Poll: Which Alignment do you Usually Roleplay As?

[Altrunchen]

So I'm curious to know which alignments people typically play over others and to try and get a good idea of this I'm going to go to various forums around the internet and post this straw poll in the hope that I'll get a decent amount of results. Mostly because I'm just curious and I'd like to get some sort of answer about which ones are the most popular.

Poll Link: http://www.strawpoll.me/14736660

Please use the link to vote and feel free to post what you voted here!

[waldronate]

You're missing the most common alignment: Chaotic Stupid.

[Tonnichiwa]

Funny, I thought that was the nickname for Chaotic Neutral

[waldronate]

Chaotic Neutral is often played as Chaotic Violent, a related but distinct alignment.

[Voolf]

Alignments system is a very poor design in my opinion. World is not black and white and all our decisions may be good for some people, but bad for others and vise versa.
Sticking with an alignment - like good - force your character to do good/heroic deeds, while in reality people don't lend a hand to everyone they meet. Killing and orc may be good for your party, but it is bad for the orc tribe. Additionally killing and orc (or any other living beeing) not in self defence is rather not a decision of a good alignment, but players do that all the time as a Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic Good.

The same goes for bad characters. Just because you are an outcast and don't follow the law (that others imposed) doesn't mean you are a bad person. You are just in a conflict with others. You will make decisions that will be bad from your enemies point of view, but good for your allies.

Truly bad people that will kill for fun everyone around even own allies (because they dont serve well) is a cliche that is made up and repeated constantly in entertainment industry. Bad people are bad for us because they want to take something from us, but for them they are trying to give better life to their people.

The whole bad-good system is relative and puts your character in a box. Your options are restrained from the start of the game. It should work just the opposite. Your character deeds during adventure should shape your alignment that is seen by others. As you progress you will gain allies and foes based on your (relative) good or bad choices. Based on that you will be seen as a good and bad fellow by different people around the world.

That beeing said, i restrain from choosing an alignment for my character. DM can understand my motivations and how my character act by reading my background story. From there i start to play and shape my character more with total decision freedom. Sometimes DM and players say "Hey your character would not do that. He is good (or bad)" and that makes you very shallow and bland character.
If the DM forces me to choose alignment i always go with Chaotic Neutral because this is the most accurate one in my opinion. We all like to break some rules from time to time and we are not always good for evereone. In game this gives you total freedom for your decisions and doesn't put you in a only Good vs. only Bad box.

[Falconius]

I have to agree with Voolf. The alignment system is terrible, unrepresentative of anything even resembling reality, and totally illogical. For instance it's totally OK for a Paladin to detect evil on let's say a goblin, and then simply murder it because its alignment is evil. It was obviously designed as a roleplaying aid (Whitewolf was great a doing roleplaying aids, DnD, not so much), but does so much harm and I doubt much of any good. So in general I would choose something that allowed the most freedom of character, like true neutral, or lawful neutral, or chaotic good (if forced into a good alignment by the DM). And in the end I would just do what I wanted anyways. (Which honestly might have been evil more often than not) However that is only one of a myriad of problems I have with the DnD system, and even with all those it's still a really great game, I mean it's pretty much the foundation of roleplaying games.

[Redrobes]

As a DM I used to assign the character his alignment based on his actions. They didnt get to choose it. If they were a cleric paladin or druid with deity impositions then it counted.

[Azélor]

I think most humans should be close to true neutral , leaning toward good a bit. The system makes more sense if you include other races/creatures like demon which are leaning heavily toward evil.

[acrosome]

The alignment system in D&D is ridiculous, and an awkward and silly attempt to pigeonhole players into stereotyped roles- just like the class system- so I'm with Voolf and Falconious. But then I haven't played D&D since I was a child. Seriously, that was back when I was 15 or so, with AD&D. First edition. And actually when I consider the covers they were probably first printing. (I wonder if my parents still have my books somewhere?) But there are much better systems, now. D&D is a one-trick pony, doing only over-the-top dungeon-crawling murder-hobos well. Which, hey, is great if that's what you're going for. Seriously. And it's not bad for a half-assed kluge that evolved from the miniatures war-game Chainmail. Or, at least it was in the 80s- as I said I haven't even looked at it since then. I have no idea what D&D3.5 is, for instance. Or Pathfinder. Heck, I have only the slightest awareness that D&D and Pathfinder are somehow related.

And even then SJG now has the Dungeon Fantasy RPG...

I only own two print games nowadays: GURPS and Call of Cthulhu. The latter I have for the awesome setting and pre-made adventures, but even then I putter with them in GURPS. I do have a bunch of other games on PDF, though, but again mostly because I find the settings interesting- 2300AD, Twilight 2000, Traveller, etc. (I admire GDW's work; they always had such awesome setting ideas, which they unfortunately executed with truly horrific game mechanics.) I'm sure there are other great systems out there but I'm definitely on the "grognard" end of the scale, so I like the crunchiness of GURPS. I'm definitely not a World of Darkness kind of guy. The idea of half a dozen adults dressing up and standing around in a room pretending to be vampires just makes me giggle.

[Pestilence]

When i'm forced to pick an alignment i typically play a neutral Evil character. As mentioned above however, the alignment system is completely ridiculous and forces players to play into a specific archetype that a player may or may not want to play into in the first place. When I DM i have an entire set of home brewed rules for things like this, including doing away entirely with the alignment system and instead implementing an opinion based system for the players, in which every NPC has their own generalized opinion of the player characters, as well as other NPCs and factions. The best part of a system like this is that it works flawlessly with a reputation system as well and can be added into almost any game. I myself am still working on fleshing out the system a bit more but from a roleplaying perspective my party has said they enjoy it far more than the typical D&D alignment system, which from what I've found most players ignore in the first place.