Alignment Distribution

[SilverLeaf167]

When reading through the Dungeon Master's Guide once again (cuz of boredom), I noticed a weird little detail. In the "Random NPC Alignment" table, there is a 25% chance for Good, 25% for Neutral and 50% for Evil.

If your world isn't especially corrupt, wouldn't Neutral be the most common, while Good and Evil were equal? After all, as I see it, Good is one who is especially devoted to doing good and stopping evil, while Evil is the opposite. Thus, as actual pursuers of either are quite rare, almost all people would actually be Neutral, giving Neutral at least a 50% chance on the table.

What are your opinions on this topic?

[Psyx]

Going into holes in the ground and killing stuff for money tends to attract a certain type of person. I see most adventurers as criminally insane by our standards, with a prevalence of evil.

[SilverLeaf167]

Yeah, that's a good point... I didn't actually think of it as just encounters for PCs, but as the actual alignments of ALL people.

[Caphi]

Most parties I play in aren't actually made of sociopathic hoboes, so I'm not sure why what is essentially a crack about adventuring as a concept is being generalized to actual worldbuilding and the alignment system. (Although a world that did use that kind of adventurer, and took it all the way, would certainly be interesting...)

Maybe the devs just thought people are inherently selfish. You never know. I prefer Neutral worlds, but then, I prefer not to invoke alignment at all unless I need to smite something.

[Maerok]

I thought that an overwhelming majority of people were Neutral (90%+). Most of them probably don't do anything anyway outside their daily routine if we're including Commoners and such. Alignments are for people who matter. Within the 10% or less that do, it's probably split pretty evenly along all the axes - different races all have their own tendencies and exceptions.

[Oracle_Hunter]

There's a metagame and "real world" explanation here:

(1) the DMG is about setting up encounters for PCs on adventures. D&D is designed - rules-wise - to be more about killing than talking. Having a greater number of Evil (and therefore combat-prone) Encounters facilitates this.

(2) Evil characters are selected for in any sufficiently lawless society. If the government isn't going to be able to ensure security for its citizens, then the citizens need to protect themselves or die.

It so happens that attacking from surprise is a good way to win battles at a low cost; the more battles you win this way, the more resources you have to protect yourself. Evil characters tend to get a lot of stuff this way because they're willing to prey on non-combatants; consequently non-Evil characters are usually less well protected than Evil ones. Therefore Evil characters prey on the weak and get stronger - making them less attractive to predation!

It's a vicious cycle, and it also explains why the PCs - as non-Evil adventurers - are exceptional (in the literal sense).

[Bagelz]

Plot reasons.
Chances are if you are bothering to stat up an npc, instead of just mentioning their existence, then you are using that npc as a source of conflict.
And since its assumed evil parties are rare (unless the campaign is specifically designed around it), then evil npcs are the easiest source of conflict.

[SilverLeaf167]

Yeah, I guess you're all right. It's just for the people that the PCs actually meet and interact with.

Not like the random creation tables matter much to me: I usually just handcraft everything.

[Sindri]

If you look at the random settlement alignment table, it tends toward lawful and good. If you look at the random individual table, it tends toward chaotic and evil. I interpret this to mean that if you go to a normal town, most people will be in the LG-TN range, whereas if you meet someone alone or in a small group in the wilderness they have a good chance of being a bandit or adventurer, both of which center around ignoring rules and standards while making a profit via violence, and thus attract CE types.

[hamishspence]

I thought that an overwhelming majority of people were Neutral (90%+). Most of them probably don't do anything anyway outside their daily routine if we're including Commoners and such. Alignments are for people who matter. Within the 10% or less that do, it's probably split pretty evenly along all the axes - different races all have their own tendencies and exceptions.

The DMG has Power Center Alignments, Cityscape has "Community alignments"- and both tend not to be dominated by Neutral alignments.

They do tend to be more Lawful than Chaotic, and more Good than Evil, though.

To quote PHB "Humans tend toward no alignment, not even Neutral"

If 90% of humans were Neutral- that would mean they aren't just Often Neutral, but Usually Neutral, by MM standards.

And at the high end of Usually- comparable to Cambions in Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (fiends with a little human blood, and the Evil subtype, which are listed as Usually Evil, and 90% are Evil).

[Lord Vampyre]

Yeah, I guess you're all right. It's just for the people that the PCs actually meet and interact with.

You have to remember that these are the random individuals that decide to interact with the PCs. Generally this means they're travelling down a road. Most people will choose not to interact with the PCs without a given reason. The ones that do want something. Consider all of the times you've walked down a crowded sidewalk. Most of the time people will ignore you, choosing to not interact with people they don't know. When people do decide to interact with you, they usually want something. This could be a street preacher wanting to save your soul, a bum who wants a donation, or con artist wanting to swindle you out of your money.

The DMG is just proposing that more often than not that any random individual harassing the PCs will more than likely want to either steal, swindle, or kill them.

Now, the usual barkeep, farmer, guard, ect are generally not considered random. The few times they are justify the 25% good and 25% neutral.

[Erts]

The DMG is just proposing that more often than not that any random individual harassing the PCs will more than likely want to either steal, swindle, or kill them.

Now, the usual barkeep, farmer, guard, ect are generally not considered random. The few times they are justify the 25% good and 25% neutral.

+1 for truth.

I'd say that all alignments are probably split evenly, that's how we define neutral. Average. Not favoring a side.

You don't need to be the Joker or Xykon to be Chaotic Evil, and you don't need to be Javert to be Lawful Neutral.

[hamishspence]

You don't need to be the Joker or Xykon to be Chaotic Evil, and you don't need to be Javert to be Lawful Neutral.

Definitely agreed on this.

[Erts]

Definitely agreed on this.

Thanks .

To clarify, I mean that in the real world and in a game world, they are split evenly across large populations.

I think I might know some Chaotic Evil people. Not that I dislike all of them personally (one is an acquaintance who I am on fairly good terms with, I just intensely dislike his personality.)

[hamishspence]

Alignment discussions that mention the real world tend to have problems- but I'd say I fit the Lawful Neutral type fairly well.

In the game world- you might have LE cities where a majority of the population are LE, or various others- often with a fairly wide range of alignments. A "typical city" might have a very roughly even split- possibly with a slightly higher proportion of Lawful than other alignments.

it makes more sense to me (in the context of the game) than saying "90% of people are neutral- but humans don't tend toward neutrality because they have no inborn alignment biases- only cultural biases"

[Erts]

Alignment discussions that mention the real world tend to have problems- but I'd say I fit the Lawful Neutral type fairly well.

In the game world- you might have LE cities where a majority of the population are LE, or various others- often with a fairly wide range of alignments. A "typical city" might have a very roughly even split- possibly with a slightly higher proportion of Lawful than other alignments.

I always tend to think that when you break a rule that most people already break (e.g, IDK, jaywalking) is a neutral thing to do. (I'm not going to use the word "deed" when talking about jaywalking.)

[hamishspence]

In some places- there's no such thing as "jaywalking" instead there's "endangering traffic"- and that's the only thing you need to worry about.

[dps]

The rules make an implicit assumption that most PC parties are at least nominally good aligned. There also seems to be an assumption that most random encounters will be a matter of conflict. Put the 2 together, and you get a situation in which NPC encountered randomly will tend toward evil. It's a game mechanic, not a comment on human nature.

[Devils_Advocate]

Yeah, that's a good point... I didn't actually think of it as just encounters for PCs, but as the actual alignments of ALL people.

Nope, provably not. It's part of a set of three tables for randomly generating an NPC's alignment, class, and race; and the classes listed are the 11 core PC classes. But, as we know, normal people have NPC classes. Thus these tables only cover freaks like the PCs.

Note, too, that a different distribution of races is given for each class/alignment combo. However, it just so happens, oddly enough, that human NPCs generated using these tables do work out to be pretty close to 20% Good, 30% Neutral, and 50% Evil. I've done the math on this. (Yes, I have that much free time.)

I'd say that all alignments are probably split evenly, that's how we define neutral.

Note that this makes alignment relative: One slaveholder is Evil and another Neutral simply because they live in different cultures. Considering everyone alive still leaves it temporally relative, as people were rather different thousands of years ago.

I mean, you could argue that there's been zero net moral progress and zero net moral decline for as long as humanity has existed, or that they've always precisely evened out...

Unless you literally mean are split evenly, and are talking about everyone alive right now. In which case humanity probably had different alignment distributions in the past, and would also probably have different alignment distributions in fictional worlds like campaign settings. Unless the fictional world is specifically designed to be precisely like ours in this particular regard.

It's like how an IQ of 100 is smarter than it used to be.

I prefer for Good characters to be generally benevolent, Evil characters generally malevolent, and Neutral characters neither, or something along those lines. Rather than work out what a perfectly average person is like (which presumably involves somehow quantifying a bunch of difficult-to-quantify stuff) and then compare characters to that, I'd rather just characterize characters directly. But, hey, that's me.

[Edit]No, wait, I'm sorry. You'd want to randomly select, say, one thousand people from the world's entire human population and then work out an ordered ranking, and then work out whether characters fell into the top, bottom, or middle third of that. You'd just need to be able to decide whether one person is more Good, more Evil, more Lawful, or more Chaotic than another, which doesn't necessarily require quantifying anything, and you wouldn't have to find an average at all.

Well, that's much easier! [/Edit]

Average. Not favoring a side.

"Average" doesn't necessarily mean not favoring a side; it means favoring whatever sides that an average person favors. Anyhoo, I'd guess that the most common human alignments are Neutral and Lawful Neutral.