Editing Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (section)

===Alignment===
As everyone knows, [[alignment]] is one of D&D's oldest [[skub|raging arguments for which no peace can be given]], right up there alongside "do [[dwarf]] women have beards?", and more virtual and literal ink has been spilled talking about the "proper" definition of alignment and how it interacts with classes that have mandated alignment requirements.  To this end, 4e made two rather deep cuts to the sacred cow:

First, classes would no longer have alignment restrictions of any kind.  [[Bard]]s, [[barbarian]]s, and [[skald|bardbarian]]s could be lawful, [[monk]]s could be chaotic, and [[paladin]]s could be whatever alignment they damn well pleased without losing all their class features.  This got some murmuring at first, but it eventually died down, hence its survival into [[Dungeons_%26_Dragons_5th_Edition|next edition]].  After all, [[Eberron|at least one campaign setting]] had similarly relaxed many of these rules, and it didn't immediately collapse from there.

Second, and much more controversially, the design team stripped out more than half of the existing alignments, collapsing together "chaotic and neutral good" into just "good," "lawful and neutral evil" into just "evil," and all three neutral alignments into "unaligned."  Their arguments for these were, essentially, that the existing alignment system promoted debate and hurt feelings, and that a certain stratum of player saw these alignments as straitjackets restricting characterization rather than tools through which to understand it.  And it hearkened back to the very olden days, when alignment was a spectrum instead of a grid, thus: Law - Good - Neutral - Evil - Chaos.  

It should be added here that there was ''some'' justification for doing this, although it was done rather poorly. Chaotic good was always a slippery alignment to get right (you usually wound up with somebody who was much more chaotic than good, or much more good than chaotic) so collapsing it together with neutral good into a unified alignment of "cares about doing the right thing without necessarily following the rules slavishly" helps ease the problem, and if you're removing that, why not go for the poorly defined line between lawful evil and neutral evil as well, since both similarly often seemed to end up in the same pot of "evil, but has some personal rules about it"? Lawful good and chaotic evil, on the other hand, both had their own very well defined identities completely separate from generic "good" and "evil"; lawful good had specific definitions of what "good" was, which the other "good" alignments did not, while ordinary evil does evil for self-interest rather than pleasure, as chaotic evil supposedly did. On top of that it can charitably be seen as a return to the original Alignments before they where expanded into a system in AD&D back in the days were Gygax had the PC's be on the side of law and order against the evil chaos of monsters

Everything might have worked better if they left in the lawful neutral and chaotic neutral alignments as "lawful" and "chaotic" (both of which had much firmer identities than neutral good and neutral evil). But, there was a complication: "chaotic neutral" is one of the most famous problematic sacred cows in the alignment system, infamous for being abused by the same sort of "LULSORANDUMB" players who give [[Malkavian]]s a bad name, treated as "carte blanche" to do whatever the fuck the player wanted without actually writing "evil" on their character sheet, or otherwise used to enable anti-social, anti-group behavior behind alignment as a shield.  Indeed, many suspect that this whole process was initially kicked off by a desire to remove "chaotic neutral" from the alignment system altogether for exactly this reason.  

Unfortunately, this was very much a "trying to please everyone, and succeeding in pleasing no one" scenario.  People who liked the old alignment system hated the new one, seeing it, fairly or unfairly (and there are some eloquent defenses of it in the PHB) as a dumbed-down, stripped down version of the old one, tearing out more than half the options and leaving nothing to really replace them.  People who hated the old alignment system continued to be unhappy with this one, since it was, after all, ''still'' an alignment system, only with even fewer options.  And even the people who liked it (for indeed, the fractious nature of alignment-based discussions all-but guarantees there are people who see no difference between neutral and chaotic good, or lawful and chaotic neutral) got to get blasted by the heat of the raging flame war this choice unleashed.

Worse, [[Planescape| a setting that was somewhat-popular with the indie crowd that liked using the game to explore ideas more than actually playing it]] was pretty-tightly tied to the traditional alignment system, and completely-revamping the entire alignment grid from the ground up necessitated plucking it up by the roots after the last edition had instead been content to subject it to malign neglect. And a variety of traditionally-friendly monsters were revamped into evil-or-at-least-dickish ones under the internally-consistent-but-externally-dubious logic that everything in the Monster Manual should exist to get killed, and putting in monsters that don't was just wasting everyone's time, leading to accusations that the alignment system was drastically revamped primarily to justify putting "it's okay to kill this, really" alignments next to as many critters as possible. 

It was ultimately undone in the transition back to [[Dungeons_%26_Dragons_5th_Edition|5e]], along with several of the changes to the setting cosmology 4e made, and, as with many 4e design choices, leaves the impression that, perhaps, the design team's vision might have been better served by just abandoning the old ''D&D'' system of alignment altogether rather than trying to tie it to the property.