Playing alignment properly requires social exposure or at least the ability to identify what social actions match the alignment you want to play. It takes imagination and sensibility to role-play alignment sensibly.
One of a few things I dislike about Dungeons & Dragons is the system's dependence on alignment.
Nine alignments seems ridiculous especially since Neutral makes up five of those. It would have been easier to put in a system to calculate a persons reknown and reputation with various factions.
Alignment seems to be more an interpretation of how others view your actions and beliefs than a statement of self. To be quite honest the lines between Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil are just that, lines very thin ones.. Neutrality does not exist in the real world, because everyone must make a choice, pro or con, for or against.
I personally favor White Wolf and the World of Darkness approach.
Personality Archetypes (Nature and Demeanor
I do not depend on alignment in my games. IT is good to know what ones belief is so if you are lawful good one should not be having fun going around and randomly killing innocents. On the same token a Chaotic Evil person is not going to go running around helping people all the time expecting nothing in return.
No Alignment in my campaigns is a guide line for you character to live by. As time goes on one can end up changing their alignment as that can happen in everyday life even now.
So no I do not think all the Dungeons & Dragons games are alignment dependent in my book but I can see some people being hampered by their alignment.
I prefer the storyteller version for alignment as Malcolm mentioned earlier. I don't mind the D&D alignments though. When someone can roleplay well they would be able to do it under either system. The D&D alignment system I feel can work as a crutch for people who either don't wish to or are unable to develop their character's motivations. I have played with a fair amount of people who would just roleplay the character as them self basically. The different alignments at least force someone like this to think a little bit about this aspect of the game.
There are two alignments I notice that are abused the most. Those would be lawful good and chaotic neutral but they are abused for different reasons. It can be fairly difficult to play a lawful good character without going over the top with it. With chaotic neutral it is often used to play an evil character when they aren't allowed in the game or an insane person who is totally random. To me the most important aspect of playing an alignment is getting along with the group. Nothing like the one player who robs the entire party at night or backstabs one of them and justifies it due to his alignment. D & D is a social game. Please be thoughtful of your other players in the group.
Oh my goodness, if some character decides to come back stabbing my character just because then that would probably be the last thing that character does. I tend to play a character with a strong personality that doesn't like to put up with bolgona.
Kyrroeth, people play as themselves rather than the character, I see it lots of times in play by post by the kind of words they choose and the way they move their character. You can't be lawful good and wondering if you should help someone in distress, its pretty much automatic if you're lawful good.
Krusten,
Alignment reaches a limit.
So you come upon a raiding party. They have been through your village or town and you are not happy with what they have done. To you they seem evil or you classify them as being evil.
That raiding party however views what they have done as being good. Coming back to reclaim tribal lands held for generations and centuries before the farmsteaders and such arrived. Being nomadic, your village was their summer camp grounds. So to them you are evil for taking their land.
So back to this raiding party, you come upon them by accident and you find out that they are no ill. Disease and illness run through the camp. So do you meet with the sick party leader and do the "Good" deeds or do you seek revenge by doing the "Evil" ones?
Alignment is a spectrum or a gradient. Movement along or in a alignment is expected. Choices effect or should effect it. You maybe lawful good with strong tendencies towards neutral evil.
I think too many try to make alignment black and white, when those absolutes remain well to the outer fringes. Alignment is more about the shades of grey than a solid choice of black or white.
Malcolmshaw, I agree with you that alignment should exist on a gradient and not black and white. In my games, I always allow my players to make their own decisions as a character without worry of the "Constraints" of their "Alignment" (As long as it would make sense). But as I see how they do in fact decide how to resolve any given situation, I will tell them that based on those choices they have started to shift to another end of the spectrum. And I think having this "Liquid" approach to alignment allows the players to feel as though they aren't "Trapped" into playing s specific way the whole game, but also allows their character to grow within the game, just as real people grow and develop different ways of thinking and acting based on their life experiences.
That being said, there are of course consequences in my games for going too far down one way or the other especially if they are devoted to a particular diety or ideology that may require the character to stay on a straight path to maintain that devotion. That's why I like the oathbreaker for Paladins in the DMG and I also will have clerics lose their divine abilities if they stray from their god's tenets or ideals. Along the same line, though, I'll reward characters who grow and learn. For instance, if an evil character sees the error of his/her ways and begins to make atonement or what have you, I might start having that character's interactions with people they may have wronged in the past easier by lowering DCs or giving advantage or something else, basically just rewarding the player for making the effort to actually get into their character's mind and really role playing them and not just playing a preconceived idea of what it means to be any particular alignment.
Maybe there should be one alignment: neutral, that way players can act out anything and it will be more or less acceptable.