Celebrim
Legend
1) No Preferential Treatment: At its core, classic D&D doesn’t provide an answer to the question, “What alignment should I be?” While some alignments are more conducive to social play than others, in the hands of a good role-player characters of any alignment can contribute to play and no alignment choice is forbidden to the player by the system. Moreover, Good is not in the D&D universe objectively better than Neutral, which is objectively better than Evil or any other hierarchical ranking. The cosmology of the D&D alignments is not a ladder, where one alignment is ranked higher and better than another. No, in classic D&D all the alignments are laid out in a ring. What this image conveys is the classic picture of peers seated at a round table. One alignment may well be better than the other one, but it will be necessary to demonstrate its greater worth by some means – the universe doesn’t answer the question for you.
Even better, alignment is presented in a way that is symetrical. That means that its just as hard and burdensome to be a member of a particular alignment as any other. (In fact, in my experience, the notion that alignment isn't symmetrical may be the most common misunderstanding about it that I've encountered.)
2) There is More than Two Sides to any Question: No matter what you believe to be true about real world ethics, if you have much powers of observation at all you have to admit that there is more than one alternative to what you believe which is held strongly by other people as reasonable and intelligent as yourself. This is true even if you believe that what you believe is absolutely and universally true and everyone else is wrong. Regardless of whether truth is objective or relative, whether the world has inherent morality or morality is an artificial and unnecessary social construct, the world is not easily and cleanly divided into two camps centered on two easily identified philosophies. Rightly or wrongly different people believe all sorts of things, many of which aren’t easily mapped out on a single axis of belief. The D&D universe models this rich complexity with an arguably simplified but still rich complexity of its own. For any moral or ethical question, the two axis system provides at least nine possible outlooks which is plenty of depth for most players needs and probably more than most ever really use.
3) For Every Alignment, a Compelling Argument can be Made in Support of it: It wouldn’t matter very much if the cosmos wasn’t ordered in such a way that it made it clear which alignment was ‘better’, if the philosophy behind most of the alignments was so preposterous and unattractive that we couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever believe in such a thing. But the conflicts of benevolence vs. cruelty and the individual vs. society are so basic and so interesting, that it is quite easy to imagine someone adopting any position amongst the nine possible choices.
4) For Every Alignment, a Compelling Champion can be Made to Promote it: It wouldn’t matter much if the goals of each alignment could be made academically interesting, if the characters holding such views were boring or repulsive. We can even easily imagine compelling, likeable, charismatic individuals holding any of the nine alignments, even if we – when we stand back from the individual – that the position that they hold is utterly depraved, or repulsive, or foolish, or dangerous. And the great thing about this is that we can easily step back at some distance from history and find compelling charismatic figures promoting all sorts of philosophies that we find depraved, repulsive, foolish, and/or dangerous.
5) At Least Among Beings with Free Will, Alignment is Mallable and Fungible: Provision was made for free willed mortal beings to change who they are. Whether or not beings are ‘born that way’ isn’t really answered for PC races, but regardless of how we answer the question of nature vs. nurture or want to answer it, it’s clear from the rules that PC races at least can change their nature through their choices and actions. Normally this change can be a steady and slow drift, but at other times it might be dramatically changing one nature for another nature.
6) The Universe is Painted with a Full Palette: Time and time again I hear various internet posters suggesting that the world is more interesting if, for example, every being has a potentially murky nature or conversely that everything is more interesting if it is clear cut black and white. Often these posters are making proxy arguments for various real world intellectual positions, be it free will vs. predestination or nature vs. nurture or relativism vs. absolutism. For my part, I think the game world is more interesting if we don’t banish any colors from it when we start weaving the tapestry. I want a world were I can play with every potential idea, whether it’s gray, black, white, red, blue, or fuchsia. And that’s exactly what classic D&D provides, with for example some beings that represent incarnated ideas and hence are always of a particular alignment and some beings which are proxy representatives of our selves in the fantasy world. Regardless of what ideas you want to explore, there is room in it and you don’t find yourself working with a palette that is nothing but shades of grey or nothing but shades of blue.
7) There is Room for Everyone: Regardless of what you believe about the real world, because the buckets are so broadly described, there is room in the alignment system to accommodate your world view. There is wiggle room to handle ethical controversies. The designers didn’t decide what was right for you and force you to accept it. If you believe that slavery is inherently wrong, you can drop it in the evil bucket and that’s a perfectly valid choice for your cosmology. If you believe that slavery is valid social institution that can serve a useful purpose but is simply often wrongly exploited do to the greedy or venial nature of man, you can drop it into the lawful bucket and that’s a valid choice. Or you can believe slavery itself has no ethical value and it’s all a matter of how slaves are treated, and you can drop it in the neutral bucket. You can set up the system however you like so long as you are consistent and have thought out the consequences of your choices. And because there is no inherently better bucket, if some player comes to your table with a different world view, they aren’t punished for choosing to align their character with something you don’t think is ‘Good’.
8) For Everyone there is a Room: Regardless of what you believe about the real world and regardless of what belief system you want to explore, because the buckets are so varied and so broadly described, there is one you can comfortably drop your character concept in without feeling like you are in a straight jacket. What to play a utilitarian character? A nihilist? A bohemian? A fascist? A libertarian? A stoic? A pacifist? Want to play a character that believes that alignment is a bunch of hooey and doesn’t really exist? There is an alignment that can fit your needs with only a minimal amount of stretching to fit.
9) Polytheism: The ultimate upshot of #1 through #6 combined is that there is a deity representing every way of looking at the world. Some of you may know that I’m highly religious. At one time, when first taking up the hobby the polytheism bothered me and I contemplated whether it might be better if the cosmology attempted to be truer to I believed was the real way the world was ordered. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that the game system I was designing was probably more morally dangerous than D&D was. If there is anything more dangerous than leaving all questions unanswered, it is certainly attempting to give all the answers but giving the wrong ones. If I were to make a monotheistic cosmology, then I would make the god of the universe a character within my game world, and I as the game master would be forced to make decisions on behalf of ‘God’ and perhaps even take the role of God. (As I’ve had Hindu friends, similarly I wouldn’t try to put the Hindu mythology explicitly or by analogy into my game either.) Moreover I would have to take diabolical roles within the game, and the more closely I tried to model these roles after what I believed to be real diabolical forces, the more dangerous these roles would be. By far the morally safest path would be to not attempt anything allegorical at all, and instead have a cosmology that was far enough removed from anything anyone really believed that the whole thing could be treated as an elaborate lark – which is as much as I think a game should ever be treated as. Moreover, by not picking any particular obvious ‘right’ answers as to what my players should believe, I was avoiding beating anyone over the head with my beliefs in a context that was usually wholly inappropriate to doing so. The other nice thing about Polytheism is that you can easily fit pantheism, monotheism or atheism into the universe by denying certain apparent aspects of the deities to be actually true. For example, in my campaign, there are persecuted heresies which correspond to pantheism, monotheism, and atheism – persecuted, but of course just because something is persecuted doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true.
10) It’s Not Personality: While there are personalities that seem to lend themselves more to one alignment or another and some sorts of behaviors that don’t seem to fit with a particular alignment at all, it’s easy to imagine short-tempered, or patient, or thrifty, or generous, or cautious, or humble, or cocky, or rash, or vengeful, or forgiving, or chaste, or promiscuous, or lazy, or ambitious, or intelligent, or foolish, or curious, or incurious members of every alignment. Alignment never serves to define our character, nor does it ever act as a straightjacket that limits characters to as few of buckets are there are alignments. We can even with a little thought imagine very complex members of a particular alignment which, while they are mostly good representative members of their alignment, have some flaw which prevents them from being true paragons and which they must repeatedly struggle to overcome sometimes perhaps even failing to do so and requiring some degree of atonement. And note, that because the alignment system is symmetrical, this is true not only of the Good alignments but also of the Evil ones. For example, we might imagine a villain who has the flaw of tenderheartedness that prevents him from at all times slaying friends (or foils!), or children, or women, or whatever that gets in the way and thus must occasionally find himself atoning for the sin of compassion.
11) It’s Simple: It’s entirely possible that a simple two axis, nine bucket system is wholly inadequate for talking about the real world in any remotely realistic way. It’s entirely possible that the real world is simply far too diverse and complicated for this to reflect how the world really is. But so what. The last thing we should want in our fantasy game is for it to attempt to accurately reflect exactly how the real world actually is, because then there would be no point in calling it a ‘fantasy’ at all and worse yet we’d be in a very real danger of blurring the line between fantasy and reality in uncomfortable and potentially dangerous ways. Equally importantly to making a successful game, we don’t want a game that requires a doctorate of philosophy or theology to understand, play, and make interesting choices within. I think a fantasy game system needs to balance a richness of ethical choices versus having a simple system that is easily picked up, relatively easy to understand in a general way at first glance, and doesn’t heavily burden someone who wants to ignore it. We can always add depth and richness to our ethical explorations if we want to, but if the first steps of that exploration are either missing or too difficult to tread on, then its highly unlikely such explorations will really happen.
Even better, alignment is presented in a way that is symetrical. That means that its just as hard and burdensome to be a member of a particular alignment as any other. (In fact, in my experience, the notion that alignment isn't symmetrical may be the most common misunderstanding about it that I've encountered.)
2) There is More than Two Sides to any Question: No matter what you believe to be true about real world ethics, if you have much powers of observation at all you have to admit that there is more than one alternative to what you believe which is held strongly by other people as reasonable and intelligent as yourself. This is true even if you believe that what you believe is absolutely and universally true and everyone else is wrong. Regardless of whether truth is objective or relative, whether the world has inherent morality or morality is an artificial and unnecessary social construct, the world is not easily and cleanly divided into two camps centered on two easily identified philosophies. Rightly or wrongly different people believe all sorts of things, many of which aren’t easily mapped out on a single axis of belief. The D&D universe models this rich complexity with an arguably simplified but still rich complexity of its own. For any moral or ethical question, the two axis system provides at least nine possible outlooks which is plenty of depth for most players needs and probably more than most ever really use.
3) For Every Alignment, a Compelling Argument can be Made in Support of it: It wouldn’t matter very much if the cosmos wasn’t ordered in such a way that it made it clear which alignment was ‘better’, if the philosophy behind most of the alignments was so preposterous and unattractive that we couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever believe in such a thing. But the conflicts of benevolence vs. cruelty and the individual vs. society are so basic and so interesting, that it is quite easy to imagine someone adopting any position amongst the nine possible choices.
4) For Every Alignment, a Compelling Champion can be Made to Promote it: It wouldn’t matter much if the goals of each alignment could be made academically interesting, if the characters holding such views were boring or repulsive. We can even easily imagine compelling, likeable, charismatic individuals holding any of the nine alignments, even if we – when we stand back from the individual – that the position that they hold is utterly depraved, or repulsive, or foolish, or dangerous. And the great thing about this is that we can easily step back at some distance from history and find compelling charismatic figures promoting all sorts of philosophies that we find depraved, repulsive, foolish, and/or dangerous.
5) At Least Among Beings with Free Will, Alignment is Mallable and Fungible: Provision was made for free willed mortal beings to change who they are. Whether or not beings are ‘born that way’ isn’t really answered for PC races, but regardless of how we answer the question of nature vs. nurture or want to answer it, it’s clear from the rules that PC races at least can change their nature through their choices and actions. Normally this change can be a steady and slow drift, but at other times it might be dramatically changing one nature for another nature.
6) The Universe is Painted with a Full Palette: Time and time again I hear various internet posters suggesting that the world is more interesting if, for example, every being has a potentially murky nature or conversely that everything is more interesting if it is clear cut black and white. Often these posters are making proxy arguments for various real world intellectual positions, be it free will vs. predestination or nature vs. nurture or relativism vs. absolutism. For my part, I think the game world is more interesting if we don’t banish any colors from it when we start weaving the tapestry. I want a world were I can play with every potential idea, whether it’s gray, black, white, red, blue, or fuchsia. And that’s exactly what classic D&D provides, with for example some beings that represent incarnated ideas and hence are always of a particular alignment and some beings which are proxy representatives of our selves in the fantasy world. Regardless of what ideas you want to explore, there is room in it and you don’t find yourself working with a palette that is nothing but shades of grey or nothing but shades of blue.
7) There is Room for Everyone: Regardless of what you believe about the real world, because the buckets are so broadly described, there is room in the alignment system to accommodate your world view. There is wiggle room to handle ethical controversies. The designers didn’t decide what was right for you and force you to accept it. If you believe that slavery is inherently wrong, you can drop it in the evil bucket and that’s a perfectly valid choice for your cosmology. If you believe that slavery is valid social institution that can serve a useful purpose but is simply often wrongly exploited do to the greedy or venial nature of man, you can drop it into the lawful bucket and that’s a valid choice. Or you can believe slavery itself has no ethical value and it’s all a matter of how slaves are treated, and you can drop it in the neutral bucket. You can set up the system however you like so long as you are consistent and have thought out the consequences of your choices. And because there is no inherently better bucket, if some player comes to your table with a different world view, they aren’t punished for choosing to align their character with something you don’t think is ‘Good’.
8) For Everyone there is a Room: Regardless of what you believe about the real world and regardless of what belief system you want to explore, because the buckets are so varied and so broadly described, there is one you can comfortably drop your character concept in without feeling like you are in a straight jacket. What to play a utilitarian character? A nihilist? A bohemian? A fascist? A libertarian? A stoic? A pacifist? Want to play a character that believes that alignment is a bunch of hooey and doesn’t really exist? There is an alignment that can fit your needs with only a minimal amount of stretching to fit.
9) Polytheism: The ultimate upshot of #1 through #6 combined is that there is a deity representing every way of looking at the world. Some of you may know that I’m highly religious. At one time, when first taking up the hobby the polytheism bothered me and I contemplated whether it might be better if the cosmology attempted to be truer to I believed was the real way the world was ordered. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that the game system I was designing was probably more morally dangerous than D&D was. If there is anything more dangerous than leaving all questions unanswered, it is certainly attempting to give all the answers but giving the wrong ones. If I were to make a monotheistic cosmology, then I would make the god of the universe a character within my game world, and I as the game master would be forced to make decisions on behalf of ‘God’ and perhaps even take the role of God. (As I’ve had Hindu friends, similarly I wouldn’t try to put the Hindu mythology explicitly or by analogy into my game either.) Moreover I would have to take diabolical roles within the game, and the more closely I tried to model these roles after what I believed to be real diabolical forces, the more dangerous these roles would be. By far the morally safest path would be to not attempt anything allegorical at all, and instead have a cosmology that was far enough removed from anything anyone really believed that the whole thing could be treated as an elaborate lark – which is as much as I think a game should ever be treated as. Moreover, by not picking any particular obvious ‘right’ answers as to what my players should believe, I was avoiding beating anyone over the head with my beliefs in a context that was usually wholly inappropriate to doing so. The other nice thing about Polytheism is that you can easily fit pantheism, monotheism or atheism into the universe by denying certain apparent aspects of the deities to be actually true. For example, in my campaign, there are persecuted heresies which correspond to pantheism, monotheism, and atheism – persecuted, but of course just because something is persecuted doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true.
10) It’s Not Personality: While there are personalities that seem to lend themselves more to one alignment or another and some sorts of behaviors that don’t seem to fit with a particular alignment at all, it’s easy to imagine short-tempered, or patient, or thrifty, or generous, or cautious, or humble, or cocky, or rash, or vengeful, or forgiving, or chaste, or promiscuous, or lazy, or ambitious, or intelligent, or foolish, or curious, or incurious members of every alignment. Alignment never serves to define our character, nor does it ever act as a straightjacket that limits characters to as few of buckets are there are alignments. We can even with a little thought imagine very complex members of a particular alignment which, while they are mostly good representative members of their alignment, have some flaw which prevents them from being true paragons and which they must repeatedly struggle to overcome sometimes perhaps even failing to do so and requiring some degree of atonement. And note, that because the alignment system is symmetrical, this is true not only of the Good alignments but also of the Evil ones. For example, we might imagine a villain who has the flaw of tenderheartedness that prevents him from at all times slaying friends (or foils!), or children, or women, or whatever that gets in the way and thus must occasionally find himself atoning for the sin of compassion.
11) It’s Simple: It’s entirely possible that a simple two axis, nine bucket system is wholly inadequate for talking about the real world in any remotely realistic way. It’s entirely possible that the real world is simply far too diverse and complicated for this to reflect how the world really is. But so what. The last thing we should want in our fantasy game is for it to attempt to accurately reflect exactly how the real world actually is, because then there would be no point in calling it a ‘fantasy’ at all and worse yet we’d be in a very real danger of blurring the line between fantasy and reality in uncomfortable and potentially dangerous ways. Equally importantly to making a successful game, we don’t want a game that requires a doctorate of philosophy or theology to understand, play, and make interesting choices within. I think a fantasy game system needs to balance a richness of ethical choices versus having a simple system that is easily picked up, relatively easy to understand in a general way at first glance, and doesn’t heavily burden someone who wants to ignore it. We can always add depth and richness to our ethical explorations if we want to, but if the first steps of that exploration are either missing or too difficult to tread on, then its highly unlikely such explorations will really happen.
Last edited:
