Five Alignments?

[A'koss]

Uhm? I always thought that the original alignments (Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic in OD&D - AD&D added Good & Evil and the 3x3 matrix) came straight from Moorcock.

I'm talking about about the "advanced" game naturally. It feels odd in that now there is only Good flavored Law and Evil flavored Chaos now in D&D. I should have said the Moorcockian influence is stronger again D&D which had really put it's own stamp down with it's wider range of Chaotics and Lawfuls in AD&D on up.

As I said, I'd like to know more about where they're going with this because I don't see the improvement over how it's been working before.

 

[Gloombunny]

Someone on RPG.net suggested an (alternative?) take of this:

Good - pure, altruistic, saintly good.
LG - social goodness, moderated by the society and the laws.
Unaligned - getting along and minding your own business
CE - petty, selfish evil, without an overarching motivation.
Evil - pure, metaphysically motivated evil.

That was me. Although my description of evil was more along the lines of calculated, ruthless ambition and/or extreme sadism, compared to the petty greed and violence of chaotic evil.

So Asmodeus is evil evil, but a hill giant who just likes smashin' things is merely chaotic evil.

 

[delericho]

Personally, I'm more interested in the second part of the report:

Among the gods I did not see any evil or CE listed.

So, does this mean that Asmodeus isn't a god then? Or is their god of tyranny not Evil?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Chaos = Individuality, Change, Flexibility
Law = Society, Stasis, Control

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Chaos = Individuality, Change, Flexibility
Law = Society, Stasis, Control

Highly biased.

 

[Remathilis]

BECMI had three alignments (Chaos, Neutral, Law) and OD&D had five (chaos+good, law+good, chaos+evil, law+evil, and neutral). So I don't mind having less alignments. However, I miss my CG.

 

[ruleslawyer]

I don't like this one bit. *Maybe* there's an explanation... maybe. But I'm not seeing it.

I hate the law/chaos axis anyway, for exactly the reasons illustrated by Kobold Avenger's and Charwoman Gene's little exchange abovethread. For a Moorcockian cosmology? Sure. But a Moorcockian notion of the Law-Chaos "balance" is as specific a narrative element as the "gods" being non-Euclidean squamous Entities from Beyond, or all wizards being celestial servants from the Undying Lands. It's more an exogenous cosmological/world-building statement of things as they are than a set of tools for determining or describing role-playing behavior.

 

[Sojorn]

It's more an exogenous cosmological/world-building statement of things as they are than a set of tools for determining or describing role-playing behavior.

Which makes me wonder if LG and CE arn't somehow PoL related.

 

[lutecius]

An odd choice. It does look very similar to WFRP alignment, it's just less "elegant".

The fact that people can, and constantly do, have so wildly different ideas of what Chaotic and Lawful mean is, IMO, the best reason to give up on them and streamline the alignments.

This. Law and chaos may work as metaphysical forces but they have always done a crappy job of simulating actual human behaviour or ethics.

Just good-neutral-evil would have been tolerable, because they’re a more common fantasy archetype than Law vs Chaos, but even they are really just that, fantasy.
Good and evil mean very different things depending on the period and society, but at least there are some examples of good or evil persons most would agree on.

Someone on RPG.net suggested an (alternative?) take of this:

Good - pure, altruistic, saintly good.
LG - social goodness, moderated by the society and the laws.
Unaligned - getting along and minding your own business
CE - petty, selfish evil, without an overarching motivation.
Evil - pure, metaphysically motivated evil.

Considering sevitors of the primordials like the titans are CE, the metaphysical extremes are more likely to be CE and LG.

 

[Gloombunny]

Considering sevitors of the primordials like the titans are CE, the metaphysical extremes are more likely to be CE and LG.

I kind of expect CE and LG to be the extremes too, but what do titans have to do with it? Are primordials the exemplar of eviltude?