Evil but No Good

[rasmuswagner]

My definition: Law (Order) is believing the Leviathan is good, Chaos is believing it is bad.

Law tends to crush Chaos, because it's actually organized, and Chaos just kind of whines and tries to convince people to become sovereign citizens.

You'll find quite a lot of very organized and "lawful" people and systems who think Leviathan is total crap, being opposed to any of the aspects of the system in it. For instance, anyone who really believes in and upholds US law.

Isn't "US Law" mostly about using anti-terror and asset forfeiture laws to make sure the proles don't step out of line?

[Nath]

Anthropocentric Order is another word for Humanoid Civilization. The farther you move from densely populated and highly organized cities of medium-sized bipeds, the more on the side of Chaos you are. Racial tension between elves and dwarfs (or humans/orcs), especially within the same city, is generally separate from the Law/Chaos angle. Monstrous humanoids are those tainted with Chaos, and everything else is Chaos; even if they form cities and cultures, they are fundamentally different from anything a humanoid would produce and thus be grouped with Chaos.

At some point (that is, before I dropped the idea of playing any pen & paper RPG that involved alignments), I considered defining Chaos/Law using the greek Chaos as the reference point, rather than a vague concept of Law. That is, Chaotic character would have been described as reactionary force trying to return the world to a state as close as it can be to the creation of the universe (somewhat stealing ecologist agenda from the Neutrals), while Lawful characters would be trying to further the organization of the world through law and technology. Only characters who would actually engage in such political struggle would have a Chaotic/Lawful alignment. A vast majority would be Neutral. To a point, the idea was that for Chaotic/Lawful ought to be revolutionary in nature: they would never have enough chaos/law for their view.
The related cosmogony would have had lawful gods reigning over strict domains (death, sea, farming, whatever) while chaotic gods would have been like ancient gods or titans, concerned about where they are at the moment or whatever attract their attention.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Easy solution:

There is a Law team.

There is a Chaos team.

Bob the necromancer joined the Law Team to get free cool Law swag and make out with attractive Lawful ladies.

Betty the Barbarian joined the Chaos Team to get free cool Chaos swag and make out with attractive Chaotic dudes.

Ta-da!

[RadiantPhoenix]

[quote="FrankTrollman]
This is the fundamental problem with Law and Chaos. Ain't nobody in the history of the universe been able to lay down an explanation where Law and Chaos are even different things. Let alone things that are mutually exclusive or comprehensive in coverage of potential motivations. They are a garbage concept. Totally unsalvageable and philosophically incoherent.

Law and Chaos were known to be bullshit before D&D was even a thing. The concept was exposed as half-assed and incoherent in the fucking Elric books, that predate the first published D&D books by over a decade. People smarter than you have been forced to concede that this is a fruitless conceptual path when your father was a child.

-Username17

My definition: Law (Order) is believing the Leviathan is good, Chaos is believing it is bad.

Law tends to crush Chaos, because it's actually organized, and Chaos just kind of whines and tries to convince people to become sovereign citizens.

Have you read Tome of Fiends?

Ethics Option 1: A level of Organization.

Optimal span of control is 3 to 5 people. Maybe Chaotic characters demand to personally control more units than that themselves and their lack of delegation ends up with a quagmire of incomprehensible proportions. Maybe Chaotic characters refuse to bow to authority at all and end up in units of one. Whatever the case, some DMs will have Law be well organized and Chaos be poorly organized. In this case, Law is objectively a virtue and Chaos is objectively a flaw.

Being disorganized doesn't mean that you're more creative or interesting, it just means that you accomplish less with the same inputs. In this model pure Chaos is a destructive, but more importantly incompetent force.

[/quote]
I just kind of assumed everyone had gotten selective amnesia about that and it needed to be pointed out, because I don't see a reason why it isn't coherent. I also added some elaboration on why Chaos continues to exist if Law keeps arresting its ass.

[Prak]

Well, to me, if Law vs Chaos is all about "Competence vs Incompetence," that is extremely unsatisfying.

[OgreBattle]

Law is about having a neatly trimmed mustache.
Chaos is about bristly beards.

Law is about hitting things with hammers.
Chaos is about stabbing things with curved daggers.

[virgil]

vs

[Prak]

Law is about having a neatly trimmed mustache.
Chaos is about bristly beards.

Law is about hitting things with hammers.
Chaos is about stabbing things with curved daggers.

Are dwarves neutral then?

[Josh_Kablack]

So Stalin, Hitler and Mario would be lawful, but Castro, Lincoln and Zangief would be Chaotic in that system. Contrairwise, Taft would be the last US President not to be neutral.

[tussock]

@CapnTthePirateG: team jersey is the stuff.

But even 1st edition was well away from it. Which is a shame, because we could've had predominately NG human settlements with NG horses and war dogs fighting the NE Orcs with their NE wyverns and war boars.

LE Goblinoids vs CG Elves. (burn it all vs don't even cut it)
NE Orcs vs NG Humans. (night wreckers vs day builders)
CE Drow vs LG Dorfs. (raid the surface vs delve the deeps)
CN Kobolds vs LN Gnomes. (trappers vs tricksters)

And the Drow/Troll/Giant alliance works with the Orcs and Kobolds easily enough, have a tense standoff with Goblins and Elves, hate Gnomes and Humans, and are almost constantly at war with Dwarves.

True Neutral is still the nature spirits and wild animals who oppose or side with everyone else equally. Druids, Dryads, and Bears. They are suspicious of and hate everyone equally.

[maglag]

A chaotic person is somebody who acts on whims and is spontaneous. The kind of people who are always wanting to try new things and always looking for something new and shiny.

A lawful person is someone who adheres to a set of rules. May be society's, may be his own set of rules, but he's gonna stick to them come high or low water. The guy who carefully plans ahead and is extra meticulous about details.

So, if chaotic people are the opposite of lawful people, how do chaotic people communicate? What is language if not a set of rules?

- Edit: Giant frog, Giant frog, Ganit ogrf.

?FroggiantFiAnTGrOg-

EDIT: Indeed chaotic people will be the most prone to spout out random gibberism and making up new words, or start using old words in new ways. Efficient communication will not be easy, but can make for great entertainment.

There's however some "universal" languages, like pain and death. A chaotic army "works" by the leader punching/killing everybody who isn't charging on the direction he wants right now.

Still most people are neutral, so that's why we have hundreds of different languages nowadays. Neutral people don't always stick to language rules, and thus they have been mutating.

Lawful people however struggle to keep some old languages, so we still know how ancient Latin works and shit.

[FatR]

Okay, I had a silly idea. How about getting rid of the Good alignment and leave just Neutral and Evil?

Because DnDverse isn't quite grimderp enough, despite being quite possibly worse than Warhammer, once you look at the big picture?

It seems like an obvious fix for a lot of problems, such as the killing orc babies issue, and why Archons don't just make enough food for every good person on the Material plane so that they no longer have to toil.
Neither is a problem that needs fixing on the setting level. The "orc babies" shit is purely a form of destructive GMing, where the GM either deliberately sets a trap by not making it clear whether that would be infanticide or dismantling killdrones before they have reached 100% of their attack capability; or even de-facto treating adult orcs as killdrones mindlessly suiciding against PCs but still raining indignation and punishments on players for taking the hint. Archons are supposed to be good, so euthanizing good populations by demographical collapse probably wouldn't have been high on their list of priorities even if they weren't busy making sure that those populations aren't eaten by hordes of fiends.

It seems like an unbalanced alignment system would be more interesting, from a a cosmological perspective.

While apparently a lot of players like to play in the worlds of absolute hopelessness, I think this niche is pretty well occupied.

[FatR]

And as about the differences between Law and Chaos.

They are only difficult to explain because Evil is a different thing from Chaos in DnD, whereas in the works of fiction from which the very idea of Law vs Chaos came (the Eternal Champion books and Three Hearts and Three Lions) Chaos was for all intents and purposes Evil with serial numbers filed off. Law stood for maintenance of the rules that ensured continued existence of anything resembling the world of mortals. Chaos stood for throwing those rules away, so that a small group of beings on the top of the power pyramid can juggle the suns and make castles of living blood, and whatever suits their fancies, while everyone else gets the shaft.

Actually that is a fairly nice point of distinction between good guy and bad guy factions for a game like DnD: it allows to quickly explain why the bad guys must be opposed without digging too deep into discussions on morality and triggering every sperg and edgy teen who thinks he's beyond the outdated notion of objective morality. But using the Law-Chaos axis in this way requires removal of the Good-Evil axis.

[K]

The alignment system is fundamentally the product of early RPG technology, but since DnD is now entirely nostalgia-gaming, it can't be changed.

[Mask_De_H]

FatR, unfuck your tags.

You could just make the alignments ultimately irrelevant by turning the spells that require their use into targeting outsiders and shit, like 5e does. If you remove the mechanics, they become character prompts for lazy people.

[MGuy]

Shitty character prompts. I stopped using them quite some time ago.

[hyzmarca]

While apparently a lot of players like to play in the worlds of absolute hopelessness, I think this niche is pretty well occupied.

You've got it wrong. The Balanced alignment system is the one of absolute hopelessness, because the good guys cannot win. Sure, they can win individual battles, but they war will always go on.

The unbalanced alignment system does give you a chance to win. It's a system where you can just nuke Baator without breaking the universe.

Besides, Mount Celestia is boring.

[tussock]

The Balanced alignment system is the one of absolute hopelessness, because the good guys cannot win.

That doesn't make any sense at all, by the way. Hope is a thing where you want the future to be better, and if Good won and eliminated all Evil, that's it, there's no more hope for anything, you've won, and all is now literally as Good as it gets forever.

[Omegonthesane]

The Balanced alignment system is the one of absolute hopelessness, because the good guys cannot win.

That doesn't make any sense at all, by the way. Hope is a thing where you want the future to be better, and if Good won and eliminated all Evil, that's it, there's no more hope for anything, you've won, and all is now literally as Good as it gets forever.

Hope is the thing where you thing things can possibly get better.

And "hopelesseness" more often than not has connotations of despair and ennui, because the situation where hope is no longer necessary because you got the Golden Ending doesn't happen outside the last 1% of videogames.

[FatR]

You've got it wrong. The Balanced alignment system is the one of absolute hopelessness, because the good guys cannot win. Sure, they can win individual battles, but they war will always go on.

The unbalanced alignment system does give you a chance to win. It's a system where you can just nuke Baator without breaking the universe.

Your theory is not confirmed by practice, given that the best-known example of an unbalanced alignment system is Warhammer 40k. Maybe somewhere out there RPG writers who do not take a system unbalanced in favor of evil as an invitation to make evil so overpowering that PCs' best hope against it is holding the line for a little bit longer. I just haven't read any. And if you talk about hypotheticals, a dualistic system might well be predicated on the assumption that one of the sides is eventually going to win, so efforts of mortal heroes raise the overall chance of good prevailing in the end.

Besides, Mount Celestia is boring.

Place that are nice to live in tend to be boring by nature, particularly in a game about walking to the heights of glory over a mountain of corpses.

But you still need such places just so characters can know that their mountain of corpses is not the only reality of the world.

[hyzmarca]

Your theory is not confirmed by practice, given that the best-known example of an unbalanced alignment system is Warhammer 40k.

40k isn't Neutral vs Evil, it's Cartoonishly Evil vs, Insanely Evil.

[Wiseman]

Your theory is not confirmed by practice, given that the best-known example of an unbalanced alignment system is Warhammer 40k.

40k isn't Neutral vs Evil, it's Cartoonishly Evil vs, Insanely Evil.

Plus Disturbingly Evil. Isn't this the setting with the rape camps?

[Darth Rabbitt]

I thought it was Stupidly Evil vs. Even More Stupidly Evil. This is the setting that gave us the Imperium of Man after all.

[Chamomile]

Your theory is not confirmed by practice, given that the best-known example of an unbalanced alignment system is Warhammer 40k.

40k isn't Neutral vs Evil, it's Cartoonishly Evil vs, Insanely Evil.

Plus Disturbingly Evil. Isn't this the setting with the rape camps?

No, that was the techno-Lovecraft one whose name I can't quite remember. The Chaos God of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll might have rape camps in some obscure bit of fluff, but traditionally he is depicted as being evil for encouraging sex at all, because 40k is written by and for thirteen year olds.

[Prak]

Cthulhutech.