Managing Your Alignments

Here's a restatement of the last post, regarding alignment and cosmology.  The position goes like this - as the modern D&D community re-evaluates the use of categorically evil humanoids, people are questioning whether the game actually needs alignment at all.  I'm not invested in using alignment at the player character or behavioral level, but alignment is hard-wired into the cosmology of the game world.  The outer planes, deities, and extra-planar races like demons, devils, angels, and more, are all predicated on cosmic conflict.  We need to account for that if we're going to tear down the old monuments.

Today's post is a survey of approaches for managing alignment.  I'll include how I like to do it these days, tackling both the player behavior question and the cosmology questions.  I prefer to minimize the behavioral aspects of alignment while preserving alignment as a cosmological factor.  I don't like adjudicating Alignment as Morality because I play D&D as a beer-and-pretzels casual game and we have better things to debate at the table.  Players are ill-equipped for ethical arguments.  What is an evil act?  Is torturing the bad guy in order to save the city okay?  Does Lawful Good mean turning in the hungry waif who stole bread to feed her starving brother?  D&D's simplified definitions are inadequate to tackle these types of questions consistently.  If no two tables can adjudicate a "rules" question the same way, it probably shouldn't be a rule.  5E has eliminated most of the punishing mechanical impacts of alignment for the player characters.

Here are some different ways I've encountered alignment through the years, plus my current preference.

Gygaxian Morality

1st Edition AD&D has detailed descriptions of the nine alignments, laying out the Law vs Chaos axis and the Good vs Evil axis, and then providing a description of the behaviors for each alignment.  The best I can say about the 9-fold alignment system from 1E AD&D is it launched the cosmology of the game, with all of the outer planes, deities, and beings tied to the different alignments, incorporating classic elements from folklore and religion.  As a tool for guiding player behavior, it's a bit of a mess.  Consider Lawful Good:

"Lawful Good creatures are convinced that order and law are absolutely necessary to assure good, and that good is best defined as whatever brings the most benefit to the greater number of decent, thinking creatures and the least woe to the rest".  Does this help us answer questions about whether torture is okay in order to save lives, or whether the waif stealing bread should be turned in to the sheriff?  If ever there was an alignment that calls for black and white rules for behavior, it'd be Lawful Good, but this definition sounds awfully utilitarian and subjective.  Furthermore, there were significant mechanical penalties in 1E for not living up to your alignment, so the answer very much matters!  Paladins would lose their status, clerics lost their spells, druids stopped being druids, and other characters could lose a character level.  Very painful.

The "Neutral" alignments drove me nuts.  Anyone that wrote down Neutral (especially Chaotic Neutral) was basically signaling, "hey I want to do horrible, evil things, but don't actually want to come out and call myself evil".  Of course players would also try the classic dodges, such as "Hey Petro the Paladin and Carl the Cleric, can you two go into the next room and start setting up a camp?  The rest of us just want a few minutes of quality time alone with our new prisoner..."

Alignment as Attitude

I prefer the BX system from the 80's as a rules set in most contexts, including alignment.  BX simplified alignment to Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic (which I believe was the original approach started back in OD&D) but also presented it more as an attitude or tendencies.  Lawful characters tend to support rules and civilization.  Chaotic characters tend to look out for themselves, act on sudden whims.

5E kept the 9-fold alignment system, from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil, but alignments are just attitudes and tendencies like BX, not moral straight-jackets with punishing mechanical penalties.  The one exception I've seen in 5E is related to paladins and oaths.  Although there are no specific alignment restrictions on Paladins, the oaths strongly signal a direction, and the game hands the referee discretion to remove a paladin's powers if they're ignoring the tenets of their oath and not seeking atonement.  It's fairly subjective, but does hearken back to the Medieval romance and literary roots of the paladin and is somewhat similar to the 1E paladin.

5E does explicitly recognize that beyond the prime material plane, alignment is a cosmic force that defines the outer planes and defines the existence of fiends and celestials.

Alignment as Ethical Philosophy

Sometime back I dropped a review of Alexander Macris's Arbiter of Worlds e-book here.  It covers a range of topics about running a tabletop game or building a campaign setting; the appendix covers alignment and describes an approach to apply classic ethical philosophies to the 9-fold system, from Kant to Mills to Nietsche.  If you're a fan of philosophy and want a system to deal with ethical problems and alignment, this is a good place to start.  For instance, Alex defines Law as rules-based (deontological ethics) whereas Chaos is consequential or utilitarian.  A Lawful paladin would never murder, under any circumstances, because murder is against their rules; the Chaotic character is willing to rationalize "the ends justify the means" and focus on the consequences or outcomes of their action (robbing from the rich is okay to a CG character but not to a LG character, for instance).  Anyway, my players would firmly be in the camp of "alignment as attitude" anyway, and not interested in getting the calls ethically correct, so this isn't an approach I'd use - but it was a super interesting read.  If you've ever seen the TV show "The Good Place", it covered similar ground regarding judging "goodness" and highlights the difficulty applying a scoring standard to behavior.

Alignment as Allegiance

One of my favorites aspects of the early OSR was the re-examination and discussion of the D&D source literature from Appendix N.  By reading Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, Moorcock's stories of Elric, and Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber, I saw where these ideas of a cosmic struggle between Law and Chaos originated.  They're well worth reading!  Plus Poul Anderson introduces the D&D style troll, the paladin, the holy sword, Chaos - if you like the origins of things, it's a must read.  In a Law vs Chaos regime, the ethical considerations of Good vs Evil are less important than being on a side - standing for Law and civilization, or Chaos and destruction.  Alignment as "picking a side in the cosmic struggle" harmonizes closest to the BX and OD&D approach of Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic and the war game roots of the hobby.

How Do I Do It?

The theme I'm most concerned with is the world building aspects of alignment, and how it defines the cosmic struggle.  For a heroic fantasy game like D&D, I like the idea of powerful forces struggling in the background, whether it has immediate impact on low level play or not.  It's not about grading player behavior; if they're jerks to NPCs, for instance, I'd rather let the setting express natural consequences (or not) rather than smashing down with an alignment hammer.

Therefore, in my homebrew settings, I use the term "unaligned" to described people.  Alignment of Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, is reserved for supernatural entities, or characters who have embraced supernatural powers.  There is a cosmic conflict between Law and Chaos, with Law representing powers of creation and order, and Chaos the forces of destruction.  Angels, devils, and similar Judeo-Christian elements fall on the side of Law, and demons and Cthulhu-monsters are Chaotic.  Planets and habitable worlds have nature spirits that embody the Neutral alignment.  It keeps the Monster Manual intact, and lets me explain why angels and devils might team up to stop the flood of demons from the Outer Dark.  I tend to put all the traditional pantheons into Law because of their divine nature.  Alignment is about power sources and which side of the cosmic conflict.  Odin and Zeus would team up to thwart Cthulhu and Demogorgon on the cosmic scale, but in the absence of Chaos, have no issue throwing down with each other.

Humans and similar character races only display an alignment if they embrace supernatural forces, most commonly by being a spellcaster.  Clerics are Lawful, magic using classes are Chaotic, and druids, aligned with the world spirits, are Neutral.  By embracing other-worldly forces, they've permanently changed their aura (detectable by an Alignment spell).  Everyone else is unaligned, and their morality is up to their personal code and beliefs. It's really simple, and very close to the Lamentations of the Flame Princess approach to alignment.

How many of you are still using the traditional 1E AD&D alignment, complete with level loss, alignment languages, and class restrictions?

Alignment Doesn't Need You

Wizard of the Coast's recent announcements regarding changes to humanoids and alignment have spawned a fresh discussion of why we even have alignment as a factor in the game.  Orcs used to be categorically evil; the new WOTC position is that all humanoids are basically unaligned (although they could certainly belong to an "evil" culture and play the roles of villains).  For that matter, the 5E version of the game has dropped all of the player-character facing restrictions around alignment - paladins don't have to be Lawful Good, druids don't have to be Neutral, Assassins don't have to be Evil.  What's the point of alignment in this new regime?  Is it just a set of guidelines to roleplay your character?  A mere descriptor of the character's attitude?

Here's the thing - regardless of how meaningless you think alignment is at the table, it is hard-wired into the cosmology of the game.  Alignment describes the objective reality of the game universe.  Each outer plane corresponds to a specific alignment and is home to a set of deities associated with that alignment.  There are extra-planar races such as demons, devils, and angels that strongly correspond to outer planes and the alignments of those planes, too.  Furthermore, when a mortal dies, their soul goes to the plane where their deity resides.  Take a look at this picture of the 1st Edition Cosmology - although there have been tweaks here and there through the years (with 4E representing the biggest departure from the classic scheme) 5E has basically returned to the 9-fold alignment system and corresponding outer planes.

The 5E DMG goes on to say, "bringing someone back from the dead means retrieving the soul from that plane (the plane of the soul's deity and/or alignment) and returning it to its body".  Regardless of how the individual players or DM fold, spindle, or mutilate alignment at their table, alignment is the basis for the transcendent reality beyond the concerns of grubby mortals.  Players and referees may ignore alignment at the table, but it's there in the core assumptions of how the multiverse works.

Of course this is all governed by rule zero.  You are the master of your campaign and game world, the creator of the cosmology.  Your cosmology might deviate from the default assumptions and the rules as written.  I get the impression many of the referees discard alignment as a relative matter, without considering that alignment has this objective game existence.  At least if you're going to jettison alignment, replace the whole cosmology and redefine the objective reality of the game universe, too.

One can argue alignment is just a descriptor tag with no inherent meaning - a player calls himself "lawful good", acts arbitrarily, and the players and referee agree this aberrant behavior is actually what lawful good looks like for this particular cosmology.  You've seen the argument, "I'm a viking, and lawful good to a viking means murder and pillage, amiright bro?"  The important thing, from my point of view, is the relationship between the game objects - the "good" plane exists, there are "good" deities there, there are "good"-aligned extraplanar beings, some player characters pencil the word "good" on their character sheets, there's a recognition they're going to the "good" place when there's a character death.  Ideally there's a common understanding of what is good or evil, law or chaos, too.

Alignment has bedeviled referees and players, but also sets D&D apart from almost every other RPG because of these behavioral guidelines and game universe tie-ins.  Thus we grapple with questions in-game of what constitutes law, chaos, good, or evil and put on our ethics hats from time to time.  My position is alignment is important mainly because of it's relationship to the broader multiverse and game fiction and less about managing behavior; but next time out let's look at some common approaches of dealing with how alignment can work at the table.

A Government by the Evil, for the Evil

What are some of your favorite portrayals of "evil" fantasy societies in gaming?  As I've been thinking about how I want to portray humanoids in the game world it's gotten me thinking about the role of societal alignment, government, and power.  Maybe this topic has been covered in a Dragon or one of the Dungeon Master Guides, and an astute reader can point out a reference?

For instance, I've always thought of "Lawful Evil" societies as tyrannical police states, heavily militarized, with a side of casual cruelty.  Would Imperial Rome be Lawful Evil?  How about Sparta?  How about the old Soviet Union or totalitarian states from the mid-20th century (like the Axis powers?).

What would a realm be like where the prevailing alignment of the populace is Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil?  In real world terms, I think of Chaotic Evil "states" as zones with warlords and armed bands, with complete disregard for traditional morality or norms.  Examples include regions controlled by drug cartels or notorious warlords who ravage entire regions, a populace living in fear.  A Chaotic Evil society is one where life is cheap and guns make the rules.  How about cultures where rampage was a way of life?  If you transport real world cultures to a game universe where alignments represent eternal and absolute truths, would the Huns and Mongol societies be Evil in D&D terms?  How about the raiders during the Viking era?  "Good", as the 1st Edition DMG defines it, represents "a belief that any creature is entitled to life, relative freedom, and the prospect of happiness".  By definition then, any society modeled after a historical counterpart that countenanced slavery would seem to be evil.  There goes antiquity.

I usually like to return to OG Gary's materials to clarify this kind of stuff, but while the Greyhawk Folios identify many kingdoms where the societal alignments point towards evil, there's not a lot of color on how the societies function or what a day in the life is like for the citizenry.  Examples would include The Horned Society, Bandit Kingdoms, Iuz, or the Great Kingdom.  We get encyclopedia facts - ruler, population, and a bit of recent history, but not the texture of how the societies run.

My favorite example of an evil place is Erelhei-Cinlu, the great Drow city in the Vault of the Drow.  Module D3 depicts armed houses of competing Drow nobles jockeying for position among the families with murder, assassination, and politics all part of the repertoire.  The city of Erelhei-Cinlu itself is a dangerous place where powerful non-Drow visitors - demons, undead, archmages, and the like - mingle in the streets and markets.  There's not so much "law and order" but rather a recognition that everyone there is a predator that can handle themselves, and if you can't defend yourself, victimization is to be expected - very much the strong survive.  It's my favorite depiction of a playable Chaotic Evil city (the Forgotten Realms knock off, Menzober-I-can't-spell-it, is targeted at compelling Drizz't fiction rather than something easy to use at the table).  The Drow may be the largest example of a Chaotic Evil society... for humans it tends to be smaller groups, and transitory - the equivalent of biker gangs, pirate ships, the aforementioned warlords or cartels, but not anything at scale or which persisted.

Here's another odd factoid I learned while considering evil societies.  Orc alignment shifted through the years!  TSR D&D had Orcs as Lawful Evil, but when WOTC took over with 3rd Edition, Orcs were recast as Chaotic Evil and this has persisted into 5th Edition.  We recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies, and I can see how the depiction of Orcs there could be considered Chaotic Evil... it's fear of their powerful supernatural leaders that keep the armies together, and left to their own devices, Orcs fall to in-fighting and scrabbling with each other (such as the in-fighting at Cirith Ungol or out on the plains of Rohan by the eaves of Fangorn Forest).

Anyway, this post is not meant to be a deep-dive on Orcs, per se, I'm still mulling.  I'm sure other media has done Orcs well - maybe Warhammer or World of Warcraft - perhaps as masters of warfare and the military arts, basically "evil Klingons" - time for more research.  On the main topic though, I would love to hear how readers would characterize notorious historical regimes in terms of societal alignments.  Similarly let me know if you've got examples of game settings or fictional states that presented compelling examples of interesting evil societies.  Thanks!