Law and Chaos gone? Good Riddance!

[Lord Zardoz]

Source?

I had never heard of Law / Chaos being removed, at least not from a direct source.

In any event, I think that many of the arguments against Law / Chaos axis being kept for 4th edition are reasons why they ought to be kept. My logic is as follows.

1) People who end up in pen and paper role playing games beyond a casual basis will always end up in useless arguments about rules minutia.

2) Because Law and Chaos are so loosely defined, they give many more options in how they are applied then Good and Evil. This lets the actual definition be worked out on a per game basis. It falls to the DM to decide if Lawful means "Always follows orders when delivered from a legitimate source of authority" or if it means "Tends to be honorable or predictiable". The extents of the Law / Chaos are easier to customize to th needs of a game. It is much easier to make that axis either Law / Chaos as a critical and campaign defining element, or to treat it as a vestigial and minor distinction.

3) In a game system where Good and Evil have in game mechanical consequences (such as Protection from Evil, Holy Word, Smite Evil), using the extremes of Lawful and Chaotic behaviour, a DM can create interesting ethical / moral dilemmas that are not as easy to justify without them. It is much easier to create an organization that is racist and commits atrocities but is still technically 'Good' when you are provided with the Law / Chaos axis.

The simple fact that Law / Chaos raises potentially interesting questions is a good thing. The fact that gamers tend to spend too much time debating their merits is just a sin that gamers need to find some other hobbies to round out how they spend their time.

I cannot recall any instance where a debate about the distinction between something like Lawful Good and Neutral Good took any significant amount of time in a game. I will concede that the Chaotic Neutral alignment is the most frequently abused excuse for random, silly, distracting, and idiotic behaviour. However, such behavior would happen from the offending gamers in any case.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[shadow]

This shows a profound misunderstanding of what it means to be "lawful." Lawful doesn't mean that you obey the laws, simply that you have an ordered, cohesive, bound, logical, mechanical worldview.

Lawful doesn't mean that you obey the laws? The 3e PHB seems to say otherwise.

Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority...

Law" implies honor, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability.

Now I suppose that you could argue that authority doesn't necessarily mean government authority or government laws, but that brings up the question of what authority a lawful character respects (especially when two authorities are in conflict). Besides, the PHB definition of law also includes telling the truth and keeping one's word. This leads to even more crazy alignment debates. (For example what would a lawful character do when asked to tell lies or break his word by a respected authority?)

When you add the cosmic descriptors of law vs. chaos you can get freakish situations like lawful good knights teaming up with lawful evil devils to crush the chaotic good elves who have teamed up with chaotic evil demons!?!?! I have had conversations like this over the years with folks who actually thought a paladin would prefer a devil's company to that of a pixie because the former was LE and the latter was CG. Insane.

Yes, I've heard of maddening situations like this too. This tends to happen in situations where law and chaos are made all important. In games where good and evil take a back seat to law and chaos, it becomes hard to imagine elves and dwarves teaming up against a greater evil as in The Fellowship of the Ring. Instead you have paladins teaming up with devils to fight against the elves.

I really don't mind "good" and "evil" as alignment descriptors too much because they resonate with most people. People understand what you are talking about when you say good and evil. Real world religions teach that certain acts are good or evil. However, most people have no idea what law and chaos really mean. (And it seems that most D&D players don't really understand them either given the endless number of alignment debates on the forums.)

 

[WayneLigon]

Is he lawful for having this code, or chaotic for disobeying societal laws?

For this very reason, I hope the distinction is gone. It really never added anything since people read 'Law' as 'written rules' rather than 'a cosmic force of Order'. It never had anything to do with the laws of the land, per se.

 

[bonethug0108]

2) Because Law and Chaos are so loosely defined, they give many more options in how they are applied then Good and Evil. This lets the actual definition be worked out on a per game basis. It falls to the DM to decide if Lawful means "Always follows orders when delivered from a legitimate source of authority" or if it means "Tends to be honorable or predictiable". The extents of the Law / Chaos are easier to customize to th needs of a game. It is much easier to make that axis either Law / Chaos as a critical and campaign defining element, or to treat it as a vestigial and minor distinction.

That is horrible game design. It is fine if you want to give players freedom to explore what law and chaos means to them, but once you couple it with in game mechanics that can punish you for going against it, you are asking for trouble.

Just look at the monk. What is okay for the monk to do and what isn't. By giving the players such creative freedom that each individual comes up with their own meaning of law and chaos, you are asking for dm's and players to get into arguments.

Contrary to what you believe, it isn't the arguments on the boards that are bad, but the ones that happen during the game. You know, the game that you said each person can interpret law and chaos differently every time they sit down to play and then argue because the monk can no longer advance as a monk because he lied to save a friend's life because he is LG. He had no better way to save his friend, so he had to choose whether he would follow law or good. This is stuff that happens in games.

I also have the same problem with good/evil, so don't think I'm hating on law/chaos. Chaos is actually my favortie alignment. I like the idea of trying to bring down governments and evil kings and fighting oppression. I can do that without alignments tied to mechanics, though.

That is why I'm so glad that alignment has little or no mechanical impact on the rest of the system. From what I've gathered it appears that good vs. evil will be its own system and players can choose not to get involved in the bigger cosmic battle by being unaligned.

 

[Sadrik]

Well I would hope it would still be in. I would be shocked if it were not.

I hope that good and evil take a back seat too!

I hope everyone is unaligned and that very few creatures are "cosmically" aligned. Remove the anthropocentric tropes of what good and evil are and define them as cosmic forces similar to how we think of law and chaos now.

For instance certain creature types should be cosmically aligned. And just because they are cosmically aligned doesn't mean that they can't act good when evil or evil when good. They just generally act that way. So even a reformed demon is not good now but still cosmically evil just acts good. The scholar who studies and even bonds with infernal powers to defeat the same infernal powers is a very popular literary figure- would be cosmically evil but uses the powers for good.

Celestials -> good
Undead -> evil
Fey -> chaotic
Demons and devils -> evil
Inevitables -> lawful

If this is not how it will be done. This is how I will do it anyway and do it now.

 

[bonethug0108]

For this very reason, I hope the distinction is gone. It really never added anything since people read 'Law' as 'written rules' rather than 'a cosmic force of Order'. It never had anything to do with the laws of the land, per se.

But it did. The description says so. That was the problem with law. It was both the cosmic force of order AND following the laws of the land. I suggest you go read that chapter again.

And this is yet another example of why alignment should not be tied to mechanics.

Edit:
I should add that the mention of law was under lawful neutral AND lawful evil. So apparently lawful good characters can not follow law and be lawful(I know the answer can really be yes; it is called hypothetical)?

This is yet another problem. Not all descriptions are uniform and alot is left to interpretation. So do you interpret that all lawful characters follow laws, or that just LN and LE ones do? Or do you say that is just one aspect of law and need not be followed.

Alignment is just bad bad bad(in 3e).

 

[I'm A Banana]

Lawful doesn't mean that you obey the laws? The 3e PHB seems to say otherwise.

No, it doesn't. It says that lawful people people respect authority, and that Law implies obedience to authority. Both are true. It also says that alignment is not a straightjacket, and that's true, too. The Paladin does respect the evil warlord's authority, but the evil warlord answers to a higher authority as well, in the Paladin's mind -- Good. They're both Lawful, but the evil warlord is guilty of not adhering to the True Logic or the Way Things Ought To Be, and thus isn't really adhering to authority himself, has no authority that he pretends to have (his commandments are meaningless because he shouldn't be in control), and needs to be punished for wrongly exerting authority. Just like a criminal in organized crime would have to be punished for violating the mundane laws of the world, this evil warlord needs to be punished for violating the Order of Existence. There's no conflict.

Now I suppose that you could argue that authority doesn't necessarily mean government authority or government laws, but that brings up the question of what authority a lawful character respects (especially when two authorities are in conflict). Besides, the PHB definition of law also includes telling the truth and keeping one's word. This leads to even more crazy alignment debates. (For example what would a lawful character do when asked to tell lies or break his word by a respected authority?)

Again, Law as an alignment is a cosmological concept, one that stretches beyond the mortal world. The authority that a Lawful character respects isn't a person's authority -- it is a cosmological authority, a power beyond the mortal world. Just like a Good character isn't nice to goblins, a Lawful character doesn't obey every law.

Telling the truth respects this authority and keeping one's word respect the authority of cause and effect, and of clarity. Language is a specific thing, it defines the world, and so it's use, in a Lawful kind of mind, must be to specify a thought.

If they need to tell lies or break his word according to the greater force of Law in the universe, then they can. As the PHB says, alignment is not a straightjacket. It's a description of actions.

The Law and Chaos axis of D&D is nothing more than Gygax's misinterpretation of Michael Moorcock's "alignment" system. In Moorcock's work there is no cosmological good or evil, there is onlhy law and chaos which, when in balance work out toward the good of all but when out of balance are destructive. Its just the personification of order vs. entropy in Moorcock's vision.

Yeah, this is why they exist, but given around 30 years of history, they've kind of become a monster of their own. They are definately a D&Dism, but they're not exactly about Order and Entropy anymore, and they do add an interesting dimension to the game.

Yes, I've heard of maddening situations like this too. This tends to happen in situations where law and chaos are made all important. In games where good and evil take a back seat to law and chaos, it becomes hard to imagine elves and dwarves teaming up against a greater evil as in The Fellowship of the Ring. Instead you have paladins teaming up with devils to fight against the elves.

Maddening how? Sounds kind of like a fun campaign to me.

 

[med stud]

Very often, the law/chaos- axis was downplayed compared to the good/evil one. I have seen many parties refered to that have a lawful good paladin cooperating with chaotic good rogues or clerics of Kord or whatever while I haven't seen one party where a paladin cooperates with someone who is lawful evil.

An example in the monstrous manuals is that celestials don't have infighting the way demons and devils have; the difference in alignment between a LG celestial and a CG celestial is as big as the difference between a LG celestial and a devil.

I don't say that everyone plays it this way but I have seen it so many times that it feels like people in general downplay the law/chaos- axis so much that it might as well be removed IMO.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

Wyrmshadows makes a lot of very good points.

I have seen a few very good depictions of a struggle between Order and Chaos in fiction (I saw one of the best very recently, actually), but those good depictions have always been "too much ether way is bad, a balance is good", or have utilized other factors to show "in this case Order is bad" or "in this case Chaos is bad".

The idea of an absolute conflict between Law and Chaos, equated with a conflict between Good and Evil, just doesn't work well.

go Babylon 5

Should a good character kill the young of evil monsters?

No, this won't end alignment debates.

if their is absolutely no chance for redemption, yes. by this i mean if their evil is learned, then killing would be the wrong thing to do, but if their evil is inherent and impossible to overcome then their really are no other options but to kill it. Of course it does make for better story if you let it live though.

 

[Dormammu]

The Law and Chaos axis of D&D is nothing more than Gygax's misinterpretation of Michael Moorcock's "alignment" system.

Don't forget Three Hearts and Three Lions... actually I know this is listed in the 1E DMG bibliography but I can't remember if Moorcock is.

Well I would hope it would still be in. I would be shocked if it were not.

I hope that good and evil take a back seat too!

I hope everyone is unaligned and that very few creatures are "cosmically" aligned. Remove the anthropocentric tropes of what good and evil are and define them as cosmic forces similar to how we think of law and chaos now.

There is a lot of what could or could not be that is unclear from this quote:

Alignment: One major change to this system in 4 E is the fact characters can choose to be “unaligned,” having no significant impulses towards good or evil. Characters can still choose to be good or evil (law and chaos are not mentioned), but most characters and monsters will be unaligned. Unsurprisingly, most spells and powers that revolve around alignment are now gone.

I don't know how accurately that is parsing the Races & Classes preview, but I don't have a copy myself.