Roy Wagner's page

I really don't like alignment and usually reduce it's impact on my games because players get weird ideas about it that often prevent interesting things happening with character development or roleplaying. I get that a lot of other people like it though. I can see how for some it acts as a focal point for character ideas and some classes base their existence around it.

What if instead of mandatory alignment it was replaced with a concept called codes or oaths? By default everyone is unaligned but some characters choose to follow certain codes wherein they gain benefits (god given I guess) if they follow them and penalties if they deviate.

As a starting point these codes could be all the alignments (lawful good etc) but also a hell of a lot more interesting and varied concepts.

This system doesn't minimize or abstract the existing alignments away like 4th ed did and it doesn't force alignment on players who don't like it.

Thoughts?

Why create a new system? Because the system isn't perfect and much could be improved. I think 10 years is a fair enough amount of time for an edition change. It's roughly the gaps between AD&D, AD&D 2nd edition and D&D 3rd edition. D&D 4th and 5th edition were roughly 5 years after their previous editions if you count 3.5 as an edition.

I'm old guard from redbox, AD&D 2e, 3rd ed, 3.5 and finally pathfinder. I skipped 4th ed and went to pathfinder not because I hate change but because there was too much change in such a short amount of a time. Also it's not like they were good changes either.

I'm really looking forward to pathfinder 2nd edition and I won't complain if I see 3rd edition in 2029. Seriously 10 years is a huge amount of time, it seems really generous to me.