A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of listing three things that a character is allied with instead of good/evil and chaotic/lawful.  This gives a player more flexibility in character creation and gets rid of moral absolutes.  However, it renders Detect Evil, Protection from Chaos, and other spells meaningless.  It occurred to me that this could be remedied by adding three abhorrences to the three allegiances.  This would make the alignment system even more realistic by adding negatives, and would also allow spells that specifiy Evil/Good or Law/Chaos to function.  Detect Evil would instead detect associations with the abhorrences of the character, and so forth.  Any thoughts?

Simple mathematical problem: The set of possible "allegiances" and "abhorrences" is a bit bigger than the five alignment components...

I've dispensed with alignments in my current campaign, too (still use it in other D&D adventures), and just came up with some slightly less generic spells like "Detect Shapeshifter" or "Smite Outsider". Works for some of the elements, the rest is just left out.

I don't really see the reason for all the hatred of alignment that many folks have. What's wrong with it?

EK:  I suspect it's may be that for many people, it begs the question on any real moral issues.

   "My paladin is LAWFUL GOOD."
"Cool, so's mine!  Now we've determined that the king is chaotic evil ... which means we have to go take him out.  The dictates of lawful good imply (to my reading) that we must fight against evil whatever its form."
"Goodness, no!  The dictates of lawful good imply (to my reading) that we must uphold our duty to king and country, even if the king is evil!"
"You should be docked experience points!"
"No, you should be docked experience points!"... but then, I don't really dislike the alignment system that much ... either you play it fast and loose with hyper-simplistic morality (and everybody who is, say, Chaotic Good having their own hip language that nobody else can understand) or else you set it aside when the grey areas get thick.  So it's likely that people who object more strongly can state their opinions with more precision.

Well, some people don't like moral absolutes. For most people it's not about "hatred", really. It's just another option that you can take or leave.

For some games, the good old "Chaos-Law" axis might be enough, for others it's quite okay if it's disregarded at all. And for most games, it's just fine as it is.

So, what you're saying is that it boils down to confusing rules with play?

There's really no confusion. Rules can always be changed to suit the campaign. We're talking Gygax, not McCracken...

brownhairedvalkyrie and I were shooting the breeze about alignment and other ways rpgs implement behavioral limitators on players.

I at least felt that the alignment system is too open while the virtue/vice system of nWoD is incredibly constricting, pretty much making the players constantly ask the ST "am I playing to my virtue? can I get willpower points now?"

D20 Modern has a nice compromise with it's allegiance priorities, but I'm not sure it's enough for me...

Check out Iridium from Hinterwelt and the Codes concept - that I like.