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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7817342" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think debating the "true" meaning of alignments is a bit pointless.The only clear accounts I know of are Gygax's, in his PHB and DMG.These make it clear that good encompasses all orientations towards valuable things: truth and beauty as well as life and wellbeing. Gygax is completely casual about the debates that characterise contemporary moral philosophy: human rights, belief in duty, promotion of wellbeing, Benthamite utilitarianism - all are classified by Gygax as good. So D&D alignment has nothing to contribute to questions about trolley problems, or global justice, or whether a beneficent king should give more money to the peasantry.Conversely, for evil purpose is the determinant - ie there is no recognition that value imposes any sort of constraint on personal choice. This is a straightforward characterisation of evil which doesn't seem to generate much need for debate. Jabba the Hutt seems to be evil in this sense. Whereas Han Solo clearly is not - he has a sense of honour and justice, and these constrain his actions, even though he is more casual with the truth, and with other's lives, than a saint would be.True neutral as Gygax characterises it roughly overlaps with some forms of Hellenistic philosophy (eg Stoicism - someone quoted Cicero upthread) and similar ideas found in Taoism, some forms of Zen Buddhism, etc.But the meaning of law and chaos are not made clear at all. Law is about order - but external or internal? Chaos is about self-realisation - but what are we to make of those, like classic D&D monks, who think that self-realisation is only possible through self-discipline and self-restraint? Are political thinkers - whether the founders of the US, or Locke before them, or Hayek since them - who emphasise the importance of the rule of law for individual liberty to be classified as lawful or chaotic? Gygax says nothing that would answer those questions, and as far as I know each table has to work this out for itself.In this context, working out what LN or CN really means seems impossible, and the aspiration pointless. The best we might say is that the LN are rules fetishists - but whether that means petty bureaucrats, or Chow Yun Fat's character in Crouching TIger, or either/both, seems up to the table to decide. And how exactly CN - which, says Gygax, is all about the necessity of absolute freedom and the overcoming of the order of life by dying - is to be distinguished from CE is not clear either. It's not coincidental that it often seems to be CE-lite or the "trickster" alignment.But <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/narrativist-9-point-alignment.451419/" target="_blank">I did once make a suggestion</a> as to how the classic tic-tac-toe alignment set-up might be used to frame an interesting campaign (though even then I don't think I managed to show that NG and NE might be useful - they really are just variants on CG and CE, right down to the way that Gygax describes them - perhaps the paradigm of grid-filling).</blockquote>

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