Free simplified pantheon: Alignments as gods!

[Devils_Advocate]

I always liked White Wolf's version in Werewolf the Apocalypse. Weaver, Wyrm, Wyld.

Weaver is the more-or-less mindless force of Order, binding up the world in its webs. Wyld is chaos incarnate, creation unbound. Wyrm is the destroyer, balancing the other two, a force of renewal.

I haven't read that source material, but I am familiar with the Exalted counterparts of those three, which are easy to pick out just from the names and your brief descriptions. ("Release the Kukla!")

Basically, the Evil god got frustrated at the eternal battle between itself and Good (well, between itself and everybody, really), and wanted something to give it an edge. So, Evil tried to tap into some foreign nameless dimension for the power to crush the other gods, but Evil wasn't a complete fool and tricked the Neutrality God into exploring the power first (flattery will get you everywhere with Neutrality). The experiment sickened Neutrality with a chronic condition, for which only the Evil (or now Chaos, I guess) has the treatment

It makes some sense for Chaos to be the one to come up with a creative solution to a novel problem (and for Evil to be the one who wrecked ****).

what Law does that Neutrality doesn't do is apply itself, work had, infiltrate the hierarchy, start entrenching itself, making it a necessary part of government and harder to remove. This leads to....ironically(?) Law creating massive inefficiency which leads to Law defeating itself when it was on the precipice of conquering the world, its global civilization collapsing under the weight of its own out-of-control bureaucracy!

So... Law never uses its influence to manage things more effectively by improving efficiency, reducing costly internal conflict, etc.? Followers of the Lawful god in different organizations don't, say, collude with each other for mutual benefit, subtly shifting competing factions towards peaceful coexistence, then alliance, then eventually formal union, until a single society of elites dominates the entire world behind the scenes, while official rulers serve as mere figureheads who can take the fall whenever things go south? Instead, they all just suck at their jobs? Chaos will always triumph, because Law is dumb?

If you say so. Seems kind boring to me.

Monks were originally a kind of variant Cleric, which is the real reason they add Wisdom to Armor class, but the reason being is they are actually supposed to be Xaiolin monks trying to find inner spiritual perfection instead of engaging in external theism.

Some have opined that D&D's Monks are out of place in a game with character archetypes generally fairly rooted in medieval European folklore, but I dunno, I think that Friar Tuck is pretty good with a quarterstaff in at least some of his depictions? Regardless, being a member of a religious order isn't the same thing as being a member of a clergy, although one can of course be both (an okay if not great multiclass); so it makes sense for Monks to be their own different thing from Clerics in a game that has more than one religious class regardless.

Which technically makes Paladins a special type of Monk, I think? Huh.

Warlocks might've had a typical god before but now that they sold their soul to their Patron will remind them, everyday, exactly who their god is.

So Warlocks and their patrons are just weird Clerics and deities? If anything, I'd go in the opposite direction, with the Warlock receiving a one-time infusion of power in exchange for a one-time service. The service is probably something significant and difficult, with a penalty (usually forfeiture of the Warlock's soul) if the service is not completed by deadline.

That's not a bad summation of them, actually.

I'm not sure how you meant it, but this sort of usage of "actually" seems like an indicator of mild surprise to me; in this case, the surprise being that the philosophies presented can be described so well so succinctly. But that's a little weird, since those philosophies seem so clearly to each be built around a single simple core concept which isn't hard to identify or give a word for. Maybe it's me.

One idea I played with a few years ago was to rewrite Dragonlance but "flipped 90 degrees"... so, instead of the big conflict being between Good and Evil, the big conflict was between Law and Chaos.

I've gathered that Dragonlance's "Good" and "Evil" factions each have an ideology or way of life that they want to bring everyone over to, whereas "Neutral" wants individuals to be free to choose their own path. So it's basically set up as Lawful Good vs. Lawful Evil vs. Chaotic Neutral, not that it's reflected in the deities' alignments, nor that they acknowledge that e.g. a Chaotic Good character may well be more sympathetic to "Team Neutral" than to "Team Good".

I don't think people care less about Law and chaos so much as they are harder to argue about. Good vs Evil is morality and people tend to have an opinion about morality. Law and chaos are more complex and people don't have primed opinions on them as much.

Well, that all depends. 3E made Good and Evil essentially just kindness and cruelty, with Law covering morality in a relative sense. AD&D was different, but there it was pretty clear that Lawful characters want some sort of Authority to enforce some sort of Order, whereas Chaotic characters aren't really willing to trust anyone with the power to do that, or at least not enough to cooperate unquestioningly. Conflict between the two is thus expected and natural.

The exclamation point is part of the title.

Fooour sharks in the water....

But really, I don't think that any version of D&D has ever given a description of alignment that doesn't require "boiling the stupid off" to even use consistently, and there are various different ways to modify things to be less pants-on-head. One can discuss the merits of different approaches to that, but it tends to be a bit futile to talk application of some categorization schema before said schema is even sorted out.