[Adam]

I'm more or less on the same page as Nightson. One of the 4e changes I actually liked was the fact that paladins now canonically function the way I've always treated them. They don't have some vague allegiance to a poorly defined notion of objective goodness, they have allegiance to a particular deity, and are responsible for upholding that deity's ideals, whatever they may be.

The notion that the alignment system represented an objectively valid moral system always bothered me. Either you end up in a situation where, since morality is part of the fabric of the world, DM fiat determines what is right and wrong, or else you end up with a situation where good and evil are just team names. It makes more sense to me to have the DM telling the players, not what is objectively and inarguably right and wrong but, rather, what, say, Pelor thinks is right and wrong.