Open Discussion: Alignment restrictions

[Ouroboros]

Unfortunately ballooning numbers is very much a 3.x intrinsic issue; it's just how all the balance is focused. Fixing that would require a significant amount of time reworking balance from the ground up, such that you're more closely emulating 4e or 5e, which had less of the chronic 'characters must have 80 AC to be relevant in combat' type issues.

[Maiyannah]

Yes, its very much something I'll have to pick my battles in and perhaps just prune back things here or there rather than be able to change the whole thing.

That said, alignment based stuff in Ravenloft just isn't supposed to work properly, so I'd say we need to either remove those spells or consider some way they'd be corrupted.

[Ouroboros]

It's not just alignment based stuff; a heap of spell effects are altered in Ravenloft.

Abjuration spells intended to send creatures back to their home plane instead randomly teleport them somewhere else in the Demiplane. Anything to do with the Astral plane is severely inhibited. Conjured creatures are harder to control; they get saves to contest the summoner's will and can break free; likewise if they discover that the implicit pact nature of their summoning is violated by the Demiplane's prison nature, they automatically get to break free. Any summoning spell that summons creatures from outside of Ravenloft automatically fail if there's not an equivalent already within Ravenloft; trying to summon a Succubus for example will fail if there's not one already within the Demiplane.

Summoning more common creatures will instead conjure up local animals near to your location. Detect Alignment spells automatically fail. Divination is neutered heavily and is actually very dangerous to use. There's a bunch of other quirky stuff like the Demiplane of Dread is located within the Deep Ethereal in a cosmological sense, but all of it's spell effects work as per the Material Plane.

TL;DR, there's an absolutely massive list of spells changed significantly by the Demiplane of Dread, not just alignment-centric ones.

[Maiyannah]

Indeed, but that reaches beyond the topic of discussion.

I think that relaxing alignment restrictions on classes probably should come with the neutering or removal of alignment-based spells - anything else is "trying to have our cake and eat it too" - maintaining the positive aspects of the alignment system in things like AC/mind control buffs while watering down one of the negatives in class restrictions. This is counter to Ravenlofts goal of eroding morality into a grey mush that suckers people into evil. Having both on the other hand entices people of previously restricted classes to do acts they would not otherwise, underlining the theme of corruption.

[Maiyannah]

To touch on this discussion again, at present I would think the easiest approach is removing alignment restrictions from classes and asking players to take the old alignment requirements as a guideline, and roleplay responsibly, accordingly.

I am less apt to do this for prestiege classes, for instance if we implement the Anchorite of the Mists prestiege class, it makes sense their alignment must be in line with their dieities.

This highlights a caveat I'd still enforce: clerics and favoured souls must still be within one step of their deity's alignments, excepting deities that have specific restrictions.

[wilkins1952]

This seems like a good solution, If things do start getting out of hand, then it can be addressed in the future but I don't see it being that much of an issue.

[Maiyannah]

It's basically an engine limitation. If I had a way to place limitations based on factions (ie limit Anchorite Inquisitor to Second Sect as it is canonically), then pretty much all of this can go, but we're limited by the tools we're using in that regard.