I think moving away from Alignment is a good thing. I'd much rather shape my character as I see fit and pick my choices based on my or my roleplayed moral compass - or simply often from a pragmatic standpoint.
Sometimes good choices lead to very obvious grim outcomes and/or evil choices end up saving/preventing more carnage. Same goes for evil side - sometimes good choices simply perfectly align with your personal desires or lust for power and influence given the situation. I much rather be context driven, as opposed to be commanded by that one off choice at level 1.
This exactly. Alignment seems to me to be something that people panic over and constantly check to see if they are making the "correct" choices rather than actually playing the game. Glad it isn't focused on in this one.
It's not a mini game so much as a major feature of the game. Or much of *the* game. The point of a role playing game is, well, can you play this role? Can you respond not as you, person who doesn't believe in objective morality (like most people in our cynical world), but instead as someone who lives in a world where good and evil are as real as gravity and oxygen.
I rarely respond as myself in these games. I play the character according to how I feel they would act in a situation and rarely is a situation black or white, there are always shades of grey.
Well said. Yes this is exactly it. When I make "good" decisions or take "good" actions, I want the game (through the game world) to acknowledge my decisions and actions as exactly that. And this is because it is a game, not just me sitting around engaging in some personal daydreaming. A game is about trying to achieve certain goals within the game. In the case of an RPG, that means getting certain results to the quests we find, getting a certain result to the main story, etc. We even care about what kind of ending we get in the game. We care about our end-slides and what those say about our game. So achieving objectives and goals is integral to playing a game. At least it is for me. And without being able to achieve those goals (the game telling me: hey, you did a bunch of "good" things), the game is a waste of my valuable time.
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I care about the journey, not some specific ending to the game. I want to do what needs to be done at the time rather than having to follow a specific path that is predetermined. That to me is boring and shallow.
