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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6633078" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.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). 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.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.</blockquote>

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