this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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What's wild is that Drizz't appeared in the Icewind Dale books back in 1988, making it canon that in D&D you aren't born with a certain alignment just because of your race, but some people still cling to this outdated idea thirty-seven years later.
Authors have explored the idea but it's not really a feature of D&D unfortunately, especially with the mechanics reinforcing it constantly. There's just the occasional Good member of an Evil species rather than species not being inherently good or evil.
I'm glad Paizo killed that sacred cow, I just wish it hadn't taken until the remaster.
It was always really inconsistent. Some authors treated Alignment as "just kinda your vibe", some as "a combination of cultural factors and divine meddling", and some as "intrinsic cosmic morals", some both but for different things (humans vs Outsiders, etc). Negative Energy and undead as being an Eeeeevil Spookyforce or Basically Just Radiation.
That kind of unaddressed inconsistency fuelled, and still fuels, endless repeats of the "Is Necromancy evil? What if my skeletons are used as agricultural robots to allow for a higher standard of living?", where everyone talks past each other based on what part of the texts they read and settings they play in.