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.

Not wrong. There's no way I'd try this sort of conversation on the WotC boards, for instance.

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.

Yeah, I have to agree. In the words of Richard Cheese, "Look, either close 'em or spread 'em. But not this halfway crap."

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.

I like that rule. I may introduce it into my Eberron game.

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.

This is one of the reasons I like the Eberron setting. The gods may or may not actually exist, and clerics can be any alignment. My Eberron party is about to hunt down an evil cleric of the Silver Flame. He was a Thrane war hero with a seething hatred of Karrnath and its undead, and regards the peace treaty as a capitulation. He wants to rekindle war in a crusade against Karrnath, and to that end, he is willing to use captured Karrnathi undead to commit atrocities in Sharn, Breland's largest city, then destroying the undead. (The sadistic delight he finds himself taking in the deaths of the unworthy Brelish seals his alignment change.) Anyway, if the PCs do badly at solving the whodunnit, they may face his pet wraith in a temple of the Silver Flame, which he has Desecrated through the power of the Flame.

Anyway, the guy is utterly convinced of the rightness and necessity of his actions to destroy the greater evil, and believes the Flame smiles on him. In a Greyhawk campaign (for instance), I'd have to force an unnoticed conversion to an evil deity to make this work.

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.

Is this per Bertrand Russell's arguments against God? I really struggled with the relation between God and good when I left the FAC. (A uni course on the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch and Rai Gaita helped me sort out my position.) I love these kinds of questions. (And the Ontological Argument for God, and questions of theodicy, and a bunch of other stuff.)

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?

I don't know, but I'm willing to try.

BT, you want to run the game, I'm in, especially if it's Eberron.

It would be amusing to have a DM half the world away.

Well, okay, probably. I probably shouldn't assume I have the time without knowing more.

BT, you want to run the game, I'm in, especially if it's Eberron.

Heh. I'd rather be a player in this one, since I'm alreday running a campaign, but we'll see who else is interested.

I'd give it a try, but the PBEM D&D I've done in the past hasn't really worked. And I'm concerned we'd need a chess-like annotation system, with each player keeping a battlemat set up next to his or her computer.

Do you guys remember the alignment-changing portal in Tomb of Horrors? We played that a couple years ago (there was another game wrapped around it, one in which you had to play a Gamer Type). Once the paladin figured out what it did, he started shoving other party members thru, starting with the thief. It got ugly.

I'd be willing to run it, but I'd need to pick up the DMG and MM.

Which I'd be willing to do, just to play with Buffistas.

I have some concerns about playing by email too, as Raq expressed. No rush. I'll keep thinking about it and consider picking up the other books.

Okay, thinking about this further, I'm definitely willing to run.

I've run a couple of 3.5 play by post games. They each ran for about six months or so, before breaking up. Now in that six months, each party did a large amount of really fantastic roleplaying, and one combat.

The combats were complex, and involved me posting several hand drawn, scale battle maps. And yeah, after a time, I did add coordinate letters and numbers for precision.

So, I'm not talking a major campaign or anything. Just a little campaign-let, maybe.

I may be able to borrow a copy of the other two books.

And...

I have an idea in mind.

This is one of the reasons I like the Eberron setting. The gods may or may not actually exist, and clerics can be any alignment.

Yeah, I only have the basic Eberron book, so that's as far as I've explored the world, but that was something I *really* liked about the setting. I think i could have gotten in to Eberron, but at this point, I'm thankful I never did.

While I bought a metric buttload of 3.5 books, spending way more money than I think I ever want to admit, I was never stuck playing or running an Eberron or Forgotten Realms campaign, so I like to think of the extra thousands of dollars I saved on 3.x books.

Is this per Bertrand Russell's arguments against God? I really struggled with the relation between God and good when I left the FAC. (A uni course on the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch and Rai Gaita helped me sort out my position.) I love these kinds of questions. (And the Ontological Argument for God, and questions of theodicy, and a bunch of other stuff.)

While I have read some Russell, I wasn't consciously channeling him. I found him interesting, although he occasionally made me want grab him by the collar and rattle him around.

would you all be willing to have a bystander for the game? I'm too much of a newbie, but I would like to watch teh masters play.

that was likely a rude thing to ask, actually. But its early yet.

Oh, not rude at all sox.

If this game happens, I was planning on posting regular updates here in thread for the enjoyment of all. Right now the game is still pretty tentative, though.