i am not lacking expirience, ive seen it happen.
you can recommend people GURPS all day long, youll end up with number crunching one man army characters in the vein of pathfinder or youll end up with gimmicks.
Restrictions breed creativity. Too much freedom ends up with everything beeing just the same.
Ive seen it happen. the most fun ive had in any system is when players have restrictive roles and clear parts to play.
And honestly, yes. characters SHOULD act in certain ways.
Thats where the dilemma part comes on.
Beeing good should be hard.
beeing good should be playing the game on hardmode. Beeing lawfull good doubly so, no bending the rules because its convenient.
I think Pathfinder Kingmaker actually does this exactly right.
Moral relativism is boring.
Any culture in the real world has rules on one hand and virtues on the other.
Thigns you ought and things you ought not to do.
Especialy in a setting like DnD where there literaly are Aspect outer planes for those concepts, it would be ridiculous not to consider what is right and what is wrong, even if the players, with a modern framework, might not agree.
Stabbey: And thats how especialy the Law / Chaos axis works anyway.
Its a framewor a character agrees to.
>Moral relativism is inbuilt
you just discribed the opposit.
Changing your alignment isnt moral relativism. Doing morally reprehensible things and justifying them for yourself and not getting an alignment change would be moral relativism.
Saying "But its good because".
>killing drow children
Goblin slayer has been quoted so much that its basically another kind of cringe, but realy the show isnt wrong.
Kill the goblin babies.
Not because goblins are "always chaotic evil", DnD hasnt done that for a while (besides demons obviously), they are mostly chaotic evil.
but mostly, they are goblins. Goblins do goblin things, having less goblins is generaly a pretty good thing for any Human.
Drow are another case entierly, they are a magical race created from a divine curse, nowhere else is it more justifiable.
a drow isnt nurtured by society to be Evil alone. They start Evil due to their nature, and their society makes em worse.
A Drow needs to consciously make the descision to be good.
Now, you could say you can try to raise the drow children to be good.
but for a high level Paladin whose raiding a drow city, killing the drow kids is probably the more practicable appraoch.
Gygax would certainly agree that this is within the bounds of the alignment restriction.
Now if you DM the game , you can decide that this is evil and the paladin needs to take another action.
Just because "Evil" exists doesnt mean that Good character can kill the evil creatures withotu reproach, well, in modern DnD it doesnt apepar to be the case, in the olden days it certainly was.
This makes me think of the newest Dark Sun supplement we got, which discribes Slavery as beeing incompatible of a Good alignment, even enslavement of evil creatures. But it also isnt an inherently evil act in Athas so most slave owning characters are neutral.
To Summarize, id say alignment adds far more nuance than it takes away.
So do character classes to circle back to classes.
