D&D General The Problem with Evil or what if we don't use alignments?

[Oofta]

(Note session 0 must always have an Alignment discussion with the DM being the final ruler in what is good and evil.)
What happens when you totally drop alignment? Not much. DM will just quit asking why the PCs burned down the orphanage because Little Ricky kicked the Paladin in the ankle.

Adventure League will have to come up with a rule which covers Evil actions but without using Alignment. Heck, two or more of my PCs were Lawful Evil in my Icewind Dale campaign. The only official thing I could do was change their alignment to evil and banish their PC from the campaign. But during Season 9 the AL team stated you can change non Mechanical stuff between sessions. So hair color, sex, eye color, height, alignment, weight, and sports team could change. So Bob would just write lawful good on his pc sheet in dry erase.

Spells would have some descriptions. Protection from good would Protection from Non Material. ETC.

I think 5E has hit the sweet spot on the Alignment. I think the monster manual needs a bold edit. Change ...The alignment specified in a monster’s stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster’s alignment to suit the needs of your campaign.....
To "THE ALIGMENT SPECIFIED IN A MONSTER'S STAT BLOCK IS A SUGGESTION ONLY." Yes bold it. And some of the more RAW people here can then start quoting and paging the Monster manual.

In the MM they already have: "The alignment specified in a monster’s stat block is the default." Unfortunately it's just buried in the intro. IMHO It should be it's own section in the DMG and spelled out more clearly in the MM.

Unfortunately it looks like their stripping it even from individuals in the new books which to me is an over-reaction. For example I was just browsing Van Richten's guide and there are no alignments for the darklords. Now I have to read paragraphs of text to understand them. If I had alignment, it helps me set the tone for them. As the MM says "A monster’s alignment provides a clue to its disposition and how it behaves in a roleplaying or combat situation."

They still make it clear that these entries are about very bad people. Nothing has changed in how they are described, but they've taken away a simple tool that helps me understand them just a little better.

 

[Oofta]

Sounds like a serious moral dilemma to me! Ok, not really. "Having these kids around is inconvenient, so should we just kill them?" rarely is a moral dilemma most people would need to think about, and if they would, I'd be very worried to be around them. Granted, what exactly to do with the kids might be a problem, but that's more of a practical problem than a moral one, once you've come to the bloody obvious conclusion that murdering them is not an option.


Yeah, a little bit of child murdering never made anyone evil if they're a decent person most of the time!


I mean it isn't black and white if you effectively just ignore it. If you think child murderers can be 'good people' then what the hell makes someone evil? At this point you might as well get rid of the system as it obviously doesn't describe anything any more.

So again ... the problem with alignment is something someone said half a century ago?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So I'm glad to see you arguing that morality is black-and-white and that child murders can't be good people, because I have this great system that reflects that called Alignment, you will love it.

You mean the system whose creator though that a child murder was a perfect example of lawful good?

But yes, there are actually things most sane people would agree are pretty unambiguously evil. We could get some such agreement with good too. But once you move away from that very limited set of obvious things (that didn't seem to be obvious to Gygax!) things get muddy super fast.

 

[Cadence]

No it wasn't. Orcs in D&D never were automatically evil.

I don't know. And there is no obvious correct answer to such questions. That's why black-and-white morality is dumb.

Iirc, the Moldvay basic rules had Orcs as Chaotic with a reminder to DMs to always play monster alignment appropriately.

Of course the alignment example vignette also had the Lawful character sparing the captives.

 

[Maxperson]

And everyone got that just fine without an alignment tag!

In a scripted movie. Unscripted RPGs are more in depth and require the DM to be able to accurately run the NPCs. Alignment helps considerably with that.

 

[Cadence]

You mean the system whose creator though that a child murder was a perfect example of lawful good?

There have been various widely used religious books over the millennia that have several examples of divinely sanctioned, or divinely carried out, mass child killing. The books and those who believe(d) them presumably wouldn't classify those incidents as murder though.

 

[Oofta]

Can someone please explain why removing alignment is going to change anything when we have descriptive text in the MM that has a description for an entry that has:

"savage raiders and pillagers ... [take] particular joy in slaughtering elves ... satisfy their bloodlust by plundering villages, devouring or driving off roaming herds, and slaying any humanoids that stand against them"​

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Or take a look at another random monster entry:

"... the scourge of sentient creatures across countless worlds. Psionic tyrants, slavers, and interdimensional voyagers, they are insidious masterminds that harvest entire races for their own twisted ends. Four tentacles snake from their octopus-like heads, flexing in hungry anticipation when sentient creatures come near."​

A rose by any other name is still evil. I just know that the former monster is CE and the latter is LE in addition to all the fluff text. Alignment gives me a little more depth and understanding I wouldn't otherwise have.

Of course, again, these are just the defaults which should be made clearer. But if you aren't using the default, in most campaigns exactly how they're implementing will vary from one setting to the next.

 

[Maxperson]

And if a child murderer can be lawful good, then the system is obviously utterly useless for describing morality!

Fortunately, what Gygax thought and what is written are two very different things. RAW didn't allow for LG child murder.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Can someone please explain why removing alignment is going to change anything when we have descriptive text in the MM that has a description for an entry that has:

"savage raiders and pillagers ... [take] particular joy in slaughtering elves ... satisfy their bloodlust by plundering villages, devouring or driving off roaming herds, and slaying any humanoids that stand against them"​

​

Or take a look at another random monster entry:

"... the scourge of sentient creatures across countless worlds. Psionic tyrants, slavers, and interdimensional voyagers, they are insidious masterminds that harvest entire races for their own twisted ends. Four tentacles snake from their octopus-like heads, flexing in hungry anticipation when sentient creatures come near."​

A rose by any other name is still evil. I just know that the former monster is CE and the latter is LE in addition to all the fluff text. Alignment gives me a little more depth and understanding I wouldn't otherwise have.

How? What does alignment tell you about those monsters that those paragraphs don't?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Can someone please explain why removing alignment is going to change anything when we have descriptive text in the MM that has a description for an entry that has:

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It's kinda the chicken or the egg situation*. Does those descriptions exist because the creatures are defined by alignment as evil or are they classified as evil because their description implies it? But yeah, some of those descriptions need to change too, no question about it. In any case, once the alignment is gone, it gives more freedom to describing the creatures. When the creatures aren't married to one specific alignment you can write their descriptions differently.

(* Which actually is a stupid metaphor, the egg was first, there is no ambiguity about this.)