How do you handle alignments?

How do you handle alignments?

Are they unchanging? Can you not act out of your alignment? Are they more fluid where you can bend the rules?

Do you exclude alignments in your games altogether?

evil is dumb and good guys always win

They dont exist.

Alihnments is merely a roleplaying tool for helping you roleplay and quickly create characters. It is not an ironclad rule that must be followed at all times.

What a shitty image.

For the players, it's just a general guideline. Their characters decide their alignment, not the other way around.

In terms of a DnD world, they're the cosmic forces that make the world run. People are always shades of alignments, and while some groups might generally become one alignment, nothing says they can't be something else. Cosmic beings, however, are stuck in their ways.

this but backwards

As a GM, I never mention them.

As a player, if I'm asked, I just say the GM can decide my alignment based on what I do and how he interprets it.

This has worked so far.

Alignment is not a specific enough descriptor for a character's motivation, so I never use it.

I usually play systems that don't use alignments. So my only interaction with alignments is when a player describes his character by referring to alignments. When that's happened, I tell the player to adjust his description so that it doesn't mention alignment.

I work with all my PC's in character creation to make sure they understand the character they are playing. What they want to do. What they would do in certain situations and then I give them an alignment based off that. If they do something that is completely out of alignment I'll bring it up with them later and ask if they see their character more as this alignment rather then the one set but generally I don't really police it unless its important like for their god or smth.

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When running D&D: Alignment is descriptive, not proscriptive. If a character, four or five sessions in, has been acting, say, more Chaotic Good than Neutral Good it's not a problem to quietly adjust the sheet. People can also change; if a character goes down a dark path and starts seeking more and more extreme vengeance, their alignment can slide down whenever it seems dramatically appropriate. In all cases this is not a punishment; nothing wrong with your character becoming more or less good/evil/lawful/chaotic.

When not running D&D: What alignment?

objectively correct chart

no alignments, consequences of actions dictated by laws and opinions of the game world.

alignments are pointless as most players act like fucking psychopaths regardless of alignments and go into a shit flinging autistic screeching fit if you ever bring up alignment or threaten to change them.

Nice try demon, but you're not tricking me into summoning "niw syawla syug doog dna bmud si live"!

...aw fuck

A guy I game with makes you strictly adhere to his idea of alignments and gives you huge penalties including level drain if you act outside of what he believes your alignment should be. For instance, we were in a city and two bandits got caught stealing by the guards, and the guards were acting to arrest them. We watched. He gave us all alignment hits for not helping, because it would be the good thing to do.

This is in 5e by the way, where alignment is entirely player choice and has no mechanical difference. I don't play with him anymore.

Alignments denote extremes. 99% of people, good and bad, are considered TN. LG, NE, etc - those are for saints and mass murderers. If a detect alignment spell pings, you know you're dealing with serious business.

Sorry, I didn't realize I was gonna have a gay porn aficionado in this thread that would know these guys true alignments

Alignment is shit. It's actually worse in 5e. At least in 3.5 it was more clearly defined, and good and evil acts were laid out in black and white. This gave a common, objective ground for morality in DnD and mitigated the worst moral arguments at the table. Now in 5e it's just woolly generalizations that only promote those kinds of timewasting arguments. Just look at Lawful Good's one-line description in the PHB and tell me that couldn't justify LGs defending slavery, spousal rape, human sacrifice, eugenics, clitorectomies and any number of other horrible things.

I don't think alignment is useful to roleplaying either. If you understand how to act IC then you don't need it. If you don't understand how to act IC then alignment won't help you anyway. A rounded well-made character always has to be more than an alignment anyway, it needs to have a personality and background in order to be interesting.

So currently, alignment fails at the two tasks it was meant to perform: stopping longass moral arguments and giving players a framework for their character. It's basically useless and does more harm than good, and should just be done away with. Systems without alignment do not suffer from its absence. Try them.

For NPCs, it's whatever the GM says. For PCs, it's whatever the player says unless it's obvious that he is NOT playing that alignment.