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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9270986" data-attributes="member: 18">The problem is that Chaos/Law are cultural gained things, and people who are truly new to D&D do not, generally, understand them in the ways which D&D defines them. For people raised on early editions, Moorcock stories, and so on, they seem second nature, but to new people, there's a lot of confusion caused by Chaos and Law, and I don't believe that was ever entirely untrue, because the meaning of "Lawful" in D&D has attracted far more debate than any other alignment-related topic, and I've seen that debate continue for the last 30 years! Indeed if anything it was more intense 30 years ago.So I don't honestly think Chaos or Law as alignment descriptors are, at this point, in 2024, significantly more useful than "Red" or the like. Especially as pretty much no fantasy media has used them, including D&D-related media like Critical Role or even actual D&D media like the movie. They're confusing archaic terms where their in-game meaning is not at odds with their colloquial one, yet distinctly quite different from it in a counterintuitive way.Good and Evil seem, perhaps unfortunately, to have peaked in relevance maybe 10-20 years ago. Back then, we'd long since moved away from Gygaxian "genocide is good actually!" definitions of Good and the like, to a naturalistic kindness, selflessness, decency, helpfulness, lack of murderosity is Good, and selfishness, greed, narrow-minded-ness, leaping to violence and so on was Evil. And I don't want to talk about politics here, but in both the US and UK and the Western world in general, we've seen those concepts eroded, with violence, greed and selfishness being celebrated by people attempting to justify certain opinions or behaviours. Let's not even start on whether Gygaxian opinions are making a comeback.So I mean I guess I'd like to see a version of D&D with pretty firm and clear definitions of Good and Evil, but I don't think it's likely to happen. I'd be unsurprised if 2024 has the weakest and most wishy-washy definitions of Good/Evil of any edition of D&D.Chaos/Law though I think has largely lost relevance and cultural cachet. I mean, I hate that no-one reads Moorcock anymore, but... they don't. They haven't for 20+ years. Ironically the one place keeping the flame alive for them seems to be MCDM, but maybe D&D should just cede that territory. Or not - they are part of the default cosmology, but maybe they should be refocused on as cosmological principles, not alignment components.</blockquote>

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