Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7974374" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well 2nd ed AD&D is probably a low point for the presentation of alignment.My view, though, is that some people want alignment to bear more load than it can carry.To reiterate a point made upthread, Gygax in his PHB and DMG expressly includes, under the label Good, all of the following: Benthamisms ("greatest good for the greatest number"), wellbeing, life, human rights, truth and beauty. It follows from this that the alignment system provides no answer to any question about trade-offs among those values, or about questions of whether the utilitarian calculus should yield (sometimes? allways?) to human rights concerns.The only moral philosphy that Gygax's alignment system doesn't gloss over is the following: is community and tradition and organisation (bundled together as law) the way to foster the values of goodness, or is individual self-realisation (which gets labelled chaos) the better way? But the alignment system doesn't answer this question because it allows players to affirm either (by being LG or CG) or to deny either (by being LE, one agrees with the CG that self-realisation is the path to goodness; by being CE, one agrees with the LG that traditionan and organisation are the path to goodness).The upshot of this is that, often, the dispute between law and chaos evaporates - or, as you say, turns into mere personality (dwarves are gruff clansmen; elves are flighty solo-ists) - because we end up saying that both LG and CG are not only possibel aspirations but are possible end-states.The alternative would be to make the dispute between law and chaos something that is actualy up for grabs in play - Dungeon World or Burning Wheel-style - but I don't see much evidence of D&D alignment actually being played in this way.</blockquote>

Verification