TFT has the same alignment system as AD&D

[hcobb]

In AD&D a character's alignment determines the type of otherworldly being they invoke to raise the dead, heal all wounds, and for other boons.

So a True Neutral character might invoke a sacred beast, a Lawful Good character would invoke a kindly paternal god, a Lawful Evil character would invoke a devil with strict rules, and a Chaotic Evil character would invoke a trickster demon.

In TFT all characters invoke only demons to do these things and can spend a mere 500 XP to gain such a boon.

Thus when the players ask what alignment their "murder hobos" are you know what to tell them. This has the same practical effect as the AD&D system while saving time during character creation and space on the character sheet.

[Chris Rice]

No one has ever asked me what alignment their character is. It's such a daft concept.

[Skarg]

I already knew what to tell them. The only place D&D alignments exist is in D&D-like games. TFT is not a D&D-like game, and has no alignments. Religions are per setting. So is availability of wishes.

[Steve Plambeck]

Hahaha! Excellent point hcobb!

And from the horse's mouth... some (much younger) friends and I were just having drinks Wednesday night, and the subject of D&D came up. They play it, and have invited me in. I'd rather recruit them to start a new TFT group, but they of course never heard of TFT and have started asking me how it's different.

When I said, "well, for one thing there's no alignments," they actually cheered and said "Oh good! We always ignore alignments, we think they're stupid!"

That warmed my heart :)

[RVA_Grandpa]

Alignments? We don't need no stinking alignments!

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by Skarg

I already knew what to tell them. The only place D&D alignments exist is in D&D-like games.

And in the fiction those alignments came from: Tolkien (for good-evil) and Moorcock (for law-chaos).

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

And in the fiction those alignments came from: Tolkien (for good-evil) and Moorcock (for law-chaos).

The alignments might exist as themes in the stories, but not every person in those worlds would fit neatly into them the way D&D wants everyone and everything to.

Good and evil exist in real frameworks as well. And are mentioned sometimes in TFT. But it's the artificial definitions over-applications of them, such as in the OP, that are thankfully absent from TFT.

[KevinJ]

When questions of good and evil do come up in non-d&d games, I refer players to the descriptive alignments in Palladium games. Based on the information presented in the respective games it is easier to understand the motivations and possible actions of an Anarchist or Scrupulous character than a Lawful Neutral character.

[BobP]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

And in the fiction those alignments came from: Tolkien (for good-evil) and Moorcock (for law-chaos).

The names come from there, but the original function of D&D alignment was inherited from the Chainmail wargaming rules, where Alignment told you which side of a fight a race's army would be on (with Neutrals it was random).

The ideas can themselves be of use, but building mechanics on them was folly.

[zot]

Not everyone wants morality as a theme in their game but rather than creating a rigid, simplistic system, alignments can actually provide an interesting playground for complex moral questions and dilemmas if you use the full background presented in AD&D's PH and DMG. AD&D alignments make morality a "thing" in the game that you can play with and make game rules about -- this works well in "high trust" games where the DM acts as a "story teller" but it might work poorly in "low trust" games where the DM acts as a "referee" and the story is supposed to be emergent.

One thing I've found that people really misunderstand about AD&D alignments is that they are tied not to cultures, but to the planes. Alignments are supposed to be like the medieval elements; a PC's "moral composition" is like matter from a medieval point of view, made from law, chaos, good, and evil instead of earth, air, fire, and water. A character's alignment determines which of the 16 outer planes they're most closely associated with.

Because alignments are made from this "ideal material", cultural ideas of law, chaos, good, and evil don't always line up with them. Some players are confused, for example, about what happens if a paladin comes from a culture that reveres brutality. A culture can have "unlawful laws" which a lawful character can, and should, break or it can have "good" definitions for "actions". So a character that a culture that says that balance is the highest good might call someone "lawful good" who is actually lawful neutral. A chaotic character might be obliged to follow a "chaotic law"; you could argue that Aleister Crowley's "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is a "chaotic neutral law". So a brutal culture might normally produce antipaladins, rather than paladins, but call them just paladins.

The planes actually form a continuum with "gray areas" that blend into each other at the "edges" of the planes (2D diagrams don't capture multidimensional relationships well). In AD&D, cosmic "location" in the outer planes determines the "alignment value" at that point. The DM's guide also says the outer planes have their nature because they are home to creatures of their alignment but this actually makes it an interdependent relationship. Original D&D, btw, only had Moorcock's (Jungian) concept of law and chaos, which D&D 4e more or less went back to.

The planes came from Moorcock's writing but AD&D's concept was actually different from his idea. Moorcock's planes are mutable and change depending on how much power the gods of law or chaos have on them. "Purveyors of Dichotomy" in "Beyond Countless Doorways" does put Moorcock's idea into D&D, btw, and actually generalizes the concept beyond Moorcock's law and chaos (and beyond AD&D's addition of good, and evil).

In high school, I had some good experiences playing a lawful good monk in but overall I'd say my experiences with alignment (as played out by high school DMs) was bad. We preferred TFT to D&D but I'd say that in almost every high school game (D&D, TFT, Traveller, etc.) we all played "murder hobos", so morality actually wasn't part of our games at all.

Nowadays though, we play out morality a LOT but it's normally in the context of Fate aspects instead of D&D alignment. I have sometimes used a "Fate version of D&D" where each PC has a high concept aspect tagged with an alignment and I've found that to work quite well.