AmerginLiath
Adventurer
By page five, the main thread on Jeremy Crawford's comments on alignment have already gotten predictably heated, so I thought to post some thoughts on what surprises me about this separately. Apologies if I should have kept it to the main thread.
The first thought that occurred to me, as I read through Crawford's thoughts, was that his take on Prescriptive Alignment seemed to have two main elements behind it: Alignment is Morality, and non-prescriptive Alignment is basically nominalist (i.e. it's just a descriptor we assign to something we see, not a concrete abstract thing) so it serves so useful purpose. Seeing different counterarguments involving examples like Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock, Dragonlance's three forces, and the pull of gods on races informed what quickly came to mind: Crawford's point, and those arguments agreeing with it from a relativistic point of view, view alignment and morality as being different words for the same thing.
It strikes me that, since the Little Brown Books onward, Alignment has meant something different; it's rather a sort of macrocosmic conflict – whether one-axis or two-axis – that reflects down through the multiverse from Upper Planes towards the Material Plane. While Gygax gets his take most directly from writers like Anderson and Moorcock, this idea permeates culture and literature for centuries, from Neoplatonic metaphysics to developments of Natural Law theories. Where fantasy literature takes the idea and runs with it is in the population of creatures on a world that is not our own. So, we see in literature and then in D&D the likes of dragons and chimera Aligned directly by their magical nature, while non-magical humanoids have cultures and religions that lean them to sides in the existential conflict but allow them to actual choose (and indeed often define the heroic story by those choices). That's something distinct from classical or medieval virtue ethics – the expectations of behavior among Lawful Good are very different (and far more violent) than those of any Thomistic or Sufi way of perfection.
While there are moral reflections in Alignments, these aren't absolute. We see that not only in the warring nature of Good as mentioned, but in some of the examples mentioned in the other thread. Dragonlance, with its explicit Balance of Good, Neutral, and Evil as cosmic forces is a great example: we see when we follow the story of Krynn where Good's binding principles have nearly destroyed the world (the Cataclysm) and where Evil's refusal to bow has saved it (the Chaos War). Meanwhile, the history of the game is ripe with examples of fiends doing right by parties and celestials doing wrong by them without either changing their sides. The key distinction between these and many of the examples Crawford given (his sweet werewolf) is how the broader multiverse and planar structure is brought into play. Whether in the LBBs or AD&D, introduction of Alignment also gives you the basic introduction of the Planes, because the two are (in the original conception) meant to literally flow from one another in the sense of the game's sources. Later editions have of course kept the same game terms but separated that connection and described Alignment more specifically in terms of morality (leading to further questions about requirements for classes and such, as the original notion of where the paladin's powers came from where quite precise).
So we come to Fifth Edition, a game where paladin morality has been shifted to a separate structure of virtue ethics (their oaths) and where the planes have gotten a quick broad brush but their interaction with the game as played and as the characters and creatures live has yet to be really discussed five years into the system. So, as so many new players come aboard, there simply isn't an expectation that Alignment means anything but Morality with a trademarked name – and that it's entirely non-prescriptive except as a burdenous descriptor of monster behavior (never enunciating why those monsters are aligned in that fashion). So, the way of opening up the system is to just assign any nominalist Alignment title to anything, because it just matches Morality and nothing more!
This is where Fourth Edition's "Unaligned" Alignment was a beautiful innovation (even if its removal of pieces of the axis was terribly confusing). I still recall really hoping that Unaligned would be the tenth alignment option in 5e, as it marks well the being that isn't tied to the macrocosmic structures and conflicts above and beyond the conceptions of the material. Of course, if WotC actually put out a planar product, in addition to all the high-level and planar travel options folks want, they could readily enunciate these sort of connections and offer options of systems of Aligned campaigns using the traditional grid or Unaligned campaigns using either no designators or separate morality labels. Mind you, I'm saying all this as probably as oddball on this board – a devout Catholic gamer who reads philosophy in his spare time in lieu of fiction and plays Dragonlance as my world of choice specifically for those alignment and philosophical elements that Hickman wrote into it. But I'm probably not alone in being a fan of the Alignment system as it's existed for soon-to-be fifty years and I'd like to think that (amidst all my rambling) I've expressed something of why I think it serves a valuable role in the history and system of Dungeons & Dragons.
The first thought that occurred to me, as I read through Crawford's thoughts, was that his take on Prescriptive Alignment seemed to have two main elements behind it: Alignment is Morality, and non-prescriptive Alignment is basically nominalist (i.e. it's just a descriptor we assign to something we see, not a concrete abstract thing) so it serves so useful purpose. Seeing different counterarguments involving examples like Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock, Dragonlance's three forces, and the pull of gods on races informed what quickly came to mind: Crawford's point, and those arguments agreeing with it from a relativistic point of view, view alignment and morality as being different words for the same thing.
It strikes me that, since the Little Brown Books onward, Alignment has meant something different; it's rather a sort of macrocosmic conflict – whether one-axis or two-axis – that reflects down through the multiverse from Upper Planes towards the Material Plane. While Gygax gets his take most directly from writers like Anderson and Moorcock, this idea permeates culture and literature for centuries, from Neoplatonic metaphysics to developments of Natural Law theories. Where fantasy literature takes the idea and runs with it is in the population of creatures on a world that is not our own. So, we see in literature and then in D&D the likes of dragons and chimera Aligned directly by their magical nature, while non-magical humanoids have cultures and religions that lean them to sides in the existential conflict but allow them to actual choose (and indeed often define the heroic story by those choices). That's something distinct from classical or medieval virtue ethics – the expectations of behavior among Lawful Good are very different (and far more violent) than those of any Thomistic or Sufi way of perfection.
While there are moral reflections in Alignments, these aren't absolute. We see that not only in the warring nature of Good as mentioned, but in some of the examples mentioned in the other thread. Dragonlance, with its explicit Balance of Good, Neutral, and Evil as cosmic forces is a great example: we see when we follow the story of Krynn where Good's binding principles have nearly destroyed the world (the Cataclysm) and where Evil's refusal to bow has saved it (the Chaos War). Meanwhile, the history of the game is ripe with examples of fiends doing right by parties and celestials doing wrong by them without either changing their sides. The key distinction between these and many of the examples Crawford given (his sweet werewolf) is how the broader multiverse and planar structure is brought into play. Whether in the LBBs or AD&D, introduction of Alignment also gives you the basic introduction of the Planes, because the two are (in the original conception) meant to literally flow from one another in the sense of the game's sources. Later editions have of course kept the same game terms but separated that connection and described Alignment more specifically in terms of morality (leading to further questions about requirements for classes and such, as the original notion of where the paladin's powers came from where quite precise).
So we come to Fifth Edition, a game where paladin morality has been shifted to a separate structure of virtue ethics (their oaths) and where the planes have gotten a quick broad brush but their interaction with the game as played and as the characters and creatures live has yet to be really discussed five years into the system. So, as so many new players come aboard, there simply isn't an expectation that Alignment means anything but Morality with a trademarked name – and that it's entirely non-prescriptive except as a burdenous descriptor of monster behavior (never enunciating why those monsters are aligned in that fashion). So, the way of opening up the system is to just assign any nominalist Alignment title to anything, because it just matches Morality and nothing more!
This is where Fourth Edition's "Unaligned" Alignment was a beautiful innovation (even if its removal of pieces of the axis was terribly confusing). I still recall really hoping that Unaligned would be the tenth alignment option in 5e, as it marks well the being that isn't tied to the macrocosmic structures and conflicts above and beyond the conceptions of the material. Of course, if WotC actually put out a planar product, in addition to all the high-level and planar travel options folks want, they could readily enunciate these sort of connections and offer options of systems of Aligned campaigns using the traditional grid or Unaligned campaigns using either no designators or separate morality labels. Mind you, I'm saying all this as probably as oddball on this board – a devout Catholic gamer who reads philosophy in his spare time in lieu of fiction and plays Dragonlance as my world of choice specifically for those alignment and philosophical elements that Hickman wrote into it. But I'm probably not alone in being a fan of the Alignment system as it's existed for soon-to-be fifty years and I'd like to think that (amidst all my rambling) I've expressed something of why I think it serves a valuable role in the history and system of Dungeons & Dragons.
