Without alignements this game make no sense.

[kigraa]

My priestess of SHAR, godess of the night (use to be lawful EVIL), is using the "blood of lathander." a 3.5Ed lawful good artifact.....

Elminster (once neutral Good) in my camp is ok with a NPC undead 2 feet away from him......i love the game but my god, for RPG extremist like me...its hard to take it seriously...

[alan0n]

Now admittedly I'm not a 5e guy, so I'm fairly ignorant of the actual mechanics of the tabletop version of 5e. I have only exclusively played 2.5 or 3.

Was the removal of alignments a Larian thing or a wotc thing?

[Moonbane]

its wotc that is moving away from Alignments, which is a good thing. Helps making the world much more nuanced.

[Ren O'the Blade]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Draken:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Calv:

What is actually stopping a vampire from being a Paladin?

What is stopping a vampire from being lawful good?

If a Paladin is carrying out his duties and hunting a nest of vampires, and during this task he is turned into one. Before he has taken any actions as a vampire, does his alignment "magically" change from lawful good to evil? Does his deity immediately smite him or strip his powers?

According to the lore if you turn a player into a vampire, that character should immediately become an NPC. Even if the player continues to control the character, the character now has an evil personality. Why?

Because Vampires are undead. And in DnD all undead basically run on evil. Their life force is negative energy. It's literally the anti-thesis of life.
That's why all undeads are evil. The intrinsically hate life and want to eradicate it, especially intelligent one.
It's also why it's considered an evil act to raise undeads. You are creating creatures that want to destroy all life and objectively make the world a worse place.

A paladin is about challenging positive energy. Even if you somehow make a Vampire that is good, channeling positive energy just would turn them into dust.

You must not have read many of the books, I read at least one book where a follower of lathander was a vampire. In this book he was sent to Ravenloft and he was not evil and Baelnorn are elven liches and they are good aligned. Not all undead is evil because it is undead. Just the mindless ones or very limited intellignece.

[Aliceskysareblue]

wizards of the coasts is doing away with the old alignment system, and after playing bg3, Im glad they did, human are complex and so is morality, I found the alignment system in wotr to be rather frustrating and inconsistant,

in my opinion the old alignment system limit role play, if I want to playoathbreaker as unrepentant and cruel then fine or altnerativly maybe I want to just be a anti-hero or a darker charecter.

dnd 5e sets the oathbreaker as an evil npc class, I like that larian has a different take on the class.

[Merque]

I agree with OP.

The removal of this system was only because of some fantasy-inclusivity BS..kinda makes the entirety of Drizzt's anthology point- and meaningless.

[Ren O'the Blade]

The argument for having the alignment in the game, was to help you make decisions that will or will not effect your reputation with your allies, there should also be ways through dialogue to change them. It is pretty clear Astarion is evil, most likely neutral evil or possibly chaotic netural, Laezel lawfull evil, Shadowheart is a mixed bag, she favors a lot of kindness and may be lawful neutral, to follow her gods tenets without really being evil, I agree scrapping the alignment system in 5e probably made for better role play, but in the CRPG games, it still helps to have it on your companions.

[GrandMajora]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Draken:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Calv:

What is actually stopping a vampire from being a Paladin?

What is stopping a vampire from being lawful good?

If a Paladin is carrying out his duties and hunting a nest of vampires, and during this task he is turned into one. Before he has taken any actions as a vampire, does his alignment "magically" change from lawful good to evil? Does his deity immediately smite him or strip his powers?

According to the lore if you turn a player into a vampire, that character should immediately become an NPC.

Which is why 2e Pathfinder is much better, as they recently made Skeletons, Zombies, Ghosts, Mummies, Ghouls, Vampires and Liches available as full fledged player character options.

But the reason why vampires would be considered evil, is because they are undead. The Undead are animated and sustained through the use of Negative Energy, which is the antithesis of Positive Energy.

Undead creatures are filled with a hatred for the living on a fundamental level that runs throughout the entire core of their being. Only an incredibly strong willpower can fight back against this instinctual loathing, and I think we can all agree that Astarion is not such a person.

[GrandMajora]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Moonbane:

its wotc that is moving away from Alignments, which is a good thing. Helps making the world much more nuanced.

Why must people insist on the world being nuanced and complicated? Why can't they find satisfaction in just switching off their brains for a while and accepting the situation at face value?

Cartoonishly evil villains may not be realistic, but they're a hell of a lot more fun and memorable than somebody who just needs therapy and a good support group to help set them on the right path.

[Draken]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Ren O'the Blade:

You must not have read many of the books, I read at least one book where a follower of lathander was a vampire. In this book he was sent to Ravenloft and he was not evil and Baelnorn are elven liches and they are good aligned. Not all undead is evil because it is undead. Just the mindless ones or very limited intellignece.

First about the novels, yeah, I wouldn't really consider a lot of them canon, as quite a few writers tend to have a very limited idea how exactly everything in a such a big setting works. There are memes about 40k novel writers getting things very wrong. There is also the possibility that he has an incredible will power, an artifact or direct divine help. Not something that should be easy to replicate by a player.

Second the Baelnorn. They are very different form the normal liches who use negative energy in their lich-ritual.
No one knows exactly how the Baelnorn ritual works. Some of the Baelnorn are even created with a divine ritual supplied by the Elven Pantheon. And none of those have any connection with negative energy or undead. So they might not actually be undead and simply share a lot of traits with liches.

[Zing]

Character alignment for NPCs would be useful to predict how they will react in situations where you want to be evil or want to be good. Its annoying when you pick a evil choice and Gale disapproves of it.

[Take0verMars]

Its been a bit since I ran or played 5e but if memory servers for the most part alignment went out the window. There are very few items that care or interact with your alignment in any cool or meaningful way. It sucks, i always found the restrictions that comes with alignment and race bonus interesting.

[GrandMajora]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Zing:

Character alignment for NPCs would be useful to predict how they will react in situations where you want to be evil or want to be good. Its annoying when you pick a evil choice and Gale disapproves of it.

Yeah, it's even more frustrating, once you realize that you can choose to play as the Origin character and make choices which are radically different from what the game perceives as their default or 'canon' behavior.

Having an alignment spectrum marker would at least give us some level of indication regarding how the story expects that character to be played. So if we want to get the 'authentic experience', we know where our priorities lie.

[Squint]

Baldurs Gate The Sword Coast Chronicles. Look it up, its 3.5 but its 15 years of modded perfection,

[Take0verMars]

Oprindeligt skrevet af GrandMajora:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Moonbane:

its wotc that is moving away from Alignments, which is a good thing. Helps making the world much more nuanced.

Why must people insist on the world being nuanced and complicated? Why can't they find satisfaction in just switching off their brains for a while and accepting the situation at face value.

Cartoonishly evil villains may not be realistic, but they're a hell of a lot more fun and memorable than somebody who just needs therapy and a good support group to help set them on the right path.

heck id argue cartoonishly evil villains are realistic, they're just far less successful than in fantasy. Id even argue having an alignment system doesnt make it less nuanced. I'm pretty sure people who say it allows for a more nuanced game hasnt really tried to use the alignment system and make it nuanced.

[GrandMajora]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Take0verMars:

heck id argue cartoonishly evil villains are realistic, they're just far less successful than in fantasy. Id even argue having an alignment system doesnt make it less nuanced. I'm pretty sure people who say it allows for a more nuanced game hasnt really tried to use the alignment system and make it nuanced.

Such a situation was addressed in Wrath of the Righteous, in which an angel explains to the player that even though his kind are ultimately motivated by the principles of order and goodness, they do not unanimously agree on the best way to uphold those principles.

Thus, even though planar creatures share the same alignment, they can still come into conflict with each other as they debate how best to follow that alignment.