"Narrativist" 9-point alignment

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the incoherence comes from making the mistake of thinking selfishness is the defining trait of evil. That in turn I think comes from assuming that lawful good is the most good sort of good. This misperception has even been repeated in the discussion of several published texts (especially in 3e), so its very widespread.

A better way to think of the position of LE is, "Screw everyone outside of the community I belong to." A simplistic example might be a member of a racist group (I'll avoid real world examples) who shows compassion and kindness and acts respectfully toward members of his own perceived community, but who believes that life is ultimately about survival of the fittest and so is completely justified in subjugating and even exterminating everyone who doesn't look like him.

Yeah, but here we are working on the basis of Pemerton's assertion that Gygax's definitions of G/E and L/C are definitive. By those definitions what you are saying is that Lawful Evil is LESS EVIL because its adherents actually adhere to principles of GOODNESS WRT their own community. This, to me, doesn't define a lawful evil community at all! It isn't that I don't get where you're coming from, but the sorts of 'evil societies' that are defined by the classic D&D 9-point system are incoherent. They simply don't fit within the system because such societies would not be consistent. You would not be able to say that a society of LE humanoids was 'evil' by its own terms, and its members would NOT subscribe to evil tenets, they would subscribe to GOOD tenets WRT each other.

In fact many examples of such societies do exist throughout human history. In fact one could easily argue that most human societies are of this type. I don't think we would argue that Ancient Egypt was an 'evil society' just because they were perfectly happy to go plunder and enslave their neighbors.

More to the point, the way you distinguish a lawful evil philosophy from a chaotic evil philosophy is that the lawful evil philosophy holds up self-sacrifice (for the good of the community) as a virtue of a high order, both for the commander/master and the servant. The less hypocritical it is about this stance, the more lawful it is. But simply holding up sacrifice for the good of the community clearly wouldn't make the community good, even if it wasn't being hypocritical, as the community could of course stand for and use a wide variety of means and methods we'd clearly associate with evil.

Yet such a society would describe those means as being for good ends, would it not? In fact even Gygax's definition of good might well support that! You can't hold up the 9-point system to examination AND hold that these societies are coherent within it, they can't be described as being "of an alignment".

Since we know from this example that self-sacrifice not only can be an attribute of an evil community, but can even increase the perversion and depravity and horror of the community, we know that self-sacrifice is an attribute of lawfulness - not goodness. People get confused on this by holding up Lawful Good as the highest good, noting self-sacrifice as a notable feature of Lawful Goodness, and so assume its a feature of goodness generally. Not only can we demonstrate LE as a counter-example, but we can bring up an obvious counter-example of self-empowered goodness that people are familiar with - The Gold Rule "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It's worth noting that from some philosophers the Golden Rule comes under attack precisely because of the central role it places on the self. "Who are you to judge what is right for someone else based on your own judgment and feelings? If you would like to be slapped, does that give you the right to slap others?" This draws into sharp focus what I think is the real central conflict between chaos and law - who is in charge, the individual or the established external Authority or Ideal?

I disagree, self-sacrifice has nothing to do with law or chaos. A chaotic good character could just as easily sacrifice himself for others as a lawful good one. Nor is it natural for evil creatures (of law or chaos) to sacrifice themselves for anyone else because evil is defined by the individual's focus on his own good and his own will! You have to abandon Gygax's definitions of good and evil, and thus the 9-point system to get here.

(Brief aside here, I'm not claiming that any real world religion that advocates the Golden Rule can be narrowly defined as 'Chaotic Good', as even if we assumed the label had real meaning outside of a game, real religions often approach the topic of 'what must you do to be good' from multiple perspectives, some of which may be seemingly contradictory.)

Sure, and I am not intending to imply that any other attribute that I apply to these 'Gygaxian societies' corresponds to the way REAL societies really think of themselves and operate either.

Again, is self-interest the core of being evil? What if the higher authority is itself evil? Isn't selflessly serving evil also evil?

Hmmmm, well... This is one of those moral dilemma questions that the alignment system doesn't seem to be designed to really deal with. Again, if you go strictly by its definitions, we don't know. I would say that selflessly serving another for some higher purpose which enhances their welfare is not evil. It might be stupid, but it isn't evil, not by Gygax's definition if you stick to the letter of it.

Yes, but does chaos demand complete inconsideration of others? The Golden Rule as I noted in and of itself does not demand the existence of an external judge of what is and is not correct behavior, but leaves each individuals as the sovereign and primary judge. In and of itself, it renders everyone the high priest of his own religion. Likewise, even the Silver Rule - "Do not do unto to others what you wouldn't have them do unto you" - which doesn't demand positive compassion or generosity or anything normally associated with the idea of 'good, still places primacy on self-consideration and self-empowerment, but doesn't demand complete inconsideration of others. "Harm no one; do what you will", is notably self-interested and self-centered, but is also clearly different from a Lawful philosophy of submitting yourself to the desires of an external ruler and judge, and likewise even clearly different in implications from the Golden Rule.

Chaos is DEFINED as the placement of the individual's freedom from restriction by others above rules, as such. The real problem here is that the whole idea of a law/chaos dichotomy doesn't REALLY work. ALL rules have moral implications and thus any sort of simplistic prognostication like "all rules will make people worse off" is logically ridiculous. So its hard to even come up with reasoning about "Chaotic" anything. All we can really call law/chaos is a personality trait, you are either a person who likes rules and authority or one who doesn't. It really has no moral or ethical character because as soon as you bring moral or ethical reasoning into play you have to discard the utterly simplistic idea that you can categorize on the axis "rules vs no rules".

I find that statement baffling. Does it not matter what rules and authorities that they submit to? Do not the goals of the society whose loyalty they pledge to actually matter? If a society wishes to feed and clothe the world, no distinction can be found between that that wants to exterminate and enslave it?

Sure, but again you cannot use the 9-point system to describe the later!

I think the upshot of this little conversation we've had is that I no longer accept that you can talk about society in terms of alignment. Alignment is an attribute of individuals ONLY, and not of society as a whole. There are no 'lawful societies' or 'good societies'. In fact you really cannot apply Gygax's descriptions to more than one individual collectively. You can have a society in which "most individuals are lawful good" or whatnot, but the society itself doesn't have an alignment.

Once you accept that limitation then all of a sudden things become a LOT clearer. You can have a society that has entirely selfish masters at the top who are neutral evil and simply follow their own good who oppress masses of slavish lawful followers who do their evil bidding. There will be a mix of individuals in this society, some that deplore the 'masters', some who wish to emulate them, some who dream of revolution. Given the limitations of the 9-point system some of these people cannot be described coherently as being of a specific alignment.

Frankly I think the system works OK for describing a basically lawful good-oriented society in which the PCs encounter many people who are lawful, many who are good, and many who stand somewhat in contrast to those people, with some 'bad guys' who aren't that closely examined. The bad guys are either internal or external, but either way they are mainly there for the killin'. If they form some sort of 'evil society' it is largely off stage and not closely examined. At most the PCs interact with it as outsiders insulated from its huge inconsistencies. Somewhere at the fringe of the PCs society are the 'chaotic guys', rangers, elves, and such that are basically 'grumpy guys' that might help you but don't like anyone crowding their space. They don't really have a separate society (or maybe again the elves society is just not really examined).

9-point is a sort of 'Keep on the Borderlands' kind of system. It lets you slap a 'caves of chaos' label on some part of the map and put 'bad guys' there and have the 'good guys' go kill them. The law/chaos divide then adds a bit of color where some of the good guys are 'ornery' and some of the bad guys are just really absolutely stark raving insane droolers. You get a label for each of these basic 2-d character types and thats enough to play a dungeon crawl with.

I wouldn't read too much more than that into Gygaxian alignment. Gygax wasn't really that fond of elaborate plots and loads of shades-of-grey type play AFAICT.

 

[pemerton]

I no longer accept that you can talk about society in terms of alignment. Alignment is an attribute of individuals ONLY, and not of society as a whole. There are no 'lawful societies' or 'good societies'. In fact you really cannot apply Gygax's descriptions to more than one individual collectively. You can have a society in which "most individuals are lawful good" or whatnot, but the society itself doesn't have an alignment.

I certainly agree with this.

The idea of a LG society has the same problem as the idea of a LG plane: it attempts to use the alignment label to describe a social/institutional state of affairs, rather than to describe a moral/evaluative orientation.

When alignment is used to describe a moral/evaluative orientation - which is what I talk about in my OP - then the existence of conflict is, in the context of a FRPG, a good thing. It provides a focus for play (and I suggest that, when it comes to 9-point alignment, that focus is whether social order or individualism is the proper path to wellbeing).

But when alignment is used to describe societies, or planes, then we get the idea that this place can be truly LG while this other place is truly CG. And then there's no conflict! In the LG place, social order leads to wellbeing. In the CG place, individualism leads to wellbeing. So there's nothing to argue or fight about! The social set-up already commits us to the feasibility and moral acceptability of both law and chaos. And it gets even worse if we point to the orcs and label their society LE - because we now seem to be saying that wellbeing, for orcs, consists in rejecting wellbeing - which verges on the incoherent!

I can only make sense of alignment as a scheme for labelling evaluative/moral dispositions.

I think Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good are incoherent. Consider the position of the Lawful Evil guy. He's expected to adhere to some sort of social hierarchy, but his ethos is "screw everyone else" (as you so aptly described it in the opening post). So why would he care about social order?

In the picture I was painting in my OP, the LE person cares about social order because s/he sees it as the means for imposing his/her will on others and hence achieving his/her self-serving goals.

In this way (and contrary to some traditional depictions of alignment) the LE person agrees with the CG person about the nature and consequences of social rules and hierarchy. As I put it in the OP, "the CG point to the LN as showing that law is an impediment to good, and to the LE as displaying the true face of order and hierarchy: a source of domination which prevents those who are dominated from realising wellbeing." It's just that the CG person, being good, recognises and acts upon the resultant other-regarding reason to reject social order; whereas the LE person disregards that other-regarding reason, and instead seeks the benefits of exercising domination over others.

I don't think this is incoherent. I think that it sets up the possibility of an interesting conflict between CG and LG, because LG run the same argument - but with "individualism" in place of "order/hierarchy" - against the CG, pointing to the CE as the true face of individualism and the pursuit of self-realisation.

he may think social order is something he can exploit, but that doesn't make HIM lawful evil, it makes him at best neutral evil. He's perfectly happy to make those other suckers obey rules that are good for him, and he may unwillingly obey rules enforced on him from above, but he's got no interest in rules per-se in any absolute sense.

I agree with this, but in the scheme I'm putting forward no one has a reason to be interested in rules in any absolute sense. The LG person doesn't believe in rules in an absolute sense either - like the LE person, s/he sees them as means to ends.

The LN person, on my reading, does believe in rules in an absolute sense but has no reason to do so. Rather, LN is a type of wrongful (but not evil) fetishism.

You can see from the foregoing that I don't accept the idea the LN is somehow "intermediate" between LG and LN. I think this idea of neutrality as a type of intermediate point on a spectrum isn't very coherent, and the schema in my OP rejects it: I read LN, CN and TN each as being its own distinct thing, and I read NG and NE as not very interesting because not speaking to the conflict between law and chaos as means to wellbeing.

I maintain that evil and law are inherently opposed and conflicting. This is because law is outward directed and evil is inward directed.

<snip>

The more evil you are the less inherently lawful you must perforce be

I think that, if this was true - or, at least, accepted as true within the context of the game - then my "narrativist" scheme for alignment wouldn't get off the ground.

My scheme depends upon taking seriously that the conflict between LG and CG is a serious contender for being explored and worked out through play. So it depends upon taking seriously that it is an open question whether or not law (in the sense of social order and hierarchy) is inherently opposed to the pursuit of self-interest and the domination of others.

In order to make this viable, the point that I made about CG (and that you have picked up on) has to be seen as a very limited one: that the sort of sociality that CG requires (ie duties to others as a constraint on individual will) is distinct from the full-blooded social order and hierarchy that LG believes is a necessary condition of wellbeing. That is, it has to be at least prima facie viable for the CG to say that honouring duties owed to others is categorically different to erecting elaborate systems of social order. If you think that such a distinction is illusory from the get go - and I can see why you might - then you'll think that my narrativist scheme is doomed from the outset!

In that case, 4e alignment would be the way to go, and the focus shifts from the law vs chaos I described in my OP to divine order vs primordial creation. Which is similar but by no means identical, and roughly describes my current 4e campaign!

I think the system works OK for describing a basically lawful good-oriented society in which the PCs encounter many people who are lawful, many who are good, and many who stand somewhat in contrast to those people, with some 'bad guys' who aren't that closely examined. The bad guys are either internal or external, but either way they are mainly there for the killin'. If they form some sort of 'evil society' it is largely off stage and not closely examined. At most the PCs interact with it as outsiders insulated from its huge inconsistencies. Somewhere at the fringe of the PCs society are the 'chaotic guys', rangers, elves, and such that are basically 'grumpy guys' that might help you but don't like anyone crowding their space. They don't really have a separate society (or maybe again the elves society is just not really examined).

9-point is a sort of 'Keep on the Borderlands' kind of system. It lets you slap a 'caves of chaos' label on some part of the map and put 'bad guys' there and have the 'good guys' go kill them. The law/chaos divide then adds a bit of color where some of the good guys are 'ornery' and some of the bad guys are just really absolutely stark raving insane droolers. You get a label for each of these basic 2-d character types and thats enough to play a dungeon crawl with.

I wouldn't read too much more than that into Gygaxian alignment. Gygax wasn't really that fond of elaborate plots and loads of shades-of-grey type play AFAICT.

I like this a lot. I think it's a fair description of Gygaxian alignment as a suitable backdrop for "Keep on the Borderlands" (pulpy/western-style) play.

But I still like my OP too!, as an attempt to make alignment a focus of play rather than a backdrop.

 

[Umbran]

I maintain that evil and law are inherently opposed and conflicting.

This is because law is outward directed and evil is inward directed.

I disagree.

It becomes difficult to give clear examples without breaking EN World's no-politics rule. I will go to the extreme end, to one that is likely to be at least uncontroversial - Nazis.

Amazingly lawful. Also evil. And, that evil is pretty solidly outwardly directed.

I accept the collective raspberries for Godwinning the thread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I certainly agree with this.

The idea of a LG society has the same problem as the idea of a LG plane: it attempts to use the alignment label to describe a social/institutional state of affairs, rather than to describe a moral/evaluative orientation.

When alignment is used to describe a moral/evaluative orientation - which is what I talk about in my OP - then the existence of conflict is, in the context of a FRPG, a good thing. It provides a focus for play (and I suggest that, when it comes to 9-point alignment, that focus is whether social order or individualism is the proper path to wellbeing).

Yup!

In the picture I was painting in my OP, the LE person cares about social order because s/he sees it as the means for imposing his/her will on others and hence achieving his/her self-serving goals.

I just don't see the guy that is at the top of the LE society, who probably broke all the rules to get there and now only wants them to be enforced because they benefit him as BEING lawful. He doesn't value or regard LAW in any sense. It is just a convenient lever for him to use to get what he really wants, power. He doesn't FOLLOW any laws, he just USES them. He's truly neutral evil, maybe even chaotic in his own temperament. The society he stands atop may be "lawful" in a sense, those under him obey because they must, or maybe because they genuinely want to.

In this way (and contrary to some traditional depictions of alignment) the LE person agrees with the CG person about the nature and consequences of social rules and hierarchy. As I put it in the OP, "the CG point to the LN as showing that law is an impediment to good, and to the LE as displaying the true face of order and hierarchy: a source of domination which prevents those who are dominated from realising wellbeing." It's just that the CG person, being good, recognises and acts upon the resultant other-regarding reason to reject social order; whereas the LE person disregards that other-regarding reason, and instead seeks the benefits of exercising domination over others.

This is an amusing thought, the arch devil agrees with the elf, "yeah, laws actually suck, but only for the poor slobs that are stuck under my thumb!" But, as I say, I wouldn't call that arch devil 'lawful', he doesn't care about the law.

I agree with this, but in the scheme I'm putting forward no one has a reason to be interested in rules in any absolute sense. The LG person doesn't believe in rules in an absolute sense either - like the LE person, s/he sees them as means to ends.

The LN person, on my reading, does believe in rules in an absolute sense but has no reason to do so. Rather, LN is a type of wrongful (but not evil) fetishism.

You can see from the foregoing that I don't accept the idea the LN is somehow "intermediate" between LG and LN. I think this idea of neutrality as a type of intermediate point on a spectrum isn't very coherent, and the schema in my OP rejects it: I read LN, CN and TN each as being its own distinct thing, and I read NG and NE as not very interesting because not speaking to the conflict between law and chaos as means to wellbeing.

OK, well, that's interesting. I suppose you could use that argument, that law has no intrinsic value, good and evil simply use it for different ends. In that case though they have nothing REALLY in common. I mean if paladins only value the law because it furthers good, and devils because it furthers evil, then sure maybe they compare notes on bridge night, but mostly they might as well fight each other as hard as they would anyone else, and LN is just out to lunch, they laugh at modrons (and the modrons probably despise LG and LE more even than chaos).

I think that, if this was true - or, at least, accepted as true within the context of the game - then my "narrativist" scheme for alignment wouldn't get off the ground.

My scheme depends upon taking seriously that the conflict between LG and CG is a serious contender for being explored and worked out through play. So it depends upon taking seriously that it is an open question whether or not law (in the sense of social order and hierarchy) is inherently opposed to the pursuit of self-interest and the domination of others.

In order to make this viable, the point that I made about CG (and that you have picked up on) has to be seen as a very limited one: that the sort of sociality that CG requires (ie duties to others as a constraint on individual will) is distinct from the full-blooded social order and hierarchy that LG believes is a necessary condition of wellbeing. That is, it has to be at least prima facie viable for the CG to say that honouring duties owed to others is categorically different to erecting elaborate systems of social order. If you think that such a distinction is illusory from the get go - and I can see why you might - then you'll think that my narrativist scheme is doomed from the outset!

In that case, 4e alignment would be the way to go, and the focus shifts from the law vs chaos I described in my OP to divine order vs primordial creation. Which is similar but by no means identical, and roughly describes my current 4e campaign!

Right. I think there's always room for conflict though. The elf and the arch devil may agree that laws suck, but then the elf's next statement is "you monster, you have no ounce of goodness in you, you use the most vile means to enslave your people, death to you!" It doesn't matter that LE is 'incoherent' in a sense, if we're accepting that the arch-devil's cynical use of law is within the realm of 'Lawful Evil' as 'law is just a tool' is a true statement, then they can hate on each other to the end of time. Really the arch-devil has less issue with the elf, but his response is "OK, if you want to screw with my setup, you better be prepared to become my next slave, and you ain't gonna like it!"

I like this a lot. I think it's a fair description of Gygaxian alignment as a suitable backdrop for "Keep on the Borderlands" (pulpy/western-style) play.

But I still like my OP too!, as an attempt to make alignment a focus of play rather than a backdrop.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with your OP really either, though I will say that IME its hard to really keep conflicts going that are fueled by abstract concepts. I think you guys already talked about that a page or so back, when you talked about personal small-scale conflict.

My old ranger, Cargorn, spent his whole career wiping out Demogorgon worshippers. Not because they were chaotic evil, I don't even remember what his alignment was, but it was probably also chaotic, but just because they were obnoxius buggers and they messed up his life. It was amusing too because the DM just wouldn't give up on them, he was that DM that just HAD to turn the plot his way, so every time he would add some absurd new wad of cult fanatics, demons, whatever it was to ruin our latest victory, we'd just get even madder and go after them harder.

I think the whole party actually ended up killing Demogorgon but by then they were so depraved that they were almost demon lords themselves. The 'Ranger' by then had a legion of undead trees, wooden armor that held the souls of all the people who's life force his vampiric sword took, AND a vampiric ring of regeneration. If there's such a thing as an anti-ranger, he's it. But by gosh Demogorgon ain't comin' back, we stompted his arse in his own plane!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I disagree.

It becomes difficult to give clear examples without breaking EN World's no-politics rule. I will go to the extreme end, to one that is likely to be at least uncontroversial - Nazis.

Amazingly lawful. Also evil. And, that evil is pretty solidly outwardly directed.

I accept the collective raspberries for Godwinning the thread.

Eh, its an example that is rather unfortunate of course, but understood. I think it illustrates my discussion with Pemerton on the nature of LE. My contention was that the leaders of this group weren't lawful. They were in fact infamously criminal in their behavior, which only became nominally 'lawful' when they took over and corrupted the law itself and wrote it to please themselves.

However, I accept Pemerton's argument that in his interpretation of Gygaxian alignments law is simply an instrumentality. The law/chaos divide them breaks down to a preference for the use of this instrumentality, or not. I have to say I'm not certain I find that a hugely satisfying motivational force, but I guess its as good as any adherence to some patriotism or such.

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, but here we are working on the basis of Pemerton's assertion that Gygax's definitions of G/E and L/C are definitive.

I don't even think we've yet conceded that Pemerton has accurately classified and explained Gygax's alignments. Granted, that might be Gygax's fault, since Gygax doesn't spend a lot of time on the subject and simply broadly sketches the major themes of each alignment - what they value, what they don't value - but nonetheless, I believe what I have described is based on a reading of Gygax per for example the 1e AD&D Player's Handbook.

Beyond that, we disagree on so much I don't really know where to begin, but I'll hit a few high points with little hope that we are going to reach a consensus on anything.

By those definitions what you are saying is that Lawful Evil is LESS EVIL because its adherents actually adhere to principles of GOODNESS WRT their own community.

Yes and no. I am saying that Lawful Evil is less evil than Neutral Evil, which doesn't have any sort of goal other than evil itself and that the Lawful Evil position while vile is at least a little less than completely vile if only by virtue of being mixed and impure. And I do agree that relative to an absolute incarnation of Lawful Evil, even a truly vile mortal individual will not necessarily be wholly evil in all his ways and therefore least some somewhat sympathetic, endearing, or admirable traits.

I don't think we would argue that Ancient Egypt was an 'evil society' just because they were perfectly happy to go plunder and enslave their neighbors.

Well, I would. Although I think I should make clear that when I apply alignment to anything, whether an individual or a society, I'm suggesting only a preponderance or preference for certain things, and not absolute unswerving uniformity. Particularly in a case of a society (in my game, although we can find parallel examples in the real world) if I define a society as 'lawful evil', I only mean that a plurality of persons in the society hold lawful evil beliefs and as such either have tended to make the societies institutions in their image or are attempt to remake those institutions along lines that they believe are better and as they would see it even more 'moral' - such as say, exterminating their neighbors.

Yet such a society would describe those means as being for good ends, would it not?

Sure? But so what?

In fact even Gygax's definition of good might well support that!

I disagree.

You can't hold up the 9-point system to examination AND hold that these societies are coherent within it, they can't be described as being "of an alignment".

Uniformly? Maybe not. By preponderance and plurality and the structure of the institutions of the society, yes, I think I can. I just did after all.

I disagree, self-sacrifice has nothing to do with law or chaos. A chaotic good character could just as easily sacrifice himself for others as a lawful good one.

He's not necessarily encouraged and most importantly is not expected to. By the lawful conception, a person that sacrifices himself for others is only doing the duty that is expected of him. The action is worthy of honor, but it is also compulsory in that anything else would have been dishonorable. But in the chaotic conception, sacrificing oneself for others is a voluntary and heroic choice which depending on how successful it was might be commendable, but a person who doesn't sacrifice himself incurs no particular condemnation. In the lawful society, if you didn't sacrifice yourself for others, it might be a crime worthy of death. In the chaotic society, this idea that you are responsible for putting others ahead of yourself doesn't hold, and any compulsion to do so would be seen as abhorrent. And in of course, CN and CE see sacrificing your own interests for others as the root of all that is 'evil' or 'wrong' in the world. CE defines injustice as the strong being forced to give to the weak. CN defines evil as altruism, and sees rational self-interest as the basis of goodness.

Nor is it natural for evil creatures (of law or chaos) to sacrifice themselves for anyone else because evil is defined by the individual's focus on his own good and his own will!

No, Gygax defines evil tautologically. To be evil is to love and advance evil, period. He doesn't delve deeply into what that means, though the closest you might come is to say that is the position of anti-life. Thus, evil is equated most with nihilism, and not with focus on his own good and his own will. Even examining the definitions of LE and CE finds no particular emphasis common to all evil alignments on the self and self-will, for the LE are subordinated by their strict discipline and hold freedom to be valueless. By contrast, freedom is a virtue of the CE and wish for power to implement their personal whims and capricious desires.

You have to abandon Gygax's definitions of good and evil..

I haven't (to my mind); you have (in my opinion).

Chaos is DEFINED as the placement of the individual's freedom from restriction by others above rules, as such.

Well, sure, but it is not solely defined by that. Particularly in the case of CE and CG, clearly they are balancing this preference with other desires and purposes.

So its hard to even come up with reasoning about "Chaotic" anything. All we can really call law/chaos is a personality trait, you are either a person who likes rules and authority or one who doesn't.

No, no. What ever it is, it is not a personality trait. I've gone through that at great length proving it in other essays. And it's not really about 'rules' versus 'no rules'. It's about where the rules come from (outside the self or welling up from within the self as an expression of their natural being) and who ultimately gets to judge (something external or ones own consciousness). That's not a personality trait. That's a belief system, or at least a portion of one, and belief systems can influence personality but they don't define it.

It really has no moral or ethical character because as soon as you bring moral or ethical reasoning into play you have to discard the utterly simplistic idea that you can categorize on the axis "rules vs no rules".

Well sure, your straw man burns. Big surprise.

As for as societies, but 'lawful good' society I would simply mean 'the majority of persons hold lawful good beliefs' and the society correspondingly has structures that reflect that to some degree. That's the definition that I have, and I think it is backed up by the normal presentation of communities - at least large and complex ones - within Gygaxian worlds and D&D generally (were things are only 'usually' of a particular alignment, but exceptions may exist). But heck, even applied to individuals, by saying an individual is 'lawful good' I only mean a preponderance of his actions and beliefs lean in that direction and not that every such belief and action is coherent with what he believes or claims to believe. And I believe that this is consistent with Gygax's idea of tracking the drift of alignment over time.

Once you accept that limitation then all of a sudden things become a LOT clearer. You can have a society that has entirely selfish masters at the top who are neutral evil and simply follow their own good who oppress masses of slavish lawful followers who do their evil bidding.

Sure. Who has said that you couldn't? Again, you seem to be making straw men to burn here.

 

[pemerton]

I just don't see the guy that is at the top of the LE society, who probably broke all the rules to get there and now only wants them to be enforced because they benefit him as BEING lawful. He doesn't value or regard LAW in any sense.

<snip>

I wouldn't call that arch devil 'lawful', he doesn't care about the law.

<snip with sequence alteration>

I suppose you could use that argument, that law has no intrinsic value, good and evil simply use it for different ends. In that case though they have nothing REALLY in common.

The last part of this quote is the position I'm advocating, yes. Which means, as you correctly say, that the LG and the LE person really have nothing in common. Or, at least, not from their own perspectives. Though from the point of view of the CG person, what they have in common is that the LG person is mistakenly/foolishly advocating for the social structures that will let the LE people take over because of a mistaken/foolish belief that social order and hierarchy can foster, rather than simply burden, wellbeing.

The same line of thought also leads to agreement with your comment that the person at the top of the LE hierarchy doesn't value law in any sense. I'm propounding a purely instrumental understanding of law/chaos. With that in mind, and looking at the other end of the grid, the CE person has nothing deep in common with the CG person either. The CG person is an individualist because s/he believes that the individual pursuit of self-realisation is the best way for people to achieve wellbeing. Whereas the CE person is not a principled individualist at all - s/he is just someone who thinks that all others are simply tools to be used or obstacles to be dealt with in the pursuit of desire. Again, I've just stated it from the chaotic point of view. From the point of view of a LG person, what the CG and CE have in common is that the CE person represents the actuality of the threat that is created by the CG person's refusal to acknowledge that wellbeing isn't simply a matter of self-realisation, but relies upon social rules and structures.

if paladins only value the law because it furthers good, and devils because it furthers evil, then sure maybe they compare notes on bridge night, but mostly they might as well fight each other as hard as they would anyone else, and LN is just out to lunch, they laugh at modrons

Agreed! And I think it's a virtue of my scheme that it makes the classic drawing of A Paladin in Hell fit within the alignment system, rather than look like some sort of alignment error!

Hopefully this also makes clearer why I find the Planescape alignment set-up so irritating, because it embodies all the incoherences you diagnosed, and makes it hard if not impossible for me to articulate the scheme I find interesting.

This is an amusing thought, the arch devil agrees with the elf, "yeah, laws actually suck, but only for the poor slobs that are stuck under my thumb!"

I like the amusement value, but I don't think it's a paradox. The CG person asserts that social order and hierarchy are a burden on wellbeing beause of how they constrain self-realisation. (That is a paraphrase of Gygax.) The LE archevil likes social order and hierarchy because they let him/her impose his/her yoke of domination upon the world. (Again, a paraphrase of Gygax.) What do they disagree about? Not about whether or not social order and hierarchy are a source of misery! It's just that the CG person cares about that (because s/he is good), whereas the archdevil doesn't (because, being evil, s/he cares for nothing but self-interest).

I think there's always room for conflict though. The elf and the arch devil may agree that laws suck, but then the elf's next statement is "you monster, you have no ounce of goodness in you, you use the most vile means to enslave your people, death to you!"

Absolutely agreed, but I think in a game taking this sort of focus alignment isn't really doing any work at all. Because the alignment system already comes with a prepackaged notion of the good guys (they're labelled "good") and the bad guys (they're labelled "evil"), a campaign focusing on good vs evil doesn't actually enliven or activate the alignment system at all. There is no debate about which of the elf or archdevil is morally correct, for instance - the archdevil is a monster who uses the most vile means to enslave his/her (and other) people.

What I was looking for in my OP was a way to identify an interesting moral question posed by the alignment system. And the one I identify is the question of law vs chaos as means to wellbeing.

IME its hard to really keep conflicts going that are fueled by abstract concepts. I think you guys already talked about that a page or so back, when you talked about personal small-scale conflict.

Agreed, I think I would want some sort of way to particularise the social order vs self-realisation issue. I have some thought about how I might do that if I wanted to, based on my ideas about the way enclosure worked in England and how similar processes around agricultural production and urbanisation operate in other countries within the contemporary economy, but I think the board "no politics" rule means that I won't go any further than that in setting it out - but hopefully that gives you a sense of how I might do it.

 

[pemerton]

Nazis.

Amazingly lawful. Also evil.

My contention was that the leaders of this group weren't lawful. They were in fact infamously criminal in their behavior, which only became nominally 'lawful' when they took over and corrupted the law itself and wrote it to please themselves.

However, I accept Pemerton's argument that in his interpretation of Gygaxian alignments law is simply an instrumentality. The law/chaos divide them breaks down to a preference for the use of this instrumentality, or not.

The question of whether National Socialist Germany was based around law or not is one that has been a significant topic of debate in the jurisprudenctial literature. An important recent contribution is Kristen Rundle's [url="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/university_of_toronto_law_journal/summary/v059/59.1.rundle.html]"The Impossibility of an Exterminatory Legality: Law and the Holocaust"[/url].

Within the framework of "narrativist 9-point alignment" this could be an interesting question to engage via play: the LG types would be trying to establish that what led to the evils of National Socialism was an abandonment of genuine legality and sociality - so that it was really an instance of chaotic evil people wearing a mere mask of law - whereas the CG types would be pointing to the same events as showing the threat to wellbeing that social hierarchies create.

In my OP, I was envisaging the conflict playing out through competing attempts to shape the social order, and then finding out (via play) whether or not these increase or burden wellbeing. But the alternative just described, of conflict over the proper interpretation of a given episode that is an established part of the fiction, could also be interesting. [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s concern that conflict over abstract ideas can be unsatisfying for play would loom especially large in a campaign taking this approach, but there are ways of trying to handle this. I'm thinking, for instance, of the way the Marvel Heroic RP approaches some similar issues of moral/political interpretation in the Civil War sourcebook.

 

[pemerton]

My old ranger, Cargorn, spent his whole career wiping out Demogorgon worshippers. Not because they were chaotic evil, I don't even remember what his alignment was, but it was probably also chaotic, but just because they were obnoxius buggers and they messed up his life. It was amusing too because the DM just wouldn't give up on them, he was that DM that just HAD to turn the plot his way, so every time he would add some absurd new wad of cult fanatics, demons, whatever it was to ruin our latest victory, we'd just get even madder and go after them harder.

I think the whole party actually ended up killing Demogorgon but by then they were so depraved that they were almost demon lords themselves. The 'Ranger' by then had a legion of undead trees, wooden armor that held the souls of all the people who's life force his vampiric sword took, AND a vampiric ring of regeneration. If there's such a thing as an anti-ranger, he's it. But by gosh Demogorgon ain't comin' back, we stompted his arse in his own plane!

I've pulled this out into a separate reply to say awesome story, and worthy of multiple laugh/XP points!

 

[Umbran]

Within the framework of "narrativist 9-point alignment" this could be an interesting question to engage via play: the LG types would be trying to establish that what led to the evils of National Socialism was an abandonment of genuine legality and sociality - so that it was really an instance of chaotic evil people wearing a mere mask of law - whereas the CG types would be pointing to the same events as showing the threat to wellbeing that social hierarchies create.

There is a problem with engaging that question via play - if you are in a game in which alignment is a *power* (say, stock 3e) then there is no question. Forces of the Universe decide the question for you, and you can tell if they are lawful by casing, for example, Detect Law. If you are playing a game that, for some reason, has alignments but there is no power associated with it, then the question is likely moot.

I submit that the overthrow of previous social order cannot be a decisive measure for whether a person or people in a D&D universe are Lawful - context matters. For example, if it can be well-argued that the previous social order had betrayed its people or its own principles (betrayal being a pretty non-lawful thing to do), the truly Lawful thing to do may be to replace that old order with a new one.

And, then we get to bring in the alignment-of-person vs alignment-of-society question, but I have a different angle on it.

When I use alignment for people, I take it to be a long-term average of behavior. Single, non-magical acts rarely cause major alignment shifts.

You can consider the alignment of a society or group to be a similar, aggregate or average measure. If most of the people are LG, the society as a whole is LG. This doesn't preclude the occasional person who is different (or even very many differences, so long as the *average* works out), just as being LG precludes the occasional jerkish action from a person. Thus, Nazis in general can be LE, even if there are a couple of notable individuals in the ranks who are really more like CE.