Quote Originally Posted by Kane0 View Post
OK, what makes alignment necessary, good and/or not replicated by other means?
Ah, anything - literally anything - can be "replicated by other means." Whether something is the best way to achieve an effect is always open to debate. So I won't bother, here, because of course it can be replicated by other means.

What do they provide that is necessary? Nothing, I suppose; very little in any game system is "necessary;" heck, the very use of rules is unnecessary. Cops & Robbers and other freeform styles with no official rule set are perfectly viable ways to have a role-playing experience.

What do they provide that's good? World-building, and a mechanical hook for certain spell effects. And other effects, too, whenever the designers of rules (or a DM) decides to use them. It is, of course, perfectly possible to have "team white, black, blue, and orange" instead of "good, evil, law, and chaos," and have them have nothing to do with good or evil or order or chaos as concepts, or to have them CLAIM to be related to these things even if they don't actually embody them. But I think that is actually the source of much of the problem people have with the alignment system as-written: it's treated as "team jerseys" that happen to have some coincidental correlation with the concepts named, but don't actually have to adhere to them. (Worse, people will write storylines to "prove contradictions" or somesuch and have "proclaimed good" actors behaving quite evilly but insisting they're doing it all in a "good" fashion.)

Where they have value, applied straight-forwardly, is not as factions but as philosophies, and broad ones at that. Yes, "be nice, be mean, follow rules, ignore rules" is a good summation for the broad philosophies. It's not perfect, but it's a good starting point.

They have value as means of establishing whether you can trust somebody to share a particular set of morals or ethics. Yes, you CAN trust that a Lawful Good person isn't going to backstab you, but will deal reasonably with you and tell you if there's a conflict of interest they perceive. Yes, you CAN legitimately worry that the Neutral Evil person might kill you in your sleep; it's certainly within his moral and ethical capacity. And as "team jerseys" that are not so much donned and doffed by applying the label, but rather are endemic parts of the creature's being based on the person they are, they work just fine.

You can have your exceptions, if you want them, but they are just that: exceptions. And they're "the evil guy who works with good guys," not, "the good guy who proves that good doesn't actually mean good."

Can you do much of it without them? Sure, but you'll wind up with labels anyway defining good guys vs. bad guys, and even if you ban "law" and "chaos," you'll have people trying to qualify the freedom vs. rules axis without having words to describe it. So, since we have the words, throwing them out doesn't help anything.

And again, in D&D at least, they define part of the setting. Used properly, alignment tying to outer planes works just fine. It is quite useful for telling stories about philosophy and exploring what is and is not a part of them, by using the settings that are literally defined by philosophy to see how things do or do not fit them.

It may cause arguments, but any story about philosophy will.

There is use and value, and throwing them out entirely doesn't get rid of them. It just makes people have to dance around the language.

Quote Originally Posted by Telok View Post
I'm not a fan just because I've seen people arguing about for 30+ years simply for the lack of agreement on what is or is not lawful, good, chaotic, and evil, plus some people insisting on bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment". I've even seen actual cultural differences over them too. I find them too undefined and carrying too much cultural & historic baggage to be useful.

Seriously, at this point explicitly changing them to "nice", "not nice", "follows rules", ignores rules" would probably work better.
People bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment" is obnoxious. It'll be obnoxious without alignment, too: "You're not playing a Crane Clan member correctly!" is something that I have heard in L5R. And "Crane Clan" is a faction, and you can be aligned to it by birth or adoption. It has definite philosophical leanings. There is no "good/evil/law/chaos" axis, even though evil is a definite force with mechanical taint it can use to corrupt a character into being supernaturally evil. And L5R does a great job of never letting you play the "good guy tainted with evil power;" you WILL NOT be able to "stay good" while "using evil power." (I wouldn't care for that version in D&D, honestly; it's prescriptive, and literally removes control from the character as the taint takes over.)

But the point is, the bad behavior you're not a fan of, Telok, happens with any factional system. It isn't a problem of alignment; it's a problem of players insisting that they have a say in how others play their characters. (And to be fair...there's room to argue this isn't 100% unreasonable. It'd hardly be fun to play in a game of "only heroes, the DM said so," and still have your guy be the only one who wants to help others and doesn't want to murder the orphans for the deed to the mine the orphanage sits on.)