Alignment: Fall 2022

[Vahnavoi]

@gbaji:

Put, say, MBTI personality test in a Google search and open it up. Look at the questions. (Examples: "how often do you make new friends? Does seeing others cry make you want to cry? Do you make backup plans for backup plans?")

Notice something? The questions are about observable behaviour. That is, the answers can be derived from a game situation, based on player character action.

This means an external observer, such as a game master, can track and analyze player character behaviour, in the exact same way the original alignment rules suggest a game master should track and analyze moral decisions. Given enough time and observations, a game master can estimate personality type of a character, whether it is stable or changing, how it is changing and in which direction, and whether the actual behaviour of a character matches what a player claims about the character.

Indeed, it would be possible to do this alongside keeping track of alignment, which would, if anything, prove whether there is correlation between personality and morality. The idea that personality and morality are distinct is questionable even in real life. The corollary to the real observations is that your conclusion doesn't hold. Having both "sides" and "personality traits" is perfectly natural, because the "sides" actually correspond to personality types.

[Tanarii]

Descriptive alignment as judged by the DM is one of the worst possible uses for Alignment. If it's not going to be Teams, then it's only good use is as part of motivations used by the player as a roleplaying aide.

Even if the DM wants to restrict Alignments during Session 0, they need to be more specific than "No Evil Alignments". At the minimum, they need to say something like "No Evil Alignments, defined as by having your character regularly/frequently behave as one of the 3 Evil alignment associated behaviors, in my personal judgement." That sets the standard for descriptive alignment as judged by the DM well in advance.

[Kurt Kurageous]

You could just as well say that Neutral cares for neutral humanoid life, such as githzerai, lizardfolk, thri-kreen, etc.

Yes, certainly. Further proof of the point in DnD alignment is subjective.

[gbaji]

This means an external observer, such as a game master, can track and analyze player character behaviour, in the exact same way the original alignment rules suggest a game master should track and analyze moral decisions. Given enough time and observations, a game master can estimate personality type of a character, whether it is stable or changing, how it is changing and in which direction, and whether the actual behaviour of a character matches what a player claims about the character.

Yup. I agree. Except that we as players of the game have to agree as to what is "good" or "lawful" in any given context for this to work, and which categories those given personality traits fall into. Which, in actual game practice, does not always work. The full range of possible personality quirks can only be distilled into a couple of axis of measurement (really a "morality" axis and a "methodology" axis, in the case of good/evil and law/chaos) in extremely broad ways. Actual people are far more complex than that, but any attempt to capture that complexity will rapidly become complex as well, which you want to avoid in a game system.

I do agree that if constrained to just a small set of action/decision components, alignment can be a useful "guide" for players. So killing helpless opponents is "evil", for example. Most decisions characters make are going to be utilitarian in nature (does this achieve our objective, or move us closer to achieving our objective). Traits can be incredibly varied: "My character has a hatred of Orcs due to childhood trauma" or "My druid loves nature and will do anything to prevent people from harming the environment". Broad alignments can provide some sort of "rails" to the actions we choose our characters to take while pursuing or acting on our traits, but that honestly is about it (or should be IMO).

Indeed, it would be possible to do this alongside keeping track of alignment, which would, if anything, prove whether there is correlation between personality and morality. The idea that personality and morality are distinct is questionable even in real life. The corollary to the real observations is that your conclusion doesn't hold. Having both "sides" and "personality traits" is perfectly natural, because the "sides" actually correspond to personality types.

But it doesn't always align with "sides" in a larger conflict (cosmological or not). The moment we introduce deities who form the "sides", the alignment system begins to have problems. The "good" deities command their followers to fight the followers of the "evil" deities. So while objectively we might consider a home invasion and brutal killing of all inside as "evil", a party of "good" adventurers could certainly be on a mission to assault the temple of <insert evil deity here>, kill all the guards, find the inner sanctum, wipe out the priests before they can finish their ritual to do <something evil>, destroy said temple, and then go have a beer with their friends and celebrate their victory. While playing the game, we actually have to work a bit to make the "bad guys" as bad as possible so as to comport with our own morals as players (they're "really" evil, and were doing something that would cast evil darkness on the world for a thousand years, and they eat babies, and sacrifice people, etc). And, of course, we have their guards on duty so we can avoid the moral implications of just killing them in their sleep or something, and the priests are always right on the cusp of finishing the evil ritual of evilness (possibly complete with human sacrifices just to up the "we have to act with violence" quotient). All so we can rationalize what would otherwise be a clearly "evil" and "non-lawful" act.

Heck. Let's set aside the "worshippers of Cthulhu about to bring ruin to the world" type scenario. Let's just examine two kingdoms. They are enemies for some historical reason. Both sides could absolutely be engaged in espionage efforts against each other. Are those "evil" acts? Ok, maybe not (or maybe)? Perhaps assassination falls into the "evil" category (harming someone helpless, right), but what if you're asked to take out the warlord of the other sides army on the eve of an invasion? Is that "evil" or "good"? Oddly, if you sneak past his guards and get to his chambers and find him awake, with a small group of personal guards you have to get through, we usually have no issues. But what if he's asleep and unguarded at the point you come across him? Same action (killing him). Same effect (taking him out of the war equation). But most of us would find murdering him in his sleep to be "evil", right? But what if he's "really evil". I mean, he regularly tortures captured soldiers on your "side", tosses disease ridden bodies over the walls to infect your citizens while engaged in a siege, and otherwise engages in every "horrible way to fight a war" possible? Is it then ok to kill him when you get the chance? Heck. What if he's also the current ruler of the "evil" kingdom and he has a younger brother who's a really nice guy and wants to reform their recently deceased father's kingdom, but his brother is just so darn evil? What if the brother (who'd be a great ally and bring peace to the entire region) has formed a resistance movement to work against his evil older brother, and has invited your group to assist him? Where does the line between what is "good" versus what is "evil" lie? What if you live in a world where resurrection spells are available (especially to evil overlords). So do you just kill him? Or do you kill him, steal the body, cut it into pieces, dissolve them individually in acid, and spread them to various random locations?

Heck. What if the bad guy is a vampire? You can literally only actually kill him for good by tracking down his coffin during the day and staking him (killing him in his sleep)? How does that fit on the "good/evil" meter?

And this is only considering human morals. We, as human players, tend towards our own modern human interpretation of "good/evil". But do other cultures in your setting follow the same rules? Does that Orc you're killing actually qualify as "evil", or is he a fine upstanding example of the pillar of Orc society? He regularly eats the meat of sentient beings as proscribed in the Book of Orc, he makes sure to beat his children so as to instill in them proper Orc strength of character (weakness hurts all Orckind, right?), has always advanced in his job by properly backstabbing and killing his (previous but obviously too weak) supervisors, always makes sure to torture people before killing (and eating) them, and otherwise acts in all ways to strengthen both himself and his Orc community. He's "good" by the rules of his society, right? If good and evil are based on morals, and morals are (literally) based on social mores, then this becomes a problem if we introduce societies into our game that literally have very different ideas of what makes a "good society" than we as the human players do.

Even Elves and Dwarves (traditional races that we view as being close to us) can present problems. A lawful good Dwarf (like Durkon) might consider it the height of "goodness" to fight against the evil that is trees, but I'm pretty sure an Elven druid (who could also be "good") would have very different opinions on the act. Both are acting for a "greater good", believing the role of trees in the world is very different, yet both would find themselves in opposition. The Elf would certainly consider wanton chopping down of trees to clear the land for use in mining (need the wood to support the tunnels, and clear the land for fill from the mine, right?) an "evil" act, while the dwarf would consider it "good" (somethings got to be burned for fuel to melt all that ore goodness, right?).

Yeah, maybe veering a bit off the areas we typically assign or judge alignment by, but still. And honestly, it's even worse when we lump the law/chaos axis into the mix. There, internal versus external analysis is positively absurd. Robin Hood would often be judged as "chaotic good". But is he? He's "chaotic" because he's fighting against the lawful rule (he's an outlaw). He steals other people's property. But if he has a strict set of rules he applies to his Merry Men, creates very well thought out plans for his thefts (has backup plans for his backup plans), and a strict code of honor he himself follows, doesn't that make him "lawful"? Which is true? Heck. Is he actually even "good"? We only judge him that because the Sherriff is "evil" (again, demonstrated by ensuring that we show him engaged in direct cruelty so we have no confusion). But what if the Sherriff was otherwise a nice guy who everyone liked? What if he's just following the rules set by the prince (lawful), and doing the best he can in otherwise hard times (there's a war going on, so everyone is suffering and someone's got to step up and to the right thing. So "good"). If the problems are just an economic downturn that's hurting everyone, but some people decide to turn to banditry to deal with it, then doesn't that make Robin Hood "evil"? I mean, he could just go get a job or something, right? Instead he's stealing other people's hard earned money (ok, and distributing to the poor). Um. But what if that money was being collected from (presumably at least successful enough to pay taxes) business owners and was actually going to be distributed to the orphanages and poor houses of the kingdom instead of just making the rich folks richer? So Robin Hood now gets to decide that he and his band are "more deserving poor" than the other poor folks in the kingdom? By what rule? No one voted for him (and no lawful authority appointed him, unlike the Sherriff who was). Maybe there's a lot more people suffering a lot more in the big city and will now suffer even more because this small town bumkin from Nottingham decided that his lot suffering by having to catch their own food and cook it in their own pots was soo much worse than folks who didn't even have that much. Yes. I'm aware that the specifics of the stories describe people *not* being allowed to do so, and the money specifically *only* going to the evil rich friends of the Sherriff, but that's kinda my point. We have to contrive those very absolute conditions (in our story/plot/setting) in order to make the "heroic and good" actions of Robin Hood actually be "heroic and good" in the first place. I would even suggest that the fiction surrounding the character was intentionally written by various authors over time to exaggerate those conditions specifically to make the actions taken appear more heroic and "good".

There's a lot more complexity to real world scenarios (or fake world ones) than can easily be fit into the very broad and often inconsistent concept of an alignment system. In a fictional story, where the author gets to decide all the actions and circumstances, it's somewhat easier. In a roleplaying game (well, a good one?. Not so much. And to then reinforce this with many games which have spells that detect such things? Dunno. Problematic most of the time. You basically are forced as a player (and GM) to willfully ignore the problem cases and work around them purely because the alignment system exists in the first place. Which I think makes it more of a hinderance to roleplaying than a help most of the time.

[Vahnavoi]

Descriptive alignment as judged by the DM is one of the worst possible uses for Alignment.

Worst for what? Compared to what? I described three game modes that hinge on descriptive alignment and you've not made a case against any of those use cases.

If it's not going to be Teams, then it's only good use is as part of motivations used by the player as a roleplaying aide.

Descriptive alignment is not mutually exclusive with teams, because it sorts by behaviour, and teams can be founded on behaviour just as well. Think asymmetric team games like Cops & Robbers rather than symmetric team games like association football. This interacts with roleplaying in a very straightforward manner: "act like robber, get treated like a robber" etc..

Meanwhile, how alignment is supposed to aid roleplaying without a descriptive element is woefully unclear. A player typically does not play alone, so in order for them to portray a role that is not just a copy of themselves, they need to know how other players define and understand whatever motivation they choose to play. For example, playing your personal definition of "coward" probably won't get you the reactions you want if what you see as "cowardice" is actually interpreted as "courage" by the other players. The probability of other people calling you out on this approaches 1 the longer a game goes on even if no-one explicitly keeps score. I'm underlining that, because there's an important corollary: people naturally make judgements of others, descriptive alignment is just a codified version of that.

A related corollary is that, since people tend to naturally group each other by behaviour, lacking explicit teams is not a great argument against descriptive alignment.

Even if the DM wants to restrict Alignments during Session 0, they need to be more specific than "No Evil Alignments". At the minimum, they need to say something like "No Evil Alignments, defined as by having your character regularly/frequently behave as one of the 3 Evil alignment associated behaviors, in my personal judgement." That sets the standard for descriptive alignment as judged by the DM well in advance.

Trying to ban behaviours before play starts is prescriptive, not descriptive. The original biaxial system is not interested with that at all - under it, Evil characters are allowed just fine, and the alignment system exist to check whether they act and stay Evil just as surely as it exist to check whether Good characters act and stay Good. The standard for descriptive alignment as judged by game master is set explicitly as part of the basic rules, independent on any character bans.

Meanwhile, if you want to ban behaviours, you can use the model of play I described as All aboard the blame train. Every player character has a face up alignment graph, every player is allowed to give score to other players for noteworthy character actions based on their judgement. Get enough negative ratings and you're out. This also removes the need for long pre-game negotiations on what is or is not acceptable and makes that negotiation part of the game.

---

@Kurt Kurageous:

None of your points prove what you think they prove. But even if they did, it would not matter. People who get hung up on objective versus subjective morality often forget that it's both possible and easy to use the original alignment system in subjectivist form. The only thing this requires players to accept is that in-game determinations of alignment represent subjective statements by some higher being. At the table level, this is of course known to be the game master, or a panel of players (see the blame train, above). In the game, it can be linked to God or gods.

It's possible to go further and propose all of reality is subjective, which is how you get settings like Planescape, Mage: the Ascension, some versions of Shin Megami Tensei, etc.. The classic tale for such settings is "Rage against the Heavens" rebellion against the ultimate subjective authority.

[icefractal]

It works reasonably well as a prompt - picture a chaotic good merchant, and then a lawful evil one, and you'll probably get different results. So you can usefully add it to random NPC generation methods.

It works much less well in the other direction - determining what alignment an already-fleshed-out character falls into.

So personally, I would make it an optional thing you can use to describe a character, like 5E's bonds/flaws/ideals. Meaning probably no mechanical usage.

[Theoboldi]

It works much less well in the other direction - determining what alignment an already-fleshed-out character falls into.

Controversial (and not thought through) opinion:

Most alignment disputes come from people not wanting to admit that by D&D's standards their favorite pet character falls under an alignment they dislike.

[Vahnavoi]

Yup. I agree. Except that we as players of the game have to agree as to what is "good" or "lawful" in any given context for this to work, and which categories those given personality traits fall into. Which, in actual game practice, does not always work.

So?

People have to agree what "hit points", "ability scores" or any other game terms mean just the same. All you are saying is that people have to agree on rules of a game to play it - this is neither insurmountable nor unique to alignment.

Alignment doesn't ask, and doesn't need to ask, people to solve real morality. It only asks them to solve who calls the shots - that is, to accept a rule such as "a game master has final say on game events". A player who takes issue with rules like that, will have issues with far more things than mere alignment.

The full range of possible personality quirks can only be distilled into a couple of axis of measurement (really a "morality" axis and a "methodology" axis, in the case of good/evil and law/chaos) in extremely broad ways. Actual people are far more complex than that, but any attempt to capture that complexity will rapidly become complex as well, which you want to avoid in a game system.

I do agree that if constrained to just a small set of action/decision components, alignment can be a useful "guide" for players. So killing helpless opponents is "evil", for example. Most decisions characters make are going to be utilitarian in nature (does this achieve our objective, or move us closer to achieving our objective). Traits can be incredibly varied: "My character has a hatred of Orcs due to childhood trauma" or "My druid loves nature and will do anything to prevent people from harming the environment". Broad alignments can provide some sort of "rails" to the actions we choose our characters to take while pursuing or acting on our traits, but that honestly is about it (or should be IMO).

Alignment doesn't measure full range of possible personalities. It does what you yourself agree is reasonable: measure a subset of game actions that the game is morally interested in. The "actual people are far more complex" argument is both underdeveloped and irrelevant. Underdeveloped, in that it fails to acknowledge all the other measurements a game might make of a character that would impact personality, such as species, ethnicity, class, profession, intelligence, wisdom, charisma, age, mental disorders etc. (all present in 1st edition AD&D). Irrelevant in that no-one is asking games to be perfectly accurate models of real people. I've said it before, I'll say it again: how many variables you track is a question of how many you need to (in order to serve the aesthetics you want) versus how many you practically can.

But it doesn't always align with "sides" in a larger conflict (cosmological or not). The moment we introduce deities who form the "sides", the alignment system begins to have problems. The "good" deities command their followers to fight the followers of the "evil" deities. So while objectively we might consider a home invasion and brutal killing of all inside as "evil", a party of "good" adventurers could certainly be on a mission to assault the temple of <insert evil deity here>, kill all the guards, find the inner sanctum, wipe out the priests before they can finish their ritual to do <something evil>, destroy said temple, and then go have a beer with their friends and celebrate their victory. While playing the game, we actually have to work a bit to make the "bad guys" as bad as possible so as to comport with our own morals as players (they're "really" evil, and were doing something that would cast evil darkness on the world for a thousand years, and they eat babies, and sacrifice people, etc). And, of course, we have their guards on duty so we can avoid the moral implications of just killing them in their sleep or something, and the priests are always right on the cusp of finishing the evil ritual of evilness (possibly complete with human sacrifices just to up the "we have to act with violence" quotient). All so we can rationalize what would otherwise be a clearly "evil" and "non-lawful" act.

You make a number of silly assumptions. The chief reason is that you're working backwards from a stereotype of what the player characters are supposed to do or be, rather than following through on the basic principles under discussion.

Firstly, the presence of a physical evil that must be fought, what you call a "rationalization" of what would be otherwise "clearly" evil or non-lawful, is not a rationalization. It's a premise of the make-believe, one of the hypotheses driving the game scenario. Gygax directly talks about this, I believe, even in 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. It's not necessary for alignment itself, it's necessary for genre of sword & sorcery and for archetypes like the Paladin, that is, a Knight in Shining Armor opposing Evil by force of arms.

Secondly, the reason why Gygax had to make that digression is because a significant amount of people at the time were doing the exact opposite of what you describe. That is, rather than making the "bad guys as bad as possible", they were humanizing the "bad guys" and requiring pacifism from Good player characters, because pacifism is what appealed to their real moral standards. In other words, Gygax was speaking against the idea that game morals have to comport with real morals of players.

It's TSR, come second edition of AD&D, after they'd kicked Gygax out, that made a mandate that the game's portrayal of morality should be tied to contemporary norms. I re-iterate, they did this because they wanted to sell their game to kids and didn't want to be shouted at by someone's angry mom.

It's 2nd edition that introduced the idea that player characters should always be heroes on the side of Good against Evil. 1st edition and the original biaxial alignment system have no such requirement. This has a corollary in that under the original rules, if player characters engage in "objectively evil" acts (as agreed on by everybody at the table), there is no obstacle to acknowledging the game characters as Evil. The sides are not symmetric, the Gods of Good can be strict on how the player characters conduct themselves in their fights against their opponents, and there is no reason to presume characters engaging in home invasion and brutal killing are Good. Heck, there's no reason to assume the opponents are Evil!

Heck. Let's set aside the "worshippers of Cthulhu about to bring ruin to the world" type scenario. Let's just examine two kingdoms. They are enemies for some historical reason.

1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide explicitly states that even two Lawful Good kings can wage war against each other. There are two chief reasons for this: one, there is variation within alignment groups. The cause of war might be a moral dilemma with mutually exclusive solutions, one leaning Law and another leaning Good, so kingdoms emphasizing different aspects may end up at odds (and there is a version of this for every alignment, dilemmas of this sort are not restricted to Good or Lawful people). Two, people with the same values may still act differently if they have different information. Imagine a security guard about to take lick of a tasty icecream cone. Suddenly, Batman appears and knocks the cone off the guard's hand, leaving then without any icecream to eat.

Is Batman acting reasonably?
Does you judgement change if you knew for sure the icecream was poisoned and Batman just saved the guy's life?

Both sides could absolutely be engaged in espionage efforts against each other. Are those "evil" acts? Ok, maybe not (or maybe)? Ok, maybe not (or maybe)? Perhaps assassination falls into the "evil" category (harming someone helpless, right), but what if you're asked to take out the warlord of the other sides army on the eve of an invasion? Is that "evil" or "good"?

The correct answer is "insufficient information", because you are not telling enough details to make that decision. The answers are meant to be given in the context of a game, with a fleshed-out situation, from the position of a game master who is allowed to fill in the gaps (because a game master has final say on game events, per the rules).

Oddly, if you sneak past his guards and get to his chambers and find him awake, with a small group of personal guards you have to get through, we usually have no issues.

As a corollary to what I already said: whether players have issues is irrelevant, because that's not what decides alignment.

But what if he's asleep and unguarded at the point you come across him? Same action (killing him). Same effect (taking him out of the war equation). But most of us would find murdering him in his sleep to be "evil", right??

That's because you changed the situation. Unsurprisingly people have different reactions to different situations. All of this irrelevant because, again, alignment is not simply decided by how players feel about any given thing. Every single question of alignment is subject to game master interpretation, based on their setting and the aesthetics of gameplay they wish to serve.

I could answer every question you made and implied in the rest of your post, but it would just lead to prohibitively long response. The only important point to make about them is that none of them prove what you set out to prove, namely that sorting personalities into sides inherently causes problems. Majority of your questions are just setting building questions that a game master can answer as they see fit.

There's a lot more complexity to real world scenarios (or fake world ones) than can easily be fit into the very broad and often inconsistent concept of an alignment system.

Which continues to be irrelevant, because no-one is asking games to be perfect models of reality.

In a fictional story, where the author gets to decide all the actions and circumstances, it's somewhat easier. In a roleplaying game (well, a good one?. Not so much. And to then reinforce this with many games which have spells that detect such things? Dunno. Problematic most of the time. You basically are forced as a player (and GM) to willfully ignore the problem cases and work around them purely because the alignment system exists in the first place. Which I think makes it more of a hinderance to roleplaying than a help most of the time.

It's a nice conclusion that doesn't follow from anywhere. What forces a player or game master to ignore "problem cases" is merely practical limits of what they can process, not presence of the system; if a game master wants to and has time to spare, they can center entire games around such "problem cases".

[LibraryOgre]

Wouldn't it be easier to just describe Hobgoblin society as "hierarchical and self-interested" instead of having to go through the extra step? That's one of the reasons I find alignment mostly meaningless – if it's not a straight-jacket it means that I still have to figure out how these particular Hobgoblins are LE or how this particular paladin is LG.

Only if you want to do away with categories as an idea altogether.

Categories exist to group things that are related, and knowing what category something is in can help you draw conclusions about what it is like, in a general sense. Cats, from housecat to puma to tiger, share general traits. It can be useful to talk about cats as a category (pun not intended, but owned), even if you have to caveat that some of the generalizations don't apply to every member. These Hobgoblins (a box) are going to share things with other hobgoblins, because they are both in the hobgoblin box. They are going to share things with other goblinoids because they are all in the goblinoid box, and they're going to share things with other evil people and other lawful people because they are in the lawful and evil boxes. However, hobgoblins of the Smashy Axe tribe are not going be identical to hobgoblins of the Boomerang tribe, because while they might be inside many boxes in common, the differences between Smashy Axe and Boomerang are also present.

For example, that Lawful Good Paladin and a Lawful Evil Hobgoblin have certain things in common; the social and ethical tools they use are similar, even if their particulars are different, and their goals are complete opposite. Both will try to build structures (organizations, ideals, etc) that further their ends, because they are Lawful. The categorical descriptor, Lawful, tells us that. If someone thinks that such structures are useless and should be abolished, then that's Chaotic.... because that's what the Chaotic box is.

In a sense, alignment is a series of Venn diagrams; Lawful Good exists at the confluence of the Law and Good categories, while Chaotic Evil is at the confluence of Chaos and Evil. What boxes things fall into tells us something about their relationships to other things, which may or may not share one or more boxes.

Categories, like all cats, really like boxes.

[gbaji]

So?

I presented a statement and a conclusion. You seem to have ignored the conclusion that "in actual game practice, does not always work".

People have to agree what "hit points", "ability scores" or any other game terms mean just the same. All you are saying is that people have to agree on rules of a game to play it - this is neither insurmountable nor unique to alignment.

Yes. And those other mechanisms "work well" as game mechanisms. They are very specific. They have very precisely measured effects on the game. We have exact die rolls for damage, which is applied to the hit points of the person hit. It's precise math. We have exact values for abilities, which in turn provide precise bonuses (or minuses) to skill checks, which again, are compared against precise mathematical values that are presented in the game (in a chart, or a DC value, depending on edition in D&D, other methods in other games).

Alignment is not precise. That was the point. It's not objective. That was the point. It's also why it does not work as well in actual gameplay as other things (like hit points and ability scores). My post was a progression of statements, not just one claim/proof after another. Wait for it.

Alignment doesn't ask, and doesn't need to ask, people to solve real morality. It only asks them to solve who calls the shots - that is, to accept a rule such as "a game master has final say on game events". A player who takes issue with rules like that, will have issues with far more things than mere alignment.

And again. If alignment is just a guide, that's fine. But the moment you tie it into other game things (like class, class abilities, etc), you present a problem. It has to be measured in some way. My overall point is that while it's easy to just say "The GM decides" or (as several posters have suggested "The other players decide"), in actual practical gameplay, that assessment can be very different based on who's making the assessment. There's a reason why alignment is probably the most hotly contested issue in gaming. Heck. How many pages and pages of arguments over Hilgya's alignment have their been, with at least two completely intransigent sides unwilling to budge, and each being absolutely certain that they are correct?

When it's just folks discussing minutia over an online strip, that's fine. What if one "side" is the player and the other "side" is the GM? And the consequences of which are losing spells from your deity, or falling outside the alignment requirements for your class? You have a problem.

Alignment doesn't measure full range of possible personalities. It does what you yourself agree is reasonable: measure a subset of game actions that the game is morally interested in. The "actual people are far more complex" argument is both underdeveloped and irrelevant. Underdeveloped, in that it fails to acknowledge all the other measurements a game might make of a character that would impact personality, such as species, ethnicity, class, profession, intelligence, wisdom, charisma, age, mental disorders etc. (all present in 1st edition AD&D). Irrelevant in that no-one is asking games to be perfectly accurate models of real people. I've said it before, I'll say it again: how many variables you track is a question of how many you need to (in order to serve the aesthetics you want) versus how many you practically can.

Or. You can just scrap the entire concept of alignment and just let the players describe their characters personality, quirks, traits, likes, dislikes, etc. Again. If it's just a guide to playing, that's fine. The moment it's has an impact on PC capabilities (which it does in every version of D&D I've played), you have a problem. I made the argument earlier that you need to pick one of those things for alignment to be. Making it both a guide to playing *and* an enforceable and detectable attribute written on the character sheet with punishments for failing to properly follow it, you run into issues.

Firstly, the presence of a physical evil that must be fought, what you call a "rationalization" of what would be otherwise "clearly" evil or non-lawful, is not a rationalization. It's a premise of the make-believe, one of the hypotheses driving the game scenario. Gygax directly talks about this, I believe, even in 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide. It's not necessary for alignment itself, it's necessary for genre of sword & sorcery and for archetypes like the Paladin, that is, a Knight in Shining Armor opposing Evil by force of arms.

Secondly, the reason why Gygax had to make that digression is because a significant amount of people at the time were doing the exact opposite of what you describe. That is, rather than making the "bad guys as bad as possible", they were humanizing the "bad guys" and requiring pacifism from Good player characters, because pacifism is what appealed to their real moral standards. In other words, Gygax was speaking against the idea that game morals have to comport with real morals of players.

It's TSR, come second edition of AD&D, after they'd kicked Gygax out, that made a mandate that the game's portrayal of morality should be tied to contemporary norms. I re-iterate, they did this because they wanted to sell their game to kids and didn't want to be shouted at by someone's angry mom.

It's 2nd edition that introduced the idea that player characters should always be heroes on the side of Good against Evil. 1st edition and the original biaxial alignment system have no such requirement. This has a corollary in that under the original rules, if player characters engage in "objectively evil" acts (as agreed on by everybody at the table), there is no obstacle to acknowledging the game characters as Evil. The sides are not symmetric, the Gods of Good can be strict on how the player characters conduct themselves in their fights against their opponents, and there is no reason to presume characters engaging in home invasion and brutal killing are Good. Heck, there's no reason to assume the opponents are Evil!

Yes. I was speaking precisely to this progression happening, and in fact that due to how D&D created alignment, it had to happen. 2nd edition may certainly have been influenced by angry mothers and with an eye towards marketing to a younger audience, but at least some of the impact on the alignment system and the creation of clear "sides" was part of that progression I spoke of. The players of 1e realized the contradiction and problems I spoke of. They realized that they were often placed in morally unclear situations, and realized that the basic murderhobo mentality of early D&D wasn't necessarily "complete". Gygax wrote the game to manage very basic things like "You enter a dungeon, encounter monsters there, kill them, take their stuff". That was about it. A mission to explore, kill what is there, and then return with your loot.

And for that, it worked. But many players and DMs wanted more detailed and complex worlds, so they created them. And this pushed them through the same narrative process that writers do. They realized that in these more complex environments, the "bad guys" had to be clearly "bad" so as to allow the players (at least some of whom would be playing good aligned characters) to feel comfortable actually engaging with the scenario. There's a reason why, in stories, films, and TV shows, the writers will almost always (there are exceptions) create a completely morally unambiguous scenario for the main characters to deal with. The bad guys are "really bad". That's done so that the audience can feel comfortable cheering the heroes when they win. Even if in the process of winning they engage in gruesome violence against the villains.

The rare occasions when most films or shows present us with a moral quandary are notable precisely because they are rare. And they are written precisely because the writers went "hey. Let's show the audience a morally ambiguous scenario just to be different". And they do it. The audience has to think about how they feel about the heroes for one episode. Then we go back to morally unambiguous stuff in the next episode to get the audience back on "our side". It's done all the time. There's a reason for it.

And the players are the audience in this case (well, kinda). If the GM presents too many unclear scenarios, they'll just stop biting on those hooks. They'll decide (rightly) that they are no better than the "bad guy", and go off and do something else. GMs realize this and present fewer of these, or only present them when they specifically want to create a "problem" in the world, but one that the players can't just walk over to and kill. That's not "wrong" or "bad". It's a good thing. I'm just talking about how that progression moves in the game, and also how it can cause problems in a rigid alignment system like D&D. If the PCs suffer no more consequences than how they feel about themselves if they assassinate a bad guy who isn't acting in super overt "bad guy ways", then it becomes more of a utilitarian decision. They may decide that "in this case, it's worth it". But if their characters will suffer directly for "making the wrong choice", they will shy away.

The correct answer is "insufficient information", because you are not telling enough details to make that decision. The answers are meant to be given in the context of a game, with a fleshed-out situation, from the position of a game master who is allowed to fill in the gaps (because a game master has final say on game events, per the rules).

Except the players are expected to act, and the GM is expected to judge whether those actions were in agreement with their alignment. You are correct. There is insufficient information to make an objective determination. That's the problem.

As a corollary to what I already said: whether players have issues is irrelevant, because that's not what decides alignment.

I meant "we have no issues" from the point of view of the players getting into trouble for failing to follow their alignment. The GM is "making the decision easy for them". This is a follow up to the point I was making earlier, that as a consequence of the alignment system itself, GMs will tend to change the nature of encounters specifically to make them fit easily into alignment positions. That's because by doing that it makes it easier for the players and the GM to know whether something is "good" or "evil".

In a game system without a rigid alignment system, you don't have this. The GM is free to present any scenario they want, and there are no consequences to the players (other than roleplayed in the game) to those actions. I recently ran an adventure where the PCs were essentially on a treasure hunt (buried pirate treasure even!). This was a sequence of vaults, each with some traps and guardian things (undead, spirits, etc), some treasure, and a map to the next vault. Yup. Very linear, but also very fun.

On one leg of their travel they were heading from a vault in one city back to their own kingdom and decided to take a shortish line through the southern edge of a kingdom to the north of their starting point (two kingdoms along the east coast, they start in the southern one, and are heading to their home kingdom which is slightly north and west of the kingdom directly north of them along the coast, so they cut a corner going inland). As it happens, the southern kingdom had gone through a difficult time in recent decades and had a Tyrant on the throne for a period of time, during which the northern kingdom had annexed a few of the border noble's lands (the northern guy's no peach either, but he was better than the guy they found themselves suffering under, so a set of nobles along that border chose to leave the southern kingdom and join the northern one). A new ruler has been established in the southern kingdom (with perhaps some help by the PCs), and things are better, so there are some of those nobles who are rethinking their decision. They all want to move as a group, so they are meeting secretly and voting on it, and there's one hold out. A real troublesome baron who no-one likes. His son and heir however, is much better liked and seems to be more willing to make the move (you see where this is going).

So, turns out that the baron goes to his summer home in the mountains to hunt. There's a small village nearby, and a plot to assassinate the old baron is afoot. The plotters have hired (in theory) a group of mercenary types to take out the baron, but it has to be done in a way that looks accidental. They've only ever communicated through intermediaries, never face to face. The mercs are coming from the main city of the southern kingdom. So. Party wanders along. They're just passing through on their way home, but their travel papers (and responses to any questions) show where they crossed the border, and that they came from that same city (cause that's where the last vault was). And they look scruffy, and like a small mercenary band... so... they get mistaken for the folks the plotters hired, and are presented with the "second half" of the money if they finish the work.

Now the funny thing was the players reaction to being greated so "nicely" by the villagers, and then having the Inn closed down early for them, so that "our friends can talk to you". Very ominous. The players have seen this before, and it usually means the villagers are secretly werewolves and want to eat them, have a vampire or two living there that need to be fed (us or you, so... you), or want to sacrifice the party to some horrible demon/spirit/whatever. You know. The usual. So they were quite relieved when they realized what was actually going on. I laid out the scenario and let them choose what to do.

When I wrote this, I had *zero* expectation of what they might choose. They could do anything they wanted. There would be political ramifications over time as a result, but it would have no direct effect on them (well, unless they tried and got caught or something). This particular party was not made up of anywhere near their most powerful characters (it was a minor side thing I ran basically to give a new player's character some play time and experience before a really big adventure I had planned. Hence the pretty contrived pirate treasure scenario in the first place). I wasn't sure what they would do. But that's the point. There's no alignment in the game system I play. Other than some PCs maybe worshiping a deity who places restrictions on such things (and there's only really one in the area that would, and none of them worshipped that one), they have no "rules" telling them they can't assassinate someone. So in this case, it's being run purely on the players roleplaying their characters based on the personalities they have decided that they have. It was purely a combination of utilitarian "Is this something we want" (which, as it happens, the PCs as a general group kinda do, since the guy in the northern kingdom is also a problem, while the new leadership in the southern one is quite friendly now), and "is this something our characters are ok with doing". Eh. And also "is this something we can actually do".

Concepts of "I'm good, so I can't do this" never entered the discussion. It was exactly the much more complex "would my character be willing to do this". Much more nuanced. And it was actually fun to watch the players discuss their decision (and the process they took to make it).

So yeah. Alignment systems can be useful as guides, but should not be used in the rigid way D&D does IMO. You *can* make it work, but it's not so easy much of the time. If there was no expectation that characters would fall out of their alignment, there wouldn't be rules for it, and punishments for it. So, GMs tend to feel a pressure to apply such things. Which, as I stated earlier, tends to act as a constraint to actual roleplaying.

That's because you changed the situation. Unsurprisingly people have different reactions to different situations. All of this irrelevant because, again, alignment is not simply decided by how players feel about any given thing. Every single question of alignment is subject to game master interpretation, based on their setting and the aesthetics of gameplay they wish to serve.

Yes. Because I was specifically detailing two scenarios with only a minor difference and how that dramatically affects whether the act itself "killing the warlord" is "good" or "evil". That was the whole point. It's also presented intentionally as a very clear cut case, to illustrate the kinds of things GMs may feel a need to do in their games in order to make alignment choices more "clear" to the players, so as to avoid argument if he judges their decision differently than they do.

I could answer every question you made and implied in the rest of your post, but it would just lead to prohibitively long response. The only important point to make about them is that none of them prove what you set out to prove, namely that sorting personalities into sides inherently causes problems. Majority of your questions are just setting building questions that a game master can answer as they see fit.

Ok. But you're missing the meat of my argument. I was intentionally moving from the basic and easy cases where determining the alignment effect of an action is relatively simple, to the more complex and more difficult where we can run into serious problems based on massive differences in subjective judgement of the situation and the action itself. You've decided to stop responding the moment I presented the very first "somewhat hard" one. I've basically said "here's where it works ok", and you've responded saying "But in those, it works ok". Now I'm saying "this is where it doesn't work ok", and you've stopped responding.

These are the scenarios where the question of alignment becomes trickier. Maybe you should have focused on these instead? The vampire case is somewhat tongue in check, but intended to follow up on the "kill the warlord while awake and guarded" versus "kill him while unguarded and asleep in his bed" scenario previously mentioned (and identified as 'easy'). In this case, I'm showing a case where you are doing the exact same thing (killing someone while unguarded and asleep in his "bed"), but that may not be so clearly identified as "evil". Get it? I'm challenging the simple moral rules we might want to apply to try to make alignment determinations "objective" by showing that they don't work in all cases.

The Orc example is critical since it shows that social mores affect "morality" and thus determinations of "good" and "evil". And again, that's not a problem if the only effect of those labels is how the character feels about themselves and their actions. But the moment you have game mechanics tied to alignment (detection spells, ability to worship certain deities, class abilities, etc), this inconsistency becomes a real problem.

And you just avoided addressing it entirely.

Which continues to be irrelevant, because no-one is asking games to be perfect models of reality.

No. But in many games (good games), GMs strive to make their game worlds as "reasonably good" models of reality (well, an alternative reality) as possible. But the moment you do that you will run into issues with an alignment system that, as I said at the top, doesn't do that well.

It's a nice conclusion that doesn't follow from anywhere. What forces a player or game master to ignore "problem cases" is merely practical limits of what they can process, not presence of the system; if a game master wants to and has time to spare, they can center entire games around such "problem cases".

Yes. He can. And his players will hate him for it precisely because they are constantly being asked to make decisions in an environment where the alignment effects are completely subjective and unclear, but in which they will suffer if they make the "wrong choice". My argument is that merely having an alignment system like D&D results in one of those two conditions:

1. GM presents "realistic" scenarios to the players. Players struggle to determine which decisions are "good" and which are "evil". They suffer if they pick wrong, but it's not always clear what the "right" choice is. The players end up spending more time trying to figure out what the GM is thinking in terms of alignment effects on the decision than actually roleplaying their character the way they want to and think *they* should do..

2. GM realizes this is a problem, so he dumbs down the scenarios. He makes the moral decisions much more clear cut and easy to determine where they fit in the alignment axis. Players are less stressed about making a mistake, but now they are living in dumb-dumb world.

That's what an alignment system in a game does. I suppose we could add a "2.5. Players stop playing characters with anything other than neutral alignments, or ones that can be played more easily in morally complex scenarios".

All of which act as restraints on player roleplaying. Get it? If you have alignment, but just as a guideline, but with no detection spells, and no punishments for straying, then it works. If you have alignment merely be "side" based (and nothing more), then it works as well (though this might be considered more of a faction system maybe). Trying to both have it apply to personality traits of the character *and* have measurable game effects on/around the character causes problems.

You can do one, or the other, but really shouldn't do both. D&D has attempted to do both for a very very long time, and as a consequence have had to meander back and forth through various editions of the game trying to re-write the rules, re-codify what they mean, etc, and still players have problems with it (not sure about 5e though, since I only played it once or twice in very short single shot adventures so alignment never actually came up). At some point, maybe just scrap the entire idea (or switch to a game system that doesn't have it at all, and be much happier).

[Batcathat]

Only if you want to do away with categories as an idea altogether.

Categories can be helpful, but they don't have any inherent value. And dividing all of human morality into nine boxes by necessity makes each box so broad and unwieldy it's not much help with anything. At this forum alone there have been threads upon threads upon threads about what constitutes different alignments, so saying that two groups have their alignment or parts of their alignment in common doesn't really tell me much about the groups.

[GloatingSwine]

Only if you want to do away with categories as an idea altogether.

Not thinking in terms of D&D alignments isn't doing away with categories, it's using a lower level set of categories that are more descriptive and specific.

The D&D alignments are broad and can have completely non-overlapping subcategories contained within them, which means you need to use the subcategories anyway so you might as well call those the categories.

[Vahnavoi]

Bah. I had a long post written, but then a misclick ate the entire thing. That's what I get for trying to write ten thousand words on a phone.

@gbaji:

You clearly don't know how either games with referees work, nor do you understand how stories work. The purpose of neither is to avoid players using their brains or to hand them morally unambiguous feel-good scenarios. Plenty aim for the opposite. For D&D, Planescape is an example of a setting that takes a deep dive into weirder parts of alignment and the Outer Planes as whole, with deliberately increased focus on moral philosophy and ambiguity. By your reasoning, the entire setting shouldn't exist.

As explained in my very first post, there are at least eight widely recognized aesthetics of gameplay. You completely fail to recognize that a game master's ability to enforce alignment and punish characters for faulty action derives from the exact same thing as the game master's ability to enforce any other kind of rule or punish characters for any other reason: the permission to facilitate a game following their desired aesthetic, given to them by the players who want to play. You harp on the players ability to express their ideas about their character, but fail to acknowledge ideas such as making a puzzle out of how to act morally or exploring a moral system that is purposefully foreign to the players.

Rules such as "game master has final say" are not a problem, they literally are the solution to players having different opinions. Again, if a player has trouble with such rules, they are going to chafe with far more than just alignment - because alignment is not unique in being incomplete or subject to arbitration. Tabletop roleplaying games inherit that trait as well as the position of a game master from wargaming. And in wargames, human arbitration was emphasized because algorithmic rules proved too slow and cumbersome to play. Your idea that hit points or attack rolls or other "objective", "exact" or "precise" rules serve gameplay better than rules based on human judgement is hence completely detached from practical game design - the purported complexity of morality is a point in favor of allowing a game master use their own reasoning and expertise to fill in the blanks. Nevermind that you obviously missed the reference to age-old arguments over what hitpoints mean or what counts as an attack; those "precise objective" rules are not, in fact, all that precise or objective and are reliant on human judgement just as well. AD&D rules aren't incomplete by accident, they're so by design.

Then we get to the fact that entire genres of games are built on a player or group of players evaluating each other, from children's games such as Mother May I to card games such as Cards Against Humanity to serious referee sports such as Olympic figure skating. It's almost as if what you call "a problem" is in fact one basic schema of game design.

And for the second time, me not answering your questions about hypothetical scenarios isn't because the scenarios you post are hard, it's because answering all of them would take a prohibitively long time.

[KorvinStarmast]

And dividing all of human morality into nine boxes by necessity makes each box so broad and unwieldy it's not much help with anything.

It's counterproductive.

@gbaji:

You clearly don't know how either games with referees work, nor do you understand how stories work.

There are no few modern RPG players who dislike that a game master is (or rather, originally was) a referee, or a judge. They have some "dealing with authority" issues.

The world builder provides some 'bounds to the problem' as it were that a courteous gamer will respect. In my experience, that is usually the result of dialogue.
On the brighter side, I have seen some cases where players offer ideas to GMs to aid in the creative process. Works in some cases better than others, but I like it when a group of players, or even just a few of them, are interested enough in doing that to give the world more texture and depth.

Alignment beyond LNC? Over time, I have found that getting too bound to that results in a pointed stick used to jab at others.
As a GM tool, when trying to frame how an NPC or monster will deal with a situation, it's very helpful, but it isn't the only piece of the puzzle.

[Quertus]

👻
Alright,
This will be the time and place we finally solve the alignment system.
Is it good or bad for the game?

What axises should we use?

What are the pros and cons of alignment?

How do we use it in our games?

Should Paladins always be Lawful Good? YES

My stance continues to be, “Alignment is the worst thing to happen to roleplaying in the history of RPGs”. You’re not playing “Chaotic Evil”, you’re playing Batman. You’re playing an orphaned billionaire, who chooses to dress up like a bat, and scare and punch criminals into submission (or kill them…) in his own one-or-more-man vigilante crusade in a world with super powers.

it's a very handy tool. Especially for beginners, but even for experienced players who have gone down the rabbit hole of backstory with no clearly listed motivations to help when making in character decisions.

This path of broken glass is a useful tool for people to use to roll naked to work on, even wealthy ones who have gone down the rabbit hole of cars with no wheels and no gas.

I mean, sure, you can do just about anything wrong, backstory is no exception. I think that the better answer than making a bad backup would be to get people to be better at the primary path (ie, making useful backstories), or providing good backups.

Anything can be done wrong, but can alignment be done right?

I think Alignment serves a useful purpose in games that have actual supernatural, cosmic forces that represent the opposing ends of the alignment spectrum. Beings of pure good or evil, spells that call upon their power and work differently against beings of varying alignments, and magical items that serve these forces and seek to enforce their power.

It serves as a good framework to illustrate how these forces and their followers behave, how to arbitrate where a given character's allegiance falls and which beings will accept him, and how the mystical powers of these cosmic forces affect an individual. There's a good opportunity for the mechanics to reinforce the setting here, making for a more cohesive world.

The only way I see this working is of the goal of the campaign is for the PCs to kill and replace these cosmic entities with something more sane; ie, the campaign is a conversation about what those things mean (or what they should mean). Or if it’s played for laughs, as a battle between the epic forces of Game, Narrative, and Story. Or the Pokémon elements. Or Chocolate vs Strawberry. Or Cats vs Dogs.

Whenever I've played in a game without Alignment I've never missed it. D&D's alignment is also very vestigial, even back in the oft-worshiped days of 3e it mostly mattered for certain spells.

What’s this about the newfangled days of 3e? Back in my day, alignment was pretty trivial to ignore.

I like Alignment when it's more like Victoriana 3e*. One axis with multiple steps and major mechanical effects, specifically in Victoriana it changes how spending Fate Points work (Order gives bonus successes, Chaos gives bonus dice) and difficulty in using magic or technology. Interesting orcs are Order-aligned by default. But the point is that alignment matters, an orc with a revolver is not someone you face lightly (as they're likely slinging three automatic successes).

* Maybe earlier editions as well? I only own 3e.

So… Chaotic Batman is terrible with his technology, while Lawful Nabu is terrible with his magic? What does Alignment add, that you think you could convince their players that it’s worth sacrificing their character concept for, or worth playing such nerfed characters for?

[Vahnavoi]

There are no few modern RPG players who dislike that a game master is (or rather, originally was) a referee, or a judge. They have some "dealing with authority" issues.

It's not a modern thing. Again, roleplaying games have been sold to kids, a lot of horror stories have their origins in situations where everyone at the table was literally twelve. Of course kids gonna complain about other kids, kids can get in a fight about who cheated at tag if they're so inclined.

The important thing to grok, once you're no longer twelve, is that there's a difference between complaining about a referee, versus complaining that there is a referee at all. The former may be valid, if there's a problem with the referee. The latter typically means you are the problem.

[LibraryOgre]

Categories can be helpful, but they don't have any inherent value. And dividing all of human morality into nine boxes by necessity makes each box so broad and unwieldy it's not much help with anything. At this forum alone there have been threads upon threads upon threads about what constitutes different alignments, so saying that two groups have their alignment or parts of their alignment in common doesn't really tell me much about the groups.

I don't agree with you; the divisions are broad, but they're not unwieldy, IME. The boxes can be pretty well defined (I define them more tightly, which is a whole 'nother argument, because people often hold that property is the person, and deprivation of property is inherently harm, as opposed to being a socially defined concept of property), and so long as you accept that each discrete alignment is a box and not a shot glass, you don't wind up in straightjackets.

To crib from Babylon 5, a lawful society asks "Who are you?"... what is your place in this society? A chaotic society asks "What do you want?"... what are your goals and aspirations, because those take precedence over the constraints of society. By extension, a good society asks "What is best for people?"^1,2, while an evil society asks "What is best for me?", and a Lawful Good society asks "Who are you, and how can you help people", while a chaotic evil society asks "What do you want, and what can you do to get it?"

Another example that occurs to me: The Dewey Decimal system. While it has its issues (I have whole rants about the 200s and the 800s, and strong feelings about the cataloging of graphic novels), it you know what an item is about, you can often know where it is. Is it a book about animals? 590s; probably 598 or 599 if it's about mammals. Magic and psychic powers? 130s, probably 133. You can GET more specific... Shakespeare is 822.33 (800s = Literature, 820s = Literature by British Authors, 822s = Plays by British Authors, 822.33 = Plays by Willy Shakes himself), and the metastructure of the system can even help direct you to other places... plays by Arthur Miller are likely to be in the 812s, since its 800s, 810s are American authors, and 812s are plays by American authors. American history is 973; American Cuisine is 641.5973... 600s is technology, 640s is cooking, 641 is cookbooks,and 641.5973 is American cuisine. Korean cuisine is 641.5951... and you'll find Korean history in the 951s. It is a system of increasing specificity, but with broad categories that still guide you to the correct places. The broad categories enhance the usefulness of the specificity, instead of umpteen tiny boxes arranged at whim.

I can't speak to everyone's personal experience with the system, and I've seen a lot of takes that I consider just flat wrong. But I find it to be a useful framework for organizing the ethics and morality of characters, without being a straightjacket that makes everyone of a given alignment the same. With smaller, more specific, categorizations you can wind up with a proliferation of categories problem... too many categories, without obvious relationships between them, making it difficult to navigate or place things accurately. If you DO have obvious relationships between them, and arrange them as such, then you just have a new set of boxes making these larger categories, even if you don't draw the box walls. Someone else might see the same arrangement as see different categories and arrangements; that the arrangements are somewhat arbitrary is irrelevant, so long as they are relatively persistent... I can't get too much more into this without discussing Discordian philosophy.

1 I have a persistent hallucination that, at some point in the series, either G'Kar or Sheridan says "The Vorlons ask 'Who are you?' The Shadows ask 'What do you want?' The humans have a question, too, and it's 'What the hell is wrong with you people?'" I have never been able to find that this actually exists.
2 "People", in this case, is pretty much any kind of life. Since most life is, to an extent, consumptive of other living things (photosynthesizers usually being an exception), you're going to have to accept that some degree of harm happens to other life in the course of living, though a good person will seek to minimize it.

[Theoboldi]

The only way I see this working is of the goal of the campaign is for the PCs to kill and replace these cosmic entities with something more sane; ie, the campaign is a conversation about what those things mean (or what they should mean). Or if it’s played for laughs, as a battle between the epic forces of Game, Narrative, and Story. Or the Pokémon elements. Or Chocolate vs Strawberry. Or Cats vs Dogs.

Honestly, I don't quite see how that follows. It's a bit difficult to make definitive statements on this, as a struggle between good and evil is quite different from one between law and chaos, for instance, but nothing defines these forces as necessarily insane or impossible to ally with.

Sure, some settings do define both sides as ultimately flawed and a threat to humanity, but those are the ones that tend to have keeping the balance or destroying both sides as the true goal anyways.

Other configurations are easily possible, for instance the classic good versus evil conflict where one side winning is objectively better and results in an improved world and a happy ending. You can also have it set up so multiple sides have their benefits, and it's up to the players which one they want to see dominant, or even make it so that it's impossible for any one side to truly prevail forever.

Keep in mind, that just because cosmic forces exist and they have creatures representing them, that this does not also mean there's necessarily some big god that's in charge of either who you can kill and then that's that. That is as far as I am aware how many mainline D&D settings work, where there are angels and demons and gods of any alignment, but they are no more in charge of any of those alignments than a common mortal.

And there's plenty of people who play those settings completely straight. It's simply a matter of not interpreting these alignments and their representatives in the strictest, most brutal manner. It may not be a personally appealing fantasy world to you, but it certainly is a viable one.

[Telonius]

Three axes. Law/Chaos, Good/Evil, and Funky/Square.

[Batcathat]

Another example that occurs to me: The Dewey Decimal system. While it has its issues (I have whole rants about the 200s and the 800s, and strong feelings about the cataloging of graphic novels), it you know what an item is about, you can often know where it is. Is it a book about animals? 590s; probably 598 or 599 if it's about mammals. Magic and psychic powers? 130s, probably 133. You can GET more specific... Shakespeare is 822.33 (800s = Literature, 820s = Literature by British Authors, 822s = Plays by British Authors, 822.33 = Plays by Willy Shakes himself), and the metastructure of the system can even help direct you to other places... plays by Arthur Miller are likely to be in the 812s, since its 800s, 810s are American authors, and 812s are plays by American authors. American history is 973; American Cuisine is 641.5973... 600s is technology, 640s is cooking, 641 is cookbooks,and 641.5973 is American cuisine. Korean cuisine is 641.5951... and you'll find Korean history in the 951s. It is a system of increasing specificity, but with broad categories that still guide you to the correct places. The broad categories enhance the usefulness of the specificity, instead of umpteen tiny boxes arranged at whim.

But the alignment system isn't like that. An author is American or they aren't, a play is by Shakespeare or it isn't (let's ignore theories about someone else writing them for now). But whether a character or a society fits into a particular alignment can lead to an endless debate, with all sides having reasonable arguments.

Using Babylon 5 in an argument about alignments seems questionable, considering how much they seem to go out of their way to avert labels like that. At first, the Shadows seems rather Chaotic Evil and the Vorlons Lawful Good, but then things get more complicated.

[GloatingSwine]

The shadows aren't even chaotic from their own high-level perspective. They are generating and managing conflicts which increase the strength of the winner, what they do is ordered progress towards a goal, even if the people it is happening to experience disruption they might call "chaos".

[Tanarii]

Three axes. Law/Chaos, Good/Evil, and Funky/Square.

Write up a Funky Lawful Evil hobgoblin wicca/shaman and a Square Chaotic Evil orc warlord stat!

[LibraryOgre]

But the alignment system isn't like that. An author is American or they aren't, a play is by Shakespeare or it isn't (let's ignore theories about someone else writing them for now). But whether a character or a society fits into a particular alignment can lead to an endless debate, with all sides having reasonable arguments.

Not if you have solid, agreed upon, definitions... and are dealing with boxes, with space on the floor, instead of shot glasses, where everything is in its small place, with little room to be different. Something is Good... or it might be in between Good an Evil. It is a point on two scales, and "not really" is an option on both scales. D&D alignment is a double trinary state... Good, Evil, and Neutral, and Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral, and the weight on those two axes provides a point in space. This is part of why I like the Great Wheel cosmology... it illustrates that, especially through the Planes of Conflict... an action that is Good might be slightly lawful (Bytopia), slightly chaotic (Elysium), or more neutral than strictly lawful or chaotic (either, but from the other direction).

Using Babylon 5 in an argument about alignments seems questionable, considering how much they seem to go out of their way to avert labels like that. At first, the Shadows seems rather Chaotic Evil and the Vorlons Lawful Good, but then things get more complicated.

That somewhat gets back to the earlier D&D alignments, and stuff like Moorcock, where the big conflict was between Law and Chaos. Lawful can seem good, in a chaotic world... until you're out of place. Chaos can seem evil as it conflicts with your own desires... until you have to make changes to save yourself. It's pretty explicit, especially towards the end when they're talking with Lorien, that the Vorlons and Shadows are Law and Chaos, not considering Good or Evil.

Law and Chaos, Good and Evil are somewhat arbitrary categories... but they are useful categories if you don't approach them from the position that they're nonsense. You can redraw the categories and make a different picture; you can abjure that there are categories, and try to put everything in its own box... but that doesn't make the categories that are drawn invalid.

[Batcathat]

Not if you have solid, agreed upon, definitions...

And that's where it falls apart. As seen in roughly every alignment discussion ever, there aren't solid agreed upon definitions. The "solid" part because finding definitions that fit every possible morality yet still end up in nine neat boxes (where the content of each box have enough in common for it to be meaningful and useful) seems nigh-impossible, the "agreed upon" part because finding two people who completely agree on what constitutes every alignment would be hard enough, getting everyone (or even a majority) would probably be literally impossible.

[gbaji]

Bah. I had a long post written, but then a misclick ate the entire thing. That's what I get for trying to write ten thousand words on a phone.

I manage to do that all the time even while using a keyboard. Gah...

You clearly don't know how either games with referees work, nor do you understand how stories work. The purpose of neither is to avoid players using their brains or to hand them morally unambiguous feel-good scenarios. Plenty aim for the opposite. For D&D, Planescape is an example of a setting that takes a deep dive into weirder parts of alignment and the Outer Planes as whole, with deliberately increased focus on moral philosophy and ambiguity. By your reasoning, the entire setting shouldn't exist.

I understand those concepts perfectly well. It is based on my understanding (and pretty significant experience) that I state that game systems with alignments that are both guides to roleplaying *and* external enforceable characteristic attributes that can be detected and have an effect on actual character capabilities in the game, cause problems. They actually reduce the range of roleplaying possibilities, and create conflict and confusion when the player's perception and the GMs don't coincide perfectly (which, based just on the sheer volume of arguments about alignment of characters in this strip, seems to be a fairly likely occurrence).

As explained in my very first post, there are at least eight widely recognized aesthetics of gameplay. You completely fail to recognize that a game master's ability to enforce alignment and punish characters for faulty action derives from the exact same thing as the game master's ability to enforce any other kind of rule or punish characters for any other reason: the permission to facilitate a game following their desired aesthetic, given to them by the players who want to play. You harp on the players ability to express their ideas about their character, but fail to acknowledge ideas such as making a puzzle out of how to act morally or exploring a moral system that is purposefully foreign to the players.

Sure. But when the GM is enforcing such things, it is, somewhat by definition, going to reduce the degree to which the player is free to play their own character how they like. The GM is literally telling the player "You have to choose X because that's what your alignment requires" complete with punishment if the player does not comply.

You can have the exact same dynamic without the punitive/forced bits and it works (better IMO). The GM can tell the player "what you're doing is an evil act", but instead of following with "and that's a violation of your alignment and may result in you losing spells from your deity, potential class abilities, and detecting as evil via spells" the GM presents the real in-game consequences like "the local authorities will put out a warrant for you, your friends wont like you if they find out what you did, you could find yourself being on the receiving end of a group of NPC adventurers hunting you down as the "bad guy".

See how that works? No artificial cosmic alignment. Just actions and consequences within a "normal" game environment. A player can choose to follow a path that leads them to a dark place, and roleplay that if they want to. Their deity wont punish them (unless they violate actual rules of their religion which may or may not be the case). No cosmic power will come along and remove abilities from them due to arbitrary class restrictions. They just have to deal with actual real consequences and play it out. And yeah, they can play a character who decides that he really likes being the local "bad guy", killing people who get in his way, taking out the competition, and possibly even building a rep as someone you don't want to cross. There are consequences for that, but they are more realistic IMO.

Same can happen in reverse. A character can start out "evil", and then choose to do good things. With alignment we have the "Belkar" problem where the degree you have to do to be "good" is based on some external factors. Remove alignment and spells that detect it, and it's just a matter of "what you are doing right here when interacting with these people determines how they view you". Past evil acts may come back to haunt you, in the same way they may in our "real world". And certainly, players should roleplay a struggle for their character to reform, perhaps being tempted by some situations along the way. But there's no spell that someone who's just met you can cast that detects those past "evil" actions. They only know of you what they know.

You can do all of this without the sort of rigid enforced alignment system that D&D has. And IMO, it's much better for a number of reasons. Again, not the least of which is the absence of punishment by a GM if/when the player thinks that the alignment effect of an action is not the same as the GMs. I think the problem is that you (many people) are starting from an assumption that an alignment system like this must exist and then using that as a premise. I'm not.

Rules such as "game master has final say" are not a problem, they literally are the solution to players having different opinions. Again, if a player has trouble with such rules, they are going to chafe with far more than just alignment - because alignment is not unique in being incomplete or subject to arbitration.

Sure. But alignment systems like D&D force the GM to make determinations based on that system. Remove the alignment enforcement mechanisms and it becomes a much easier and more rational determination for the GM to make: Did you get caught/seen doing something evil? What are the ramifications of that? Roleplay the results.

The GM does not have to decide how the cosmic forces view such an act in reference to an alignment system if such forced compliance doesn't exist in the first place. It eliminates a case where differences of opinion alone can have massive impact on things. The GM just roleplays the NPC actions in response to the PCs actions. Period. He doesn't have to think about how an action fits into some bigger picture. That makes things, not just much easier, but much more flexible. People aren't purely defined as "good or evil", but how their actions effect others and how they react to those things. We don't need to determine that Orc's alignment. We just have to decide that he's part of a community that is actively doing harm to people the PCs care about, and is thus an enemy. And if said Orc decides to help us out in some way, in return for some favor, we don't have to think about whether we're "helping an evil person", and what effect that may have on our alignment. We just decide whether the deal is fair and works and make the decision based on that.

It makes more complex and nuanced decisions more likely and more rationally playable.

And for the second time, me not answering your questions about hypothetical scenarios isn't because the scenarios you post are hard, it's because answering all of them would take a prohibitively long time.

I get it. It's just that you could have chosen to respond to the cases where I actually highlighted specific flaws in rigid and enforced alignment systems instead of spending time on what were basically baseline examples where things work "ok".

I have a particular issue with the broad and absolute labeling of characters as "good" or "evil". My Orc example directly addressed this. The primary issue is that if you have a system where good and evil are actual detectable traits (with spells even), it forces some really nonsensical outcomes. And, again, those things are utterly unnecessary to play a RPG successfully.

And BTW. This does not preclude game systems (or worlds) where those alignment factions actually exist on a cosmic level and characters align with "sides" in some bigger conflict. But, the reverse should be the case. Which "side" you are on should be less an examination of character personality traits as it is "which side are you helping out and/or fighting for" and "what actions have you taken on behalf of your side". That may also come with some action based prohibitions or requirements, but those aren't due to a broad "you are good/evil" concept, but "are you following our rules or not". Again, easier to determine and play.

[Tectorman]

Obviously, the truest and best alignment axes are Pirate/Ninja and Bacon/Vegan (with Pirate/Ninja representing a similar confluence of oppositional traits as Law/Chaos and Bacon/Vegan serving as a stand-in for Good/Evil, where Bacon= good and Vegan= evil, evil, evil, dirty evil).

And that's where it falls apart. As seen in roughly every alignment discussion ever, there aren't solid agreed upon definitions. The "solid" part because finding definitions that fit every possible morality yet still end up in nine neat boxes (where the content of each box have enough in common for it to be meaningful and useful) seems nigh-impossible, the "agreed upon" part because finding two people who completely agree on what constitutes every alignment would be hard enough, getting everyone (or even a majority) would probably be literally impossible.

But seriously, this.

Because while nearly all games have to work according to certain agreed-upon rules, likely adjudicated by a referee figure, alignment differs in that there definitionally must be a moral or ethical judgment against someone in the inevitable case of disagreement.

Say a game has health, damage, and healing as factors. Then we will need to agree to abide by how total health is determined. How healing occurs. Where it can come from. How much it heals. How often it can be applied. What, if anything, happens when your current health is at half or less. What, if anything, happens if a certain amount of damage is sustained in a single instance. Etc, etc.

Okay, fine. These things have to be determined, one way or another, and it might come at the expense of one or more players disagreeing with how the rules came out. But there is no "you are a lesser (less moral/less ethical/etc.) person for disagreeing with me" judgment. Yes, a person could still read a judgment on their character into that disagreement, anyway, but it isn't inherently there.

But it can't NOT be there when it comes to alignment. Any disagreement about "does this qualify as a BLAH act" or "does this many/this frequency of such acts constitute an alignment change from BLAH to BLABBITY-BLAH" (even before the question of rules, spells, or class features comes up) comes with the implicit (or maybe even explicit) judgment on the part of one or both sides of the argument of "your character is lacking in some fashion for even thinking differently than me/the DM/the rules of the game".

Alignment HAS to tear down; it can't not.

[Quertus]

Honestly, I don't quite see how that follows. It's a bit difficult to make definitive statements on this, as a struggle between good and evil is quite different from one between law and chaos, for instance, but nothing defines these forces as necessarily insane or impossible to ally with.

Sure, some settings do define both sides as ultimately flawed and a threat to humanity, but those are the ones that tend to have keeping the balance or destroying both sides as the true goal anyways.

Other configurations are easily possible, for instance the classic good versus evil conflict where one side winning is objectively better and results in an improved world and a happy ending. You can also have it set up so multiple sides have their benefits, and it's up to the players which one they want to see dominant, or even make it so that it's impossible for any one side to truly prevail forever.

Keep in mind, that just because cosmic forces exist and they have creatures representing them, that this does not also mean there's necessarily some big god that's in charge of either who you can kill and then that's that. That is as far as I am aware how many mainline D&D settings work, where there are angels and demons and gods of any alignment, but they are no more in charge of any of those alignments than a common mortal.

And there's plenty of people who play those settings completely straight. It's simply a matter of not interpreting these alignments and their representatives in the strictest, most brutal manner. It may not be a personally appealing fantasy world to you, but it certainly is a viable one.

Ah, I can see how my post was confusing. But this is a great opportunity to say something I wanted to say anyway.

So, as much as I’m generally opposed to Alignment, there is an X-Axis Alignment system I’d love to see, where X is the number of deities in a polytheistic world.

So, for each deity, there’s a scale, that ranges from, say, +5 to -5, based on how closely you adhere to the deity’s creed. Is Technology better than Magic? Yes gives you +1 to Gond, but -1 to Mystra. Would you cast Mordenkainen’s Disjunction? Yes gives you +1 to Garyx, but -1 to Mystra. Or whatever.

Point is, each Deity should be roughly equally interesting, with roughly an equal number of things they care about. Then again, maybe a character’s alignment with them shouldn’t be based on areas of conflict, but adherence to their religion. Do you wear fine clothes? +1 Tzeentch. Do you burn trees on Arbor Day? +1 Thor (or so his clergy believe).

Shrug. I’d like to see a well-made deity-based Alignment system.

But a polar good/evil system, as viewed by the idiots sitting around the table? Nah, I’ve got a root canal I’d rather handle, thanks. I don’t find “petty tyrant armchair philosophy” or “group of morons armchair philosophy” particularly appealing, and don’t see why anyone else would, either. I don’t want the focus of the game to be analyzing the moral ramifications of burning down the demon-Possessed orphanage, let alone the moral ramifications of shoving the alien-possessed orphans out the airlock. I just don’t see those discussions about how some cosmic being (as filtered through the lenses of the mortal GM’s and/or players’ minds) view these events being discussions worth having at your average table. Or most any table. How the PCs view the events is generally the extent of what I care about, and even then, almost exclusively only in how it differs from how the players see things.

[Jorren]

As I have stated before, the cardinal sin of any alignment system is putting the referee in the position of judging the in-game morality of character actions. This holds whether the referee is a stand-in for the gods, the cosmic order, the disco ball of evil/good, or whatever it happens to be in that particular setting.

This has the potential for problems even if there is no mechanical benefit or penalty invovled in that determination. Just putting a moral label on a character action from the vantage point of the gamemaster is enough.

Once you get away from that you can start on getting a workable alignment system, assuming that you even need one.

[LibraryOgre]

And that's where it falls apart. As seen in roughly every alignment discussion ever, there aren't solid agreed upon definitions. The "solid" part because finding definitions that fit every possible morality yet still end up in nine neat boxes (where the content of each box have enough in common for it to be meaningful and useful) seems nigh-impossible, the "agreed upon" part because finding two people who completely agree on what constitutes every alignment would be hard enough, getting everyone (or even a majority) would probably be literally impossible.

Again, it doesn't fall apart if you have solid definitions, and realize that the position one views things from affects your view of them, without affecting the thing itself; it can, as the meme says, be two things. Some of the problems is that the book definitions are seldom solid (3.5 probably had the clearest definitions, and I don't praise 3.x often), and that things are viewed as a binary... it is always necessarily Law or Chaos, or Good and Evil, seldom with the view that it can be Good and Neutral, or Evil and Neutral. It won't be Chaotic and Lawful, nor Good and Evil... those arrive at Neutral. But it can be Neutral and another thing, or even two other things, provided they aren't opposites.

One of my favorite examples is Arcadia, in the Great Wheel. It is Lawful Good, and Lawful Neutral, at the same time, without conflict. If viewed from Mount Celestia, it is Lawful Neutral. If viewed from Mechanus, it is Lawful Good. When you stand in Fortitude in the Outlands, or in Arcadia itself, it can be see as both, because of your perspective; if you stand in the Abyss, the three are indistinguishable. What it is hasn't changed, and it's nature is both, and its nature is itself. If Lawful Good is blue, and Lawful Neutral is Red, then what is their overlap? Their overlap is purple, which is blue, and is red, and is itself.

I think folks who don't like alignment have a tendency to view it as unworkable, rather than working with it. Folks who view it as a workable system work with it, and can manage it just fine. It depends on the filter you're look at it through, and if your filter insists that it doesn't make sense, you won't see the sense. If your filter allows it to make sense, you'll see a form of sense to it. I say that there is a sense to it, and it is understandable. I see it as a useful organizing tool, and have used it successfully as such for many years. If you don't, I don't know what to tell you, but the assertion that it doesn't work is belied by the fact that it works fine for me, and that I can often reach consensus with other people who think it works.

[Mechalich]

As I have stated before, the cardinal sin of any alignment system is putting the referee in the position of judging the in-game morality of character actions. This holds whether the referee is a stand-in for the gods, the cosmic order, the disco ball of evil/good, or whatever it happens to be in that particular setting.

This has the potential for problems even if there is no mechanical benefit or penalty invovled in that determination. Just putting a moral label on a character action from the vantage point of the gamemaster is enough.

Once you get away from that you can start on getting a workable alignment system, assuming that you even need one.

But isn't that inevitable? If you have in-game morality of any kind, someone has to serve as the morality judge. Players absolutely cannot be trusted to do it themselves. Consider, for example, the old Humanity system from VtM. The GM had to serve as the judge there too. And the GM has to judge light side/dark side orientation in Star Wars and on and on. Generally any morality system that has an in-game mechanical meaning is going to have some kind of in-universe judging entity, even if that entity, as in the case of the Force, lacks a consciousness. It's always going to fall on the GM to enforce that, just as it falls on them to enforce any other mechanic where judgments are required.

It is true that this area can produce problems, mostly because it is very difficult for most tables to accept a game world where the rules of morality are explicitly different from their own personal worldviews, just as it is often very difficult to, in real life, have a discussion about morality with other people who have vastly different worldviews. What this means is that, in campaign design, moral complexity is bad and moral conundrums are best avoided in favor of clear and obvious choices whose contours everyone at the table will agree upon.