What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

[Quertus]

So, ignoring the elephant in the room that many people already view Alignment as a spectrum, and the even bigger elephant that moving from black and white to a spectrum not only doesn’t solve but exacerbates what is arguably the biggest problem with Alignment, what else can I say about such a change?

Hmmm… I’m not sure.

Does it make it more or less likely that when I write “evil” on my sheet to try and ignore the whole “Alignment” argument that the GM will track every good deed I do, and threaten to change my Alignment? Does it make it more or less likely that they’ll ask me *why* my character is performing a seemingly good deed, what my actual motivations are? Does it make it more or less likely that the campaign will focus on asking interesting questions and providing interesting tools and scenarios, or that it will devolve into a waste of time?

Acknowledging that “good people do bad things” makes it less likely that we’ll see a repeat of one of my many horror stories, of seeing *multiple* GM’s with tables of “in scenario X with Alignment Y” (and one “advanced” GM whose table was “in scenario X with Alignment Y, race Z, and gender Q”), this is the opinion you should have / the action you should take, otherwise, you’re doing roleplaying wrong. So… that’s a good thing, I guess.

EDIT:

Also, sane people have frank moral dicussions with each other all the time,

Sure. But even with as much as my player clearly considered Charisma to be a dump stat, and as much as I feel Bakugo could have been modeled off said lack of Charisma, even I recognize that opening such conversations with “you are evil” isn’t the best way to start such a conversation.