Quote Originally Posted by Roxxy View Post
I'm the one writing the adventures, the NPCs, the setting, and everything else. It's mine, full stop.
Well, except that you're not the one writing the main characters. And unless you have purely reactive players who don't have their characters do anything unless prodded by the GM, they're going to have a role in driving the plot too. Not to mention that most of the GMs I know will take PC backstories as jumping-off points for plot ("Okay, I'll set up the guy who killed Character A's parents as one of the antagonists, and at some point a situation will come up that threatens to reveal Character B's deep dark secret...oh, and Player 3 says that his character's goal is to find the lost city his deity used to rule before her apotheosis, so I'll work that in somehow..."). The story really is being jointly told by you and your players.


As far as banning alignment goes, I think that banning alignments outright eliminates a lot of interesting stories. One that comes immediately to mind is the archetype of the former villain seeking redemption. He may well be Evil-aligned at the start of the campaign, because 1) he hasn't yet done enough good to outweigh his past evil deeds, and 2) everybody who's trying to make a big change in their life backslides sometimes. I had a character like this in the first game I ran, and he was a compelling, interesting character who significantly contributed both to the party and to the richness of the overall story. Telling the player that he couldn't play that character would have been an immensely bad idea.

I also agree with the posters who've said that Good alignments can sometimes be just as disruptive as Evil ones. There's a thread in the main roleplaying forum, for example, where the OP talks about two parties he's run games for--one Good, one Evil. The Good party did such things as murdering town guards, while the Evil party did such things as warning an order of paladins about an approaching orc army. (Granted, the Evil party probably had a self-serving reason for doing so, like not wanting to get killed by the orc army themselves, but still.) And honestly, I feel like I've heard just as many stories about stereotypical stick-up-the-posterior paladins disrupting parties as I have about sterotypical CE murder-everything-that-crosses-their-path characters disrupting parties.