For example, a pragmatic paladin might be willing to work with less scrupulous characters to work towards a higher goal, while a fanatic paladin would outright refuse to associate with them at all.

Justice dealing with doling out proper punishments to those who commit crimes against the paladin's deity while mercy deals with forgiveness after restitution. A Just paladin would haul off a brigand for stealing food to feed his family, while the merciful paladin would instead ask for amends to be made and maybe attempt to correct the reason for stealing in the first place.

seek a way to help a brigand that steals because he needs to feed his family, while the fanatic one might just smite the shit out of him for stealing regardless of the circumstance.

I picked Chaos because Gore was such a thundering fucking faggot about Neutrality. I wanted to be Neutral but I value my freedom more. I'm literally the only guy capable of summoning demons properly and beating the shit out of people, saved your useless black ass twice, and now you're going to try and holy highroad me into doing whatever you say? Fuck off.

If Gore wasn't there, I'd have been neutral for sure. I looked at the Law route and it was possibly the most terrifying Law route I've seen in SMT, with the universal godvoice song brainwashing everything.

Chaos end went pretty ungabunga real fast too, but it was definitely freedom.

The alignment system is actually just fine.

The problem with the alignment system was never the alignment system itself. The alignment system is both easy to understand and adds depth to the game. Rather, the problem was with people who adamantly refuse to accept the book's definitions of Good and Evil because it does not jive with their own definition of morality. PROTIP: it does not have to. You can have an Evil-aligned hero in D&D. Its like being Black-aligned in Magic.

You can have subjective morality alongside objective alignment.

Law/Chaos is even more subjective than Good/Evil, OP.

That's exactly the problem.

People just read "Law/Chaos" "Good/Evil" and stop right at the names and go "OH, I KNOW WHAT THOSE ARE" and dive dickfirst into the game, not realizing that they should probably read the fucking explanation.

Everyone should be forced at gunpoint to take college philosophy. Just one semester. It's literally nothing but "HERE IS A TERM, WE'RE GOING TO DEFINE IT, AND NOW WHEN WE USE THIS TERM AND TALK ABOUT IT IN THIS SPECIFIC SETTING, IT MEANS PRECISELY THIS. NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT DOES OR WHAT YOU WANT IT TO. THIS IS THE BASELINE"

>Morality
>Wholly subjective

I want the commies to leave

>implying alignment matters for anything aside from outer beings and people who associate with them
In fantasy like Dungeons and Dragons, morality and ethics are pretty much defined by whatever the gods, friends, and whatever pure law/pure chaos beings say is good and evil. It does not matter for anyone aside from divinely empowered classes and outsiders.
>laughing_druids_and_monks.png

Pfft, the real Chaos faction are the White from 4.

I absolutely loved the White.

>Lucifer is gigantic fucking faggot and we're tired of dealing with YHWH's shit. Fuck everything. If all they want to do forever is play with us then the only way we can dick them over is by breaking all their toys and burning down the house. Fuck this gay earth. We don't want to live on this planet anymore and no one in the universe gets to outlive us.

Also, Anarchy route in Apocalypse is great. Salvation route or whatever is really, really stupid.

REMOVE ALIGNMENTS remove alignments
you are worst morality. you are the morality idiot you are the morality smell.

>Study Philosophy

I'll take the bullet, thanks.

>1. They do in fantasy
In shit fantasy maybe.

You're a retard. Moral relativism happens in the sense that people will try to explain away or justify their amoral actions in a way that works for them. Man hits his wife? Bitch deserved it. Cops shoot 12-year-old black boy with a BB gun? They were threatened. It happens everywhere.

Also if all your fantasy revolves around the trials of good va evil, you need to work on your imagination.

It can't be fixed because it's overloaded. It doesn't matter what you start with if you ask it to do too many things it will start to fail at them.

Apocalypse is out already?

ITT: Idiots post the exact same counter-arguments even after said arguments and book examples have been shown to be bullshit.

>Laughing_petitioners.jpg

Why are we still so pissy about 3.5's alignment system?

Do you fucks even care? You do not play it apparently, why use its alignment system or even discuss it? It serves a very basic function for class features and weapon enchantments, not much else. No one has any clue how to roleplay in the system according to the vast majority here so why is it worth discussing?

It's out in Japan, US doesn't get it till September, and as usual Europe doesn't exist.

4 really messed with it by giving so many choices and zero indication of where you were. At least the game is generous enough to give you a "FUCK EVERYTHING" button so you can NG+ and rofflestomp your way back to the alignment lock.

Laws of the land are nothing to do with lawful or chaotic. Lawful is about discipline, keeping your word, establishing and respecting legitimate authority, and maintaining order through actions.

A king that says "Thou shalt not kill" is legitimate, one that says "Everyone has to stand at the Kingdom/Empire border at 5PM sharp every other tuesday and moon the neighboring Empire under pain of whipping" is not.

It's confirmed EU will get it eventually, though. That's enough for me.

Light and Dark are determined by whenever you are revered or feared. YHVH is certainly not a good person by any stretch of the imagination, but he is still Light as he is revered by literally billions of people.

Hehe "MoreCock'

Make your own fucking alignment chart. For England Up'turned (LotFP), alignments are Cavalier - Neutral - Roundhead and Royalist - Neutral - Republican.

we could just add a few more axis's like "smart/dumb" and other shit until we basically arrive at a dnd point sheet for personality

12 int
14 good
11 law
19 don't give a fuck
2 morals

I didn't side with Neutral for Gore, I did it for Arthur.

>Gondor vs. Mordor is "Lawful vs. Chaotic."
That's a terrible example if you're specifically talking about Law and Chaos as opposed to Good and Evil, man. Just sayin, I get your point, but bad example.

There's a variant rule for 3.5 that adds two new alignments: corruption/purity, and honor/dishonor. I've entirely replaced the two alignments with these variant alignments with great results.

>Merciful vs Just
getting unwelcome hints of Mr. A here

>3.5
More like every edition that isn't 4E and has a Player's Handbook.

4E went with the straight LG-G-U-E-CE line and OD&D/Basic with just a straight Law/Neutrality/Chaos, but AD&D (1E and 2E), 3.X and 5E all went with the two-axis nine-point system.

And then there's Holmes and its LG/CG/N/LE/CE fivepoint system, but who plays Holmes these days?

No, it's MOORcock - as in the Muslims who took over Spain.

Chainmail has enough Tolkienisms that I felt that it was appropriate, what with the chaotic Orcs of the Red Eye and Lawful Hobbits.
Also IIRC Gondor vs. Mordor as Law vs. Chaos was literally an example in one of those old articles/games.

Just think with diagonals.

LG/CE: "Law's purpose is to protect the weak, and that's good/dumb."
CG/LE: "Law exists so that the strong may dominate the weak, and that's bogus/the way it should be."
LN, NG, NE: "Law brings order, which is the most important thing / less important than good / less important than me."
CN: "Let's just ignore the law and make up our own rules!"
N: Any number of things.

When you think of alignment in these terms, as well as general stances rather than one alignment per action, these issues iron themselves out.

Organized criminals are CN by default. Sometimes they shift towards good or evil. Pretty much all sentient beings have some sort of code, even antipaladins. It just so happens that the criminal code exists because the real code is too inconvenient.

And literally every alignment can fight against authority. LG fights if the law is being misused. CG fights because authority sucks, especially the one in power. LE fights because they want to be top dog. And so on.

... What the fuck even is a Royalist Roundhead? Is this the line of thinking that lead to """"""Lord Protector"""""" Cromwell?

But, I mean, where are you getting that the Hobbits are Lawful in the first place? I mean, the closest thing I can think of to any relationship the Hobbits have to Law is that they have a mayor, and that Bilbo's cousins used the idea that he was dead as an excuse to rob him instead of just stealing his shit outright. It's not that the Hobbits are Chaotic, or even Neutral, it's just that nothing about them in particular really suggests that they're Lawful in the first place: there's virtually no reason to not call them NG. Why would you use something that isn't very exemplary of a trait as an example of that trait? Actually, wait why did you bring up the Hobbits in the first place? You know they're not from Gondor, right?

As contrasted with settings like Greyhawk, Tolkien's works don't HAVE actual entities of Chaos and Law; at least, they don't have the equal-but-opposing forces that the alignment system prefers. Mandos, who could conceivably make a good stand-in for a power of Law, has no counterpoint for a power of Chaos. Even alignment-style Good vs. Evil doesn't fit in Tolkien. Capital-E "Evil" isn't actually a force in Tolkien, any more than it is in Catholic theology: re-read the Ainulindalë, specifically the bit about Melkor's inability to create anything unplanned by Eru, and you'll see what I mean. In this work, anything "evil" is inevitably a corruption of what is intrinsically Good, not Good's diametrically opposed force.

So, really, just about anything Tolkien is a bit of a shit example in terms of what constitutes Alignments in the elemental sense, but the Chaotic/Lawful contrast supposedly exemplified in the Gondor vs. Mordor conflict is probably the worst possible example of alignment you could use involving Tolkien in the first place.

Hobbits being lawful was mostly just the first thing to come to mind, to be honest. And yeah, they're hardly a good example of the more cosmic "Law" - they're the peaceful innocents that are sheltered by Law, but don't really go out and fight for its cause.

But yeah, Gondor vs. Mordor is a pretty bad example. Looking around I'm pretty sure that the only reason I mentioned it was because that was the focus of Len Patt's wargame that Chainmail stole from wholesale.
>playingattheworld.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/a-precursor-to-chainmail-fantasy.html

>As contrasted with settings like Greyhawk, Tolkien's works don't HAVE actual entities of Chaos and Law; at least, they don't have the equal-but-opposing forces that the alignment system prefers.
It's not a question of having exact opposites - it's having the Valar as a whole stand for Law and Morgoth stand for Chaos. Which they do, in a way, although given Tolkien's Catholicism it's no surprise that the focus is more on Good vs. Evil. In a more moral sense than a cosmic one - it's not God vs. Megasatan, it's the Allies vs. the Axis.

>the Chaotic/Lawful contrast supposedly exemplified in the Gondor vs. Mordor conflict is probably the worst possible example of alignment you could use involving Tolkien in the first place.
Yeah, I'll have to agree with that.

What is even the point of an Alignment system?
Are they Babby's training wheels for "playing my character?
Are the unimaginative not able to figure out "what my character might do" without consulting the entry on Alignments in the rules?
Are they way of justifying infuriating or assholish behavior at the table by saying "Hey bro, just playin' my alignment here".

Can someone explain to me how the game is enriched or enhanced by having a system of behavioral Archetypes?
It's not even a classic (or modern) trope of Fantasy/Science Fiction, for the Holy Knight to meet with the town council and "detect Evil" on them to determine who's underhanded.

I mean, wouldn't the entire situation of the Knights of the Round Table be rather easily resolved if Galahad could simply scan the table for "whoever is radiating Evil" at any given moment?

Someone defend Alignments, if you dare.

>Morgoth stand for Chaos

This is stupid. Morgoth stood for overthrowing the current order and making himself the Absolute authority, he wasn't Heat Legend Joker just wanting to blow it all up.
His second Sauron was exactly the same sort of guy trying to establish unbreakable order and dominion over Middle Earth.
Neither of them were anarchists.
Alignment systems were always dumb.

The point, is to use them as markers to identify the main drive behind characters. It isn't just for PCs, but for NPCs as well in setting with literal manifestations of good and evil. A GM describing an order of Paladin as lawful neutral, you'd know that they place the law above the well-being of innocents even if the system fails. A Chaotic Good Druid would ignore laws to directly set up an orchard for the poor to directly harvest for food.

I think, initially, that it was an interesting way to categorize characters based on how they acted. You could call that "training wheels" if you wanted. Another useful thing was that they allowed for hypothetical spells that interacted with purely Evil or purely Good things -- which groks well for things like Smiting, so that you would not be able to Smite good guys with holy power. This also ties into the fact that the first paladins were intended as being better Fighters, with the restriction of being locked into one alignment.

These are benefits of the system: whether or not you think these benefits outweigh their negatives is another story.

Interestingly, I looked up Galahad in TSR's Deities & Demigods book, and he's a level 20 Paladin. I'm not sure which Arthurian "situation" you're talking about specifically, though: when would he need to be detecting evil at the Round Table?

>Alignment system
>wholly subjective

Alignments dictate what cosmic forces your soul is aligned with. This is why detect spells only detect those who are over level 5 (barely), horrifying monsters (undead, angels, demons, and such), and clerics from level 1 (who have been imbued with power from gods).

Its also a convenient shorthand for the general behavior of a person when confronted with a moral situation.

A lot of people seem to think the gods make the rules of how alignment works, when it's much closer that the gods align themselves to the planes of existence that are made from the pure elements of morality. This is because alignment is a physical thing in D&D. You can go to the Abyss and pick up literal evil. Same with Celestia and literal good. Same with Mechanus and literal law. Same with Limbo and literal chaos, though this is not recommended if you wish to retain your soul and form.

>What is even the point of an Alignment system?
Gygax got tired of having debates on the morality of orc genocide.

LOL?
Ultra lawful. They were trying to build the perfect state.

Go to the bookstore, tell them you love Long, Dick, Pohl, and Moorcock.

He was a shit gm.

Oh man I love memes!

Good and Evil are not subjective.