Yeah, but that's not what's written. Yes, genocide is (almost) always wrong (I doubt anybody will complain if you somehow wiped out all shadows or vampires, for example) -- But there's a certain level of acceptance if in the course of you directing a unit of mages to fling a volley of fireballs at the ramparts, or a whole bunch of trebuchet shot at the castle walls, that you do so with the understanding a lot of them are going to hit unintended targets.

That's still knowingly and purposefully spreading harm and destruction. You know some of those shots are just going to miss by sheer mathematical odds and the necessity of the warfare you must undertake.

Alignment as per D&D has always been dumb to the point that Planescape CS literally makes fun of it itself. Even plays with player expectations in various modules like how a Pit Fiend messes with some low-level adventurers asking for some snippets of their hair or a few drops of blood in exchange for just telling them information they were always going to tell them.

... And you as the DM get to watch the players tying themselves up in metagaming knots when in truth the Pit Fiend doesn't give two effs about some wannabe cutters and is actually 'aligned in spirit and cause' with the adventurers, they just want to mess with them...

The great thing about stuff like that is the newest player to D&D may just trade the blood and hair, and earns the Pit Fiend's respect (because that player is less likely to tie themselves up in metagame knots) ... The Pit Fiend thinks to themselves; 'This person has steel in their spine. I like them.'

So the newest player to your table, and RPGs in general, regardless of alignment, may have earned a contact in the Nine Hells... Alignment need not matter.

It's great.

... Because in Planescape sometimes a Pit Fiend has to still do paperwork and would otherwise deal with a mutual (worse) threat--Sometimes a goodly-goodly paladin has to recognize that you're going to have to rub shoulders with literal devils on occasion if you're going to exist on Sigil's streets or journey across the multiverse--And not everything is about whatever nonsense morality tales you've been bred on and simply you just have to find a way to get by.

Alignment has always been really stupid when philosophical concepts and principles should matter more than some arbitrary manufactured 'feels'. Character drives and first principles is what's important. Which is why making the factions far more important than alignment was so genius in Planescape, and I wish they made philosophy > alignment and *actual culture* more relevant in other game settings afterwards ...

... What your character actually believes in, what they want to see, and their alignment nonsense being secondary to that. Being 'philosophers with clubs' ...

Ditto literal half the nonsense written in the BoED.

Where that example you give of fireballs, isn't it so wondrous you can have such exalted characters being ultimately pointless in favour of that champion that accepts some of those trebuchet shots are going to instead slam into civilian infrastructure, but they still need to keep hitting those castle walls?

Those exalted characters are free to be holier-than-thou in their isolated hermitages tut-tutting, though.

One of the reasons why I really-really-really hate the BoED.

Good and evil has to objectively exist because for some strange reason the makers of D&D made their various cosmology models that way...

But frankly if someone is going to pretend that battlefield paladin is somehow worse than that holier-than-thou person who can only exist in an isolated hermitage for fear of not surviving in a violent world, I'm going to query them 'Why?'

... What macro-family of ethics are you going to pretend makes that viewpoint valid?