Seek75's page

Not really, those threads will always exist as long as Falling exists, regardless of Alignment's existence. Even without Falling as a mechanic they would probably still exist.

Well, sure, the threads themselves will still exist, but there won't be any reason for anyone to take them seriously anymore, because at that point it won't be a fundamental issue with the system itself anymore. It will be almost purely an issue between the player and their DM. 5E is a good example of this, since as far as I can tell whenever I'm browsing Reddit or the forums for that sort of thing it very rarely if ever comes up.

I don't think anyone's brought that up, just that the Subversion of characters as Xerres mentioned is not terribly interesting to some people. I like playing in campaigns with unambiguous Good characters. Setting up a "perhaps it is the Angels who are the real villains!" is not a scenario I'm at all interested in playing. Falling, Redemption, moral ambiguity? Sure. but I don't want everything to be a shade of Grey, I leave that for the real world.

That's what I meant when I talked about turning everyone into the bad guy. You don't need alignment for the angels to be...well, angels. Superman, the example Xerres used, is actually a really good example of this; in the vast majority of his depictions, Superman is the quintessential warrior of truth, justice, and good, and is pretty much the gold standard for a fictional depiction of good as a concept. But he was created before alignment existed, before Gary Gygax was even born. If we can have characters like him without alignment, then why do we need alignment at all?

Rysky wrote:

Dracala wrote:

Rysky, Life is about shades of gray, shades of gray bring far more nuance and ambiguity than hard lined black and white dichotomy between good and evil... Sure there's neutral in between, but know what? Everyone has their reasons for doing things, and no person is an island for we are All shaped by chance and circumstance.

And Pathfinder is a fantasy game. Where you can have unambiguously good and evil things. And all the grey in-between.

One benefit of alignment I notice for myself is that there is far less effort to 'subvert' the image of a 'Good Guy' and draw everything toward that center grey. Easy example: Superman. Yes, I'm aware that because of his horribly expansive library of stories, you can always find one where he sucks, but as a baseline, he's an All Loving Hero who wants to save the world. Hooray! So in Pathfinder, he's Good aligned. Which good, debatable, but there he is. When you strip out alignment, there's so much temptation to say "What skeletons does Hero Person have in his closet." because they don't have to maintain their Good alignment. So you can say he's actually the Plutonian, and he's going to snap and go nuts because he's actually a villain mad with power!

Eberron has moral ambiguity, where a Good aligned leader wants to restart a horribly devastating war, and an Evil aligned leader is desperately trying to keep the peace. But having those alignments forces you to think deeper about them. You can't just say "She wants war, what a horrible person she must be!" How does she maintain that Good alignment even with those intentions? She doesn't want to rule with an iron fist, the post-war landscape of Khorvaire is vulnerable and broken. It has to be re-united so it can heal, by some views. And the Evil guy may want peace, but he is going to do horrible things to keep it.

And I'm not saying alignment is perfect, but I've never had any trouble with moral ambiguity when using it. The turning everything into shades of...

You know what's boring and uninteresting to me? Constantly reading the same threads over and over again about what makes a Paladin fall or whether or not it's LG to kill orc babies or whether or not a Paladin is even capable of utilizing Sneak Attack without falling. Those things are a direct result of alignment restrictions being a mechanical element of the game. Conversely, the failure to properly distinguish good guys and bad guys by making everyone the bad guy is not a direct result of a lack of alignment as a mechanical element, but rather either the inability of the DM to tell a proper story or the inability of the DM to tell a story that is to your personal liking. I play a lot of 5E, where alignment is something that you write down on your character sheet at the start of the game and then more than likely forget about, and out of all the 5E campaigns I've played I can safely say that virtually all of them have been very good about having legitimately good characters and legitimately evil characters and keeping them firmly separated while also having characters that fell squarely somewhere inbetween. If you haven't found a game without alignment like that yet, then really you're either looking in the wrong places or you've just been unlucky and haven't found a game that fits your personal preferences yet.

RangerWickett wrote:

Darigaaz the Igniter wrote:

What about my CN inquisitor of Desna who was working his way to becoming CG by bettering himself? Does that personal evolution no longer count because he's not good enough (or Good enough)?

Exactly!

Good narratives need nuance and ambiguity.

one last thing to mention....

I agree that nuance and ambiguity are great for stories, but the mere existence of the alignment system fights against that. Taken to an extreme, readers can (and have) interpreted our version of an NPC or deity who does certain acts as Paizo taking a firm stance on rendering judgment on a real-world act as being not evil or good or whatever, which makes for some really frustrating and eye-opening situations in this age of increased visibility and awareness.

If we want to further embrace nuance and ambiguity... the problem might actually be that the alignment system is the fault and it should, perhaps, be abandoned...

James Jacobs admitting that the alignment system isn't a divine revelation visited upon Gary Gygax by whatever higher powers may exist, and that it might in fact be limiting Pathfinder's story-telling potential, rather than empowering it?

Somebody pinch me. I'm not sure I can believe it.