What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

[Quertus]

“Tracking” isn’t the hard part.

Suppose the party stops for the night, gets attacked by goblins, and kills them.

Ok, but… why did they do what they did? Did they intentionally light a fire and cook aromatic food to make themselves easier to find? Intentionally choose goblin territory and make themselves look weak in order to bully the goblins to death? Choose goblins because it’s socially acceptable to murder them? Does it matter what they plan to do with the corpses, or with the children? Does any of that matter wrt their Alignment?

Figuring out what details to track in the first place (and how to value those details) is far trickier than simply tracking some numbers.

Once those numbers are tracked, then things get hard again.

Does almost everyone ping to both Detect Good and Detect Evil? Are the totality of one’s life choices detected by such spells? Do they function almost as “detect being with moral agency”, or even “detect how old you are / how boring your life has been”? Or do they function by “doing enough bad deeds that your friends won’t catch on that you’re secretly skimming money from the BBEG to fund the orphanage” logic?

All in all, tracking the numbers is the easy part. Determining the numbers, and evaluating their meaning is where the difficulty lies.