9 Alignments Again (Hoping to make sense)

[Eikre]

The existence of the Atonement spell is pretty fucked up because the Christian concept of Atonement on which it is based is all fucked up

Well.

Okay, so lots of Protestants could give a fuck about Good Works, but the Catholics recognize them as necessary for Salvation.

The rite of Confession is actually called the Sacrament of Penance and genuinely necessitates that you do something to sustain your absolution. Over many centuries, and in part due to cynical reasons, penance has become far more trivial and personal and the great likelihood is that you'll leave the Confession box assigned to chant a certain number of Hail Marys, but classically you were under the obligation to go forth and do good deeds, give alms, and try to restore the injuries you inflicted on your neighbors. If you step into the confessional today and tell the priest that you murdered a man and that his body is buried in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance he's going to demand you surrender yourself to the police and give up the location of the body as a condition of your absolution.

This is as good a theology for a game as it is for the Catholics. You're never really out with Christ or Pelor if you don't want to be, and your supernatural privileges will not be stripped from you for mere error. If you fuck up really badly, though, you're going to be obliged to fulfill certain tasks. In real life this is an inconvenience, but in D&D, it's a sidequest, baby.

The problems that strike me about Atonement in D&D is the misnomer with respects to Evil religions, that it's a fucking fifth-level spell and thus the strict privilege of higher level characters, that it's wildly discretionary, and that the caster (not the sinner) is the one who shoulders the significant costs of the spell.

Really, "Communion" should be a ritual that a level 1 NPC can do. If you're a lay member of the congregation then he assigns ordinary tasks in the form of some generic on-aesthetic works, but if you're a powerful convert or have supernatural powers as a grant from your religion (sidenote: clerics are a dumb class; this should be a single domain and class skill that you got from a feat) then somebody discharges their highest level spell-slot to power a Divination effect where confessor and priest are both visited with with a revelation as to how they'll serve penance. Might just be a compulsion to mutilate a housecat for the glory of Satan, but if the DM is mad at you for murdering the self-insert that he was going to use to deliver a bunch of exposition, or if your character's background is that he's lived a long life of NotTeamWhoever and he's trying to convert, or if this is an NPC that you've talked into switching sides and need a mechanism to parole him, then the confessor gets hit with far more specific and arbitrary directives that sends them where they need to be for the campaign to continue.

If, as a confessor, you don't do that shit, then that religion stops providing your Domain, the priest who performed the sacrament will know it and have you censured, and the DM can have a filler session where you fight the inquisitors that came to hold you accountable. Or if you're the priest, then you'll know where the heretic is and YOU can go hold him accountable.

But all of this is STILL hedged to coming up with particular philosophies or religions to hold you accountable to instead of "Chaotic Neutral," so I have nothing to say in defense of alignment in the context of this post.

[DrPraetor]

Historically, calling someone an anarchist basically meant anti-monarchist or even democrat.

So anarchists are not people who oppose all efforts to supplant organic morale sensibilities with rules; but, people who opposite the imposition of rules or efforts to formalize morality would surely qualify as anarchists! More realistically, there do exist people who renounce authority, and feel their principles betrayed by anyone who would wield authority. Whether such people have a philosophically consistent worldview:

Isn't your denial of authority, or opposition to formalism, itself a rule that you wish to impose on other people... man?

is besides the point, because people hold such views regardless.

So, it's true that this distinction is not philosophically expressed as an aversion to Ethics which are in the real world seldom a motivating factor for those in Authority.

But, it doesn't bother me if Chaos is philosophically inconsistent. Hell, in Moorcock Chaos is supposed to be internally contradictory, it was like their thing.

The bigger problem is with Law. There are certainly people who hold what might be called the opposite view - that it doesn't matter what rules you have, as long as you have rules. There are people who feel a similar way about religion. But, they aren't really a team, right?

So Modrons can't be team, "follow some Law", they have to be team "follow THE Law", which means there needs to be one Law that everyone with a Lawful alignment shares.

Good, on the other hand and since Chaotic Good people exist, is therefore the alignment of pluralism. So a defining aspect of the Good alignment is that while you insist on morality, you accept that others will have a different viewpoint and don't disregard their sincerity or virtue. Law, on the other hand, is not pluralistic.

If you're playing the game of hexes, Law is the alignment that makes your legitimacy go up.

[GnomeWorks]

I feel like this is a pretty good explanation of how the MtG color wheel works, philosophically, and why it would work as an alignment system.

Specifically, it calls out that white is not inherently good, and black is not inherently evil, which I've seen used up-thread. Among many of the other things about the wheel that it spells out.

[Mord]

I feel like this is a pretty good explanation of how the MtG color wheel works, philosophically, and why it would work as an alignment system.

Specifically, it calls out that white is not inherently good, and black is not inherently evil, which I've seen used up-thread. Among many of the other things about the wheel that it spells out.

Sorry, but I don't buy these descriptions at all. This whole thing is fucking incoherent. This is how it describes Black:

The archetypal black organization would be a hedge fund or a startup, and a black dystopia would be a totalitarian dictatorship.

And here's how it describes White:

The archetypal white organization would be a church, and a white dystopia would be a fascist regime such as the one in George Orwell’s 1984, or a stagnant society like the one in Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

What the fuck? Those are the same thing!

Here's how it describes Blue:

The archetypal blue organization would be a university or a research lab, and a blue dystopia would be one in which efficiency were pursued without morals or limits, or in which intelligence were the sole axis of a meritocracy.

And here's how it describes Black:

Black wants power and agency so that it can act upon its preferences at any time, reshaping the world around it into whatever it wants. It recognizes no limits upon this pursuit except those which emerge from its own desires and self-interest. It is capable of cooperation and alliance, but only consequentially, as in game theory; at its core, black is amoral, not immoral, since it doesn’t think morality is even really a Thing.

What the fuck again? Those are literally the exact same words for the exact same thing!

Someone competent might be able to assemble a moral framework out of the Magic colors, but this author is not that person.

For what it's worth, the Black they describe is openly evil without mitigation. If your best example of a "good" black organization is a hedge fund, which is an organization dedicated to enriching its owners and fuck everyone else on Earth, then you've failed to describe a Black that is anything but evil.

This is not the first time someone has attempted to argue that there is a meaningful distinction between human actors who do shitty things to other people based on whether those actors acknowledge that what they are doing is evil ("immoral") or whether they consider themselves to be beyond good and evil ("amoral"). It is a distinction without a difference. If you do shitty things to other people because it enriches you at their expense, that's evil and you're evil for doing it. Full stop.

P.S. Also it's really off-putting that the author keeps referencing HPMOR as though it were a real thing. It's not.

[Chamomile]

I don't want to write a whole article right now (although it sounds like the kind of thing I could copy/paste mostly unaltered into my blog, so I may at some point), but to address the specific flaws of that one:

-A black mana dystopia is not a totalitarian dictatorship, it's Somalia or medieval France. Warlords constantly vie for power and while particularly competent dictators may be able to mostly impose their will over their vassals for their lifetime, when they die everything will collapse back into incessant infighting. Totalitarianism is a white mana thing.

-Blue mana is not about efficiency, it's about achieving sufficient understanding of the universe that you can change it to suit your whim. I don't know how the author of the article managed to miss this because he's clearly an HPMOR fan and that book is one of the biggest blue mana cheerleaders I've ever seen. A blue villain is one who is willing to make any sacrifice in pursuit of greater knowledge, something which perhaps the original author is reluctant to admit because there's pretty good odds that Eliezer Yudkowsky would totally do that.

It's also worth noting that one of the biggest flaws of the MtG wheel is that while it is easy to imagine a black mana character being on Team Good as an alliance of convenience, it is difficult to imagine a black mana character who isn't evil. The closest I've ever been able to get is one whose ambitions are relatively humble, someone who just wants a comfortable life for themselves and their family, for example, which means they just don't usually have any reason to drown puppies, even though they are totally willing to do that if it ever became convenient. And it's worth noting that even getting this far required throwing in some green or red mana overtones. You could certainly create a better alignment system than MtG serves in terms of pure usability, but I don't think there's anything better that has the advantage of already being well known and easy to explain and remember. If you want people to remember what purple, gold, and mauve represent, you're starting from scratch, and familiarity with actual real-world philosophies is woefully uncommon compared to either MtG or the alignment grid.

[Username17]

Yeah, the MtG color wheel is actually kind of crap. Within each block, the "meaning" of each color is different. To the point that there are cards that are one color in one set and a different color in a different set. Basic concepts like "Greed" are blue in one set and black in another. The general feel of each color is only tenuously linked over time. Green always has giant forest creatures, but sometimes that's because Green is in harmonious communion with nature and sometimes it's because Green is a feral spittle-fanged beast that can't be contained or negotiated with. Red always has burn spells, but sometimes it's because they are scrappy freedom loving underdogs and sometimes it's because they are Sauron-style dark lords.

Which is not to say that it isn't strictly better than the nine alignments. I mean, obviously it is. Saying that your character is "Red" has a pretty wide range of meaning, but it conveys some information, where declaring your character to be "Lawful Neutral" really doesn't.

In Kaladesh, the main villains are White and Blue, while the main heroes are Black, Red, and Green. In Amonkhet the main villains are Black, Red, and Blue, while the main heroes are White, Black, and Green. It's not confusing or problematic for good guys and bad guys to have the same color. And that's a good thing if you want to assign alignments to all the monsters in the monster manual.

Fallen Empires was a bad set from a gameplay perspective, but the groundwork in demonstrating how you could have the central conflict be within colors rather than between them was good from a roleplaying standpoint. Red Dwarves fighting Red Orcs, White Soldiers fighting White Clerics. It worked fine from a storytelling standpoint, and that's what you want for an RPG.

But yeah, you're going to want different colors where you don't have stuff like Blue which is conceptually narrow but mechanically large. Blue is primarily the color of metamagic, which isn't actually an opinion or a team or even a group of identifiable creatures, it's a fucking character class. Or things like White and Black that keep defaulting to "good and evil" without significant expenditure of mind caulk. Yes, the last few years have had some very cool Black heroes (Drana, Liliana, Olivia, Yahenni), but the color obviously defaults to villainy in a way that muddies the waters. If a creature is bad it is assigned Black by default, which really muddies all the other colors.

-Username17

[maglag]

Frank, you do notice that you need to still use the 9-alignment system to describe MTG's color system as soon as you start talking about bad and good, but not the other way around, yes? Which is not compatible with previous claims that there's no such thing as bad and good. Either the 5-color system can be described without needing the 9-alignment system, or it is inferior.

Plus there's things like the colorless eldrazi that come to consume everything and turn them into more of their own. Which is somehow supposed to be totally different from, say, the all-black original Phyrexia that also want to consume everything and turn them into more of their own. Which is also supposed to be different from multi-color Phyrexia that also want to consume everything and turn them into more of their own?

And what's even a 5-color creature supposed to represent? One with everything? Then shouldn't a colorless creature be an impossible concempt?

[Username17]

Frank, you do notice that you need to still use the 9-alignment system to describe MTG's color system as soon as you start talking about bad and good, but not the other way around, yes?

No. I really don't. There are heroes and villains, but I don't have to assign them alignments like "Chaotic Good" to make them be Heroes, nor do I have to assign alignments like "Neutral Evil" in order to define villains.

Consider a villain like Baral or Dovan from Kaladesh. They are fanatically devoted to maintaining order and following the rules. In D&D terms, they are probably Lawful Neutral. They are the villains, because they support an oppressive and unfair regime. But the fact that they are Blue or that they are Lawful Neutral isn't why they are villains. They are villains because they took Tezeret's side against Kiran when the consulate had to choose whether to go all Cyberpunk Dystopia on people or not.

But now consider a couple of Black revolutionary heroes: Drana and Yahenni. They are both Black because they are Vampires. Drana was the head of a Vampire house, and she's a hero because she led her house into rebellion against the Eldrazi who had made submission pacts with her ancestors but were presently engaged in destroying the planet. Yahenni is much less global in their aspirations, they are a genderless and disposable replicant with a very short life expectancy who joined the revolution because their people are being worked to death as slaves by an uncaring society. Both revolutionaries, both on "team hero," but I don't even know where to fit them in 9 alignment box theory and I don't care. You could make a case for Drana or Yahenni being Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil, and that's a stupid argument to have.

You need to define "Team Hero" and "Team Villain," and neither five color theory nor 3x3 Alignment theory provide much help with those assignments. The color wheel is much better because it conveys other information and doesn't pretend that it's telling you who is on Team Hero and who is on Team Villain. The 3x3 Alignment system is worse because it acts like it tells you who is on Team Hero and who is on Team Villain, but it really doesn't. Also it doesn't provide any other information either. At least the MtG Color Wheel tells me what my epic level flying mount is going to look like. 3x3 Alignments don't even do that.

-Username17

[tussock]

3e D&D alignment tells you

"They are fanatically devoted to maintaining order and following the rules."

That's the bit it tells you. If Evil, they'll generally stomp all over innocents to do it, if Good they'll generally take personal risks to protect innocents. That is the thing it does. Plus burns you will divine magic.

but I don't even know where to fit [the vampires] in 9 alignment box theory and I don't care

Yes, to discover that you have to ask relevant questions. Which in 3e are how they view harm done to innocent people, and if they are either "because it says in the book" or "fuck the man!"

Probably all Chaotic, really, 3e basically expects CE to collapse into internal power struggles on a near constant basis.

Typically, chaotic evil people can be made to work together only by force, and their leader lasts only as long as he can thwart attempts to topple or assassinate him.

And if the "Rebels" have gone all noble-minded and protective of the innocent about it, woo, alignment shift caused conflict, go go CG. That is also something 3e D&D alignment can do. If you want it to, instead of trying to get it to do other things that it doesn't do.

[Eikre]

[DenizenKane]

I think a ROYGBV color wheel would work best.
You can hit 6 different points on the spectrum, and you don't have non-colors like white and black.

[Foxwarrior]

ROYGBV isn't a wheel

[DrPraetor]

The 3x3 Alignment system is worse because it acts like it tells you who is on Team Hero and who is on Team Villain, but it really doesn't. Also it doesn't provide any other information either.

I could quibble about that last sentence, but it's besides the point.

So I have a certain fondness for the AD&D alignment wheel, and would like to salvage a version that makes sense.

No utilitarian statements are made, and I am not alone in feeling this way:

EDIT:

<snip awesome post>

If D&D Alignments are bad, why do threads about them keep producing quality content like the crunchy/sticky distinction, or this thing of beauty here? CHECKMATE, ATHEISTS.

He's making fun of me but that's entirely the point. If you want to argue this is a bad idea, you have to argue against my entirely subjective fuzzy feeling for AD&D alignment wheels, which I think would be a challenge.

Okay, so, alignments need to have fixed codes of conduct rather than sensibilities associated with them. While they are bad games and you should feel bad if you like them, the Palladium RPG does have well-specified alignments. They may not be useful or universal, but you know what you've got on the tin:

Anarchist
1. May keep word
2. Lie & Cheat if he feels necessary
3. Not likely to kill an unarmed foe, but will certainly knockout, attack, or beat up one
4. Never kill an innocent, but may harm or kidnap
5. Not likely to help someone without ulterior motive
6. Seldom kill for pleasure
7. Use torture to extract info but not likely for pleasure
8. Doesn't work well in groups he will do as he d**n well pleases
9. Have little respect for self-discipline or authority
10. May betray a friend


EVIL ALIGNMENTS: Miscreant, Aberrant & Diabolic

Miscreant
1. Not necessarily keep his word to anyone
2. Lie & Cheat anyone
3. Most definitely attack an unarmed foe, they are the best kind
4. Use or Harm an innocent
5. Use torture for extracting info. and pleasure
6. May kill for sheer pleasure
7. Feels no compulsion to help without somekind of tangible reward
8. Work with others if it will help him attain personal goals
9. Kill an unarmed foe as readily as he would a potential threat or competitor
10. Has no deference to laws or authority, but will work within them if he must
11. Will betray a friend if it serves his needs.

Well, okay, Anarchist and Miscreant are little hard to distinguish (also as we've gone over that is not what Anarchist generally means.) So it's no surprise that Palladium's implementation of their alignments are a dumpster fire but the bullet-pointed list of conduct restraints is exactly what you need to define who is Lawful Good and what that means.

Therefore: the AD&D alignment wheel needs specific things that good and/or lawful people won't do, specific things that both flavors of neutral won't do, and if you keep to those terms you keep the alignment.

That has to be how it works.

This is completely independent of which magical forces (which may be color coded and oppositional, in which case the correct number of color-coded opposing cosmic forces is UNIQUELY SEVEN) you have in the setting.

[Ancient History]

That has to be how it works.

Eh. As pretty much everyone has said, good and evil are relative. Morality is not black or white, unless you're literally picking parties.

Which is how it should work.

You're chaotic if you're aligned with the gods of Chaos.

You're Good if you're aligned with the gods of Good.

You're Evil if you're aligned with the gods of Evil.

You're Lawful if you're aligned with the gods of Law.

You're Neutral if you're unaligned. You're True Neutral if you're aligned with the Grey Lords/serve the Balance.

Now, what you do under this system is objectively not tied to your affiliation. You can be aligned with the Lords of Evil and still run a soup kitchen for orphaned orcs. Alignment with one or other of the factions brings certain advantages and disadvantages, powers and responsibilities. For mortals with free will, it's something you choose, but the choice has consequences and it's a two-way street - somebody or something has to accept your pledge. For Outsiders, it's a part of their being - they don't get to choose their alignment, they're created affiliated with one side or the other. They can't be corrupted or redeemed unless they fall and become mortal and gain free will.

[Chamomile]

I think a ROYGBV color wheel would work best.
You can hit 6 different points on the spectrum, and you don't have non-colors like white and black.

I'm not sure why either of these things is supposed to be a particular selling point for an alignment system. It is entirely possible to make an alignment system in which all alignments are non-colors like "Buddhism" or "Legalism." Going with ROYGBV makes the list easy to remember but does you no favors in getting people to remember what the colors actually represent. In fact, if your red, green, and blue factions represent different things from what they do in Magic, you're actually worse off than if you used completely made up terms.

Having six different points on the spectrum isn't very helpful, either. For starters, it suggests that you want a spectrum, in which red and violet are opposing ends of it, rather than bending it into a wheel, where red and violet are adjacent. It's not actually a good thing to have some alignments have fewer friends than others. You can make it work, it's not impossible to have a red and a violet who are extremists that tend to get along with fewer alignments than others do yet are still capable of functioning as party members, but it's an obstacle to overcome, not a feature you'd intentionally gun for.

It's also worth noting that when alignments map directly to factions like in Planescape, an even number will mean that it's possible for them to break off into two evenly matched coalitions. This may or may not be desirable depending on whether or not you want players involved in making the coalitions (in which case you probably don't want it to be possible to get a stalemate on that) or not (in which case you probably want things even until they get involved to tip the scales).

If you're going to explain your alignment system from scratch anyway, then the obvious place to start is with actual, real-world philosophies which have some depth to them.

[erik]

I think a ROYGBV color wheel would work best.
You can hit 6 different points on the spectrum, and you don't have non-colors like white and black.

ROYGBV isn't a wheel

I believe he was thinking of this wheel of the primary and secondary colors:

[Wiseman]

I don't know if this has been answered already, but is there any real need to have an alignment system at all?

[Foxwarrior]

Making improv easy and fun to do requires a bit of a mad libs component. Having a one or two word description of how the character thinks and acts helps them start on the path of acting like something other than the player's default state.

D&D already has class and background for that, though.

[Eikre]

I don't know if this has been answered already, but is there any real need to have an alignment system at all?

Absolutely none whatsoever.

But if you have a set of tags and you can hang mechanics on those tags, then they can have substantive worth.

Also, people seem to like them for some reason. Please reference the shear number of online tests which purport to determine which of the Backstreet Boys or High-School Cliques or Principle Commodities of the Dutch East Indies Trading Company you are.

[Username17]

ROYGBV isn't a wheel

ROYGBP is the pigment one, and it's a wheel. ROYGBV is the light one and it's a line.

If it was 1992 again and you were making Magic the Gathering from scratch, you'd want to go with six colors, ROYGBP that come from Fells, Wastes, Plains, Forests, Swamps, and Mountains respectively. This has a number of advantages:

• With Vampires being Red, Mummies being Orange, and Bog Wraiths being Blue, there isn't an expectation that undead have to default to one color, which means that undead can have individual flavor other than "is undead". Similarly, there isn't the expectation that villains default to any particular color, which allows them to be more interesting and flavorful than just "is a villain."
• As none of the lands are "island," none of the colors have a monopoly on aquatic stuff. Pirates and Sea Serpents and Sirens and Merchants and shit can be assigned colors by what they do rather than by the fact that they live proximal to water.
• Since all of your types of land are in fact types of land, rather than being defined by meta-relationships, you don't have to have any of the colors specialize in meta-magic. Which is good, because meta-magic is pretty fucking broken in a card game about magic. Relationally, you can have terrain-appropriate bestiaries and you don't have to end up with one of the color's giant monster tribe being something lame like "Sphinx."

That's all fine. And you'd totes do that if you could in any way steer the ship back at the beginning. And you'd make sure that they never made mistake cards like Timewalk or Black Lotus and make sure the first set was draftable the way modern sets are.

But let's be honest, you don't know what it means for a card or a character to be "purple" in this system. It has the potential to be better defined than Blue is in Magic (indeed, it would be hard not to be). But you'd still actually have to define it. It does not now have the same cultural connections that Magic colors do for being old enough to drink and vote.

A ROYGBP color wheel you made today would be just another color wheel that you made from scratch.

-Username17

[tussock]

I believe he was thinking of this wheel of the primary and secondary colors:

That is a super wrong colour diagram. Like, nothing works like that. It's not additive, it's not subtractive, it's just not anything. Blue and Yellow mixed are a shade of Grey, not Green. Sort of works with a half green blue, but that will not make white by mixing any of that. About a century out of date. Just no.

Red and Green are definitely not opposite colours and do not mix into a Gray.

Like, we're trichromats and those cones respond to Blue, Green, and Red, and equally mixed are greys. Though the particular colours shown in your sRGB display are a very yellowish green and an orange-red, because those are perceptually brighter. Conveniently, when looking at sRGB displays, the human brain interprets the yellow green as a more green colour as long as you don't hold something green next to it, and the red as less orange, the same way.

Anyway, the absorbative colours, for paints, you want would be Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, plus black if you need to make darker colours. CMYK.

Orange and Violet are at least vaguely spectral, but so are a lot of other colours like the skye blue and bluish green and even golden yellow that Indo-European languages don't handle well, especially since we stopped calling Indigo a separate colour. And of course Brown is also a thing, along with so many others.

--

Like, use whatever colours you want, that leave you free to do good things with 'em, but fuck that colour diagram, that shit is wrong.

Edit, fucking tags, also wrong.

[Username17]

Blue and Yellow mixed are a shade of Grey, not Green.

Someone needs to go back to kindergarten. Draw on a white piece of paper with a yellow crayon and a blue crayon. I guaranty that you will not get a shade of gray. Here's a color mixing chart for fucking preschoolers:

FFS.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

<snip factually wrong statements>

Dude, seek an optician.

[RobbyPants]

Maybe he's talking about light, where mixing blue and yellow make white (although not grey). Still, we're not talking about light, so that observation would be off topic and misleading at best.

Edit: I went back and revealed his post. He's all over the place, and so far as I can tell, he's talking about light when mentioning RGB and us being tetrochromates, he bounces into pigment (when talking about those primary colors), but still gets weird when thinking that any way of viewing color would result in grey when mixing red and green (you get yellow with light and brown with paint).

It was all just very weird. Some correct and incorrect color science that was completely off topic.

[Occluded Sun]

Alignments are objective. Right and wrong are not.

Good: Will act to prevent harm to others even at personal cost.
Evil: Will seek personal benefit even if it causes harm to others.
Law: General, universal, and consistent trump specific, local, and inconsistent.
Chaos: Specific, local, and inconsistent trump general, universal, and consistent.