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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6195762" data-attributes="member: 42582">Gygax used this terminology too, in Unearthed Arcana. It can be used to make a type of sense, but not in the way the OP has gone:Good/evil = morality ie the extent to which you regard it as important to honour your duties to others; Law/chaos = ethics ie the extent to which you regard it as important to cultivate yourself.So lawfuls (monks, samurai, paladins) are into self-cultivation; chaotics (rogues, barbarians, Jet Li after his process of self-discovery in Tai Chi Master) renounce self-cultivation as a goal.Of course, this requires abandoning the idea of law/chaos as connecting to groups/individuals - D&D has always been incoherent in trying to treat the issue of self-cultivation and the issue of group affiliation as if they go together, so I think getting rid of this might actually be an improvement.You still have the puzzle of whether the evil are those who repduiate their duties to others (as when Milton's Satan says "Evil, be thou my good") or rather those who fail in their duties to others - on the first reading there are very few evils and they're mostly vicious crazies; on the second reading the world is full of evils but they're mostly tolerable (and also don't acknowledge that they are evil - hard to reconcile with Know Alignment abilities being rampant).On this sort of account, Lancelot - who believes in self-cultivation and fulfilling his duties to others - is LG, at least until he falls and become LE; Hitler, who believed in self-cultivation but repduiated his duties to (many) others, is LE; a wild orc who hates all living things including himself is CE; and the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles) is CG, having given up on self-cultivation but accepting his duties to others.This sort of account has no need of LN, CN, NG or NE. Either people self-cultivate or don't; either they fulfill their duties to others or they don't. The notion of someone who believes in a "balance" between fulfilling or repudiating their duties to others makes no sense - that's just someone who's evil, but not as evil as they might be (notoriously Hitler was kind in many of his personal relations). Likewise the notion of a "balance" between culitvating oneself, or letting one's raw nature take its course, makes no sense.This account also doesn't have room for True Neutral that I can see. Animals obviously are unaligned - they have no duties to others (not being capable agents) and therefore are neither good nor evil; and the neither self-cultivate nor reject self-cultivation, for they have no option of existence outside their natural modes of life.Druids, who believe in a balance of nature, are chaotic - they reject self-cultivation - but may be either good or evil depending on whether they acknowledge their obligations to others. Many traditional D&D antagonist druids - the sort who kill all those who log in their forests - are probably CE, but some might be CG and believe that they are acting in legitimate defence of others' interests.On the model I'm putting forward you would still have to decide exactly what counts as fulfilling your duties to others. Is mere sincerity enough? - so you could have both a LG consequentialist (say JM Keynes) and a LG deontologist (say the archetypical saint, except perhaps St Francis who is probably CG). Or does the table take a vote on what counts as good for the purposes of a particular campaign? My personal view is that heroic fantasy works better with a superhero version of non-consequentialist morality - we disregard obligations to distant others, and largescale social and economic considerations (and hence don't ask the question why Storm wastes her time fighting Arcade when she could be relieving drougts the world over), and emphasise the importance of honour and individual interpersonal interactions, with some sort of background romantic understanding that when all' right with the heroes then all is right with the world.</blockquote>

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