A structured attempt at alignment

[JigokuBosatsu]

Well, at least the Dapper/Scruffy and Gentleman/Hooligan axes have much less loaded language.

[Occluded Sun]

Well, at least the Dapper/Scruffy and Gentleman/Hooligan axes have much less loaded language.

Oh, I hope this was sarcasm.

I could see an argument that the terms are more agreed-upon, but unloaded they are not.

[animea90]

Well, at least the Dapper/Scruffy and Gentleman/Hooligan axes have much less loaded language.

Yeah, nobody is going to be able to keep a straight face while arguing over whether someone's alignment should be shifted from Dapper to Scruffy.

[tussock]

True Neutral (grey) can serve as the guys that are always on the winning team just as well as the guys who don't want anyone to win and thereby impose anything on them.

Wait, are you actually bringing up that Protected Balance bullshit where Neutral characters were required to change sides mid-conflict if the side they're on began to win? Because that was horseshit when it was the status quo in D&D and should in no way be encouraged to return.

It was aimed in context of the Ranger/Druid/Assassin post. But yes, in context of team jerseys, if you're the serious-minded small farmers of the hinterlands, you want to side neither with the forest-guardian love-in types, nor with the devil-worshipping city folk. The duty of formally neutral territories is to resist either army should they cross your border.

And if they both arrive, you stand back and prepare to kick the shit out of the winner when they've been nicely softened up. Think Switzerland, rather than a crazy person.

Yeah, nobody is going to be able to keep a straight face while arguing over whether someone's alignment should be shifted from Dapper to Scruffy.

If the dude casts Dapper Word, I'm Dapper. At least for that round. Jaunty smile. Legit.

[Occluded Sun]

Oh, the Swiss are completely mad. But they're quiet and polite, so no one cares.

It's a lot easier to understand the "we'll fight to maintain the balance of the status quo" if you picture two completing armies of eldritch abominations fighting over the Earth, and plucky adventurers struggling to defeat them both.

Being conquered by the forces of 'Good' ultimately wouldn't be much better for reality than falling to the forces of 'Evil', after all.

[rapa-nui]

In those the really "evil" things are alien beings who have become stuck on a world with Gods who enforce a very strict code of good and evil. Use magic = go straight to hell. The aliens have no idea what the code is, and their native psychology doesn't even allow them to understand good and evil in the same way as humans so they always get sent to hell. Its pretty interesting, if also a little on the wordy side. However, its the sort of thing that just further makes it clear that D&D alignment is a terrible idea.

I just wanted to +1 Bakker, since he's my favorite fantasy author by a mile. The work is actually an exploration of what happens when you take a world where reductionist materialism and God Enforced Morality are both literally true.

[virgil]

Morality:

• Good - Willing to sacrifice personal gain for the greater good
  Neutral - Personal sacrifice only for personal gain
  Evil - Willing (and usually eager) to sacrifice others for personal gain

Legality:

• Lawful - Hold yourself to an externally-defined code of behavior
  Neutral - Unconcerned by externally-defined codes of behavior
  Chaotic - Attempts to breakdown externally-defined social mores.

[Laertes]

It's interesting that this thread came up again. I was thinking about this as a result of discussing intra-party betrayals with a friend, and I came up with the following. The idea was that regardless of alignment, the entire party is still on the same side and has the same goal; alignment merely describes the way they go about it.

Morality:

Good - Willing to disadvantage their personal group in order to benefit the broader population
Neutral - Unwilling to disadvantage anyone for anyone else's benefit
Evil - Willing to disadvantage the broader population in order to benefit their personal group

Legality:

Lawful - Willing to honour their word even if it means acting against their morals
Neutral - Depending on the circumstances, may go either way
Chaotic - Willing to hold to their morals even if it means dishonouring their word

[Starmaker]

Willing to honour their word even if it means acting against their morals

Think of the kittens.

[Username17]

Since keeping your word or not is by definition a moral choice, that description just made me sad face.

-Username17

[Laertes]

Semantics. You know perfectly well what I mean; in case you genuinely don't I can give you an example. You are given an assassination mission and you solemnly swear to carry it out. It turns out that the target is actually someone whose cause you agree with and your client is actually the bad guy. What do? This is an actual situation which turns up a lot in gaming and which every GM has sprung on people at least once. As such, asking a character what they would do in this situation is a question that has real implications during play.

[Cervantes]

That's not really Morality/Legality though, that's Self-Sacrifice/Promisekeeping.

[Username17]

Semantics. You know perfectly well what I mean; in case you genuinely don't I can give you an example. You are given an assassination mission and you solemnly swear to carry it out. It turns out that the target is actually someone whose cause you agree with and your client is actually the bad guy. What do? This is an actual situation which turns up a lot in gaming and which every GM has sprung on people at least once. As such, asking a character what they would do in this situation is a question that has real implications during play.

That's just a moral question of whether the cause in question is more important than honor. It's absolutely not a meaningful point to divide alignment along because there are infinity other questions just as important. Property rights versus rights to basic needs for example.

-Username17

[fectin]

Property rights vs rights to basic needs actually sounds like a great dichotomy to build a law-chaos axis on. It's clear, has deeper implications, and each side has a compelling pitch.

Interaction with spells is a little weird, but any philosophy-based alignment scheme has that problem.

[Occluded Sun]

I see no practical reason why characters who adhere to individual codes shouldn't be considered lawful/ordered - as long as it's clear to all of the players involved what that code is.

Characters who are motivated by their own personal whims aren't ordered.

[John Magnum]

Occluded Sun you goof, what if your code is "act according to my whims"? Indeed, for any possible set of actions, it's possible to have a sufficiently large, complex code that mandates all of them. So really what you want to look at is the Kolmogorov complexity of a character's code.

[hyzmarca]

I prefer the Spock-McCoy spectrum for the Law-Chaos axis.

Modrons are Vulcans, Slaadi are Southern Gentlemen.

[Ancient History]

"That polyhedron son-of-a-bitch. It's his revenge for all those arguments he lost. Ribbit."

[Sir Aubergine]

"That polyhedron son-of-a-bitch. It's his revenge for all those arguments he lost. Ribbit."

The mental imagery created by your post is too much.

[Username17]

Property rights vs rights to basic needs actually sounds like a great dichotomy to build a law-chaos axis on. It's clear, has deeper implications, and each side has a compelling pitch.

Interaction with spells is a little weird, but any philosophy-based alignment scheme has that problem.

The problem is that it's not a dichotomy. Obviously you have extreme positions like Inspector Javert who believes that people should be pursued to the ends of time and fully punished for stealing bread to starve and the Mooninites who believe that you should take other peoples' stuff when you want it - but not only do the vast majority of non-fictional (and fictional) characters have opinions that are in between those positions, but people whose opinions are between those positions still get into screaming matches with each other for lack of seeing eye to eye.

But most importantly of all, the people who don't agree don't agree because they are farther on a spectrum, they just don't fucking agree. People don't agree on what counts as a "need," nor do people agree on what constitutes "property." You got people like Cliven Bundy who argue that their property rights over cattle entitle them to graze on your lands without paying for it, because reasons. You got people like the nation of India who argue that the needs of their sick people entitle them to not pay for the intellectual property of drug companies whether or not there is enough money in their entire budget to pay for them.

-Username17

[Niles]

Here's my alignment axis

Scruffy<--->Dapper
Gentleman<--->Hooligan

Orcs are an example of Scruffy Hooligans. Aragorn is a Scruffy Gentleman, Sauromon is a Dapper Gentleman, Bilbo was a Dapper Hooligan.

All you really need to popularize this is to do some good MGK style alignment charts. (Which sensible people will agree are the best/only good thing to come out of AD&D's 9 point grid.)

[Laertes]

I like your axis, fectin, but my objection to it would be that it doesn't have a position for simple selfishness. After all, there are plenty of people in the world who will shift their opinion on property rights vs basic needs depending on whether it's their property or their needs that are being discussed. For the most part, the supporters of a vulgar-libertarian state tend to be those who are either wealthy or who optimistically expect to be wealthy; whereas the supporters of a nonconsensually egalitarian society tend to be those who are either deprived or who see themselves as representing the deprived.

A cynical man might posit that as Frank's examples showed, most people who hold these positions hold them selfishly. I'm not a cynical man - I genuinely believe that there is such a thing as idealism in the world - but you might be. As such, I think you need to separate the "believes in basic needs" and "believes in property rights" from the "believes in whatever will most directly advantage this person or the group with which they identify."

This is why I posited an axis of "wants to help their in-group" versus "wants to help the wider population." There's a very real and useful place in roleplaying games for the person who's a total asshole to outsiders but looks after the other party members. It manages to create genuine roleplaying opportunities while not being the thing that's often called "creating genuine roleplaying opportunities" - that is, being a game-wreckingly party-splittingly disruptive presence because the other characters can't trust them.

[fectin]

The problem is that it's not a dichotomy. [etc.]
-Username17

That's true, as is your longer critique. I don't think either is bad for games though, in principle or in practice. Law and chaos are not strictly speaking a dichotomy either, but they are in opposition enough that you could follow one or the other (assuming you could get a common definition for what they actually mean).
Further, I don't think that having room for disagreement about "what do property rights entail" is a bad thing - fundamentally, that reduces to arguments about what property rights someone has. That's analogous to two parties agreeing that "justice" is important, but disagreeing on what it means, which is at least potentially good for games, and is definitely good for stories.


@Laertes, I like your phrasing on "nonconsensually egalitarian society." However, I think that the positions you propose are more useful as consequences of some underlying philosophy than as a direct cause.

My own swing at it was way back on page 1, with positive/negative energy and arcane/divine magic.