D&D 5E A different take on Alignment

Umbran said:

pemerton said:

to show that slavery is a wrong you probably have to more than show it causes suffering. You have to show that it does so unjustly

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No, I don't, on several levels. The most basic being that you appear to have some delineation between "wrong" and "unjust", and causal logic from one to the other, that hasn't been given to the rest of the class.

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The relationship between wrong and unjust isn't one of causation. It's logical/conceptual.

To act justly is generally understood as ensuring that each receives their due. Withholding that which is due to someone is one way of treating them wrongly. (Generally speaking, all unjust conduct is wrongful, but not all wrongful conduct is unjust because their can be - or at least may be - ways of acting wrongly that don't treat anyone unjustly.)

Umbran said:

In the real world, words like "good" and "justice" are not subject to proof. They are opinions. I may be able to convince you to agree that slavery is wrong in any particular case, or even that slavery is wrong in all cases, but that agreement is as best consensus, not proof in any useful meaning of the word.

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I think this is an extreme oversimplification of a discipline that is somewhere over 2,000 years old. I don't think you would take the same approach to the disciplines that you are trained in (physics, I think, and maybe also some fields of mathematics and computational theory).

Umbran said:

In the standard D&D world, again, it isn't subject to proof because, as you will likely remember form whatever studies of formal logic you may have had, axioms are not subject to proof. The multiverse tells us whether it is wrong not, and does not allow debate on the topic. In the standard D&D cosmology, the creators of worlds, the gods themselves, are not above and beyond the metaphysics - they are bound to it. It is a given thing of the multiverse, not subject to external logic or argument.

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The standard D&D world is made up. Imaginary. But alignment is a set of descriptors and associated practices that are not imaginary. They are real, used at D&D tables.

The fiction doesn't create itself. It is authored. It is obvious that the authorship of D&D alignment rules draws upon ordinary understandings of the words used. For instance, when Gygax says that good suggests respect for human (creature) right, he is no inventing the concept of human rights, or directing referees to arbitrarily stipulate some meaning for that phrase. He is using the phrase with its existing meaning. Likewise when he refers (in his description of LG) to bringing "the most benefit to the greatest number" - this is clearly an allusion to Benthamite conceptions of the good being understood in a collective, aggregative fashion. In making sense of D&D alignment there is no circumventing the need to engage with the ordinary use and understandings of these words and phrases.

Even within the fiction, there is no greater need for D&D characters to deny that the gods love the good because it is good then Plato thought was the case for our own world.

Oofta said:

I could see the argument that Dexter was LN (not that I've ever seen the show).

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I could stretch him to LN. Good is out of the question, though. If you ever do decide to watch it, stop before season 8, maybe 7. The show goes rapidly downhill about then.

Trying to fit characters from modernist fiction into the D&D alignment framework seems a fool's errand.

Gygax already stretches it by using modern notions like Benthamism and (perhaps - it's disputed) human rights.

Assuming the goal is to have D&D play in some fashion that, not utterly remotely, emulate the fiction that ostensibly inspires it - Arthurian legend, Robin Hood, LotR, even REH Conan - then we need the good guys to be, in general, bold, generous, honest, not too manipulative, willing to fight for their convictions. We need a sharp contrast between morally permissible killing - self-defence, defence of others, willing duels - and morally wrong killing - killing without warning, killing the old and weak, etc.

There are always going to be borderline cases - is the use of flaming oil, for instance, consistent with the forthrightness of a paladin? Does a thief who backstabs only monsters already engaged in an affray with those trying to stop them preying on the innocent avoid the charge of immorality? This is the sort of thing one would expect each table to smooth over as seems appropriate.

Crucial to upholding these tropes is that the ends don't justify any and all means. Means which are dishonourable, or dishonest, or otherwise underhanded, for instance, can't be treated as consistent with being good.

None of this is to say that such conceptions of goodness and honour are actually correct. But if they are departed from, D&D won't look very much like the fiction which it purports to.

Aldarc said:

Once again. Noted.

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Yeah that’s a forum glitch on the mobile browser. Sometimes it saves (most of) a post that has already been posted, and it’s easy to not see it when quoting someone later on.

Maxperson said:

Good is out of the question, though.

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I really don’t understand how Good can be out of the question for a character that kills murderers after extremely thorough investigation and literally seeing them kill, in a society where such killers simply will not face state justice. We can argue the premise of the show, but if we accept the shows premise, he is either Good or Neutral, depending on how you interpret some of his secondary traits and actions.

Maxperson said:

I could stretch him to LN. Good is out of the question, though. If you ever do decide to watch it, stop before season 8, maybe 7. The show goes rapidly downhill about then.

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I was thinking maybe LN based on the premise: yes, he has dark urges but does his best to channel them to good use. Kind of like a vampire that only feeds on the bad guys. Not good but maybe not evil.

Maxperson said:

Correct. And the reason why is that this is a False Equivalence. The paladin with the very lawfully oriented class oaths is a very different thing than the sorcerer with no class driven anything that would bend a PC towards any particular alignment.

No they aren't. Nothing in 5e suggests it in any way. Nothing. One subclass has inherently chaotic magic, but that has nothing to do with the PC's personality. And another subclass is as likely to be lawful magic as chaotic(the storm is wild and unpredictable, but comes about through very intricate weather patterns), and still has nothing to do with the PC's personality.

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Ah yes, how could I forget such lawful tenants as "Be Good", "Protect Good Things", "Don't be Bad", Clearly, this incredibly lawful code of conduct stands as a beacon against any form of Chaos.

It is such a stronger indication of Law than the Sorcerers power source, flavor test, and original intent.


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Helldritch said:

@Chaosmancer
Again you go waýyyyyyyyyy top far in your analysis.
Hear me out again. Two letters are more than enough for a basic concept/understanding of a character or NPC.

Beginners will not need much more than that. I will not need much more than that (and the stat block of course, and even then...) to run a
creature. Of course if you want to blow things to kingdom come with full RP you might need a bit more, especially for key NPCs and BBEG (and even then, not much more than a paragraph two, If any. I can improvise very well.)

Alignments are a basic tool. To help you quickly size up what basic assumptions you can make about a creature/NPC. With experience, you can even play without the stat block and improvise on the go, only the two letters are needed.

Blabla of woes. CE.
My players could encounter such a creature and how I play it will give them a clear idea of what the creature's disposition is about. I will even make up the stats on the go and adapt it to my players and their current situation. It is not in any MM so they will not know its stats. Heck, I will not even know the stats myself until the encounters is played out. If it was fun, I might add it to my list of nice monsters to have.

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Until such a time that they encounter something that bucks those basic assumptions, then it is worse than useless.

I also like how all the monsters and enemies wear little two letter signs above their head declaring their allegiances clear for any player to see. Oh wait, no, those are just for the DM. The player just needs them to tell him how to play his character, because they couldn't figure out that they wanted to play someone who is kind-hearted but respects authority until they reached into the mystery bag and pulled out LG... oh wait, they had to decide all of that before writing down LG.... so... it is a shorthand for telling the other players about their character, because clearly two letters is better than actually talking about their character....


It is useful for saying "those are enemies" I can give it that much.


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Manbearcat said:

The point is, there are many, many conceptions and manifestations of a Paladin. There is ample drift/divergence (both outwardly and inwardly) between Thurgon and Alastor (and surely more still tha I've noted above) that are at tension with the homogeneity expressed in Law and God discretely and especially the expectations that arise from the intersection of those two.

D&D culture has this tendency toward "Paladin homegeneity", when in reality, (a) THAT SUCKS AND IS BORING, (b) that isn't how people are (in genre or reality), and (c) actual compelling Paladin play rests upon BOTH the genre conceits of Paladinhood AND the struggles of a human (or whatever) aspiring to meet an impossible purity test.

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Yeah, I don't really understand why "this lets us stereotype" is a selling point for a lot of people. And even Stereotypes are more descriptive than alignment.

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Hriston said:

It depends why he does these things. He steals to survive, and everyone needs to survive, so that really doesn't tell us much. Fast talking and lying are just tactics to get what you want. He wants to get out of a bad situation. Well, so would anybody.

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So... you would be completely okay with a Lawful character lying, cheating and stealing...but only if it was to survive?

So, what does Lawful mean if you are going to be perfectly fine to abadon all laws and social bonds the moment your personal survival is on the line?

Hriston said:

So, it's an autowin? That is very socially effective, wouldn't you agree?

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I don't generally consider inaction because you see no reason to interfere as a socially effective autowin, no that doesn't seem like that is anything of the sort. Seems more like... background noise you don't care about.

Hriston said:

Well, yeah, that's kind of my point. I think cherry picking a list of fictional characters and claiming they would have one alignment or another and claiming that some are better in social situations than others and acting like this is somehow representative of fictional characters in general all without hardly a shred of textual evidence is pretty pointless. Especially when the claim you're trying to support is that a rule in a game that those characters are not a part of is a bad rule. I'm sure there are a lot of characters out there that could be played as high charisma chaotic characters. I'm equally sure that there are a lot of characters that could be played as high charisma lawful characters, or low to moderate charisma chaotic or lawful characters. I'm not sure what the existence of any of these characters is supposed to prove.

As for setting the DC of an ability check with reference to a particular character, that's technically always the case by the rules of 5E. The DM sets the DC of a check after a player has declared an action for their character that the DM determines has an uncertain outcome and a meaningful consequence of failure, so it's always with reference to a particular character.

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I am aware it is "technically" the case. But if you have to defend it by going to technicalities, you are already on thin ice.

And, we weren't out to prove that Charismatic Lawful characters don't exist. We were proving that that Chaotic Charismatic characters exist and are fairly prominent archetypes, and your rule seems to unfairly tip the scales in a direction that is not supported by the fiction.

Hriston said:

I'm sorry, what assertion would that be? That chaotic characters in my games are given higher DCs on Charisma checks in social interactions than lawful characters with all other things being equal? That's easily provable. Just observe one of my games.


Um, no, I've made no such assertion.

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If they get a bonus to charisma in social situations, they are more effective in social situations (all else being equal, remember) that is plainly obvious. So the intended effect of your rule is to make Lawful characters more effective in Social Situations... which, per fiction, is not neccessarily the case. Their are plenty of lawful characters that are poor in social situations and many more chaotic characters who thrive on them.

Hriston said:

Yes, those are typically recurring characters in fiction, and most of them rely on having a certain amount of charisma, but what alignments they would have (if any) if ported over into D&D is impossible to say just from the broad archetypes.

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How you can look at a list of chaotic archetpyes and say you can't tell their alignment... I guess it just helps prove that alignment is ultimately a useless tool.

Hriston said:

Sure, but the thing you're criticizing about Alignment is part of the source material. It wasn't invented in the interpretation the way Tauriel was.

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And that source material is... the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, inspired from many sources, but when people talk about alignment charts and such they are referring to Moorcock.

Because, as you must realize, the addition of the second Axis is the entire problem. Once it isn't just Law and Chaos, but Good Law, Evil Law, Good Chaos and Evil Chaos in opposition, then the entire formula Morcock was using falls apart. It's why he didn't right in good and evil as part of his law and chaos divide.

Which means the blame for the 9 block alignment system and the use of Law to not mean Law, but mean something else, falls to the people who made DnD. Because Morcock was using an entirely different system.

doctorbadwolf said:

I really don’t understand how Good can be out of the question for a character that kills murderers after extremely thorough investigation and literally seeing them kill, in a society where such killers simply will not face state justice. We can argue the premise of the show, but if we accept the shows premise, he is either Good or Neutral, depending on how you interpret some of his secondary traits and actions.

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That is probably where motivation comes in.
Does he care deeply about people and society in general, and feel guilty about each killing, viewing it as a personal failure that he wasn't able to resolve it without murder?

Or is he driven to/not feel guilty about killing, and has simply been taught that bad people are acceptable targets for those urges. He doesn't care for people or society as a whole, just for those individuals that he has formed personal attachments to?

Umbran said:

Whatever the intention, it took up most of the semantic content of the post, so it caught my attention.

I was trying to give people a chance to back away from current issues, no-harm, no-foul, before red text had to come out. If you want to argue with me until red text comes out, you can do so, but I don't expect it'd make you happier, so can't say I'd recommend it.

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Power tripping on message boards is extremely unbecoming. You seem to have a penchant for it.

I'm glad they finally divorced if from most game mechanics, but my biggest issue with alignment is that it "boxes" morality in a way that turns into a massive oversimplification of how both psychology and society actually work. It's clearly a very old school way of conceptualizing morality and IMO it's really time it gets replaced with something more interesting as well as something that actually is tied to game mechanics in some way.

One of my favorite homebrew modules for 5e is a supplement for secondary and tertiary ability scores that adds 6 new secondary scores with minor effects/mechanics (Courage, Sanity, Composure, Allure, Luck/Fate, and Style), and essentially replaces alignment with 3 new tertiary scores: Empathy, Honor, and Piety.

It may sound convoluted to have 15 ability scores, but it isn't with the way they're set up here - it's awesome. In many ways it actually simplifies the game and makes character building a lot more interesting.

The tertiary scores interact with other character traits/religion/reputation to help inform views and guide players in making character decisions. They can even form the basis of roll-based branching character arcs and can rise or lower over time.