I found this interesting post where the poster try to get rid of alignment.
Now, I'm thinking to do the same with the upcoming Kingmaker campaign I'll run. Anyway, I have a couple of issues with this article series.
first of all, in the 3rd part, where he talk about monsters, he says:
The basic guideline to follow is: If a creature has aligned damage reduction, replace it with DR/silver if the creature is lawful or DR/cold iron if it’s chaotic. If it already has one of those as part of its damage reduction, replace the aligned DR with DR/magic.
[...]
By now, canny readers will already have noticed the flaw in this system: we have replacements for chaotic and lawful creatures, but what about good and evil creatures? The problem here is that we’ve got two remaining alignments to replace, but only one remaining special material.
[...]
In this case, it’s probably best to replace the aligned DR of good creatures with adamantine (so a solar angel, for example, will have DR 15/epic and adamantine). Why use adamantine for good creatures and not evil ones? Mostly because there are more Neutral Good creatures with aligned DR (mostly the angels) in the Bestiary than Neutral Evil ones. This will be more of a problem when the Bestiary 2 (with its attendant daemons) comes out later, but for now it’ll have to do.Some suggestions for what to do when the daemons do arrive, however, are that you can invent a new type of special material to use against them, have them only be subject to a specific damage type (e.g. DR X/slashing), or halve their existing DR value and make it unbeatable (e.g. a daemon with DR 10/good would have DR 5/-).
Now, that's kinda upset me.
I like the line of thought "keep it simple", still it seems not fair. Any suggestion on how to treat those DR?
2) The base classes, and the prestige classes. Now, it should be kinda simple, at least for the base classes, I still had to work them out, so if you want to help you're welcome. For now I find pretty obvious a bit of rework on Inquisitor, Cavalier, Samurai. The antipaladin is pretty obviously a carbon copy of the reworking of paladin or so. I'm in doubt on the oracle and summoner, I need to read deeply, but seems not much rework. For sure I need to remove the magus arcana that let you gain the aligned weapons with arcane pool, and that should work. For prcs, it seems to me that the only reworking is needed for the Assassin, but aside deleting the alignment requirement it seems he don't have anything strictly keyed to alignment itself. Do you think I left something out?
Can I ask what the problems with those DR are? Just saying magic instead of aligned DR is pretty simple I thought.
Assassin having an alignment restriction doesn't have much to do with the class itself so much as enforced fluff. Removing it doesn't hurt balance at all and opens up more concepts. Same with the Arcane Trickster(Edit: do people even remember that guy has that restriction?).
For the DR of good/evil creatures, you could just change it to DR/unholy or holy. But that would be expensive seeing as it's the equivalent of a +2 enhancement bonus.
Can I ask what the problems with those DR are? Just saying magic instead of aligned DR is pretty simple I thought.
Yup, pretty simple, but there are two things that I don't feel fit well:
1) "If a creature has aligned damage reduction, replace it with DR/silver if the creature is lawful or DR/cold iron if it’s chaotic. If it already has one of those as part of its damage reduction, replace the aligned DR with DR/magic."The bolded part is an issue for me. I mean, DR/lawful or chaotic seems to be more "heavy", somehow, of the magic, event though align weapon and magic weapon are both 1st level spells. I don't know, I just feel this need some fix.
2) the second issue is the lack of options for good/evil DR, wich is, at least for me, needed.
Same with the Arcane Trickster(Edit: do people even remember that guy has that restriction?).
Er... no :) Thanks for pointing that :)
For the DR of good/evil creatures, you could just change it to DR/unholy or holy. But that would be expensive seeing as it's the equivalent of a +2 enhancement bonus.
Hmmm. I'll think of, thanks.
Monte Cooks arcana evolved is an entire system with no aligment I think so that may have some idea if you can still get ahold of it.
Interesting. I'll check for sure.