D&D 5E WotC's Jeremy Crawford Talks D&D Alignment Changes

Jeremy Crawford has spoken about changes to the way alignment will be referred to in future D&D books. It starts with a reminder that no rule in D&D dictates your alignment.

Data from D&D Beyond in June 2019​

(Note that in the transcript below, the questions in quotes were his own words but presumably refer to questions he's seen asked previously).

Friendly reminder: no rule in D&D mandates your character's alignment, and no class is restricted to certain alignments. You determine your character's moral compass. I see discussions that refer to such rules, yet they don't exist in 5th edition D&D.

Your character's alignment in D&D doesn't prescribe their behavior. Alignment describes inclinations. It's a roleplaying tool, like flaws, bonds, and ideals. If any of those tools don't serve your group's bliss, don't use them. The game's system doesn't rely on those tools.

D&D has general rules and exceptions to those rules. For example, you choose whatever alignment you want for your character at creation (general rule). There are a few magic items and other transformative effects that might affect a character's alignment (exceptions).

Want a benevolent green dragon in your D&D campaign or a sweet werewolf candlemaker? Do it. The rule in the Monster Manual is that the DM determines a monster's alignment. The DM plays that monster. The DM decides who that monster is in play.

Regarding a D&D monster's alignment, here's the general rule from the Monster Manual: "The alignment specified in a monster's stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster's alignment to suit the needs of your campaign."

"What about the Oathbreaker? It says you have to be evil." The Oathbreaker is a paladin subclass (not a class) designed for NPCs. If your DM lets you use it, you're already being experimental, so if you want to play a kindhearted Oathbreaker, follow your bliss!

"Why are player characters punished for changing their alignment?" There is no general system in 5th-edition D&D for changing your alignment and there are no punishments or rewards in the core rules for changing it. You can just change it. Older editions had such rules.

Even though the rules of 5th-edition D&D state that players and DMs determine alignment, the suggested alignments in our books have undeniably caused confusion. That's why future books will ditch such suggestions for player characters and reframe such things for the DM.

"What about the werewolf's curse of lycanthropy? It makes you evil like the werewolf." The DM determines the alignment of the werewolf. For example, the werewolf you face might be a sweetheart. The alignment in a stat block is a suggestion to the DM, nothing more.

"What about demons, devils, and angels in D&D? Their alignments can't change." They can change. The default story makes the mythological assumptions we expect, but the Monster Manual tells the DM to change any monster's alignment without hesitation to serve the campaign.

"You've reminded us that alignment is a suggestion. Does that mean you're not changing anything about D&D peoples after all?" We are working to remove racist tropes from D&D. Alignment is only one part of that work, and alignment will be treated differently in the future.

"Why are you telling us to ignore the alignment rules in D&D?" I'm not. I'm sharing what the alignment rules have been in the Player's Handbook & Monster Manual since 2014. We know that those rules are insufficient and have changes coming in future products.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Not if I don't have to, as chances are extremely high I'm going to be applying my own lore anyway.

But I do want the alignment noted, to give me a starting point; and if the "lore" consists of a physical description of the creature along with maybe a single sentence about its social structure (if any), I can easily take it from there.

Why that lore section cannot be your 'starting point?' What do you need the alignment for?

 

[Lanefan]

Or, how about this scenario, we've been adventuring for a year, and you've never seen my character do anything extreme like killing babies. Maybe he's argued with a quest giver, risked his life for the innocent, and killed people to stop the bad guy from using them for a ritual to destroy a city. We find a robe of the archmagi and you ask me what my alignment is. And I tell you I never wrote one down. Now what do you do?

From your previous statements, I assume you are going to try and flatten my character into two words, to justify whether or not I can sue the loot you gave us.

That's exactly what I'd do, regardless of whether you'd ever written something down on your character sheet or what that something said.

Aligned items, alignment-interacting spells, and a very rigid great-wheel-ish cosmology are the primary reasons I keep alignment around.

There are no lawful hags. Hags often work together in covens.
There are no lawful Yugoloths. They work together in mercenary companies.
There are no lawful Yuan-Ti. They run an empire and work together for the fulfillment of that empire.

And in each case it's pretty easy to set it up such that a more Lawful creature or individual is behind their apparent organization - look no further than Saruman or Sauron somehow getting hordes of Orcs to follow orders.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I want you to recognize that you are also adding details to the system in order to defeat it, and that this method of argument is only self-defeating. Every time you point out such a statement in another person's argument, whether rightly or wrongly, you affirm the statement's negation (and usually expand on it with another statement or two of your own). Somebody says that (e.g.) oral tradition is less lawful than written law, you say it is equally lawful if not more so*. The book doesn't say either way. Both claims are interpretations. So what makes your interpretation better than their interpretation? Why should anyone adopt it? You tell us that it leads to a contradiction, but standard interpretive principles tell us to minimize contradictions where possible, so that's exactly the reason we shouldn't adopt it.

*Side note: If your impulse is to defend this particular claim, stop and remember that it's just an example I'm using to illustrate the formal problem. Replace these examples with "P" and "not-P" if it's less distracting.

The issue with your assertion here is that it proves my point.

If both claims are interpretations, and both claims are equally valid then alignment has told us nothing.

To simplify this down, if I use a system to define something, and two people can equally validly, and equally correctly say that the system defines something as "P" and as "not-P" then the system is broken.

And yet, people are defending the fact that this system is interpretive and offers a vast array of possible interpretations, as a fact that proves it is a useful tool for getting information.

No one would use a Ph strip that couldn't tell the difference between a Base and an Acid, why are we using an alignment system that can't tell the difference between Chaos and Law?

That's exactly what I'd do, regardless of whether you'd ever written something down on your character sheet or what that something said.

Aligned items, alignment-interacting spells, and a very rigid great-wheel-ish cosmology are the primary reasons I keep alignment around.

Right, I don't use those. And alignment-interacting spells have caused lots of problems in the past. See every story about Detect Evil being used on a rogue or murder suspect ever.

And in each case it's pretty easy to set it up such that a more Lawful creature or individual is behind their apparent organization - look no further than Saruman or Sauron somehow getting hordes of Orcs to follow orders.

Yuan-Ti run their own empire, they don't have more Lawful creatures in charge of them. And, their leaders are also statted as Neutral Evil. So to do that, you'd have to change the alignment, and if you are going to just change it to suit your whims anyways...

Also Hag covens are very rarely organized by someone else, they are organized by the Hags. So again, you'd have to take one of the Hags, make them lawful instead of Neutral, and then make them the person in charge. And again, if you are just going to go in and change their alignment to match the story you want to tell, what was the purpose of giving them an alignment in the first place.

I will give you Yugoloths though, since they have a guy, I think "The General of Ghehena" who is supposed to be in charge of all of them. And I don't know his statblock. Of course, Yugoloths are supposed to be the definitive Neutral Evil force in the universe, but they could have a Lawful Evil leader I suppose.

 

[Lanefan]

Why that lore section cannot be your 'starting point?' What do you need the alignment for?

If I'm stripping out that lore in order to replace it with my own, in your system my starting point would be a blank page other than perhaps a picture of the creature. Fat lot of use that is.

Give me an alignment to go with that picture and I'm a lot closer to coming up with, in general terms, what makes that creature (and-or its society) tick.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If I'm stripping out that lore in order to replace it with my own, in your system my starting point would be a blank page other than perhaps a picture of the creature. Fat lot of use that is.

I do my own lore too. But I still usually read the official lore and ideas can come up as a reaction to that. What to chance, what to keep, what to do completely differently etc.

Give me an alignment to go with that picture and I'm a lot closer to coming up with, in general terms, what makes that creature (and-or its society) tick.

Considering that there are only nine possible options and most of the time only three of them are used for monsters the characters are likely to fight, that doesn't really seem like a great starting point to me.

 

[Lanefan]

Right, I don't use those. And alignment-interacting spells have caused lots of problems in the past. See every story about Detect Evil being used on a rogue or murder suspect ever.

Detect Evil (and-or Know Alignment) would sometimes be used for exactly this in a society that had access to such - I've no problem with that.

There's also many spells (Magic Mouth, Glyph of Warding are but two) where the presence of an alignment can be set as a trigger. I like these.

Yuan-Ti run their own empire, they don't have more Lawful creatures in charge of them. And, their leaders are also statted as Neutral Evil. So to do that, you'd have to change the alignment, and if you are going to just change it to suit your whims anyways...

Remember, I throw out the book lore for most creatures. I have Yuan-Ti as being individually variable across the Evil scale (thus some are LE, some are NE, some are CE, and many are somewhere between two of those points; the E component is constant) with a societal average of NE.

They generally only appear in small groups; there's not enough of them to form anything resembling an empire. Sometimes in the interests of self-preservation a group will attach itself to some leader or organizer or whatever, for whom they perform (usually nasty) deeds in return for safety and support.

And as my players have yet to encounter anything other than those small groups, and those very rarely, they've no way of knowing any of this through their PCs other than what their own experience bears out: Yuan-Ti are generally badasses.

Also Hag covens are very rarely organized by someone else, they are organized by the Hags. So again, you'd have to take one of the Hags, make them lawful instead of Neutral, and then make them the person in charge. And again, if you are just going to go in and change their alignment to match the story you want to tell, what was the purpose of giving them an alignment in the first place.

I can't remember, in 35 years of DMing, ever having Hags show up in any number greater than one at a time. Thus, I've never had to worry about how or if they organize themselves; I can just run them as individualists and have done with it.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Detect Evil (and-or Know Alignment) would sometimes be used for exactly this in a society that had access to such - I've no problem with that.

There's also many spells (Magic Mouth, Glyph of Warding are but two) where the presence of an alignment can be set as a trigger. I like these.

I utterly loathe magical effects like thse and I'm glad that alignment detection is dead in 5e. Complete plot killers. Also surefire triggers for an inane alignment debate.

Remember, I throw out the book lore for most creatures. I have Yuan-Ti as being individually variable across the Evil scale (thus some are LE, some are NE, some are CE, and many are somewhere between two of those points; the E component is constant) with a societal average of NE.

"The alignment works if I chance the lore and the alignment of the creatures!"

Ok, mate...

 

[Lanefan]

Considering that there are only nine possible options and most of the time only three of them are used for monsters the characters are likely to fight

In your game perhaps; in mine they'll fight all nine alignments if they think there's a buck to be made.

More seriously, by no means do I expect everyone of a given alignment to get along with each other. Some of the most thunderous in-character arguments I've seen have been between two Lawful Goods arguing over how to apply the law and-or justice; and at times those arguments even came close to (or erupted into? don't remember now) blows.

Good-trending nations or communities can still go to war with each other, just as much as Evil-trending ones can.

 

[Lanefan]

I utterly loathe magical effects like thse and I'm glad that alignment detection is dead in 5e. Complete plot killers. Also surefire triggers for an inane alignment debate.

They're only plot killers if you don't account for their existence up front and either have means of dealing with it or just accept it'll happen.

In a D&D murder mystery, if someone busting out Know Alignment catches you-as-DM off guard then your prep has some rather glaring holes in it. (ditto Speak With Dead or just about any other common divination spell)

And spells that trigger off alignment are great! If you're a Cleric setting up your temple defenses, don't you want to be able to discourage those of opposed ethos from going places they shouldn't?

"The alignment works if I chance the lore and the alignment of the creatures!"

Ok, mate...

Of course I change the lore - I've consistently said this all along. Do pay attention, 007.

And if changing the lore means changing the alignment so be it; my point is that a) I had an alignment suggestion in the first place to start from and b) having that suggestion is far more useful than not having it.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

If both claims are interpretations, and both claims are equally valid then alignment has told us nothing.

Did I say both claims are equally valid? I said that your claim "leads to a contradiction, but standard interpretive principles tell us to minimize contradictions where possible, so that's exactly the reason we shouldn't adopt it." That's not saying your claim is equally valid -- quite the opposite.

No one would use a Ph strip that couldn't tell the difference between a Base and an Acid, why are we using an alignment system that can't tell the difference between Chaos and Law?

Your complaint is that the system comes to conclusions about Chaos and Law which contradict certain premises you're asserting. This complaint would be empty unless the system did, in fact, come to conclusions about Chaos and Law. Which it does. It doesn't say "Orc culture might be chaotic, might be lawful, you have to decide for yourself"; it says orc culture is chaotic.

And yeah, it does leave some things interpretation -- this is moral philosophy in a roleplaying game, not chemistry in a textbook. But the chemistry analogy might be apropos for just a little bit more. A chemistry textbook says that vinegar is acidic. There are many different pH tests out there which operate on different principles; the book might describe some, and enterprising chemists might come up with more on their own. But the acidity of vinegar is a well-established fact and can be used for calibration of new tests: if your test says that vinegar is basic, it is far more likely that something is wrong with your test than that something is wrong with the textbook.