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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7975279" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, alignment is meant to be a reasonably simple yardstick for fantasy adventure that is morally rather light, or at least relatively unambiguous.What sucks is that people try to use it ways that it clearly isn't fit for.For instance, it makes little sense to try to fit real world people and events into the alignment framework, because the real world isn't really an examle of morally light and unambiguous fantasy hijinks.And anyone who wants to run a game with a moral context closer to modernist literature isn't going to find very much of use in the alignment system.Another problem, which may be inherent to the mechanic for reasons I will try to explain, is that people seem not to be able to take it at face value. For the mechanic to work, good has to mean good. Which means that the non-good (LN, CN, evil) are wrong in their convictions and actions. (TN are different because, as Gygax sets it out, they are committed to not acting - they resemble certain real-world outlooks such as Stoicism.)Because good means good, we have to explain other outlooks as flawed. The evil are selfish and don't respect other values (life, wellbeing, truth, beauty) in their goals and action. The LN and CN are fetishists of order and individualism respectively, who treat those things as ends rather than means.But somewhere along the way the idea came about that eahc of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil is a coherent value in its own right. Which leads to statements like [USER=177]@Umbran[/USER]'s that a LG person might rationally will order even when that does not contribute to wellbeing! Which is to say that a good person might prioritise some other end over the good! Which is incoherent unless good means something other than good. But if it does then the whole system breaks down into a garbled mush.Where does this idea of each end of the axis as a self-standing value come from? I blame Appendix IV of the PHB, which sets out the Outer Planes and correlates them to the alignments in a way that suggests that Law and Chaos are values or rational aspirations in their own right. I think this then gets taken up further in 2nd ed AD&D, and Planescape is it's culmination. In the 3E MotP we also see notions like NG being the "purest" or most absolute good. Which again implies that the LG are simultaneously committed to good and committed to subordinating it to some other value - yet are still good! Which as I've said makes no sense.Gygax's PHB and DMG alignment descriptions are much clearer. NG is not more "pure" than LG or CG. Rather, the NG take no strong view on what is the best means to achieve the good. If we assume that, a priori, it's an open question whether tradition, self-realisation, or both can lead to wellbeing then the NG are no more or less likely to bring about the most good in the world than the LG or the CG. Which to me is much more sensible as a framework.</blockquote>

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