Alignment

Another homebrew mechanic I have is an overhaul of the alignment system. This overhaul treats each alignment as more of an umbrella at first, and can help serve as a guide for those who aren't quite sure what they want to do but have an idea of how they want to do it.

It adds a primary and secondary alignment, with the primary alignment being more of an umbrella and the secondary alignment being how the character acts under that umbrella.

For example, if you have a character who is usually perfectly good but gets really self centered and opertunistic when drunk, their primary alignment might be lawful good with their secondary alignment being chaotic evil, since the secondary alignment represents where in the scale of things that could be considered "lawful good" they fall.

Only the primary alignment affects gameplay, unless the DM wishes both primary and secondary to affect the game. In that case, the character above would be affected by things that affect lawful, chaotic, evil, and good characters.

More than anything, I view this as a role playing tool for players.