D&D 5E A different take on Alignment

[Chaosmancer]

Who says 'good' is morally correct?

That's your own subjective opinion isn't it?

If Good isn't morally upright and correct it is meaningless noise. And if you are going to declare other player's interpretations of Good as subjective, while gleefully declaring your own as objective and noting how they will go to Hell for their actions, then what is the point of Alignment?

And we can get into very precise things where this falls apart. Say for example you sneak up on a cult of demon worshippers and the wizard casts Cloudkill to try and take them out before they can turn and retaliate. CloudKill does poison damage, does poisoning unsuspecting people count as a good act or an evil act?

What are you on about?

Explain how anyone is 'beating' anyone with anything.

Me (DM, Session zero): 'Guys before you select an alignment for your PC, this is how I as DM/ the Gods in this game world view them (provide definitions of good, evil, law and chaos, fictional examples of protagonists and antagonists of each alignment, explain that the ends to not justify the means etc). Dont stress too much about alignments, if you stray from your alignment, I'll let you know and we can discuss it, and you can either change your alignment on your character sheet, or keep it as is, and I'll just simply note what your alignment actually is (for any mechanical purpose that interacts with alignment) from the POV of the Gods.''

I'm not interfering with player agency, telling a player how to play their character or 'beating' anyone with anything.

If a player of vengeful mass murderer who routinely tortures his enemies to death gets upset that he cant use a Talisman of Pure Good because despite his characters repeated evil actions, he has 'LG' written on his character sheet, then I frankly don't care.

He cant use it, his soul goes to the Nine Hells on death, he doesn't get any benefit from a Unicorns lair and so forth.

On the positive side, he can use a Talisman of Ultimate evil, and take levels in Oathbreaker Paladin, and his Spirit guardians spell does necrotic damage instead of radiant.

If he wants to sook about it, he can take it to another table.

Do you have the bad guys spill the beans on their plans if the players capture them?

Do you have prisoners attempt to kill the players in their sleep?

Do you make it more and more difficult for them to do the Good thing?


Sure, "being good shouldn't be easy" but we are playing a game. And if being good means getting the snot kicked out of you every time you face an enemy who surrenders, then the players are going to get real sick of it real fast.


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All I can say is that I have a "no evil" rule*. If someone says they're going to cross the line I let them know and if they continue their PC will immediately become an NPC.

If that bothers you then I'm not the right DM for you.

*EDIT: which I make clear in the invite and reinforce in my session 0 that it's pretty much a zero tolerance policy.

And then we are going to get into potential issues of "what is evil"

Can I use the suggestion or Dominate Person spells, or is magically robbing a sentient creature of free will Evil?

Can I play a Phantom Rogue, is a person who steals fragments of people's souls Evil?


There is so much grey area, it ends up being fairly arbitrary. And what I've really heard is that "no evil" means "No torture and no killing your fellow PCs" and that is... really just not being disruptive, instead of not being "evil"

 

[Oofta]

If Good isn't morally upright and correct it is meaningless noise. And if you are going to declare other player's interpretations of Good as subjective, while gleefully declaring your own as objective and noting how they will go to Hell for their actions, then what is the point of Alignment?

And we can get into very precise things where this falls apart. Say for example you sneak up on a cult of demon worshippers and the wizard casts Cloudkill to try and take them out before they can turn and retaliate. CloudKill does poison damage, does poisoning unsuspecting people count as a good act or an evil act?






Do you have the bad guys spill the beans on their plans if the players capture them?

Do you have prisoners attempt to kill the players in their sleep?

Do you make it more and more difficult for them to do the Good thing?


Sure, "being good shouldn't be easy" but we are playing a game. And if being good means getting the snot kicked out of you every time you face an enemy who surrenders, then the players are going to get real sick of it real fast.


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And then we are going to get into potential issues of "what is evil"

Can I use the suggestion or Dominate Person spells, or is magically robbing a sentient creature of free will Evil?

Can I play a Phantom Rogue, is a person who steals fragments of people's souls Evil?


There is so much grey area, it ends up being fairly arbitrary. And what I've really heard is that "no evil" means "No torture and no killing your fellow PCs" and that is... really just not being disruptive, instead of not being "evil"

I'm the final judge of what is evil in my campaign. Just like a bunch of other rulings in the game. There doesn't have to be one answer for every question that applies to all tables; welcome to D&D 5E.

 

[Helldritch]

1) Why not by the player whose character it is?

2)If it's a purely imaginary problem then why worry about it?

1) Because it is to the DM to set what is and what isn't acceptable at his/her table. Welcome to 5ed as Oofta said.

2) Flamestrike was answering to an other poster about a situation. Flamestrike then proceeded to say what would happen if it would happen at his table. Fair enough?

 

[Maxperson]

Then why both with that aspect of alignment at all?

Because they are an aid for those who want to use it to guide their roleplaying.

 

[Maxperson]

In the good vs evil conflict, though, it's obvious who's morally correct. Those who repudiate good have chosen to abandon moral conduct (for whatever reason). So what's the point of that aspect of alignment, besides being a stick for GMs to beat players with? (See eg @Flamestrike's posts not far upthread - I share @doctorbadwolf's dislike for that sort of GMing.)

So if alignment is going to do anything useful, it seems that law vs chaos is where the action is.

Alignment isn't about being morally correct, though. It's about being a tool for roleplay. If the goal was to be morally correct, nobody would play a neutral or evil PC.

 

[Maxperson]

Also, you can beat characters with the good stick pretty damn hard as well.

If any PC is being beaten with an alignment stick, the DM has gone off the RAW rails. Alignment isn't a straight jacket.

 

[Hriston]

What you describe here seems to be a departure from canonical D&D, in which Law and Chaos are opposed, and hence (among other things) affect reactions; rather than the conflict between them being simply the result of poor reactions.

That's an interesting point. I've never played a game that used alignment languages, for example. I think it would fun for alignment to be named in the world and for characters to declare their alignments to one another, etc. I've never played D&D that way, but I think you're right that it's canonical to do so. In that context, alignment-related modifiers to reaction rolls could be understood as dependent on the reacting creature actually knowing the alignment of the PC. I'm not sure if that's canonical, however.

Without checking my DMG, my understanding of the 1E alignment modifiers to reaction (which I'm pretty much using whole cloth) is that they do not depend on the reacting creature knowing the alignments of the party members and that actually revealing your alignment by, for example, using an alignment language that differs from the alignment of the reacting creature could garner an automatic reaction of "attack on sight". This implies to me that the alignment modifiers operate in the fiction by some unidentified means.

So I'd say that in my game both parts of your statement are true. On the metaphysical/outer-planar level, Law and Chaos are opposed and directly affect reactions between aligned individuals in the multiverse. On the prime material plane, however, this has the appearance of creatures of opposing alignments having disagreements about things and coming into conflict with one another over things other than not having the same alignment.

There is a very strong providential element in JRRT's work: everything always, in the end, tends back towards good because the creator is supremely powerful and all seeming discordance is in fact incorporated back into the music of creation. Gollum is the most obvious exemplar here, but even Morgoth's theft of the Silmarils bends back towards good - among other consequences it creates opportunities for the cultivation and display of deep virtues, it allows Earendil to become a star, and it ultimately leads to the birth and triumph of Aragorn which allows just government to be restored among human beings.

But Ulmo is not an instance of this. He is, himself, good. He never falls out of grace. And so when he goes against the Doom of Mandos he is not doing evil which ends up being re-subsumed within good. He is doing good directly. So if Manwe or Mandos were to attempt to stop him, they would be doing evil.

This is why I think that JRRT is not just unconcerned with Law vs Chaos; in his work they don't appear as fundamentally opposed means. This is a difference from Moorcock or REH's Conan.

In a game that was JRRT/LotR oriented, I don't think there would be any use for the Law/Chaos aspect of alignment. It wouldn't capture anything meaningful. It might be helpful in such a game to label people as good or evil, as a reminder of which side of the conflict they are on.

I agree that the Law/Chaos axis wouldn't have much to offer in a game based on the works of Tolkien. I think this also points to the dubious value of assigning alignments to non-D&D characters, or even to D&D characters in D&D games where alignment isn't gamified to some extent. I could see something like 4E linear alignment being applied to a Tolkien-based game, with LG at one end and CE at the other, with the Halls of Iluvatar and the the Void being the locus of each respectively.

That being said, what I was trying to get at by assigning CG to Ulmo has everything to do with the theme of Providence. Ulmo knows the Music, which fills the waters of Arda as it fills the Void, better than any of the other Valar so operates within that milieu informed by that knowledge and is thus Good. Contrast this with Melkor who thinks only of his own vain and Void-touched themes and ironically seems to be without awareness of the full implications of his Evil actions.

 

[Maxperson]

Up to a certain point any and all aspect of the games are dependant on the DM's view. But alignments are not that well defined on purpose. It gives a leeway for interpretation and adjudication for the DM.

Not all DMs do much of that, though. For instance, I'm more interested in my players giving their PCs detailed personalities, than what two letters are on their sheet. A human in the real world rarely falls within a single alignment with their behavior, and will often have narrow aspects that even fall into opposing alignments. Take a serial killer driven through some psychological flaw to kill certain people. Outside of that one horrific aspect, he might be a fine upstanding person. That's an extreme example, but most people have many such lesser examples riddled throughout their personalities.

I have the world at large respond to the PC's actions and I really don't care what letters they have down for alignment. If they come across one of the rare artifacts where alignment matters, I'll have to make a judgment about their general behavior to see if it matches up, but outside of those rare instances, the players are the ones that decide what their PCs do.

Alignment in my game is primarily a tool for me. I have too many monsters and NPCs for me to give all or even most of them detailed personalities. I'll do it for the few important ones, but for the rest it's alignment only or alignment plus a quirk or two.

 

[Maxperson]

And Jafar can't be LE because he doesn't respect law and order in any way. He just wants power and will basically do anything to get it. NE at best?

Except that he does, because he uses the law to get that power. A NE person wouldn't bother with the law if it was in his way. Were Jafar NE, he would have just killed the Sultan and taken over.

 

[Aldarc]

What does using the evil alignment label add to any of these characters?

By my count? Four letters with a 7 point total face value in Scrabble.