No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

[ImNotTrevor]

1) Information density. One of the major benefits of D&D's race and class system compared to more freeform systems is the ability to briefly convey a lot of information about your character. You can give a newbie one list of races and one list of classes, have them pick something from each, and go from there, and an experienced player saying "I'm an Elf Ranger" conveys a heck of a lot of information about their character, compared to more fiddly games like GURPS where a newb has to do everything from scratch and a veteran can't convey detail "packages" in the same way. Alignment is basically that for roleplaying prompts: Saying "here are six flavors of general moral and ethical outlook, pick one" can get a newbie thinking about character motivations and such without going through long lists of character traits or whatever, and "I'm a CE Elf Ranger" vs. "I'm a LG Elf Ranger" is a quick way to convey party dynamics and such between veterans.

Alignment isn't information dense. It's Vague.

John is Lawful Good. Based on that:
What are his goals?
What does he value?
What is his biggest struggle?

I know none of this information, and alignment implies none of it. And this information is much better roleplaying info than alignment is precisely because it's less vague.

2) Universality. In games with defined settings, a character's moral and ethical outlook usually has something to do with the religions or organizations they belong to; in a real-world setting a character might be a Catholic or a Buddhist, and in Star Wars they might be a Jedi or a Sith, and each of those four things gives you a good sketch of their outlooks on life. But there are a lot of religions and organizations even in a single setting--if I tell you my d20 Modern character is a Zoroastrian or that my Star Wars character is a White Current Adept, do you know offhand what that means about their philosophy?--and D&D has a bunch of different settings to the point that "I worship the sun god" means very different things depending on whether you're talking about Pelor in Greyhawk, Amaunator in FR, Dol Arrah in Eberron, or Paraelemental Sun in Dark Sun.

Alignments, meanwhile, are constant across settings (to the point that people can meaningfully talk about what alignment characters from non-D&D settings would be) and there are exactly nine of them you need to remember.

We can post-hoc apply a lot of labels to a lot of fictional characters. That does not give them inherent value as a thing that must continue to exist.

3) Overlaying. People in this thread have talked about replacing alignments with character traits or the like, but the great thing is that they're not mutually exclusive, you can use both (as 5e kinda sorta does). What's more, adding that extra layer can give you more depth: a character who's Altruistic is one thing, but a character who is Lawful Evil and Altruistic? Figuring out how to express that gives you a great prompt right there. Conversely, alignment can be ignored in cases where you think it doesn't make sense (see the bit about swords-and-sorcery in my last post) because D&D functions just fine if you arbitrarily declare that all creatures are TN and alignment magic is gone.

As for mechanical hooks, people have already given examples of systems that work based on alignment systems--Dark Side points, join-Cthulhu-if-you-go-insane sanity meters, and so forth--and then you have the usual detecting/smiting/etc. stuff as well. If you want to represent profane shrines, corrupted swamps, and so forth, there's really no substitute for a mechanical alignment system, especially in a D&D-like setting where "evil" means everything from demons to undead to aboleths so you can't just point to a handful of creatures or one kind of magic or whatever and key everything to those.

I can't talk about or have a profane and corrupted place without alignment? Bulldroppings, plain and simple.

[The Desecrated Temple]
The moment you set foot in this place, a chill runs through you. The shadows seem to quiver unnaturally and lunge for you out if the corner of your eye. The stains of blood upon the walls and floor must be hundreds of years old, and yet they still seem fresh. The wind through the shattered windows sounds like distant screaming, and the stained glass visage of The Kindly Judge now looks more like the rictus grin of a corpse.
[Entities not allied to The Dark Sovereign are treated as if under the effect of a Bane spell while within this location.]

Bingo. A profane location, with a simple mechanic which does not rely on alignment. Easy.

Again, even if detect evil were (anti)magically removed from the game, there are still plenty of benefits to having alignment around, Evil is not just a neon sign in the shape of a skull.



Law and Chaos have a much vaster pedigree than Good and Evil in terms of fiction and mythology alike. Lots of real-world religions have a fundamental law-vs.-chaos struggle in their mythology (can't give specific examples here, obviously) and while Moorcock's specific take on it was the closest inspiration for D&D there's plenty of other authors and series who delve into that conflict. If anything, the ethical axis is more important and influential than the moral one both at a personal scale ("Sure, you want to be the good guy, but what kind of good guy?") and a cosmic one, and if you put a gun to my head and forced me to ditch one of the two axes in my games I'd ditch Good and Evil and keep Law and Chaos.

This kinda leaves out how many stories in fiction say "law and chaos" but really it's just good and evil under new labels. "The land was a perfect and beautiful utopia of morally pure people until the God of Chaos showed up!" It's really common and is clearly not meaning the same thing as law and chaos mean in D&D.

Those "three arbitrary squares" are broad enough to contain literally the entire span of real-world moral and ethical philosophy and a broad variety of characters from fiction, mythology, and history can fit in each of those squares.

So can the two squares "human" and "not human."
That doesn't make the categories useful nor necessary, which is the thing you need to do here: show that these squares are a NECESSITY, since you asserted that any high fantasy campaign requires their inclusion.

If you were to describe the Blood War to your players, how would you do that? Would you, perchance, go into detail about how demons are power-hungry maniacs who give into every evil whim and want to carve up the multiverse into little fiefdoms for every demon prince while devils are cunning and strategic types who embody the evils of bureacracy and believe the multiverse must be placed under the Baatorian yoke and so on and so forth?

Congratulations, you've just reinvented the LE and CE labels, you've just gone out of your way not to use labels because they're bad or something.

So you admit I can forego the alignment and High Fantasy still works functionally the same? Great, we can be done.

And yeah, in my experience putting the stickers on things breeds a qualitatively different reaction from players and DMs.

Do you know what immediately solved all alignment squabbles at my table? Dumpstering it as a concept in favor of having a conversation during session 0 about our desired tone and regular check-ins. It has never been a problem since, and the quality of the roleplay has gone up since players worry less about "what does being Lawful Good mean I should do" and more about "What does my character WANT?"

The new players introduced since I began have more naturally flowed into the roleplaying than they did with alignment in place, since they see their character as a PERSON, and not an ALIGNMENT.

Turns out a lot of those growing pains into roleplay are quite artificial.

Like, seriously, Order and Chaos show up all over basically every mythological system (see e.g. here and here for some examples), and Good and Evil has been doing the same thing since at least Zoroastrianism. I simply don't understand why applying near-universal symbolic mythical principles to a roleplaying game involving creatures, places, items, and plots from those same myths is such a controversial idea.

I'm not saying you can't. But I am saying you don't need to, and that insisting nobody can do high fantasy with mythological stakes without your sacred cow being involved is a laughable assertion.

Serious answer? Many character arcs that involve explicitly pre-planning things between the player and the GM are generally either very fragile or very capricious.

Who said I'm pre-planning? I'm working together with the player to see what makes sense as we go. You do know that it's allowed and even fun to play some things by ear, right?

Fragile, because unless you heavily railroad the party and you have a very cooperative group, the plot can go in totally unforeseen directions that require making drastic alterations to the plot arc or perhaps render the planned arc impossible, other players can do things that derail the arc either intentionally (e.g. they don't want to deal with a fall-and-redemption arc in the game so they sabotage it) or accidentally (e.g. a cleric PC saves an important NPC in the PC-to-fall's backstory who would otherwise have set them on their dark path), the player of the PC-to-fall can derail it themselves either accidentally (e.g. they realize that, whoops, after something that happened a few sessions ago they need to add in some epicycles so their arc still make sense) or intentionally (e.g. they come up with an awesome idea mid-campaign and want to take things in a different direction), and so on.

Since I'm not going to throw a hissyfit if my loosely defined plans go a bit pear-shaped and I *continue working with the player through this process, rather than a one and done, because I have a brain,* none of the above applies.

Capricious, because if there are no hard-and-fast rules for corruption then a GM has to issue rulings on a bunch of game elements, the GM and players might disagree how corrupting certain acts are (see: every player ever who wanted to play a Mace Windu-style "carefully walk the boundary between Light and Dark" Gray Jedi character in a Star Wars game run by a "one Dark Side act and you fall" GM), and so on.

Imagine not knowing that players are humans and you can talk to them to solve all these problems.

Talk to your players like reasonable humans. It works wonders.

And then there's the basic fact that a lot of games have uncertain schedules or varying group compositions or rotating GMs or are plot-less sandboxes or whatever, and pre-planning character arcs just doesn't make sense for logistical reasons either in- or out-of-game.

Again, not pre-planning it and making it an ongoing conversation solves these problems.

Having defined corruption mechanics puts everyone on the same page, ensures fairness and impartiality, removes the need to pre-plan character arcs while not preventing someone from planning them, and such. Plus, it allows for more organic "falling" scenarios, where there's a mechanic right in the book that says you can do X at the cost of Y and you hadn't planned for your character to take that step but y'know this boss is pretty hard and you could use a bit more oomph in your spells/Force powers/etc., so why not just dip a toe in the deep end of the morality pool...., adding spontaneity and character variety in the same way that wizards learning spells from scrolls instead of picking them at level-up, getting random treasure and incorporating that into your build, and the like can.

I can accomplish literally all of this by talking to my players as we go.

Amazing.

You're using very...interesting definitions of descriptive and prescriptive, here. When I used them, and pretty much every other time I've seen them used in alignment discussions, here's what it means: some people think alignment is prescriptive, where you put CG on your PC's character sheet and now you're a robot locked into some random CG personality until the end of time and if they act outside their alignment the DM says "You can't do that, you're CG!", while in fact it is descriptive, where you put CG on your PC's character sheet but can act however you feel your character would and if they act outside their alignment then their alignment changes to match.

Similarly, Dark Side points are descriptive, in that if you do Dark Side-y things you get Dark Side points and if you keep doing Dark Side-y things you keep getting Dark Side points until you fall off the moral cliff but if you try to atone you lose Dark Side points until you come back from the brink. A prescriptive corruption system would be a setup where, I dunno, as soon as you have a single Dark Side point you're not allowed to be polite to people and are obligated to kick one puppy per week, or something.

If I tell you that if you eat carrots I'll dye your hair blue, that's not exactly a Descriptive exchange, is it? The blue hair is less of a natural result of the thing happening and more like an outside entity determining the consequence, isn't it? Seems a bit more Prescriptive, when you look at what the exchange actually is. The prescription end is: "you did X, so now you are more evil and here are the consequences, regardless of if they make sense in context."

"High fantasy games really need an alignment system" does not at all imply "any game with an alignment system is automatically a high fantasy system," any more than "school buses need to have a flashing stop sign on them to comply with local laws" implies "putting flashing red lights on your car legally turns it into a school bus."

I mean, you've given no other requirements for me to work with, so if a system meets the requirements for High Fantasy then it must, therefore, be capable of achieving it as an aesthetic.

I pointed out the Paladin's Detect Evil ability not because it's some secret sauce that the alignment system requires to function, but because everyone who's against alignment has been focusing all their ire on detect evil as the primary sin of the alignment system for reasons I can't fathom, and then you turned around and held up Dungeon World, a game with an alignment system and Detect Evil, as a counterexample to D&D, that's all.

The core problem, however, remains:
You have yet to demonstrate why High Fantasy as an aesthetic, or the clash of Good and Evil as a theme, is IMPOSSIBLE without formalized alignment, as you previous asserted alignment systems are a "requirement" or "necessity" for High Fantasy campaigns, but have yet to tell me why I CANNOT achieve the same themes and aesthetic without the 3x3 grid.


This is why I don't take alignment seriously, especially as D&D does it. It doesn't add anything meaningful that I can't achieve with decent DM notes and talking. Nearly every other system DOES.