Playing games with alignment

At that angle it would be horrible.

why? i won't be inviting you to any of my games anyway.

In OD&D, the cosmology was such that the forces of Law and Chaos were eternally at war. The only alignments were lawful, neutral, and chaotic, and they referred to whether you were aligned with one of the two sides in the war.

Thus, most humans were neutral because they had no direct stake in the war.

It meant nothing more or less than this.

Please explain to me what's wrong with this?

>playing games
You DO know Veeky Forums is 18+, right?

This thread is a mess.
Every single post.

What's wrong with

and

>Implying you have any games

What's wrong with it is in later editions, these terms were taken to another extreme, listed as a moral compass for your actions instead of a simple go to for your allies in a larger conflict than yourself. As such, classes who were expected to adhere to stricter moral codes were shafted if the DM thought the players did anything to conflict with their alignment, possibly robbing them of class features; ie, the fallen Paladin and other such classes.

As a simple direction of which side of the cosmic spectrum you lied on, nothing was wrong with it. Later editions just turned that on its head and armed shitty DMs with a new toy to fuck players over for no reason. It's not that alignment in OD&D sucks, it that those who favored later editions of D&D (for one reason or another) have been turned off of alignments due to how they worked as a heavily involved mechanical element that many DMs and players latched onto without fully understanding how to use them.

I agree pretty much entirely. I tend to run Swords & Wizardry Complete and use the one-axis alignment from 0e.

But OP was shitting on alignments in general so I thought I'd ask him/her to explain what's wrong with it there.

Sadly, most hate on alignments stems from those editions. In some cases, it might be a specific edition that's the target of the hate. In more extreme cases, it's more or less a blanket idea that alignment in all games (possibly even outside of D&D) is a misunderstood mess of bullshit waiting to happen. So while I don't mean to defend OP, I'm pretty sure the mindset he has comes from a time when alignments were truly terrible to include.

>in later editions
Alignment has only ever been a problem in 3.5 for me. In AD&D it was a bigger part of the mechanics and everything was weirder and bad rules were because they tried something that didn't work for everyone.

3.5 has no excuse for the alignment abuses it encouraged, but since it doesn't crack the top 50 of issues with the rules it's not talked about as much. Most people just ignored that shit and threw shade on Paladins.

I'll keep in mind next time I play Pathfinder that some assburger on the Internet disapproves.

I do, but it's certainly not gospel for your character's choices, we just use it as a general frame to work from.
It also doesn't quite work the way you may think, at least for me. "Evil" means you're sadistic, very self-serving, etc., while "Good" means that you are charitable, empathetic, etc. Lawful and Chaotic is really just if you're pro or anti-establishment.

You better.