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| Law vs. Chaos!? DAT rocked. |
Alignment kinda sucks. And it's also kinda awesome. But mostly I'm leaning toward the suckage. With caveats.
Here's my entry point to alignment.
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| B/X description of Law as "good". |
Lawful is good.
Neutral is neutral.
Chaotic is evil.
This scheme is explicitly stated in both B/X and BECMI editions of D&D. I have heard people argue on the interwebs that alignment in classic D&D should not or does not map onto a moral code, but is rather an adherence to some kind of cosmic battle plan of Law vs. Chaos. This idea comes from the ways that these notions are used in various classic fantasy stories, such as those written by Michael Moorcock. And I get that. I guess in original D&D that was the intention, or at least a strong inspiration. But very quickly they started mapping the "bad" monsters onto Chaos and the "good" ones on the side of Law. Then they made it concrete in both B/X and BECMI: Law means good, Chaos means evil. Done and done. Easy to grok.
If we go back to the original game I think it's still very clear that Law is good and Chaos is bad. On page 9 of Men & Magic there is a table showing which alignments are suitable to which races/creatures. Would you say that being in the company of ghouls, evil high priests, vampires, and mummies makes you kind of "bad"? Yeah, I agree. It does. So Chaos is evil even in original D&D, no matter what a few grogs want to argue*.
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| Holmes took things to a new level. |
With Holmes, our 3 alignments become 5: Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Evil, and Neutral. This is weird because Holmes is, arguably, the first iteration of the "basic" D&D branch of the game, which adheres to only Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. Holmes is the only place the 5 alignment method is ever seen.
Holmes' system definitely breaks the whole Law = Good structure. Because now you can literally be Lawful Evil. What does that mean? It means that being Chaotic now doesn't automatically make you evil. It makes you unpredictable and maybe selfish, but not a total cunt.
Holmes' method was more sophisticated than the simple 3 point system, but that wasn't complex enough for Gary Gygax. So when the AD&D Players Handbook dropped in 1978 the world was formally introduced to the now-classic 9 alignment system. This is the one I came to glom onto when I was running and playing D&D in the mid 80s. It's a very intuitive system when you think about it. It's clearly a way to map alignment onto morality and behavior. I would argue that any notion of alignment being connected to a cosmic struggle is annihilated with AD&D. Here if you are Lawful Good it means exactly what you see on the tin: you want things to be orderly and you prefer to do good instead of doing harm. If you are Chaotic Evil you're the opposite of that: burn the church with the people inside, take a dump on the steps, and steal a car to get away.
Here, this Nic Cage schematic kind of sums it up. Sort of.
When playing in 1e style games I tend to favor Neutral Good or Chaotic Good alignments. I dislike LG and have no interest in being evil. I don't really get neutrality here. But that's ok.
Alright, so that's my history with and understanding of alignment. Now what am I doing with alignment today?
Nothing. Because it sucks. And leaving it out of the game has zero impact. Hell, I wasn't even aware that I wasn't paying any attention to alignment until I actually thought about it.
But there's a caveat. Games like DCC RPG, for example, do a very nice job of making alignment matter. In that game it is allowed to be simple 3 point alignment and it is pretty explicitly described in those broader, cosmic war terms... not in terms of good and evil. So in DCC I think it is far easier to play a chaotic character who isn't evil. And there are nice mechanical reasons to use alignment in that game. If you're a thief, your skills are linked to your alignment. When clerics Lay on Hands, they heal you differently depending on your alignment relative to theirs. Touching weird statues may impact you differently if lawful vs. chaotic. It's a cool little mechanical knob you can pull and play with.
In D&D not so much. There are some magic items that impact or favor alignment, and there are alignment restrictions on some classes (depending on version), but other than that it's really just a useless bit of wasted space on your character sheet. Fight me.
*Much love to the grogs. Keep on keepin' on, just recognize that you're wrong, based purely on text.
Here I am talking alignment.
And here I am again.
And once more, probably contradicting what I said on this post.
I think alignment can work if you keep it to representing aligning yourself with a cosmic force rather than a personality/morality test, with neutral meaning you have no affiliation.
ReplyDeleteI prefer to think of Law and Chaos as examples of alignment, not a complete list. Sure, you can have a pact with the Lords of Chaos, but if you worship Zeus, your alignment is Olympian. You expand the list of alignments infinitely to include the various pantheons and cosmic forces of your setting.
This lets you still have magic items and spells that are connected to alignment but with a much wider variety. It also gets away from alignment as morality, so the DM doesn't have to keep making value judgments. Instead, you only need to determine alignment status based on whether the PC is right with their god/patron.
This is cool. I dig it.
DeleteI think the 3 point system still works better for games like DCC, though. And my only reason for saying that is because you can have chaos magic in a random module that will then easily port over to your campaign because you also have chaos as an alignment. But if your alignment is Olympian you're not going to run into many published works that resonate.
Still, that's only one reason to go with 3 point alignment and your idea seems legit to me, especially if you aren't planning to use published materials.
I agree with you on DCC. The mechanical weight of its tables gives DCC a lot of flavor, but its also one of the harder D&D variants to hack. I tend to run it just as at is.
DeleteI start with B/X as a base when I am going to tinker.
Good point. I tend to run DCC as is. I also rarely make content for it. I did write a funnel, which I need to finish up.
DeleteThe original "Law good, chaos bad" comes from Poul Anderson; Moorcock adds nuance. But I argued that, in D&D, the shift between "alignments are factions" to "alignments are your character's moral code" comes because the focus of the game drifted from armies to individual characters.
ReplyDeleteThe two versions get mixed up, even by current D&D designers, with results that are often confusing.
I prefer having just Law/Chaos as cosmic factions, with some humans (and deities!) choosing balance or neutrality.
Here is an extensive analysis FWIW:
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2015/03/on-alignment-part-i-alignment-origins.html
Makes sense to me.
DeleteAlignment means even less in 5th edition. It literally has no mechanical effect except for a couple of specific magical items.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for dropping alignment, unless you're going to tie it specifically to the cosmic balance in that DCC/Moorcock/3-Hearts-3-Lions way.
Nine-point alignment simply doesn't work as written because it tries to be all things to all people, and so ends up doing nothing. It's what I call a "RAW Trap." Every DM just has to decide what it means in their own game.
ReplyDeleteHah, yeah. I remember being happy to have found a way to make both Law and Chaos something potentially “good”, proving the point that law vs chaos does not necessarily mean good vs evil. And yet… in my games it simply never comes up. Never. By contrast, whenever I play in games with the nine alignments the only times they come up is when people are trying to explain away their rude behavior, or when they they are trying to talk other people into doing things with their characters they don’t want to do. And for those purposes, Pendragon traits are simply more interesting. So, the nine-fold alignment remains uninteresting to me.
ReplyDeleteWhat always strikes me is how explicit the bad monsters are tied to Chaos and vice versa. So it seems extremely clear that Chaotics were meant to be evil and that's how I played it.
DeleteI enjoyed AD&D alignment, mostly. I think it was always fun when you were rolling up a new PC to ponder alignment. Without it, I'm not sure players would have even thought much about their PC's moral compass. It would have come out in play instead. Which, I'd argue, is also OK or perhaps even better.
Or perhaps that's just what happened anyway, alignment or not. Why the hell is that paladin searching the body??
Unless I'm playing Stormbringer, I have no use for alignment systems. I'd much rather use Gamma World's cryptic alliances or other types of factions, if at all.
ReplyDeleteI find the 9-point alignment system helpful when it comes to NPC and monsters and such. It's not personality but it does provide some guideline at a glance of how the encounter will react. As for PCs I've never held them to their alignments, but I've never had a player push it either so who knows.
ReplyDelete