Alignment Through Deconstruction

[Daracaex]

Here's something I thought I'd try out after learning this view in English. The theory: There is no alignment. Why? Because the words used to represent it are meaningless. Many people struggle with the meanings of good and evil and law and chaos. So what is good? No one knows. That's what keeps being debated here. Different things are considered good by different people and societies. All anyone agrees on is that good's opposite is evil. So if good has no meaning, then what is evil? That doesn't mean anything either. And what about the other half of the alignment system? Laws are different for everybody, so how can anyone say for sure what lawful is? Law means nothing to people as a whole because there is no concrete definition for it, other than it is the opposite of chaos. Thus, chaos has no meaning either.

So where has that left us? We do not have "good" or "chaotic" characters. We only have characters who save peoples lives, help old ladies across the street, cheat at cards. Characters cannot be defined by the current alignment system because it has no meaning. They are instead defined by what they do.


I hope this little experiment turned out okay. I'm more reader response myself, but I do find this sort of thing fun to play with.

[Khantalas]

Yeah, but D&D alignment system is much more clear-cut than real life.

[Talya]

That's real life. And it's very true.

However, in RAW D&D, good and evil have meanings. (Chaos and Law are a bit hazier, but they, too, have meanings. Sortof.) Morality in D&D is absolute.

[LotharBot]

Words have no "intrinsic" meaning, in the sense that the letters g-o-o-d arranged in that order don't necessarily have to carry with them the meanings we generally ascribe. In that sense, deconstructionism is has a point, but it falls short by assuming the concepts themselves are meaningless.

Words are convenient labels we give to ideas. It doesn't matter whether we call the ideas "good" and "evil", "duck" and "goose", or "blx4d" and "oiumx9~", so long as we share a common idea as to what those labels mean. The problem with D&D alignment is not that good, evil, law, and chaos are meaningless, but rather, that different people use the labels to refer to slightly different concepts, so the words have multiple meanings depending on whose game you're playing in. (There's a simple solution in game: the DM is the ultimate arbiter of what the words mean within his game world, based on what the DMG says.)

Outside of an individual game, things are a little messier. We each have our own concepts which are somewhat similar, and which we have given the same label. So we get into arguments about who's "right" -- as to whose definition is "correct" -- when all we're really arguing about is who gets to claim the label for their personal idea.

[Daracaex]

Personally, I'm of the view that alignment can have some flexibility, but some interpretations of good and evil are better than others and some can be obviously wrong. I just wanted to experiment with deconstruction and see how people here reacted to it.

[Wojiz]

That's where religion comes in. If there is a true religion, then the words set down by the god/gods of said religion is what's objectively good or evil, if the religion holds the god/gods to be the ultimate force in the universe.

[CharPixie]

Well, yes. Thing is, signifiers are a major part of society; while it may be impossible to find objective good and law in the world, it is possible to discourse using the signifiers of good and law. And in that discourse we find meaning. It's the nature of abstracts.