some sort of narrative designator for a character’s beliefs is pretty much what I want from alignment. I don’t view it as a burden, but an aid in fleshing out your character. And I’ve never been in a game where any alignment penalty was ever an issue, nor ever felt that was needed. The point is to help develop an interesting character with consistent motivation, not to hobble play.
The one dimensional thing in 4 was pretty useless.
Hijack to describe my favorite initiative system (used in, among other games, the most excellent TimeWatch, a time-travelling detective game due to be released ANY YEAR NOW KEVIN):
-Combat begins with whoever makes combat begin. You can say, “Screw this, I whack him in the schnozz with the fire extinguisher,” and that’s the first thing that happens in combat. Or the GM can say that.
-Whoever is acting gets the Action Device (like, an hourglass, or a paperweight, or a poker chip, or whatever). This shows who’s going.
-Begin your turn by handing the Action Device to whoever you want–the GM, or another player–as long as that person hasn’t gone yet this turn. That tells them to figure out what the hell they’re going to do, because they’re up next.
-Once everyone has gone, whoever has the Action Device chooses who goes first in the next round. And so on.
This system removes a boring die roll. It keeps GMs from having complicated initiative orders (Jim, Mary, Frank, you’re delaying; Gary, you’re readying an action; Lisa and Joan, you’ve rolled the same initiative, who’s got the higher modifier?"). And it adds some tactical choices.
Yeah, it means a lot of time you can force the bad guys to go last in a round. But here’s the wrinkle: if they survive to the end of the round, they can also go FIRST in the next round, and sometimes you can pull off some real cheese by getting to go twice in a row without interruption.
I like the system a lot, and it’s easily adapted to almost any other game.
And in another tangent… This is from a political thread. Note the d&d reference and alignments. 
I haven’t played it, but the reviews made me consider trying out the similarly named Mouse Guard:
See, if all it is is “an aid in fleshing out your character” I feel like it tends to fall by the wayside, except in those “Hey, would you really do that, you’re supposed to be Lawful Good” almost-penalty moments. And if you were playing by the rules back in The Day, you actually lost XP if you changed alignments, which definitely made them into something of a straightjacket.
Why is it one dimensional? It still has pretty much all the same implications as the old system, for me. And if it’s just a way to help define your character, it doesn’t really need to be a rigid two-axis system?
Holy crap, anytime now, buddy. -_-
Yeah. This concept has been floating around for a while. It’s occasionally called “Popcorn initiative” but I have no idea why.
Mouse Guard is SUPER GOOD. I placed it in my recommendations list further up for a reason. 
Here’s what’s awesome about Mouse Guard:
Beliefs, Instincts, and Goals:
Beliefs are your alignment substitute. The player writes a single statement about what their character BELIEVES. “Build, do not destroy.” “Rules are to be followed to the letter.” “Swift action now is better than perfect action later.” “The place of the Guard is in the wild, not in the settlements.” or whatever. And the player gets a reward at the end of session if they played their belief. Or if they dramatically played against it.
Instincts are basically a free action. “Draw my sword at the first sign of trouble.” “Check the weather every morning.” “Always have an escape route in mind.” “Always protect the Tenderpaw.” and so on. Write one down, and your character can be counted upon to do that thing. Even if you don’t necessarily say it. And you are also rewarded for playing them.
Goals are short term objectives - they’re expected to change every session. “Impress the patrol leader on this mission.” “Get the mail safely to Barkstone.” “Find a good souvenir for my daughter.” “keep my patrolmates safe while we explore the burrow.” You are rewarded for working towards your goal, and also for achieving it.
Setting: Let’s face it, it’s pretty awesome to be mice with swords, and the game is full of good stuff that reinforces your smallness in a hostile world. Whether that’s the Natural Order scale, that tells you “Hey, a lot of animals are just TOO BIG for you to kill in a straight up fight. You’ll have to settle for driving it off unless you want to do some crazy science or something.” or the fact that the weather is one of the four types of obstacles.
Resolution mechanics - very codified and unified. It’s always a dice pool of d6’s based on your skill, with 1-3 being “snakes” and 4-6 being “successes”, and a clear system for determining how many successes are needed for a task. There’s also a more intricate conflict system that works like a sort of strategic rock/paper/sissors. Also, the concept of Circles and Resources. The game doesn’t track money, but instead you make a resources check to see if you can get what you need. It’s extremely elegant.
Strongly recommend Mouse Guard, though it’s a lot further from D&D than Dungeon World is, for obvious reasons.
For anyone who actually cares about the D20 “argument” from earlier, there’s a pretty good answer on the topic HERE.
Like it’s a straightjacket to be true to yourself in general? Naw, it’s a useful way to think about human nature, and thus about the nature of your character. And players share the job of narrative development with the DM.
I agree that the “beliefs” you describe in Mouseguard can serve a similar purpose. Having them be completely free-form puts a little more burden on the players’ creativity than having a set alignments out-of-the-box, but gives a lot of flexibility, of course.
Because there are just 5 steps on one axis. (chaotic evil, evil, neutral, good, lawful good). Having only one axis is pretty much the definition of “one dimensional”. And two of those are barely playable – it’s generally problematic to have evil player characters. A really good player can carry it off, but most can’t. Certainly it would be rare to find a kid who could do that. Whereas the interplay between lawful and chaotic and characters, or between good and neutral characters, can be quite rich, and lots of people can play those well.
p.s. In real life I am currently engaged in a conflict that at it’s heart is due by my being neutral good and the other party being lawful neutral.
But people usually don’t fit into tidy little boxes, and people are almost never really consistent. That’s the problem with penalties for changing alignment. It’s bizarre to me that if someone comes to the conclusion that, say, the belief they were raised on that adhering to the spirit of the law is just as important as helping people is problematic under certain circumstances and they might be more interested in helping people and less interested in upholding someone else’s idea of the best way to do that (i.e. transitioning from Lawful Good to Neutral or Chaotic Good) that they should get slammed with an XP penalty? How is this character not staying true to themselves? I think you are oversimplifying. Which is unfortunately what alignment tends to cause, in my experience. And the penalties involved mean that people are essentially locked in - if someone is having a GREAT debate with another character, but neither side is basically ALLOWED to admit the other is right, because that would mean alignment change and a big XP hit, how does this help roleplaying?
Yes, it’s definitely important to work with the GM and create a good Belief, but fortunately, if you discover that your belief isn’t working, or isn’t producing interesting results, or isn’t what you really want your character to be, or if your character changes their mind for some reason, there’s no penalty for changing it.
I think you’re being reductive here. Is “Lawful good” simply “more good” than non-lawful good? I don’t think that necessarily follows. I think what we have here is just to realization that either someone believes laws are important as a means towards Good, or they aren’t. The distinction between “No, F*ck your laws, I’ll do what I want.” vs people who just say “I’m just looking for the best way to help people and don’t care if it’s lawful or not.” is not an especially useful one in my mind. This is the sort of nuance that should be represented in play.
The point of the alignment system is not just for PCs. And honestly, I think an equivalent-to-slightly-larger portion of the “old” alignments were unplayable. Chaotic Neutral is like the worst alignment ever. 
Sorry, are we judging things based on how easy they are to roleplay now? I wasn’t aware that was a criteria.
I’ve been playing Heroica with my 4-year-old. It’s a Lego game in which you build the board, and your pieces are Lego microfigs. In the case of Heroica, the board you build is in the style of an RPG-like map. It’s a lot like a Lego version of the old Hero Quest game. He understands the concepts of the game – movement, dice resolution, the use of accessory items and artifacts. I figure that with the set up, I can eventually move him to using the same tiles and figures for a more D&D style game, even possibly 5e, with certain things dumbed down for introductory purposes. Of course, I could just start with something like Microlite d20 in the first place, but he’s often asking me about what the monsters in the 5e Monster Manual do.
Maybe I’ll wait until he can add numbers with a sum greater than 10.
Meanwhile, can anyone comment on the game No Thank You, Evil?
That’s a sweetie. Maybe just a bit complex for beginners, but it has a lot of solid elegance. You can do really good things with it.
(A friend is reffing a campaign right now using the old original Marvel Superheroes system. I’m playing Doctor Strange, and loving every minute of it!)
The “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” game is also pretty good. Nice and introductory, easy to get into for new players. A good common-sense game design.
“Big Eyes Small Mouth” is fun, especially if your players have manga/anime exposure.
Of course? Isn’t that the point of any RPG? The facilitate role playing in an interesting narrative environment?
I guess we have completely different approaches to these things.
I don’t think the approach is that different, I just think the standards are. Though this whole discussion is getting really muddled, because most of your assertions seem to apply equally to the 4E system and the traditional alignment system, so I’m not sure if you’re arguing for the superiority of the traditional system, or for the merits of alignment in general. It IS the point of an RPG, but it’s not, necessarily, the point of alignment, which is what we were discussing.
That said, I think players should be allowed to try something difficult. You… seem to think that since Evil alignments are challenging that they… shouldn’t count? Or something? This is one of those places where I’m losing track of your argument - are you asserting that the 4E system doesn’t have even non-Evil alignments? I’m not really sure that that is a valuable metric though - you could, if you wanted, invent a whole bunch of additional categories, but I don’t think the number of categories is what matters, so much as whether those categories useful capture the options.
Original D&D alignments vs 4e:
Lawful Good -> Lawful good
Neutral Good -> Good
Chaotic Good -> Also “Good” the distinction between this and NG is not large.
Lawful Neutral -> Okay, this one pretty much gets lost. It can often be kindof a jerky alignment, if that’s a concern?
True Neutral -> Unaligned. Same difference. “I do what I want.” Often a difficult alignment.
Chaotic Neutral -> Gone, and good riddance. If we’re using the “difficult to do properly” metric, then the removal of this alignment is the single biggest boon of the 4E alignment system.
Lawful Evil -> Evil
Neutral Evil -> Chaotic Evil; The difference here, much like the difference between Neutral and Chaotic good, is not particularly large.
Chaotic Evil -> Chaotic Evil
Of those, yes, the evil alignments are hard to play in a party (as is Chaotic Neutral and, sometimes, Lawful Neutral. Heck, to listen to people on internet message boards, so can Lawful good because it interferes with people’s ability to be jerky murderhobos.) But that’s… kindof irrelevant. If you want to play a party of heroes, saying “No evil characters” is a longstanding tradition, even among experienced players who could probably be counted on to play evil characters well.
But that’s glossing over things too; The alignment system isn’t (supposed to be) just for PCs. It’s also codified into the world, because you can literally magically affect someone based on their alignment. So… no, the whole point of alignment is not to encourage roleplay. You can use it that way, but it’s an awkward tool, because it grew out of the assumption that Law and Chaos (and later, Good and Evil) were literal, primal forces in the universe and would PUNISH you if you changed allegiances.
This is why I don’t really care for alignment - as a tool for supporting roleplaying, it’s weird and kludgey. And yes, contains many things that are difficult. The best way you can use it, in my opinion, is as a descriptor, that helps people think about their characters in a certain way, but people need to be careful not to use it to fuel “I’m just playing my alignment” jerkishness, and it doesn’t actually offer any incentives. You can write down “Neutral Good” on your character sheet and it tells you basically nothing about the character other than they will probably try to help other people.
Oh man, that can be so much fun though! My favorite character, a trickster cleric, played CN to the hilt.
-Started a secret society dedicated to bringing down institutions good and evil. Motto: “The angelic hosts and the hordes of hell both trample the peasant’s garden.”
-A town needed evacuation before an oncoming danger; some folks were reluctant. His approach: tell everyone that children were gonna evacuate. Adults could stay or go, but if they stayed he didn’t mind telling them they were fucked and he wouldn’t stick his neck out for them. Also he didn’t have the time or patience not to kill any adult who got in the way of evacuating the kids, he didn’t care if they were the parents.
I think folks often play CN as “motivations? We don’t need no stinking motivations!” That’s boring and dumb. But played with internal consistency, it can be a lot of fun.
Sure. And most people play Evil as “is an asshole to everyone, all the time” which is annoying and dumb, but played with some nuance, it can be a lot of fun.
Though honestly I’m not sure “killing anyone who got in the way of evacuating kids” doesn’t verge on evil.
But this is why judging something on “how hard is that roleplay well?” is not necessarily a good evaluation of its merits.
I object to this categorization. “I do what I want” is chaotic.
Neutral neutral accepts gray and even embraces it, thinking that there’s a place for people to misbehave, and a place for them to behave. And it thinks that there’s a place for social cohesion and a place for individualistic freedom.
True neutral will actively work to produce a world of greys and compromises.
\m/ LONG LIVE TRUE NEUTRAL! \m/
I don’t agree with your last sentence: consider the OP’s question, certainly you want something on the easier end, for the same reason that when I introduce my daughter to math, I don’t start with quadratic equations.
And yeah, my goal with that character was to make a lot of morally questionable decisions with the central theme of disdaining established authority: thus, seeing kids endangered by their parents’ obstinacy, I took the kids’ side. The fact that the new boss (me) was perilously close to the old boss was a feature, not a bug, of the character’s fun :).
That actually happens to be the alignment of one of my brothers, Mr. I Would Repeal The Law Of Gravity If I Could. Mr Lawful Good and I (Good Lawful, which is not quite the same) have many times felt an urge to bash him about the head with something heavy and solid, such as the complete works of Robert Ludlum in large print hardcover. Or a planet.
His wife is Legal Neutral. They haven’t exploded yet.
Technically, it’s not. Chaotic is supposed to deliberately choose things that buck laws and order. Neutral is supposed to make decisions without heed for law or chaos. This, to me, is why the chaotic vs neutral difference is so troublesome - where does the difference lie between “I don’t care about laws” and “I break laws on purpose”? Is that a worth differentiator?
Or maybe that’s not even what it means, since Sage Rat seems to have a different idea about True Neutral. Either way, alignment is clearly failing us here because few people even agree on what most of them mean.
But the EXISTENCE of quadratic equations doesn’t make math less suitable for your daughter. Additionally, I didn’t really get the feeling that puzzlegal was basing her dislike of 4E’s alignment set on its suitability for new players. That may be what the thread overall is about, but I don’t think that was the basis of that particular complaint.
In any event, I’d actually suggest that having fewer alignments is easier for new players, because there’s less to keep track of/differentiate between (See: Neutral vs Chaotic, above) - since both the 4E and non-4E alignment systems have alignments that are not suitable for inexperienced roleplayers, I think it’s a wash at best. And considering how difficult Chaotic Neutral is to play properly, I’d even go so far as to suggest that the 4E alignment system has a higher percentage of “beginner friendly” alignments - 60% (Lawful good, good, Unaligned vs Evil, Chaotic Evil) vs 56% (LG,NG,CG,LN,TN vs CN,LE,NE,CE).
So to recap:
[ul]
[li]Alignment is an awkward tool for encouraging RP because the only options you have are for it to be strictly descriptive, or to be a stick to hit players with when they roleplay “wrong” (See: XP penalties for alignment change).[/li][li]Alignment is awkward in general because people have a hard time agreeing on what many of them even represent.[/li][li]4E’s alignment system is no worse for beginners than the old system and may be better, since it trims down the number of choices and the degree of fine differentiation required, but otherwise suffers from all the same problems. Though it does give you an “opt out” option via “unaligned”[/li][li]There are interesting alternatives to alignment in other systems that don’t fall prey to the top two problems.[/li][li]Dungeon World sidesteps many of these issues by tying alignment directly to a behavior and a reward.[/li][/ul]
I agree, my objection to the 4e version of alignment isn’t that it’s harder to play, it’s that it feels neutered.
It’s an interesting observation that lawfulness fundamentally different from goodness. This is a useful observation that many people learned from d&d and took to their real lives.
I agree that a d&d world will include NPCs of every alignment, and i think this adds depth and interest.
But really, i think that Airk and i just have a different idea of how to play RPGs in general.