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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nivenus" data-source="post: 6406685" data-attributes="member: 71756">I think you've more or less hit the nail on the head. Good and evil, as most people use the words, are inherently quite contentious and subjective in meaning, and basically everyone can and will differ over what they regard as "absolute good." However, for the terms to have any meaning in the context of D&D's rules, the terms have to be assigned more concrete meanings. According to D&D mercy, compassion, selflessness, and hope are good while severity, cruelty, selfishness, and despair are evil. Law and chaos, meanwhile, represent an entirely different set of values, which good or evil characters might exhibit alongside their (good) virtues and (evil) vices.The other thing is that pemerton does have a point insofar as part of the confusion also derives from several authors' unequal treatment of the law/chaos divide in respect to the good/evil one. While I think in certain respects it makes sense that good characters will band together for common cause regardless of law or chaos (because tolerance is essentially a "good" value in D&D), the fact of the matter is that a lot of authors (and designers) lean on the conflict between good and evil because it's easier to understand within the context of our culture (what with its background in Abrahamic mythology), often to the expense of law and chaos.That being said, I think the law and chaos conflict is largely more interesting, because it's actually more common (in my experience) and because it allows for more nuance in storytelling. A lawful good character is clearly superior to a chaotic evil one, but are they really morally superior to a chaotic neutral one? What about a lawful neutral character and a chaotic good one? Which you believe to be superior depends to a large extent on your own personal beliefs, which is something the simple dualism of good vs. evil doesn't allow (or even law and chaos by itself, if law is presumed good and chaos presumed evil). I like then that a lot of early sourcebooks (Planescape included but not alone) put an emphasis on the law vs. chaos conflict and didn't let it get totally subsumed by good vs. evil. For similar reasons I kind of wish WotC had put out a Book of Impeccable Honor and Book of Boundless Liberty (or some such thing) alongside the Book of Exalted Deeds and Book of Vile Darkness, to encourage more sophisticated play of the lawful and chaotic alignments in the same way those books encourage a more sophisticated consideration of D&D's conceptions of good and evil.That WotC (and TSR) have in the past often failed to do this however is not because law vs. chaos is a meaningless conflict; the rules and the lore both explicitly state its equal importance to good vs. evil. Rather, it's because good vs. evil is more popular and easier to understand.</blockquote>

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