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.

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.

You and my DH share a brain on this.

Something else I like about 4E: The character sheet.

I've never found a single version of the 3.x character sheet that didn't wind up having large swaths of unused or poorly used space. Even on the sheets I like.

The 4E character sheet is seems to be a thing of beauty, and because of the mechanics of the game, offers very little wasted space. And more importantly, most of the things that seem to need to be grouped or sided together together are. That's a claim made without having actually seen the sheet in action, but just at a glance, it appears to be very well laid out.

A question to all who possess 4E (I have not read it enough to have a well formed thought on it yet): Do we think it might be possible to run a 4E game play-by-email?

If so, I would propose a Buffista PbEm game of 4E. I think that the very nature of such a game would force us into heavier roleplaying territory, and thus put that very aspect of the system to the test.

I would offer to run such a game, but I do not have possession of the DMG or MM, and am not really planning to, so I think I actually lack the proper tools to make such an offer.