thecrazedcow wrote:

I believe that in most cases the alignment system worked perfectly, and only held characters in a "straightjacket" which made sense to me. It helped to avoid outright silly and impossible ideas. Such as the paladin who did things that were obscene, or one day decided to take a level in barbarian for the rage ability.

Its in the very begining of description that alignments are tools for roleplaying, if your felt like you couldnt create a character who even loosely fit any of the alignments, then you select nuetral.

As for basing their opinion of someone on a know alignment spell, thats rather fair, as a person who has commited evil acts, or supports the laws of a land, will no doubt represent themselves as such. By removing alignments its another step towards allowing players to make characters that they can do whatever they wish with, how they feel at the moment, without reguard for the roleplaying aspect of how the character would react to a moment. If you dont have fun playing something with a strong personality or character, either play nuetral or WoW.

Ok, I really disagree with the idea that Know Alignment has no problems because that person should be portraying that alignment anyway. First of all, this is a roleplaying game, so let the players roleplay figuring it out instead of waving their hands and realizing they should kill that guy instead of doing the job he's trying to hire them for. Secondly, I can think of a lot of reasons why characters wouldn't necessarily act the way you would expect for their alignments. Evil people in particular might want to keep that hidden. Its kind of like whenever you see a killer, child molester, or other criminal caught on the news and the neighbors are like "Oh, I can't believe it. He was so nice. I never would have suspected he was a killer." Well no sh!t. If he acted like a killer, it wouldn't have taken so long to catch him. Even good characters might not always seem so. A paladin could live up to all the ideals of LG, but just be a rude bastard with an extremely abrasive personality.

As for the straitjacket, that's my biggest problem with the old alignment system. Alignments are a good guide, especially for new players, but thats where it should end. Older editions were especially harsh on this, where you could lose XP for it.

That thing you mentioned about players without alignment restrictions being able to play their characters however they want, yeah that's called roleplaying. If your group is honestly that bad that you need to force them to play a certain way, then maybe you need to find a new group, because either they aren't really roleplaying, or you are forcing your expectations on them.

And yes, thanks for comparing neutral characters to WoW. Because you know, only LG or CE can ever be interesting.

bone_naga wrote:

First off, how is it contradicting the core rules?

By the Core rules, the death penalty is automatically and inherently Evil (a point that I've supported on innumerable occasions in this very thread and incidentally has never been debunked). That's a contradiction right there.

Secondly, it is a SUPPLEMENT put out by WotC, and reflects how they view alignment.

Emphasis added by me. It's optional material. It also doesn't specifically say that it overrules Core (like, say, the Fiendish Codices specifically say they do), thus it doesn't overrule Core.

EDIT: Looking over it, the book doesn't even support your case. It preaches on and on about respecting life and how an Evil act is always an Evil act, no matter the consequences. It says that you must always accept an enemy's surrender, no matter how often he plots to escape, or how many people he hurts (and there was even a clause about treating him humanely, i.e. not hurting him or turning him over to authorities that would torture or kill him). It seems Calron here wasn't being completely honest, but at least he led me to check it out and find another instance of hypocrisy and contradiction in the book.

EscherEnigma wrote:

As your whole argument boils down to one short line about respect for life (or something like that) and how you can't possibly respect life if you accept that one person must die for the greater good if they've done enough evil in their life...

"One short line" doesn't exactly describe it, now does it? It is, in fact, the single most important "one short line" of them all. It is what defines the alignment. Without it, everything else is meaningless.

Plus, there was another "one short line" that I used. It was the part where Evil debases life for fun or profit (both are the only [S]reasons excuses for the death penalty to be carried out; any other reason holds no water, logically or morally speaking).

You might not realize it, but those two lines make for a powerful, if not irrefutable, argument, considering the very nature of the death penalty.

Yeah, I don't see the contradiction.

It's still there.

I see you imposing your own views on the rules that are loose enough to support most any view.

Am I? I don't think you know any of my views.

The problem is that you're trying to argue that your interpretation is the *only* interpretation.

The burden of proof is on you to show that there exists a contradictory, valid interpretation of the text if you want to keep claiming that.