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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7783321" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Character growth arcs often involve shifting priorities. Insofar as D&D has a personality stat, this could well be indicated by an alignment shift. Sure, and one interpretation someone else suggested was essentially a notion of how large the circle of caring was. I agree that's how things were implied, but D&D has been inconsistent about this. Of course, it's a game, not a treatise on moral philosophy and D&D has always been a pastiche of many different influences. Part of it is because alignment didn't originally even have Good and Evil, just Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic, with an implication that these also were Good, Neutral, and Evil, respectively, though it's not explicitly spelled out. These were lifted from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hearts_and_Three_Lions" target="_blank">Three Hearts and Three Lions</a> by Poul Anderson as well as Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion (who got them from Anderson) and indeed the paladin class really is a direct lift from the protagonist ofTHaTL's abilities. From what I understand (I am not a Medieval historian) the notions of Order vs. Chaos are pretty strongly represented in Medieval thought. I don't know the exact history of the Hollywood Squares grid alignment but it was there in AD&D but Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic was around in BECMI until the end of the line. Lots of things got assigned alignments pretty much on the "oh, crap, we need to put something in to make the deadline... let's just get it done!" line.  I do like the different paladin takes that appeared in 3.5's Unearthed Arcana, where they had paladins for the other three extreme alignments (paladin of freedom for CG, paladin of tyranny for LE, paladin of slaughter for CE), representing divinely inspired warriors of different types. I played a Paladin of Freedom for a bit in a late 3.5 game. This character was constantly bucking the dictums of the temple, feeling it was more focused on the organization than on actually helping people. 5E kept this to some degree with the different Oaths, which are loosely related to particular alignments, though not exactly so.</blockquote>

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