John Morrow said:
I think the alignment system serves a much more fundamental purpose which is to clearly mark the good guys and the bad guys. That's also why D&D has the Paladin as a core class. Alignment serves the same purpose that white hats and black hats used to serve in westerns. As such, I think it's undermined by deconstuctionalism and moral relativism, in much the same way that they undermine the traditional western, which leads to the incoherency that you talked about.
John, let me begin by expressing that you're my favourite person here on ENWorld with whom to debate alignment. While our views almost always differ, I never feel that we are failing to comprehend one another.
That stated, I really have to object to how you are characterizing sharp, impermeable good-evil distinctions as somehow postmodern. They are only postmodern in that part of the project of modernity was to erect these impermeable boundaries. I'm not interested in games that are either postmodern or modern; what I'm interested in are games that have a pre-modern feel.
The idea that of it being okay to systematically exterminate a race because it is evil by nature is, according to the postmodernist critique, a fundamentally modern one. The holocaust helped to inspire postmodernism because it was recognized that the idea of systematically exterminating a group because it was by nature under all circumstances, essentially evil was a consequence of modernist thought.
Even the most extreme persecutions of the past like Charlemagne's mass execution of Saxons, the Spanish Inquisition, the suppression of the Judean revolts of the first and second centuries, the Crusades, etc. did not share the characteristic that it was okay to kill all the Cathars/Jews/Saxons/Saracens because they were irredeemably evil. Pre-modern persecutions might envisage a group as less human or less possessed of grace but they did not deny the essential humanity of these groups. Mass executions took place to "inspire" resistors to convert to whatever it was that the persecutor wanted.
Look at saints like Christopher and Guinefort -- even semi-human creatures unable to speak were seen as having souls and some kind of contact with the divine. For pre-moderns, it was not necessary to dehumanize an opponent in order for it to be okay to kill him.
Pre-modern social paradigms tended to be hierarchical rather than citizenship-defined -- everyone had some relationship with the highest divine or highest political but one's status was dictated by their distance/proximity to it. Modernist social paradigms have tended to work off an in/out concept -- you are either CITIZEN or NOT CITIZEN.
So, while the model of good and evil you favour for D&D stands in opposition to postmodernism, it does so because of its alignment with modernism.
Once you decide to start telling stories where the good guys wear black hats and the bad guys where white hats, where hats no longer indicate who is good or bad, where there are no good guys or bad guys, or where everyone wears a gray hat, the alignment system stops working as well or at all.
I agree that alignment systems are better adapted to essentialist ideas of characteristics but I don't think they lose all utility when they interact with these other modes of storytelling. If one looks at Cold War politics in the Third World, one can see an alignment system interacting just fine with moral ambiguity and indistinguishable behaviour.
As for outsiders and divine magic, the same thing applies. If you treat them in a postmodern or cynical way, then it's just not going to work very well.
I think you mistakenly assume modernist essentialism as an eternal characteristic of human thought; it is a recent one. Pre-modern thought had essentialism but a messy, permeable relativistic essentialism.
I think that a lot of this problem goes away if you read "Neutral" (in any context) as "Pragmatic" in many cases. I don't think the edge alignments are meant to be all that pragmatic and I think they do work as ideologies that are not pragmatic.
But how do you explain a person trying to open the gates of hell as "neutral" simply because he pursues his goal pragmatically? The goal is still fundamentally evil. To suggest that everyone who acts rationally in their own interest is neutral is to challenge the idea that we can make intelligent villains. I don't want a system that forces all chaotic evil villains to thwart their own goals on a regular basis or demands that I redefine opening the gates of hell as a "neutral" program.
A character that seeks Chaotic Evil ends but has the patience and discipline to wait and patiently plan is not necessarily Chaotic Evil, in my assessment, but something closer to Neutral Evil or even Neutral, if they can suppress their cruelty. A character that is really Chaotic Evil, in my assessment, has a mindset that is neither patient or able to suppress it's cruelty.
But don't high Intelligence and Wisdom become problematic then here? Does Chaotic Evil then enforce a cap on Intelligence and Wisdom because they indicate, respectively, the capacity to formulate complex long-range strategies and the capacity to exert self-discipline sufficient to carry them out? If this is the case, I have the same criticism of your idea as I have of the multiple axis system; an alignment variable should function as an independent variable not as a proxy from which the value of other variables can be derived.
Then there is the more practical question of the fact that I want him to open a gate to the Abyss not to Hades.
An alignment doesn't need to be effective or efficient for someone to follow it, any more than an economic or political system in the real world needs to make sense or work for people to believe in it.
Yes. But effectively running a Communist Party in the first world required that people run their party like capitalists -- expanding their market share, making profits, etc. Effectively promoting an ideology in a society that has not accepted it is an ambiguous tightrope act; Green parties still hand out disposable brochures, etc.
