Front End Alignment

My car is pulling to the right. Tires have weird wear patterns. My front end is waaaay out of alignment.

Oh... wait. This is about gaming. So it's not that kind of alignment. Sorry.

(Come to think of it, I haven't even thought about front end alignments since I bought my first new car in the 90s. What was it about older cars? My old AMC Spirit was constantly out of alignment.)

Alignment sucks. I said so in this post, and I still mean it. You don't need alignment in D&D games. You might think you do, but actually in fact you absolutely do not. So ditch that shit right now. Of course, as I said in that other post, alignment is actually useful in other iterations of the game, such as DCC RPG. In that game alignment is both fun and useful, unlike in D&D where it is constraining and pointless.

Here's a newsflash: orcs are a racist trope. Indeed, it's true. The arguments for this are pretty solid and I'm certainly convinced. But also... who cares? It's really not a big deal. Orcs are dumb and boring anyway, so fuck 'em. Make your orcs more monstrous, less like Mongol hordes, and maybe that will fix it. I don't know. And I kinda don't care. But yeah... the racist trope allegation does hold water so stop bitching about it.

More importantly is the drow thing. It's quite god damn clear that having your prominent black skinned race of people be inherently evil is kind of a problem. This has been known for decades. Hell's bells, I remember joking about this shit in high school. And that was the 80s, when racism was just How Things Were™. I'm happy that WotC is addressing this problem, and the orc thing as well. It's a net good.

Stop bitching about it. They're trying to sell the game to young people, not our old asses.

TL;DR version:

Alignment in D&D is stupid and boring. Get rid of it. Or use it like DCC uses it.

The orc and drow tropes are kinda racist. Deal with that. You can still use orcs and drow if you want and if anyone tells you that you're being a racist you can say "Fuck off". It's fine. But honestly... orcs are boring so fuck 'em. Let's come up with new stuff.

EDIT: I just learned that Netflix removed the AD&D episode of Community. One of the best episodes! Fuck the bastards. What a dumb, stupid, cynical move.

Alignment Tongue Lashing

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.

B/X description of Law as "good".

I got my dirty paws on D&D red box and devoured it. I grokked the alignment immediately in the simplest terms:

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*.

Holmes took things to a new level.

In 1977 Holmes complicated matters by introducing another axis to the alignment table. Now we have not only Law and Chaos, but also Good and Evil enter the picture explicitly. I am less familiar with the how and why of Holmes D&D as I never even laid eyes on this version until 2012 or so. I didn't know it existed. No one I knew had it and I don't remember seeing ads for it. I came into gaming in 1984 so I guess I missed the boat on that one, along with original D&D, which I also never laid eyes on until 2012 or so. That's right. Actually my first visual treat in RPGs was the DM at school and his 3-ring binder containing B/X rules. Imprinted for life.

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.

And One Last Alignment Thing

And more on alignment...

Yet the previous two posts do not consider the other way of looking at alignment, which is to say it is merely an alignment to a faction. Which "side" are you on? The group that is Lawful or the group that is Chaotic? Does this entail good and evil or not? What does the group's stance on law and chaos have to do with their moral character, if anything? This obviously comes down to a matter of your specific campaign setting. If in your world the monsters we can all agree are evil are of the Chaotic alignment and all the creatures we tend to see as good are Lawful then law correlates with good and chaos correlates with evil and we'd be on pretty strong ground to argue that Lawful is good and Chaotic is evil.

But what if your factions are not like that? The recent movie Maleficent (which I thought was just "ok") poses the Kingdom of humans against the un-ruled world of faery kind. Maleficent herself is portrayed as innocent and good in the beginning, then she becomes a bit twisted by thoughts of revenge and could be called evil. But the world of humans is harsh to the faeries and, I think, fits the bill of being quite evil in that sense. Meanwhile the feary realm seems quite good, if chaotic.

These factions do reflect Law and Chaos. But they do not align with good and evil in any clear way, or if they do it seems reversed so that Law is more evil than Chaos.

I don't really like the faction interpretation. It's a little too particular to each setting for me. I prefer something a little more universal.

More on Alignment

Continuing about alignment...

So the 3-point system of Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic covers a lot of motivational territory. In other words it expresses what might drive your PC to behave a certain way. In the previous post I expressed that this seems loose and gives a lot of freedom. But I think it also comes at a price.

If you are playing a Chaotic PC and there is a temple that only "good" creatures may enter. Can you enter? Let's say you do not describe your PC as evil. But what if  your DM perceives your actions as evil? What if you tend to ignore suffering, look out for yourself, and disregard the needs of the group? Is that evil?

If your DM considers those tendencies to be evil then he might say you cannot enter the good temple. And what if this is really important to the game? Does this shut your PC out of some important part of the story?

It seems to me that as a game function the labels matter. A spell that targets evil should target any creature with an evil alignment. If Chaotic is not inherently evil how do you determine if the spell will target the creature in question? DM fiat? Perhaps. But, considering this is a game and not just improv theater and storytelling, doesn't that seem less than satisfying?

So from that perspective I can see an argument made for the language of the Basic book of the B/X set:

In this view, Lawful is equal to good and Chaotic is equal to evil. Here the labels aren't merely about your habits of organization and attitudes about structure, laws, and so on. The labels indicate which side of the eternal struggle you really are on.

Now for some folks this is all a bunch of useless navel-gazing. You could have a very brutal, basic campaign setting in which ideas about good and evil are simply not addressed at the game level. Good and evil are what comes out of play, not what is codified in the rules. Perhaps in this type of setting the gods are aloof (ala Conan) or weird and unintelligible. Or nonexistent. In these schemes "good" and "evil" are not real in the sense of the greater structure of the universe. They are labels we assign down here on earth in the daily grind. They have value to us because we give them value, not because of some external source.

In that sort of setting you could do with Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic as indicators of habit, organization, and attitudes about society without any mention of good or evil. Spells that target "good" and "evil" would then have to be re-interpreted. What is "good"? "Evil"? Is it merely the intention to do harm or the intention to help? Then what is harm? What is help?

I can sympathize with the DM who, puzzling this out, simply ditches alignment altogether. Who needs it? In fact in my current Doomslakers campaign my house rules document basically does that (more-or-less):

(You can see how I was hedging my bets, weaseling out of commitment...I just wasn't sure about this whole alignment thing. Still not sure!)

Detecting Evil

Alignment has always been weird to me. And obviously it is the biggest point of contention in discussions of D&D.

The classic system uses 3 alignments: Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. This is how those alignments are described in B/X D&D:

So there is no mention of good or evil in those descriptions, though the descriptions in the Basic Set do include some good/evil language. I suppose that means one could be a chaotic character and be...good. This notion is upheld in other places within the text, such as the description of the spell Detect Evil:

For years I didn't really understand this. And it is mainly because of my tendency to assume a LOT about what is in these books without actually reading them for years at a time. It is possible that I haven't read the description of Detect Evil in 25 or more years. So I believe I have made the mistake of assuming that a Detect Evil spell will reveal alignment. It doesn't. It only reveals intentions. So you could have a chaotic, villainous NPC in a scene in which that NPC is really only interested in the same goal as the other PCs, such as escaping a dungeon. Casting Detect Evil on him will not reveal anything.

Now it may be the case that once everyone finds an escape route the bastard turns on them. But to allow Detect Evil to predict a future that is not even being actively contemplated by the target of the spell would be to grant that spell enormous power.

The spell does indicate that items can be determined to be evil or not. I suppose this is because most items have no active agency. They simply are or are not evil.

The classic 3-point alignment system is actually quite useful, creatively. I love the 9-point AD&D system because it adds all those nuances. But if your alignment says NOTHING about your moral character that leaves a ton of freedom for you to explore the character in play.

And what about monsters? It seems like the monsters with a lawful alignment tend to be described as good or at least peaceable. But the chaotic monsters tend to be pure evil. Perhaps that is why lawful seems to indicate good and chaotic indicates evil? Sripping away the moral element you could create a chaotic monster that is described as being good, perhaps helpful to PCs under the right conditions.

But chaos is still described as selfish and untrustworthy. In a sense that aligns more readily with evil than good, since good suggests the opposite. I suppose that means in the end you can have a good chaotic creature...but it would still be a bit of a monkey wrench type of creature...getting in the way or causing trouble. Like some kind of imp.

/alignment musings for now.