D&D General The History of Alignment: Why D&D Has the Nine-Point Alignment System 4 UR Memes


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The only way I could see it working is with a system like MtG, but even there, White does not represent "good" so much as it does a concern for morality, ethics, and also order.


Again, a scheme like MtG's color pie could work so that it's not just a simple axis.
I will restate again how much I'd love a D&D-like game built around the Magic color wheel and concepts. (Just not the 30 years of crufty card lore.)
 



I'm confused regarding your reading of The Strategic Review article. It clearly states "This all indicates that there are actually five, rather than three, alignments, namely: LAWFUL/GOOD LAWFUL/EVIL CHAOTIC/GOOD CHAOTIC/EVIL NEUTRAL."
These correspond with the only alignments in the Monster Manual. The nine point I do not recall ever seeing until the AD&D PHB. I just point this out to clarify your timeline as it doesn't really jump from "three to nine to five to nine" but from "three to five to nine"

In the article Gygax says that Law & Chaos meaning good & evil "meant just about the same thing in my mind" but is quick to point out they were not synonymous.

For what it's worth, I've always just considered it they way Gygax said most people did, with law=good, chaos=evil and moved on. If I needed more complexity,
 


Even growing up it struck me that automatically equating law with good and chaos with evil reflected a pretty particular view of the world.
I think that in a world where Law/Stasis and Chaos are the main cosmological opposing forces, with good and evil being mainly mortal and philosophical concerns*, and if you're at a point where the forces are mostly balanced... equating Law with Good is pretty tempting. Law is where you get the river flooding on schedule which gives you rich harvests. Law gets you cities protecting you from the wild. Law punishes miscreants who sell you low-quality copper ingots. Chaos... Chaos is where Weird naughty word is coming from. Things like chimeras and owlbears. And rivers not flooding on time, leading to poor harvests and famine.

Sure, if you go too far toward Law, you get stasis and oppression. But most settings aren't anywhere near that point. Excessive Law is a distant threat, mostly of concern to philosophers. Excessive Chaos will eat your face right here right now.

* Yes, this is not the setup from the OP, but I think we've wandered off a bit from that.
 

I've always seen alignment as something of "the lies you tell about your enemies".

I also feel like sentient creatures tend to lie to themselves about their own qualities, while condemning others for the same.

Even when I was twelve, and thought to myself, "Are Elves better than Orcs?" (meaning more good).

The answer that I came up with was, "Well, they think that they are!"

(I think that I might have been raised with a certain attitude toward colonialism, before I even knew what that was).
 

I also feel like sentient creatures tend to lie to themselves about their own qualities, while condemning others for the same.
i always have the urge with alignment to want to try a little social experiment where you make people judge the actions of their own characters without letting on that it was their own characters, to see how differently they weigh the scales when they don't have the inherent bias of knowing it was them doing it.
 


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