I want to be able to discuss it here, I want you and anyone else who doesn't like it to be able to discuss it here too.

Good! Because I want us both to be able to discuss it with each other! And pretty much everywhere else on the interwebs, this would involve dirty fighting and blood oaths, so it's nice to be able to have the 3E/4E conversation without it turning into personal attacks and jihads.

Oh, and I disagree with ditching LE as an alignment. What were the Nazis if not LE? But I like Unaligned.

They didn't ditch the underlying outlook, they just rolled it in with the rest of "Evil". That I don't mind, but I think they should've removed CE and LG while they were at it. I tend to think the alignment system proved to be more a source of always-edifying arguments in moral philosophy, and doesn't really seem to have added much to defining a character.

OI! I still have only read the character creation chapter, but what they did to alignment just bugs the crap out of me. I've long hated alignment, for many reasons, though I also understood its utility. My basic general solution to alignment is just to not use it.

4E seems to have tried to solve the problems by combining alignment with no-alignment to get the best of both worlds, but I find it to do exactly the opposite. The 4E alignment system is just a big mess that makes so much less sense than alignment as it existed before.

Also, for all their efforts to revamp alignment, it seems to me that, by leaving Lawful Good as an alignment choice, they've changed so much but done nothing at all to solve the "paladin-asshole straightjacket" problem that seems so rampant among paladin players.

(Plus, when your PHB falls apart on you, it's hard not to take that personally.)

Yeah right! I'm doing my best to not let the shit binding influence my opinion of the game itself, but it is just a big slap in the face. I've had the damned book less that 48 hours, and it's already partially unbound.

Well, we're going to lose power for a few hours today, while they replace our breaker box in preparation for rewiring our whole building to fully grounded outlets, so I'll have a few hours undistracted to read further in the book.

Just assure me that Stage 3 was profit.

I have no clue, because I bailed before Stage 1 was finished. When I asked someone later, I was merely the vanguard to a full scale exodus and the game fell apart completely.

Heh.

I was apparently thinking ahead. I have a pretty decent APC battery backup. If I remember correctly, the battery gave me about an hour or so of use, running my Dell desktop and a flat screen monitor (15 minutes with a CRT).

We just lost power in the house, and it will be out for about five hours or so.

The only things currently plugged into the battery? My Airport and the DSL modem.

Both our laptops are fully charged. I expect to be able to connect to the internet the enitre time I am without power today.

My basic general solution to alignment is just to not use it.

I can't remember if it was in Unearthed Arcana, Arcana Unearthed, or somewhere else, that I came across a rule for making alignment a percentage. Like, I'm 25% Chaotic and 45% Good. It was axial (25% != 75% Lawful, but a quarter of the way to the Perfectly Chaotic), so it was sort of "I'll be good about half the time, and the other half is whatever it is.

Then I dumped alignment entirely.

If I had to use alignment, it would be Good/Evil, without Law/Chaos. And even then there are problems. I've had several players who take actions I consider Evil, or at the very least Not Good, yet who swear on a stack of bibles they are Good.

Everyone thinks their motives are pure, right? Everyone's the hero of his own story.

The other solution I used for alignment was to rule that you could call yourself any alignment you wanted, without levels in an explicitly evil (or good) prestige class, humanoids and monstrous humanoids just do not register on detection spells, even if you are of evil alignment and conducting evil activities and thoughts at the time of the detection spells.

Basically, you needed to be an outsider, undead, dragon, aberration, or other explicitly evil (or good) kind of creature to be EVIL (or GOOD, or whatever) enough to register for detection spells. Thus, at least as far as alignment related spells worked, they still served their main function, but don't affect day to day life at all.

Everyone thinks their motives are pure, right? Everyone's the hero of his own story.

This.

When I play, I want to play and run games where anybody can use whatever justification they want for their actions, but the gods (and their spells) remain silent on the issue.

This is one of my main problems with any form of D&D and the way the cleric class functions. Just by nature of their existence, the game intrinsically, mechanically, defines gods as existing and taking sides.

Which I think is where my fundamental philosophical dislike of alignment comes in -- if the gods exist definitively, and good and evil is defined by the clear, bright teams of the gods, the concepts of good and evil become utterly meaningless and arbitrary.

if the gods exist definitively, and good and evil is defined by the clear, bright teams of the gods, the concepts of good and evil become utterly meaningless and arbitrary.

So you're saying that if both sides agree on what is good and evil, the terms "good" and "evil" are meaningless?

Or is it more that the LG Paladin destroying a village in the name of his god is just as evil as the LE Anti-Paladin torching another village?

(I see this as an interesting philosophical question, nothing more)

billytea, thank you for a well-written critical look at 4E. My opinions pretty much match yours, but you did a far better job than I could in getting it all down in a clear fashion.

Oh, Sean, I'm sorry about the binding - there are a number of reports of this happening unfortunately - but try not to take the rest of the game so personally. And remember where you see patronizing, the writers were probably just ensuring that things were clear for a newbie.

As for alignment, yeah, it's not the cleanest option they could have come up with, but I find what is there to be manageable.

Also, for all their efforts to revamp alignment, it seems to me that, by leaving Lawful Good as an alignment choice, they've changed so much but done nothing at all to solve the "paladin-asshole straightjacket" problem that seems so rampant among paladin players.

You're getting bent out of shape about an assumption. Alignment is no longer a requirement for any class, or any spell/power for that matter. The only alignment restriction for a Paladin is that he be the same alignment as his diety. In the game we're about to play I'm going to be an unaligned Paladin. He will be actually quite a mellow character.

If you can play an unaligned paladin, the 4E alignment rant is withdrawn.

if the gods exist definitively, and good and evil is defined by the clear, bright teams of the gods, the concepts of good and evil become utterly meaningless and arbitrary.

So you're saying that if both sides agree on what is good and evil, the terms "good" and "evil" are meaningless?

Or is it more that the LG Paladin destroying a village in the name of his god is just as evil as the LE Anti-Paladin torching another village?

Both. Plus, definitive proof of the gods renders the need for faith null and void. And for me, when you take away the need for faith, everything interesting about morals and ethics goes away.

Power is back. Yay. Now I can print some 4E character sheets and build out some characters. I'll have to take a short break for work this evening, but I really do want to work up some characters.

And there are things I like about the new edition. They are vastly outnumbered by the things I am not liking, and I think all of them can easily be grafted onto any other system, but there are things I like.

Example: the new rules for small characters. Much simpler and nicer.