So I'm playing in a rather odd game that's a combination of Red Box, 1E AD&D, and the DM's house rules. We leveled last night (finally!), and my wife was looking at spells and asked me about Protection From Evil, so I read it. I noticed something odd in the wording that caught my eye:
This spell protects you from various "evil" attacks (those coming from creatures of alignment differing from yours)...
I don't remember the exact wording, but I do specifically remember that "evil" was in quotes, and the parenthetical mentioned differing alignments. From what I remember, back in old D&D, the three alignments were Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral (or unaligned?) and they really did serve as "hats" per se, to differentiate teams; they didn't have to do much with morality. Still, I'd never noticed that blurb in PfE about "evil" being any alignment different than you.
I know the game was pretty hands off on most rules in that game, but I find it interesting that they seemed to handle morality in a completely subjective fashion and didn't tie it in to the rules much at all. I really wish they would have kept with this system instead of creating the dual-axis nine alignment wheel that gave us all the crap we have today (BoVD/BoED, I'm looking at you
).
