“Alignment doesn’t matter!” We’ve heard it all over the place, but alignment has been a part of D&D — and most RPGs in some form — for decades. And it’s been played differently through every edition. Is it worth your time? Does it make things worse instead of better? Does it have any benefits players today are overlooking?
Once upon a time, violating alignment could cost a character a level, which meant acting against alignment lead to fighters forgetting how to swing a sword as well. It got kind of weird, and many modern RPGs, including D&D 5E, have de-emphasized alignment since then in the name of player fun.
But in other ways, the 9-box D&D alignment grid can be a very useful roleplaying tool. And doesn’t it make sense for Paladins and Clerics to lose some kind of power when not acting within the tenets of their deities?
In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about what they really think about alignment in TTRPGs, including how they use it in their games to define characters but not controlling them.
2:00 A brief history of D&D alignment and what we think about the iconic 9-box, law/chaos X good/evil system
7:00 Who decides what these alignments even mean DM, player, other players?
9:00 Should alignments be relative to the world or the character’s internal POV?
12:00 Would the 3 Wise DMs (and most modern people) be Lawful Good?
13:00 Alignment is more useful for defining how a character feels about the world or culture than defining the world or culture
15:00 How lawful, neutral and chaotic characters feel about the rules and society
18:00 The DM Trap: Don’t get caught up in “enforcing” PC alignment
21:00 How mechanics interact with good and evil in D&D 5E
24:00 How do you define “good” and “evil” in a D&D campaign?
27:00 Captain America and making decisions by prioritizing one side of alignment over the other
30:00 “How is this OK from your character’s POV?” An approach to DMing player character alignments (and the Deck of Many Things Debacle)
38:00 D&D’s 5E power balancing and how it impacts play
41:00 Cons and pros (but mostly cons) of Paladins needing to be Lawful Good in old school D&D
47:00 Don’t be a line judge, but do get player buy-in on how alignment, gods and patrons work
50:00 Why alignment should matter
53:00 9 stories about burning a village down: The alignments in action
58:00 Alignment subjectivity vs. character decisions and problem-solving
63:00 Beyond alignment: Things more important to characters than their alignment
68:00 Alignment and god-like tentacle monsters
73:00 Use alignment as a hook, just don’t force it
76:00 Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what alignment the DM thinks an action is because the PC’s point of view should define it
82:00 Final thoughts
90:00 “Alignment isn’t important” — Myth busted, plausible or true?