Never had much use for "fixed" alignment.
From my experience, players don't rigidly stick to them anyway.
Or endlessly look for ways to justify how their behaviour falls under the alignment.
What I *am* a fan of are reputation systems.
The world and NPC's responding to the outcomes of your choices and behaviour.
Murder everyone in a village?
Maybe you've done a great service to an invading warlord, who now wants to hire you.
Maybe you've now got a bounty on your head from the local lord.
Maybe you've accidentally killed someone with hidden knowledge and are now being tracked by people who want that secret.
Saved the village from raiders?
The evil cultists operating in the village get to continue their plans.
A young hero survives the raid and joins your party.
The local mayor grants you a plot of land in gratitude.
That's the real power of making decisions, not this weird restriction around what you "should and shouldn't do based on a decision at character creation".
I will once again point to Pillars of Eternity.
An objective, numbered stat in a CRPG is a fair replacement for the ability to adjudicate individual situations and behavior on a case by case basis as a human GM. So while I find alignment unnecessary in TTRPG, it's not a terrible idea in a CRPG.
The problem is that Alignment with its two axes of Law/Chaos and Good/Evil is really under-utilizing what you can do in terms of tracking. Also...you have to value things on a good vs evil or law vs chaos level.
Good vs Evil is mostly easy....but Law vs Chaos assignments in past D&D games I've mostly found to be weird and arbitrary.
Single axis alignments tend to be even more disappointing and more prone to really weird, arbitrary decisions on what is what. (Open Palm vs Closed Fist in Jade Empire, Paragon vs Renegade in Mass Effect, Light vs Dark in Star Wars)
I tend to feel alignment with no mechanical impact is harmless. But Alignment with actual impact on dialogue will again be disappointing.
Pillars has the best approach to such behavior tracking I've seen. I've heard Tyranny has a similar approach, but I've never played it since I'm not fond of "play the bad guy" style games and whether or not that's what it is....that's what it was marketed as...so I was never interested.
