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<blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 6458884" data-attributes="member: 6786839">There's the use of alignments as a shorthand, rule-of-thumb description of the motivations and behavior of critters including PCs. It's clunky, but I prefer it to Meyers-Briggs or Enneagram.And then there's cosmology. In 1E, the distinction between books providing a game system, and books providing a setting, was not so clear, and there was One True Cosmology for all D&amp;D games, at least according to the books. In that cosmology, the Prime Material Plane hung in the balance between Positive and Negative.In such a world, every intelligent creature is aligned one way or another with those all-pervading influences, just as a compass needle has an ongoing pull to stay aligned with the Earth's magnetic field. Any individual can claim not to care, but look, if you're a cleric, then either you turn undead or you command undead, it's objectively testable.So, first decide if your setting hangs between powerful, intrinsic, multiplanar structures of Good, Evil, Law and Chaos. If it does, then every creature, intentionally or not, is in some sort of relationship to those qualities.If that's not the basic structure of the world, then you have other options.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Riley37, post: 6458884, member: 6786839"] There's the use of alignments as a shorthand, rule-of-thumb description of the motivations and behavior of critters including PCs. It's clunky, but I prefer it to Meyers-Briggs or Enneagram. And then there's cosmology. In 1E, the distinction between books providing a game system, and books providing a setting, was not so clear, and there was One True Cosmology for all D&D games, at least according to the books. In that cosmology, the Prime Material Plane hung in the balance between Positive and Negative. In such a world, every intelligent creature is aligned one way or another with those all-pervading influences, just as a compass needle has an ongoing pull to stay aligned with the Earth's magnetic field. Any individual can claim not to care, but look, if you're a cleric, then either you turn undead or you command undead, it's objectively testable. So, first decide if your setting hangs between powerful, intrinsic, multiplanar structures of Good, Evil, Law and Chaos. If it does, then every creature, intentionally or not, is in some sort of relationship to those qualities. If that's not the basic structure of the world, then you have other options. [/QUOTE]

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