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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 7817338" data-attributes="member: 1465">Originally in D&D there was only Law vs Chaos. Perhaps the idea was to avoid using the Good and Evil labels, because in some way it was used as Law = the right side, Chaos = the wrong side, even tho things were blurred since the start with mixed PC groups.When D&D switched to 2-axis alignment, things should have become more understandable, but a lot of players never really got the meanings. For many of them, law meant rigid and chaos meant random, except that "random" was exploited as "I do what I want when I want" and the rest of the world will interpret my behaviour as random.Pair that with Evil vs Good and it gets even more messy. In a triumph of relativism, some players always insisted in thinking that neutrality between Good and Evil means something like 50% Good and 50% Evil, perhaps because they are thinking too much "mathematically" and pretend that things which are labelled must work symmetrically, but that is frankly insane, and bears no resemblance with our natural real-life concept of morality...After all, if you murder one human being, it's not like any justice system will go easy on you because it's just one and you could have murdered a hundred... you are pretty much punished for decades at least, sometimes for life, and in some systems you are even executed.The point being, in real life Good and Evil are not symmetric, so why should they be in D&D? If your players' OCD prevents them from accepting that, you can still restore some sort of balance between the two, but do not base it on murder counts! Stress the fact for each murder (or bad thing) an Evil character makes, a Good character normally makes one selfless act of sacrifice. If you character does neither, then it's Neutral. Perhaps buying flowers to your mom, caring for your family, working honestly are not selfless enough to grant the Good label, they are just decent things everyone is expected to do in their lives. The problem is maybe that people who only do those still consider themselves "Good" because they are not murdering anyone. Ok, but if you do the same in the game, there is then no real room for a "Neutral" alignment, so ditch it altogether.Back to Law vs Chaos, this shouldn't really have much to do with randomness, but it's rather about the character's relation with rules, and consequently with authority. A character that recognizes rules and mostly abides to them is Lawful, a character that believes absence of rules is actually better is Chaotic. Authority should be considered later, because there are a lot of grey areas between legitimate and illegitimate authority. Is a character supporting a corrupt government or a dictatorship established by a coup more Lawful or Chaotic? Depends on how you watch it...Finally, we should always remember that alignment is meant to be a guideline for roleplaying, not a cage. I think 5e designers made the right choice in making alignment optional. You want to play the hood who "occasionally" murders someone? Just don't put any alignment on your character sheet, and nobody will care.But if you really want to put that label on your PC, either make it more realistic (even if it means 90% of the people are Neutral in all respects), or consider ditching Neutral altogether to separate the sides.</blockquote>

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