alignment is bad and you should feel bad

[Max_Killjoy]

BoVD does spell it out pretty well- spelling out that accidentally causing a landslide that flattens a village might not qualify as evil, but knowingly causing a landslide that flattens a village, in the process of saving your own life, is definitely evil.

You've got BoVD saying intent and context matter, you've got BoED saying intent matters, you've got WOTC online articles saying intent matters... it's pretty clear that, in 3.5, intent matters.

I wouldn't consider any of those three to be core published works, but this is getting more into my long-standing peeves with publishers spamming books and having information that should be core to the game spread out across a dozen or more volumes.

Right around 3.0 is when and where I jumped ship and washed my hands of all things D&D/d20, as well, so from that point forward, all of my exposure to Alignment is based on prior works, watching others play, and reading/hearing discussions others have had about Alignment. All I can say is that I've never had an experience where Alignment made a game better, only experiences where it made it far far worse, and the online and IRL discussions of Alignment I've been exposed to very much reinforce that impression (as detailed in my posts here).