Quote Originally Posted by Stonehead View Post
It's kinda funny how much alignment gets under everyone's skin for how minor a part it actually plays in the game. Mechanically, it's basically just a tag for a relatively small amount of spells and abilities to interact with. I think a lot of the issues come from treating alignment like a bigger deal than it actually is.
Alignment is a big deal for the relatively small number of classes - mostly paladin and various divine casters, but also the occasional PrC like assassin - for whom basically the entire suite of class powers is dependent upon maintaining within a certain sector(s) of the alignment pie chart. That's where most of the big arguments actually arise.

You might disagree with that, you might remember some time your group got into an argument about a character's alignment, but did their alignment ever actually matter? I don't want to speak for everyone, but in my experience, the problems entirely consist of a character acting a certain way, some other characters, or the GM objecting to that behavior based on their alignment (or objecting to the alignment based on the behavior), then everyone argues a bunch. Eventually they settle on an alignment for the character, sometimes changing it, sometimes keeping it the same. Then that alignment never actually comes up in the rest of the campaign.
A lot of alignment arguments are ultimately about abilities versus role-playing restrictions. Specifically, it's about players trying to acquire (and keep) various alignment-gated class abilities while playing as far off from the actual intent - admittedly often narrow and stereotypical - that the class, PrC, or other feature is intended to portray. Things like people who want to play non-evil assassins, or clerics of alignments vastly removed from those of their gods, and so forth.

And I get this, since I've run up against it myself. For example, in a playthrough of Pathfinder: Kingmaker (the cRPG), I played a LN inquisitor, because I wanted the animal domain (animal companions are powerful in that game), but because I'm a big softy in cRPG play, I ended up playing the character much more like LG, and had to cast Atonement multiple times in a single playthrough to regain LN status and avoid losing all inquisitor powers. This is the kind of cheese that absolutely would not, and should not, fly at an actual table. Now, one solution is to avoid making certain options only available to certain alignment combinations, because that is unnecessarily limiting. Unfortunately, that interacts rather poorly with D&D's pseudo-mythology.