Alignment
Alignment is a way of quantifying Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos in Dungeons and Dragons. People, creatures, spells, objects, and places can have an alignment. Alignment has spawned more debates and motivational posters then anything else in D&D.
Alignment threads now belong in /co/ after we swapped them for Empowered. Post alignment threads at risk of sagebombing.
Some argue that taking alignment seriously in any way entails failure because it tries to simplify and categorise something philosophers, sociologists, theologists and psychologists have been debating for thousands of years with no tangible results. A famous example shows the goddamn Batman in various periods of his comic and his actions and words correspond to pretty much all existing alignments. Recent developments in D&D (Eberron, 4th Edition) have been relaxing and ignoring the old rigid structure.
Others argue that those people don't understand fuck about how the two-axis alignment system is meant to work and that using an inconsistent comic book character who has been written by dozens of different people over the course of his existence to try and demonstrate that the system fails is completely missing the point.
Debate continues.
Alignment in 4th Edition
In one of the more controversial changes between 3rd and 4th edition, the entire alignment axis was changed drastically. Instead of the classic 3x3 grid which has persisted since the early days of D&D, the alignment system was changed to five positions: lawful good, unaligned, evil, and chaotic evil. Evil and good encompass the axed lawful evil and chaotic good alignments, while unaligned covers everything that was morally neutral in previous editions. As with many of the changes implemented in 4E, this has caused much heated, vigorous discussion about the subject.
