D&D General Rethinking alignment yet again

[Celebrim]

But if alignments are subjective or relative moral judgments, you run into the problem that everyone has a justification and no considers themselves to be Team Evil.

I'm going to avoid addressing the problematic topics and again focus on what I can, and that is that you have a false dichotomy in the midst of your argument. It's quite possible for alignment to be objective and still have everyone has a justification for what they believe and no considers themselves to be on Team Wrong. Like it's perfectly possible to believe both "We are Team Evil. And we are Right."

And if they're supposed to be some sort of objective evaluation, then who's making it and by what standard?

In most D&D cosmologies the cosmology doesn't address which alignment is right. Alignment is usually presented as a Great Wheel, or if you would "a round table" where peers are sitting, and it's possible that all or none of them are right. Which one is right is something you or your character will have to decide or at least, you'll have to come up with a reason why your character believes what they believe (whatever it is). But you can't appeal to the system for answers because it doesn't give you one. The "Good" motifs and beliefs do tend to line up with traditional answers for what is Good in Western society, but the alignment system itself doesn't force you to believe that Neutral Good is the most right way of looking at things.

As noted earlier, you can make a really strong philosophical argument in favor of evil. In the real world I like to think I play for Team Good and that Team Good is right and correct, but the intellectual in me is quite capable of realizing that there are serious philosophical challenges to my beliefs that many intelligent and rational people disagree with and as such I probably not only can't know for 100% certainty whether what I believe is right and at the least I can't expect everyone to treat it as obvious that I am. Even if we had real world Detect Alignment, that problem wouldn't go away. I might be relieved to glow 'Mauve' or 'White' or whatever the bucket labeled 'Good' glowed, but it wouldn't prove that I was right, just that was in the bucket I intended to be in.

There's still a place for alignment as a board shorthand personality trait in NPC stat blocks.

I don't think it tell us really anything about personality. I think for example it's possible to be a LG miser or drunkard. You have vices even in people playing for 'team good'. Alignment though tells us something about where that breaking point is going to be where the inner quality shows (or doesn't) and how they feel about their vice and whether they are sorry for what they do. It's about when you go against your own personality because you believe you can be wrong, or whether you even have a belief system in which you think you can be wrong. But it's not personality.

 

[Maxperson]

But what if your "alignment" behavior doesn't actually further the interests of your team?

Then it's very likely that you are not that alignment. If your personality is LG, you are furthering the interests of your team, because your actions will be mostly LG. If they are not mostly LG, then you are a different alignment.

According to most recent setting material, demons vastly outnumber devils in the Blood War, but the war remains in balance because demons are incredibly disorganized; they have to be forced into service by more powerful demons, show no discipline, etc. This behavior matches the ethos of their cosmic team... but it severely hinders the interests of that team.

But it does further team CE, which encompasses more than the Abyssal demons and what they want. They WANT to win the internet, I mean planar war, but team CE keeps getting in the way of that goal by being team CE. They are furthering CE by getting in their own way. If they were more organized, they'd be on a different team.

Under @Jer's approach, you'd still expect most of the Chaos team to behave in such a manner; it wouldn't be the Chaos team otherwise. But if an archdevil were to turn against Asmodeus and join the forces of the Abyss (as Graz'zt did in the 4E cosmology), the archdevil would become aligned with Chaos, despite being as methodical and disciplined as ever, and those traits could greatly advance the demonic cause.

Not really. That archdevil would be temporarily allied with(not aligned with) part of team chaos in order to further team LE. That archdevil would still be acting in a LE manner, which furthers team LE by adding more LE to the universe.

It's an unlikely alliance, though. The archdevil would know that Graz'zt would ultimately betray him at the worst possible time, because team CE.

 

[Celebrim]

How long does a marker for personality or culture need to be in order to be descriptive enough? Two sentences? A paragraph? A book? An entire field of study?

I'm not even prepared to answer that. I think the correct answer for an RPG is probably "As detailed as you need to serve your needs", but what is "enough" I couldn't tell you. Consider attributes of a culture that aren't necessarily easy to address from alignment:

Warlike or not?
Expansionist or not?
Hegemonic/Colonial or not?
Intellectual or not?
Elegance as a standard of beauty or Ornate as a standard of beauty?
Hedonistic or Ascetic?
Gender roles or not?
Frugal or not?

And probably by using these binary markers I'm already messing up.

And the same thing goes with personality. Rubs the whiskers of his chin thoughtfully is a personality trait. It's not easily an alignment trait.

 

[Kinematics]

No, that won't work. You cannot use alignment as a marker for personality or culture at all. It is not descriptive enough to do that and IMO no simple array or list is complex enough to describe personality or culture.

Which is exactly why I have an issue with using alignment in that way, as that's fairly common.

So if you are looking for a way to map Alignment to personality, not only have you missed the point of alignment but your project is doomed.

Well, I'm not, really. I'm taking the idea of using the alignment system as a means of describing personality (which I find clumsy and not always useful), and changing it so that it does not depend on the traditional alignment system. I'm not trying to "map" alignment to something else (eg: Lawful Good → Loyal Brave), only using the mechanics of the 9 square grid (a variant on a Cartesian plane) to display a different type of description — what I described as a social compass.

And you can go ahead and do that project and say, "Oh, Drow believe in Strength." But what you'll find is that even after you do it, you know more if you also know their alignment because it will tell you a lot about what they think Strength is and how they think it is acquired, or conversely if we know a lot about what they think Strength is or how they think it is acquired, then we probably can guess what alignment bucket to put them in.

Very valid points. I even recognized that a single word descriptor may sometimes make things confusing, such as if you used Strength for both Drow and orcs, when the usage of those terms would mean very different things to those different societies. I would try to find more useful descriptors if I was sitting down giving more serious thought to each society.

I hope you'll allow leeway for the fact that the original post is mostly brainstorming, and not the result of lengthy research and development.

No, no no. Bravery and loyalty are neutral terms.

Ehhh... Sorta? It can be a flaw to be loyal to the wrong person, but loyalty in itself is almost always treated as a virtue. Similarly with bravery, as can be most easily seen by considering its counterpart, cowardice.

Note that these are largely predicated on approaching things from the perspective of virtue ethics, not consequentialism or deontology. The virtue itself matters more than the results of applying that to any given situation.

Being loyal is a virtue. Being loyal to the wrong person is a flaw, but doesn't devalue the virtue itself. The person in question would be considered "vicious" rather than "virtuous" because of applying the virtue in the wrong way (per wiki entry on Virtue Ethics).

Whether we equate them with goodness depends entirely on what the person is being brave and loyal about. If you are brave and loyal in defense of a terrible cause, we might admire that bravery and loyalty to a certain extent, while still thinking it is foolishness and evil. Merely being brave or loyal tells us nothing about whether someone is good.

The main problem here is that I'm not asserting that they are "good". As I noted above, I'm not trying to map the alignment system to a new set of terms.

I don't think you really do think Loyalty is "Good", because there are few modern Western cultures that really take that idea seriously and really claim that Bravery and Loyalty are in and of themselves Good.

I'm not saying that Loyalty is "Good" in the typical moral sense. I'm saying it's "a good" in the virtue ethics sense. It's an aspirational virtue, to describe how to be the "best" orc. Or, well, since Loyalty was on the social axis, the primary virtue that keeps orc society running.

But don't you think that does matter what you are brave and loyal about? I mean these aren't merely just teams. The perception that all teams are equal and it doesn't matter what they believe you always defend your own is also an alignment viewpoint. It does matter what belief system you have.

And yes, I agree here. The cosmological alignment provides context for how the social virtues are used.

And I'm not understanding the problem here.

I'm not understanding the problem you're claiming to not understand. That is, there is no 'problem' in the associated quote, so what problem is there to not understand?

 

[Celebrim]

Which is exactly why I have an issue with using alignment in that way, as that's fairly common.

Yes, it is. And it drives me nuts. So I'm glad to see we are on the same page here.

I'm taking the idea of using the alignment system as a means of describing personality (which I find clumsy and not always useful), and changing it so that it does not depend on the traditional alignment system. I'm not trying to "map" alignment to something else (eg: Lawful Good → Loyal Brave), only using the mechanics of the 9 square grid (a variant on a Cartesian plane) to display a different type of description — what I described as a social compass.

Yeah, I get what you are trying to do, but I'm not just arguing that the alignment system fails to describe personality or culture (which is fine because it was never intended to do so) but any 9 square grid, or 16 square grid, or 64 cube space will fail to do so to an equal degree. The project is going to dead end.

My suggestion is if you are serious about this to pick up a pdf of Pendragon and look at Pendragon's approach to describing culture, because while that has its limitations it will get you much closer to where you are wanting to go. Of course, going there without actually taking the mechanical system of Pendragon and its implications seriously might not be useful to the game you want to play, but that's a different discussion.

Ehhh... Sorta? It can be a flaw to be loyal to the wrong person, but loyalty in itself is almost always treated as a virtue.

Notably, by the "Lawful" (getting us back to Gygax's unconsidered bias). Loyalty is considered a virtue in tribal and feudal societies, sometimes as the most important virtue. But, there are belief systems that consider loyalty one of the great vices of the world and the source of much that is wrong with it, because they believe what loyalty really is is putting glitter on the ideas of self-denial and irrationality. They would claim that loyalty is what gets us a world filled with violence, genocide, and war. Without loyalty people wouldn't be able to get others to do evil on their behalf, and without loyalty people would question whether or not they should do something on the basis of reason and not feelings or fear. And if you are neutral on this question then you tend to answer as I did that "loyalty" is a neutral virtue and it all depends on what you are loyal to.

Similarly with bravery, as can be most easily seen by considering its counterpart, cowardice.

Yes, exactly. There are belief system that consider "bravery" to be a great evil and would claim that it's putting a gloss of goodness on something that was wrong, and the world would be better if all soldiers were cowards and refused to fight and that "bravery" simply meant obeying orders without question. And to the extent that there was a good virtue to being brave, it would look nothing like what most people mean by bravery. It's quite possible to question whether being accepting of risk is really good in the long run. And it's pretty easy to imagine a fantasy species that makes a virtue out of being cowardly.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Like it's perfectly possible to believe both "We are Team Evil. And we are Right."

Is it though? Almost universally people and organisations see themselves as good and their causes as reasonable and righteous. No matter how horrible their aims and deeds actually are.

Hell, Gygax himself labels genocidal war criminals and slavers as good! The entire basis of the alignment system is rotten from the foundation.

 

[Celebrim]

Is it though? Almost universally people and organisations see themselves as good and their causes as reasonable and righteous. No matter how horrible their aims and deeds actually are.

How is that a contradiction of what I just stated?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

How is that a contradiction of what I just stated?

You'd not think yourself as "Team Evil" if you thought yourself as good.

 

[Celebrim]

You'd not think yourself as "Team Evil" if you thought yourself as good.

Sure, that's possible. Yes you could be on Team Evil even if (and some might say especially if) you thought yourself as Good. Just because you think you are Team Good doesn't mean you are, and you already seem to believe and understand that because you are willing to pass moral judgment on others. So clearly you aren't saying that it doesn't matter what you believe, everyone is equally correct.

And as such that doesn't contradict what I said.

In addition to what you said, it's also possible to believe that you are on Team Evil and you are morally right and correct. It's not as common, but it definitely happens. So even if you could prove to gnolls that they were somehow objectively on Team Evil (say you cast Detect Evil on them), it doesn't mean that they'd immediately concede that they were in the wrong or even that they'd be discomforted by this revelation. They'd laugh and say something like, "Well yes, but we live in a world governed by survival of the fittest and those that don't believe that are irrational and in denial of the reality of the world. So we are going to kill you, eat you, and enjoy that. And all your pretense that you are better than us is just self-delusion." And that's not that different than what many real people believe.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

You'd not think yourself as "Team Evil" if you thought yourself as good.

They might call themselves that even if they think they are right, though, and that "Good" isn't actually good. There are people who call themselves Satanists despite the negative connotations and the fact that they do not actually worship or believe in Satan, after all.