No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

[NigelWalmsley]

Unless you're wrong and those things aren't fundamentally subjective. Are you unable to accept the possibility that morality might not work the way you think it does, even if only in a fantasy game?

I'm not wrong, because that subjectivity is part of the definition of the terms. If you'd like to use the terms to mean something else, you can, but the problems we discuss using those terms don't go away if you do that. They just become harder to talk about.

Let's suppose we postulate a moral universe where it is "wrong" to pull the lever (killing the one person) in the Trolley Problem, and if you do that you detect as Evil and if you don't do that you detect as Good. That doesn't actually resolve the moral dilemma at all. All you've done is changed the consequences from "one person dies" v "five people die" to "one person dies, you detect as Evil" v "five people die, you detect as Good". Who's to say that I'm obligated to believe that detecting as Evil rather than Good (or whatever consequence you decide alignment has) is worse than four additional people dying? Who's to say that I have to subscribe to a consequentialist theory of morality at all? Maybe I believe people have an ethical obligation to pull levers. That belief isn't consequentialist to begin with, so changing the consequences cannot change the outputs of that ethical theory. All you have done, literally the only thing, is made this conversation harder to have. You haven't answered any questions, you haven't simplified anything.

That level of popularity is good evidence that for an awful lot of people the alignment system is a positive, or at the least not enough of a negative to spoil their enjoyment of the game. So why change what clearly isn't a problem when there are plenty of other games you can play if D&D isn't to your taste.

This argument proves too much. Every edition of D&D has, at some point, been the market leader. Most of them were the market leader for their whole lifespans. Therefore, we can conclude that nothing about D&D should be changed, and that all the changes ever made were actually unnecessary. Of course, that's absurd. D&D has a lot of moving parts. Saying that we should keep alignment because D&D as a whole succeeded is like saying the Zune was a success because Microsoft didn't go bankrupt.

I for one have never met someone able to consistently maintain that good and evil are entirely subjective. Thorough discussion will always reveal something that they feel is just plain wrong or unfair, as if they really do believe there is an objective framework within which to judge such things.

That is subjective. Saying "I think X is unfair" is a subjective claim. That doesn't make it bad or wrong, and it doesn't mean we should reject those things as a basis for morality. But they are, fundamentally, subjective.

"Baator is based on a philosophy where X is evil and Y is good...".

Oh, look, you've completely lost the plot. Once you start talking about "Evil according to Baator", having Baator's philosophy be calle Evil no longer makes even the faintest amount of sense. Since you have soundly rebutted your own position, I see no need to waste any more of my time on it.

See, that's the part where i disagree. You can take out the old alignment system in terms of player vs DM gatcha mechanics entirely, but i don't belive any character, protagonist or antagonist, can or should be encouraged to be described as if they are post-modern abstractions beyond morality.

That's a false dichotomy. Consider characters from elsewhere in fiction. Characters are almost never described in terms of some abstract metaphysical alignment (literally the only story I've heard of that does that is A Practical Guide to Evil, and it really doesn't work out the way the alignment side wants). Most people just do stuff and have values and we are left to judge whether we think they are good or not (sometimes the narrative will include other character's judgements, but that's not the same as saying "Lawful Evil" or "Neutral Good"). Characters like Han Solo, Dalinar Kholin, Sherlock Holmes, and Cersei Lannister don't ever get scenes where someone says "this character is Good" or "this character is Evil", but that doesn't mean they're "beyond morality".

[PairO'Dice Lost]

This is just punting. You are accepting that alignment is stupid and we should use philosophies whose definitions we can agree on instead, but insisting that we keep a layer of obscurantism between "this faction is Utilitarians" and the name of the faction, and that the layer of obscurantism we use be extremely loaded terms that people care deeply about in real life.

I'm accepting nothing of the sort. Chaos isn't just Utilitarianism on the cosmic scale in the same way that the Plane of Water isn't just an infinite expanse of Caribbean seawater, so just doing a search-replace everywhere misses the point and accomplishes nothing. Alignment encompasses personal values, societal structures, cosmic forces, and various scales in between, and isn't reducible to just a WoD-style personality system or an MtG-style color wheel.

And we can agree what actions a Utilitarian would take in what circumstances.

Say you set up a trolley problem with three divergent tracks, one with three happy kindergarteners tied to it, one with a burned-out retiree tied to it, and one with a golden retriever puppy tied to it, and ran an experiment where you let eight different Utilitarians pick a track. Would you get the same result every time just because they're all Utilitarians?

Nope. The Negative Utilitarian and Sentient Utilitarian would disagree about whether to go for the puppy, the Average Utilitarian and Total Utilitarian would disagree about how to count the retiree, the Motive Utilitarian and Rule Utilitarian would (hopefully) disagree with how to handle the kindergarteners, and the Act Utilitarian and Two-Level Utilitarian would possibly settle on the same outcome but disagree on how they reached that decision. Utilitarianism isn't a singular ethical philosophy which its adherents follow in lockstep, it's one of three overarching families of related ethical philosophies within which exist multiple philosophies that agree on the big picture stuff but can disagree on the particulars.

Same with alignment: as I said before, they are (and are useful as) categories, not singular personalities or straitjackets of behavior. If you insist on unreasonably high standards for defining and separating philosophical standards, then not only does alignment collapse under scrutiny but so does every single moral and ethical system ever developed by humanity--so it's a good thing that that's not how alignment works, in any edition.

Alignment is pointless, and running 5e as if alignment isn't there is easy, simple, and flat-out better.

Having an alignment system of some sort is a fundamental necessity in any system that goes for the "high fantasy" setup with Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil and other Abstract Capitalized Concepts because that's how those stories and tropes work. Whether it's Good vs. Evil or Light Side vs. Dark Side or Eru vs. Morgoth and whether you have one axis or two (or rarely more) will vary by setting, but the hallmark of those kinds of settings is that the opposing moral precepts are cosmic forces that have tangible physical effects on the world and on those who align themselves with one side or the other.

Now, does that mean every D&D campaign needs to care about alignment? Of course not; if you're running a gritty swords-and-sorcery campaign or a political Game of Thrones-like campaign you can toss alignment and that's fine, because those kinds of stories are about moral ambiguity and petty human squabbles and such, and they aren't about opposing or supporting the Elder Gods of Lankhmar or the Others of Westeros on philosophical grounds, simply the grounds of "they're going to kill us all if we don't do anything about them and that would be bad." When I ran a pseudohistorical Norse campaign (basically, set in the real world in the 900s except Norse mythology was true) I didn't use the standard alignments at all because alignments weren't a good fit for the Norse milieu (though I did use a replacement system based on four cardinal values of Norse heroism).

But D&D as a game cares about alignment because it operates at scales from the grittiest swords and sorcery to the highest of high fantasy depending on what level you're playing at, what setting you're playing in, and the plot of the campaign you're playing through, and as anyone who has tried to run Planescape or Dragonlance in 5e can probably attest, it's much easier to have all that information and all those mechanical "hooks" available throughout the game and let people ignore it if they don't want to use it than to not have any of it and force people to add it back in if they do want to use it.

Trying to remove alignment from D&D-the-game would be like trying to make D&D-the-game low magic rather than simply houseruling a low-magic campaign: that's not what the game is or does, and trying to contort it into that is a dumb idea when you could simply play a different game more focused on the experience you want that does swords and sorcery or low magic better.

That's a false dichotomy. Consider characters from elsewhere in fiction. Characters are almost never described in terms of some abstract metaphysical alignment (literally the only story I've heard of that does that is A Practical Guide to Evil, and it really doesn't work out the way the alignment side wants).

Funny you bring up PGtE, because it's a great example of how viewing Good and Evil as monocultures without acknowledging the ethical alignment axis leads to bad and/or nonsensical outcomes.

Its basic premise is that for centuries the Heroes have all equated Good with Law and are a bunch of paladin types fighting for Truth, Justice, and the Calernian Way, while the Villains have all equated Evil with Chaos and are a bunch of scheming and backstabbing cartoon villains, and the Heroes beat the Villains because that's the way the stories go...but as soon as a set of villains show up who are LE instead of CE, they start kicking butt and taking Names because they don't buy into the black-and-white caricature of Good and Evil in the Narrative.

Most people just do stuff and have values and we are left to judge whether we think they are good or not (sometimes the narrative will include other character's judgements, but that's not the same as saying "Lawful Evil" or "Neutral Good"). Characters like Han Solo, Dalinar Kholin, Sherlock Holmes, and Cersei Lannister don't ever get scenes where someone says "this character is Good" or "this character is Evil", but that doesn't mean they're "beyond morality".

Putting aside the fact that Neutrality in general and TN in particular is an option and so characters don't always have to be Good or Evil, when a demon shows up and starts making human sacrifices and kicking puppies you don't have someone literally stand there and say "oh by the way demons are Evil" either, but that doesn't make them any less Evil, it just means that the writer/DM doesn't feel the need to condescend to their audience/players and spell out something that should be obvious.

[Vahnavoi]

Who's to say that I'm obligated to believe that detecting as Evil rather than Good (or whatever consequence you decide alignment has) is worse than four additional people dying? Who's to say that I have to subscribe to a consequentialist theory of morality at all?

That you feel the need to ask these questions best demonstrates you never approached the system in good faith to begin with.

Nothing obligates you, as a player, to believe in the setting morality. Nothing obligates your character to believe in it. The only thing you, as a player, are obligated to do is accept that in the game, the character who rejects in-setting Good morality is no longer Good in that setting, meaning they might not get in the Good afterlife, be able to worship Good gods etc. The "solution" to moral dilemmas exists so a GM can easily tell the setting's reaction to whatever choice you make and attach mechanics to it.

Oh, look, you've completely lost the plot. Once you start talking about "Evil according to Baator", having Baator's philosophy be calle Evil no longer makes even the faintest amount of sense. Since you have soundly rebutted your own position, I see no need to waste any more of my time on it.

Incorrect. You forgot the part where this is about relative positions of the planes on a literal map. The definitions given to Good and Evil (and Law and Chaos) on the Alignment grid axels serve as a common comparison point for all of the planes, so once you've answered "What's Good and Evil according to the greater setting?", the follow-up of "What's good and evil according to baatorians?" helps to put them on the map and explain why they are on that part of the map instead of somewhere else.

The Great Wheel and by extension Planescape were derived from this construction, so I fail to see any obvious way in which omitting the construction makes a game using those better. In any case, you have not demonstrated that the game runs better, you've only stated so.

[NigelWalmsley]

Alignment encompasses personal values, societal structures, cosmic forces, and various scales in between, and isn't reducible to just a WoD-style personality system or an MtG-style color wheel.

Personal values, social structures, and cosmic forces all sound like things that get color alignments in MTG. That said, I don't see why you want or need one term for all of those scales. In Star Wars, the cosmic forces are "The Light Side" and "The Dark Side", but the social structures are "Republic" and "Empire". You certainly could claim that those were fundamentally the same, but it's not particularly obvious that they are.

Would you get the same result every time just because they're all Utilitarians?

Yes, there are different kinds of Utilitarians. But the point is that, once you slice things down to the point that you agree that we're talking about a single philosophy, we can agree about what that philosophy values from just the name. You can't do that with alignment, even if you divide things Lawful Neutral-Lawful Good and Lawful Good-Lawful Good and whatever. The terms you're using don't have an objective accepted meaning, you can't build one by combining them. Eventually, you have to explain what it is that you think the natives of Baator or Celestia value, and at that point what you have is a poorly-explained version of Planar Alignment.

the hallmark of those kinds of settings is that the opposing moral precepts are cosmic forces that have tangible physical effects on the world and on those who align themselves with one side or the other.

In Star Wars, the "tangible physical effects" of the Light Side don't come from believing in Light Side philosophy. They come from being a Jedi. There's not even really any indication that you have to be a Jedi or a Sith to use the Force. It's true that all the force users are, but there are also only five of them, and two of those are disciples of the others. In The Stormlight Archive, the "tangible physical effects" of being on Team Honor are a result of a bond with a Spren, an actual physical (well, cognitive, or maybe spiritual) creature with actual specific powers. The idea that power comes directly from cosmic forces that care about morality qua morality is pretty rare. And insofar as it does exist, it is about some particular moral philosophy that you can just name, rather than insisting on "Good" and "Evil".

Funny you bring up PGtE, because it's a great example of how viewing Good and Evil as monocultures without acknowledging the ethical alignment axis leads to bad and/or nonsensical outcomes.

PGtE is a great example of how cosmic forces of Good and Evil don't map well to personal-scale moral questions. The Grey Pilgrim unleashes a plague that kills thousands to capture Black. The Saint of Swords cuts out Black's soul. Those people are both heroes. Cordelia's scheming against Malicia isn't particularly better or more restrained than Malicia's scheming against her. But Cordelia arbitrarily gets to be Good. The elves are racial supremacists, but still on team Good. In fact, the whole backstory of the setting is that "Good" is "determinism" and "Evil" is "free will". If you happen to think that the distinction between the two is not morally important, the story all but explicitly tells you that you don't consider "Good" good and "Evil" evil.

when a demon shows up and starts making human sacrifices and kicking puppies you don't have someone literally stand there and say "oh by the way demons are Evil" either, but that doesn't make them any less Evil, it just means that the writer/DM doesn't feel the need to condescend to their audience/players and spell out something that should be obvious.

Again, that is exactly my point. You don't need alignment to figure out that Hagar The Baby Eater is a dude you should fight. You can observe that he eats babies, and fight him on that basis. The only places alignment enters into the equation are cases that are ambiguous, and those are exactly the cases where declaring that one side is "Evil" and one side is "Good" is the least helpful. If you're fighting people-eating demons, they don't need to be explicitly Evil. If you're adjudicating a border conflict with the hobgoblins, it doesn't help for them to be explicitly Evil. So why do we need Evil to begin with?

[Jason]

That is subjective. Saying "I think X is unfair" is a subjective claim. That doesn't make it bad or wrong, and it doesn't mean we should reject those things as a basis for morality. But they are, fundamentally, subjective.

You misunderstand me. They don't say "I think this is unfair or wrong" they argue as if it actually is unfair or wrong.
In other words, I've never met someone who professes that good and evil are entirely subjective concepts who is fully consistent in their belief. There is always something that they believe really is objective, no matter how they talk.

[JoeJ]

I'm not wrong, because that subjectivity is part of the definition of the terms.

That is incorrect. If subjectivity is part of your definition of good and evil, then your definition is faulty as far as D&D is concerned.

Let's suppose we postulate a moral universe where it is "wrong" to pull the lever (killing the one person) in the Trolley Problem, and if you do that you detect as Evil and if you don't do that you detect as Good. That doesn't actually resolve the moral dilemma at all. All you've done is changed the consequences from "one person dies" v "five people die" to "one person dies, you detect as Evil" v "five people die, you detect as Good". Who's to say that I'm obligated to believe that detecting as Evil rather than Good (or whatever consequence you decide alignment has) is worse than four additional people dying? Who's to say that I have to subscribe to a consequentialist theory of morality at all? Maybe I believe people have an ethical obligation to pull levers. That belief isn't consequentialist to begin with, so changing the consequences cannot change the outputs of that ethical theory. All you have done, literally the only thing, is made this conversation harder to have. You haven't answered any questions, you haven't simplified anything.

You're not obligated to believe anything. Many creatures don't believe that Good is the superior moral position. Those creatures are Neutral or Evil. Thus, Zariel can say, "I did not fall into the clutches of evil. I rose to shoulder a cosmic burden." She believes she's doing the right thing, but she is wrong.

Also, referencing your example, alignment as described in the rules is more about attitude and belief than actions. Whether pulling the lever is a good, neutral, or evil action depends in large part upon why the character is pulling it.

This argument proves too much. Every edition of D&D has, at some point, been the market leader. Most of them were the market leader for their whole lifespans. Therefore, we can conclude that nothing about D&D should be changed, and that all the changes ever made were actually unnecessary.

We can at the very least conclude that the burden rests on those who want the game to be changed for everybody (rather than just house ruling their own game, or playing a different game entirely) to show that the change is justified.

[JNAProductions]

Well, as it stands now, there are very few mechanical elements to alignment in 5E. It's still there, but it has similar effects to saying "Many elves have blonde hair" or "Dwarves have thick, majestic beards".

[Lord Raziere]

Again, that is exactly my point. You don't need alignment to figure out that Hagar The Baby Eater is a dude you should fight. You can observe that he eats babies, and fight him on that basis. The only places alignment enters into the equation are cases that are ambiguous, and those are exactly the cases where declaring that one side is "Evil" and one side is "Good" is the least helpful. If you're fighting people-eating demons, they don't need to be explicitly Evil. If you're adjudicating a border conflict with the hobgoblins, it doesn't help for them to be explicitly Evil. So why do we need Evil to begin with?

Agreed, the people-eating demons don't need to be labeled evil, they demonstrate that they are evil. quite clearly with the fact that they eat people, with their actions. slapping an eviltron label on top of it is superfluous. like, its not as if there are good people-eating demons or something that would just be absurd.

I think I can boil down my problem with the whole alignment thing to a single phrase: "Innocent Until Proven Guilty". with detect evil, you look at someone and they are just assumed guilty of something without any proof of what it actually is. It makes the process of justice backwards: instead of having faith that people are innocent and be considered as such until proven otherwise, one can just check under the hood, see they are guilty of something even if you don't know what that is then go about searching for things to match the guilt. Thus the process becomes assuming they are guilty and searching for evidence to fit what you've already assumed.

Problem is, even if you do it "right" and not involve the "Evil Innocents", your still operating on "Guilty Until Proven Innocent" logic. Your starting with the conclusion and searching for evidence to support what you've already concluded. Its twisted, and I'm not sure if I can call that justice. Its not moral to me, its alien: because only a weird alien creature would think switching to Moral Vision like its thermal or X-ray then trying to carry out justice from that, and its not alien in a fascinating way to me but in a "unsettling" way. Especially when what you see isn't actually evidence of anything. Its not even whether about the detect evil works: its about the process being weird and backwards to me.

[NigelWalmsley]

You misunderstand me. They don't say "I think this is unfair or wrong" they argue as if it actually is unfair or wrong.

People believe their beliefs. That doesn't make those beliefs not subjective. Saying you "think X is wrong" means that you "argue as if X is wrong".

That is incorrect. If subjectivity is part of your definition of good and evil, then your definition is faulty as far as D&D is concerned.

It is part of how people use those terms. If you insist that "2" actually means "5", that doesn't make "2 + 2 = 4" wrong, it just makes you difficult to communicate with. Similarly, if you declare that the "Good" answer to the Trolley Problem is "pull the lever", that doesn't magically make people who are against pulling the lever change their minds. You have the exact same debate, just with less useful terminology.

Many creatures don't believe that Good is the superior moral position.

Then alignment is fundamentally unhelpful nonsense. If you ever find yourself with an Objective Good that people do not support, your notion of Objective Good is broken. Since any version of Good is something some people don't support, Objective Good is inherently unhelpful nonsense. It's like the thing with "Baator thinks X is good and Y is evil". If you are saying that, you have accepted that alignment is nonsense.

We can at the very least conclude that the burden rests on those who want the game to be changed for everybody (rather than just house ruling their own game, or playing a different game entirely) to show that the change is justified.

Inaction is also a choice. 6e Dungeons and Dragons, as far as we know, has no rules yet. If you think Good/Evil and Law/Chaos belong in it, prove that they do.

[Jason]

I think I can boil down my problem with the whole alignment thing to a single phrase: "Innocent Until Proven Guilty". with detect evil, you look at someone and they are just assumed guilty of something without any proof of what it actually is.

Well, not quite. It is proof that they are guilty of past misdeeds. The trouble comes when trying to use it as a predictor of future behavior or to determine guilt for a specific crime.

It's like discovering someone had a criminal past. IRL that is often useful information to law enforcement investigating a current crime, and it will certainly have a bearing on sentencing if they are found to be guilty, but law enforcement gets (rightly) in big trouble if they try to use that as the sole determinant of guilt.

[NigelWalmsley]

Jason, stop. You've already demonstrated that your position on this is incoherent. Detecting as Evil is not enough to justify criminal prosecution, but spells that selectively target Evil people "protect the innocent". Those positions directly contradict each other.

[ImNotTrevor]

See, that's the part where i disagree. You can take out the old alignment system in terms of player vs DM gatcha mechanics entirely, but i don't belive any character, protagonist or antagonist, can or should be encouraged to be described as if they are post-modern abstractions beyond morality.

I just describe them like people, instead of trying to hamfist them into a 3x3 grid of morality.

I'd say 5e is a compromise between 3e and 4e - alignment is "more mechanically relevant" than in 4e, but less mechanically relevant than in 3e.

Alignment has virtually no uses in 5e. I'm talking about DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS 5e. Not sure what system's 5th edition you're talking about but 5e has all but dumpstered alignment. There's one monster that can detect your alignment, period and.... that's the only mechanic related to it I can think of.

Having an alignment system of some sort is a fundamental necessity in any system that goes for the "high fantasy" setup with Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil and other Abstract Capitalized Concepts because that's how those stories and tropes work. Whether it's Good vs. Evil or Light Side vs. Dark Side or Eru vs. Morgoth and whether you have one axis or two (or rarely more) will vary by setting, but the hallmark of those kinds of settings is that the opposing moral precepts are cosmic forces that have tangible physical effects on the world and on those who align themselves with one side or the other.

D&D alignment rarely achieves this goal anyways, so I'm not sure what this is meant to mean. I can accomplish exactly this with a Session 0 conversation and descriptions.

Empire shoots red lasers, Rebels shoot green lasers.

It's also super ironic that the Star Wars RPGs (since you quote the force) don't use an alignment system.

PalpatineSayingIronic.gif

Now, I imagine you think that the moment things that are good and things that are evil exist within a setting or campaign, then there is an alignment system. That's just not true.

I play Apocalypse World a lot. If I want an NPC who is just a really evil dude, he acts like a really evil dude.

In a high fantasy D&D campaign, if I want forces of darkness and evil, I make them wear black and describe them doing some evil stuff. I don't need to write down "NE" anywhere in my notes for this to work. It's entirely unneeded. Do you think the guys that write the high fantasy novels are getting out their D&D 3x3 grids so they can make sure their villains are evil, or do they just show them being evil?

Having that little slot on the character sheet and/or a codified method for punishing the players for "roleplaying wrong" is not in any way required for high fantasy, and nobody has ever shown me how.

Now, does that mean every D&D campaign needs to care about alignment? Of course not; if you're running a gritty swords-and-sorcery campaign or a political Game of Thrones-like campaign you can toss alignment and that's fine, because those kinds of stories are about moral ambiguity and petty human squabbles and such, and they aren't about opposing or supporting the Elder Gods of Lankhmar or the Others of Westeros on philosophical grounds, simply the grounds of "they're going to kill us all if we don't do anything about them and that would be bad." When I ran a pseudohistorical Norse campaign (basically, set in the real world in the 900s except Norse mythology was true) I didn't use the standard alignments at all because alignments weren't a good fit for the Norse milieu (though I did use a replacement system based on four cardinal values of Norse heroism).

But D&D as a game cares about alignment because it operates at scales from the grittiest swords and sorcery to the highest of high fantasy depending on what level you're playing at, what setting you're playing in, and the plot of the campaign you're playing through, and as anyone who has tried to run Planescape or Dragonlance in 5e can probably attest, it's much easier to have all that information and all those mechanical "hooks" available throughout the game and let people ignore it if they don't want to use it than to not have any of it and force people to add it back in if they do want to use it.

Except, again, the concepts of Good and Evil can exist within a game without any of the mechanical bits and bobs associated with a formal Alignment System. (Which 5e proves, ironically, by not having Alignment DO anything and making it have as much mechanical effect as hair color.)

Trying to remove alignment from D&D-the-game would be like trying to make D&D-the-game low magic rather than simply houseruling a low-magic campaign: that's not what the game is or does, and trying to contort it into that is a dumb idea when you could simply play a different game more focused on the experience you want that does swords and sorcery or low magic better.

Except there are other games that do high fantasy without using alignment? (Dungeon World can do it just fine, for instance)

How do you explain their existence?

And again, you'll have to demonstrate why I can't have the legion of black-clad worshippers of a dark god trampling the innocents underfoot in the name of wickedness without also making sure to label them all with an NE and making sure to change that label for the one who's doing a redemption arc? Why can't they just... act the part without concerning myself with the grid? You know, like every other form of fiction ever produced?

[Jason]

Jason, stop. You've already demonstrated that your position on this is incoherent. Detecting as Evil is not enough to justify criminal prosecution, but spells that selectively target Evil people "protect the innocent". Those positions directly contradict each other.

Those are not contradictory positions.

Detecting as evil indicates past guilt. Past guilt however is insufficient to justify punishment for a current crime without further evidence that the person also committed the crime presently under investigation. Those that detect as evil because of past misdeeds are guilty of those misdeeds, even if they did not commit the current crime.

Innocents do not detect as evil and will not be affected by magic that affects evil beings because they have not previously performed evil actions.

[Lord Raziere]

Those are not contradictory positions.

Detecting as evil indicates past guilt. Past guilt however is insufficient to justify punishment for a current crime without further evidence that the person also committed the crime presently under investigation. Those that detect as evil because of past misdeeds are guilty of those misdeeds, even if they did not commit the current crime.

Innocents do not detect as evil and will not be affected by magic that affects evil beings because they have not previously performed evil actions.

I dunno, criminal records and using detect evil on someone just don't seem equivalent to me for some reason? pretty sure that criminal records are more detailed.

except for those spells that affect neutral beings just for being low level. riiiiight.

that and there are paladins of tyranny and slaughter! even if good spells exist, that means the evil versions exist as well and are used, and both the codes of tyranny and slaughter disallow you from doing good acts, explicitly. thus those evil paladins can use detect good to find good people and kill them just for being good! and there is possibility that since evil has less moral restrictions they can seek forms of power that good won't take, and thus get an advantage that good cannot overcome despite what underdog stories would have you believe.

like what happens if someone figures out how to take the Blasphemy Spell and use it on wider scales to just carpet bomb all the world with blasphemies to kill all non-evil people? good and neutral would die and evil would rule.

[NigelWalmsley]

Those are not contradictory positions.

Yes, they are. Either "you don't detect as Good" is enough evidence for the government to justify imprisoning you, or Holy Word is killing people who don't deserve it. Because if you don't deserve to be locked up for your alignment, you sure as hell don't deserve to be killed for it.

[Jason]

Yes, they are. Either "you don't detect as Good" is enough evidence for the government to justify imprisoning you, or Holy Word is killing people who don't deserve it. Because if you don't deserve to be locked up for your alignment, you sure as hell don't deserve to be killed for it.

The potential for collateral damage is why responsible people don't go throwing Holy Word around in every combat situation, in a crowded street for instance, any more than they would a fireball. But it can come in very handy at times when the only targets are evil or good, such as in the evil temple where the only potential targets are "cultists or sacrificial victims".

[Rynjin]

The potential for collateral damage is why responsible people don't go throwing Holy Word around in every combat situation, in a crowded street for instance, any more than they would a fireball. But it can come in very handy at times when the only targets are evil or good, such as in the evil temple where the only potential targets are "cultists or sacrificial victims".

Except a sacrificial victim is likely to be Neutral, as are most people.

[Jason]

Except a sacrificial victim is likely to be Neutral, as are most people.

Not when they were specially selected by the cultists using detect good spells.

[Rynjin]

Not when they were specially selected by the cultists using detect good spells.

Honestly, I don't know how to respond to this.

You do realize that posts like this do not help foster any sort of discussion, right? It just shifts goalposts and serves to make everyone involved frustrated, with you specifically in this case.

[Jason]

Honestly, I don't know how to respond to this.

You do realize that posts like this do not help foster any sort of discussion, right? It just shifts goalposts and serves to make everyone involved frustrated, with you specifically in this case.

Well maybe in your games evil cultists will settle for whoever happens to be wandering around outside the Temple of Doom. My evil cultists know that their dark masters are only satisfied with 100% good-aligned sacrificial victims.

[ImNotTrevor]

Well maybe in your games evil cultists will settle for whoever happens to be wandering around outside the Temple of Doom. My evil cultists know that their dark masters are only satisfied with 100% good-aligned sacrificial victims.

You do realize that quoting your particular campaign as evidence for how the general standard should be measured is like.... so egregiously fallacious that I'm baffled how to even communicate the severity of it to you.

And in what way is choosing specifically nice people for your human sacrifices significantly more horrifying and evil than just sacrificing whoever they can drag onto the altar, with particular focus on the visibly nice folks around town. Like, do they really need a spell to know that the guy who donates to the orphanage every Tuesday is a good guy? And even so, isn't it much scarier to imagine a cult carefully stalking and recording the behavior of kind people for them to systematically murder than to just imagine a guy in a cloak waving his hand and going "that guy, that lady, and that guy." The former is malicious, calculated, and done with something bordering on care. The latter is basically what you do at the supermarket. I can't imagine the cultist as having a name other than Carl and this is just an internship that got a bit out of hand but hey, they have dental, so....

If the cultists are basically supermarket shopping the village for nice people it's hard to take the situation seriously.

Yeah, my dude, this is not a good argument for alignment existing. And it kinda borders on parody.

[JoeJ]

It is part of how people use those terms. If you insist that "2" actually means "5", that doesn't make "2 + 2 = 4" wrong, it just makes you difficult to communicate with.

People use the term "wizard" in a lot of ways, but within D&D, the term has a particular meaning, regardless of how it's used in other contexts. The same is true of alignment terminology. Establishing a definition doesn't make communication difficult. On the contrary, it's what makes communication possible at all.

Similarly, if you declare that the "Good" answer to the Trolley Problem is "pull the lever", that doesn't magically make people who are against pulling the lever change their minds. You have the exact same debate, just with less useful terminology.

Whether or not people change their mind about some silly trolley problem is absolutely irrelevant to any of this.

Then alignment is fundamentally unhelpful nonsense. If you ever find yourself with an Objective Good that people do not support, your notion of Objective Good is broken.

What an absurd idea! Objective good remains good even if nobody at all supports it, or even knows of its existence. Morality is, in that respect, like a natural law.

Inaction is also a choice. 6e Dungeons and Dragons, as far as we know, has no rules yet. If you think Good/Evil and Law/Chaos belong in it, prove that they do.

Inaction would be no change: nothing at all belongs in 6e, since there's no reason for there to be a 6e in the first place.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Personal values, social structures, and cosmic forces all sound like things that get color alignments in MTG.

When I said alignment isn't reducible to MtG colors, I don't mean that the two aren't similar kinds of all-encompassing multi-scale construct (because they are), just that the common suggestion of "Just replace alignment with the color wheel, it's obviously superior, problem solved" doesn't work. Firstly and most obviously because White/Black/Blue/Red/Green don't directly map to Good/Evil/Law/Chaos/Neutrality, either in terms of their relationship to each other or in terms of definitions, so the idea that the swap is just replacing moral terms with team labels is incorrect; and secondly because the colors also include things like personality, technology levels, and such that alignment explicitly doesn't.

That said, I don't see why you want or need one term for all of those scales. In Star Wars, the cosmic forces are "The Light Side" and "The Dark Side", but the social structures are "Republic" and "Empire". You certainly could claim that those were fundamentally the same, but it's not particularly obvious that they are.

As with the Game of Thrones example, you don't always want to bundle all those scales together or even involve all of the scales at all, but sometimes you do. During the original and prequel trilogy the Force is the province of a handful of Force users and not dominant on the galactic scale, so of course Republic ≠ Light Side and Empire ≠ Dark Side...but go back to the earlier periods when the Republic is led by Jedi, they're opposed by the Sith Empire, Force-users are a credit a dozen, and the Force is almost visibly shaping events on a grand scale, and it's very much the case that the two are closely intertwined.

Yes, there are different kinds of Utilitarians. But the point is that, once you slice things down to the point that you agree that we're talking about a single philosophy, we can agree about what that philosophy values from just the name. You can't do that with alignment, even if you divide things Lawful Neutral-Lawful Good and Lawful Good-Lawful Good and whatever. The terms you're using don't have an objective accepted meaning, you can't build one by combining them. Eventually, you have to explain what it is that you think the natives of Baator or Celestia value, and at that point what you have is a poorly-explained version of Planar Alignment.

This is a double standard. Claiming that you know how "Motive Utilitarians" act just from the name but have no idea how "Acheronians" act just from the name just means that you think you have a handle on the former but not on the latter--any "X Utilitarian" subset needs just as much explanation as any "X Plane" subset--and means that you've read the literature on your Utilitarianism flavor of choice and have completely ignored all the writings on alignment in every edition of D&D. Someone who's never studied philosophy but has read the Manual of the Planes could easily say that your Utili-whatsit mumbo-jumbo is bogus but that the difference between Acheronian LLE and Gehennan ELE is obvious.

In Star Wars, the "tangible physical effects" of the Light Side don't come from believing in Light Side philosophy. They come from being a Jedi. There's not even really any indication that you have to be a Jedi or a Sith to use the Force. It's true that all the force users are, but there are also only five of them, and two of those are disciples of the others.

Firstly, I'm not just talking Original Trilogy here, I'm talking the prequels and EU as well--y'know, where drawing on the Dark Side deeply enough causes actual physical changes like turning your eyes yellow and aging you and stuff like that. But even just in the OT you have things like the Emperor informing Luke that him killing the Emperor in anger will cause him to fall to the Dark Side, not in some vague sort of way where he might decide he likes beheading geriatric dictators and start doing more evil things on a lark, but in a way where taking that action causes you to choose a side in a way that the Force recognizes and enforces. "If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny," and all that.

PGtE is a great example of how cosmic forces of Good and Evil don't map well to personal-scale moral questions. The Grey Pilgrim unleashes a plague that kills thousands to capture Black. The Saint of Swords cuts out Black's soul. Those people are both heroes. Cordelia's scheming against Malicia isn't particularly better or more restrained than Malicia's scheming against her. But Cordelia arbitrarily gets to be Good. The elves are racial supremacists, but still on team Good. In fact, the whole backstory of the setting is that "Good" is "determinism" and "Evil" is "free will". If you happen to think that the distinction between the two is not morally important, the story all but explicitly tells you that you don't consider "Good" good and "Evil" evil.

Not exactly. The Gods Above and Below are pushing determinism vs. free will as the major conflict in Creation, but the power that Heroes and Villains draw on is explicitly not an active gift by the gods. Providence "is a force, not an intelligence," as per Black; Masego and certain Heroes we see later on can manipulate Light like any other sorcery rather than the divine miracle that the House of Light teaches it is; Names grant power based on how well Heroes and Villains fit into their roles, which is why the Grey Pilgrim can commit evil acts so long as he sincerely believes that it is (and others perceive it as being) for the Greater Good while Vivienne can "fall" from a relatively neutral Name like Thief due to not fitting the role anymore; and villains like Black and Cat can actively spit in the face of the gods' intended narrative while still gaining Name power like anyone else.

This actually maps quite nicely to D&D, where Heironeous and Torm and the other LG gods aren't sources or arbiters of Lawful Goodness but merely individual possible instantiations of it, and a paladin can serve the forces of Law and Good without serving any particular gods (outside the Realms, anyway).

Again, that is exactly my point. You don't need alignment to figure out that Hagar The Baby Eater is a dude you should fight. You can observe that he eats babies, and fight him on that basis. The only places alignment enters into the equation are cases that are ambiguous, and those are exactly the cases where declaring that one side is "Evil" and one side is "Good" is the least helpful. If you're fighting people-eating demons, they don't need to be explicitly Evil. If you're adjudicating a border conflict with the hobgoblins, it doesn't help for them to be explicitly Evil. So why do we need Evil to begin with?

Looking back, I thought you were conflating characters not having an alignment with a DM/producer not explicitly telling the players/audience someone's alignment and was objecting to that with the demon example, but you were actually responding to someone talking about post-modernist non-characters, which I can't find fault with. Carry on.

Then alignment is fundamentally unhelpful nonsense. If you ever find yourself with an Objective Good that people do not support, your notion of Objective Good is broken.

Hardly. People in real life turn against Objective Goodness all the time. I can't get into too much detail, obviously, but basically any time a religion provides a list of Thou Shalt Nots and someone Shalts anyway, that's what they're doing.

And then of course there's the fact that someone who doesn't believe Objective Good is superior can simply be wrong, which doesn't entail any problem with Objective Goodness at all.

It's also super ironic that the Star Wars RPGs (since you quote the force) don't use an alignment system.

Literally every Star Wars RPG has an alignment system, they just use Dark Side Points or whatever instead of an X Evil label. Because, as I mentioned before, Good vs. Evil is not the only possible alignment setup that matters, different settings will have their own takes on it.

Now, I imagine you think that the moment things that are good and things that are evil exist within a setting or campaign, then there is an alignment system.

Nope. I already used Game of Thrones as an example of a setting that doesn't have and doesn't need an alignment system, and a lot of people would argue that a bunch of characters in it are pretty darn evil and that the Others are even evil-er.

An alignment system involving good and evil matters and is necessary when questions of morality are a large part of the setting and intended plotlines and such and forces thereof have a tangible impact on the setting and whether a character is aligned with one or the other is an important factor. There can be other criteria and one might quibble with those points, but that's the basic idea.

Both Lankhmar and the Cthulhu Mythos setting(s) have ancient tentacly beings called Elder Gods, but a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser game doesn't need an alignment system of any sort while most Cthulthu Mythos games need one (traditionally expressed as some kind of sanity meter that turns you into a gibbering cultist if you fall below a certain point) because in the former the Elder Gods are a background setting detail and in the latter the central conflict is about dealing with the artifacts/cults/etc. of the Elder Gods and being "aligned with the Elder Gods" is a significant thing in terms of both plot and characters.

And note that I said most Cthulhu Mythos games, not all, because a game like Cthulhutech has an explicitly Lovecraftian backdrop, but it's closer to Pacific Rim Meets 40K than any sort of existential horror game and the Elder Gods are a background fluff aspect at most.

Having that little slot on the character sheet and/or a codified method for punishing the players for "roleplaying wrong" is not in any way required for high fantasy, and nobody has ever shown me how.

If you're using alignment as a tool to punish players for roleplaying wrong, you're being a bad DM at that point in time, because for the umpteenth time alignment is not a straitjacket, it's a descriptor.

Except there are other games that do high fantasy without using alignment? (Dungeon World can do it just fine, for instance)

Dungeon World? "High fantasy"? Surely you jest. Dungeon World is a blatantly swords-and-sorcery take on D&D, written by people who dislike everything about D&D as a system as a concession for people who want to play a PbtA game with D&D trappings.

And even then, Dungeon World has an alignment system--the Paladin even has Detect Evil!--so your objection falls flat.

In a high fantasy D&D campaign, if I want forces of darkness and evil, I make them wear black and describe them doing some evil stuff. I don't need to write down "NE" anywhere in my notes for this to work. It's entirely unneeded. Do you think the guys that write the high fantasy novels are getting out their D&D 3x3 grids so they can make sure their villains are evil, or do they just show them being evil?
[...]
And again, you'll have to demonstrate why I can't have the legion of black-clad worshippers of a dark god trampling the innocents underfoot in the name of wickedness without also making sure to label them all with an NE and making sure to change that label for the one who's doing a redemption arc? Why can't they just... act the part without concerning myself with the grid? You know, like every other form of fiction ever produced?

If they're a bunch of punch-clock villains just wearing skulls on the armor and committing garden-variety crimes, sure, there's no need for any kind of alignment system. But as soon as you stick Sir Kills-a-lot the Death Knight at the head of your Legions of Doom and make the plot about the clash between him and his gods vs. Lady Saves-a-lot the Paladin and her gods, you need an alignment system of some kind, just like how as soon as you make a game involving combat you need a combat system of some sort.

[hamishspence]

This actually maps quite nicely to D&D, where Heironeous and Torm and the other LG gods aren't sources or arbiters of Lawful Goodness but merely individual possible instantiations of it, and a paladin can serve the forces of Law and Good without serving any particular gods (outside the Realms, anyway).

And even in the Realms, the paladin serves Law and Good first, and their god second. Some LN, NG and even one CG god (Sune) have paladins - they still need to stay LG to keep their powers.

[Lord Raziere]

If they're a bunch of punch-clock villains just wearing skulls on the armor and committing garden-variety crimes, sure, there's no need for any kind of alignment system. But as soon as you stick Sir Kills-a-lot the Death Knight at the head of your Legions of Doom and make the plot about the clash between him and his gods vs. Lady Saves-a-lot the Paladin and her gods, you need an alignment system of some kind, just like how as soon as you make a game involving combat you need a combat system of some sort.

No. Its already pretty obvious one is good and the other is evil, that is over systematizing it. one is doing acts that are bad, others that are good. its obvious and any denial about it is just being obtuse or forgetting what you just said.

we model combat because its a physical thing that CAN be modeled. morality isn't something that can be modeled by any gameable system. I've never seen an attempt that does it well, and all the most moral characters I've had was when were no rules to hold them back from doing what is actually right, rather than is theorized to be right by some limiting system.

a lot of fiction has good heroes and vile villains without any kind of alignment system involved. you know a villain is bad because they do a bad thing, you know an entire legion if bad because you've heard the stories of their villainy. you know a dark sealed evil is bad, because you heard legends passed down the generations of how much he is a bad idea to let out! People are not dumb about who is bad and who isn't, and it takes a special kind of distrustful to assume that a villainous murderer might not evil because you didn't get the cosmos itself giving you a neon sign to confirm it.

like why isn't the dark plated warrior with skulls on their armor, riding on a black horse and riding with an army of skeletons at their back clear shouting "slaughter anyone in our way!", a force that you've heard has slaughtered villages, enough confirmation of evil for you? why do you need eviltron readings to confirm? is there somehow doubt in your mind that they're not actually evil unless you get a cosmos disapproval stamp? I don't get it.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

a lot of fiction has good heroes and vile villains without any kind of alignment system involved. you know a villain is bad because they do a bad thing, you know an entire legion if bad because you've heard the stories of their villainy. you know a dark sealed evil is bad, because you heard legends passed down the generations of how much he is a bad idea to let out! People are not dumb about who is bad and who isn't, and it takes a special kind of distrustful to assume that a villainous murderer might not evil because you didn't get the cosmos itself giving you a neon sign to confirm it.

The needs of single-author fiction are completely different from the needs of a collaborative RPG. People continually bringing up "Oh, well in this book/movie/etc. no one's consulting the D&D alignment grid!" is missing the point...on two different axes, appropriately enough.

like why isn't the dark plated warrior with skulls on their armor, riding on a black horse and riding with an army of skeletons at their back clear shouting "slaughter anyone in our way!", a force that you've heard has slaughtered villages, enough confirmation of evil for you? why do you need eviltron readings to confirm? is there somehow doubt in your mind that they're not actually evil unless you get a cosmos disapproval stamp? I don't get it.

Because you're focusing myopically on the idea that alignment is a neon sign floating above someone's head that tells you what team they play for and nothing else. Alignment is a mechanical tool to express the common fictional trope of sensing a Great Evil in that cave over yonder, yes, but it's a lot more than that--again, roleplaying prompts, mechanical hooks, etc., see upthread.

[Vahnavoi]

Then alignment is fundamentally unhelpful nonsense. If you ever find yourself with an Objective Good that people do not support, your notion of Objective Good is broken. Since any version of Good is something some people don't support, Objective Good is inherently unhelpful nonsense. It's like the thing with "Baator thinks X is good and Y is evil". If you are saying that, you have accepted that alignment is nonsense.

"If you ever find yourself with objective theory that a world is round that people do not support, your notion of objective round world theory is broken. Since any theory of how the world is shaped is something some people don't support, objective round world theory is inherently unhelpful nonsense. It's like the thing with "Flat-earthers think the world is a disc and not round". If you are saying that, you have accepted that objective theories about the shape of the world are nonsense. "

EDIT: it's worth noting that, since we're primarily concerned with fantasy in this thread, there are settings where the world is in fact something other than round. There are also settings where shape of the world is in fact subjective and what a character believes about it directly impacts how the world reacts to them.

"In this setting, Good is X and Evil is Y" is, in context of games, no more exotic than "In this game, the world is a disc and the sun is either a giant dungball rolled by a beetle or a golden chariot, depending on who is looking".

[Lord Raziere]

The needs of single-author fiction are completely different from the needs of a collaborative RPG. People continually bringing up "Oh, well in this book/movie/etc. no one's consulting the D&D alignment grid!" is missing the point...on two different axes, appropriately enough.

Because you're focusing myopically on the idea that alignment is a neon sign floating above someone's head that tells you what team they play for and nothing else. Alignment is a mechanical tool to express the common fictional trope of sensing a Great Evil in that cave over yonder, yes, but it's a lot more than that--again, roleplaying prompts, mechanical hooks, etc., see upthread.

The alignment system has demonstrated more than enough that it doesn't promote collaboration at all. It promotes divisiveness if anything.

I don't see what points your talking about "raised upthread".

any roleplaying prompts or mechanical hooks can be better done other ways.

Edit: also you haven't actually answered my question. So I'll state it again: why do you need the confirmation, even when its so obvious beyond all reasonable doubt that they are evil?

[Morty]

Having an alignment system of some sort is a fundamental necessity in any system that goes for the "high fantasy" setup with Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil and other Abstract Capitalized Concepts because that's how those stories and tropes work. Whether it's Good vs. Evil or Light Side vs. Dark Side or Eru vs. Morgoth and whether you have one axis or two (or rarely more) will vary by setting, but the hallmark of those kinds of settings is that the opposing moral precepts are cosmic forces that have tangible physical effects on the world and on those who align themselves with one side or the other.

This might be a stronger argument if there weren't actual RPGs based on LotR, which don't use alignment. IIRC at least some of them use a "corruption" mechanic of some kind - but that just goes to show that the alleged goals of the D&D alignment system can be accomplished much better in other ways.

That's good/evil, mind you. I've yet to see a plausible case of the law/chaos helping with anything. Really, it seems that the entire D&D alignment system is essentially a tool for being able to slap a big, red "EVIL" label on some people or things. Everything else is just twisting logic into knots trying to pretend it's some kind of sensible larger framework.

[Vahnavoi]

1) The Corruption system seen in, for example, CODA version of Lorf of the Rings RPG, is an alignment system.
2) It's functionally equivalent to saying "you get X Evil points for acting in ways that conflict with Tolkien's morals, if X is larger than 10, your character becomes an NPC".
3) The Law and Chaos axels in D&D are directly inspired by fantasy fiction such as Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, along with a ton of other D&D tropes. If you don't know what they're for, you've basically admitted ignorance of the rules. Your case isn't helped by old versions of D&D (such as 1st edition AD&D) directly stating their inspirations in the game books.