9 Alignments Again (Hoping to make sense)

[DrPraetor]

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

In AD&D 3rd, Law and Chaos are primarily fashion choices that secondarily relate to whether you are "rowdy" (chaos) or "uptight" (lawful). This secondary axis support two rival teams who are both good guys, and provides some ostensible reason why the different good guys don't always get along based on whether they listen to loud music after 9PM. The descriptions of why the sample PCs (especially the monk and the wizard) are their respective alignments make no sense. There's a hysterical thread on how the AD&D 3rd alignments might be parsed, which deserves a bump but I *don't* want to start rehashing that stuff.

So Law and Chaos were distinguishable when they meant Good and Evil, but when they lose that association in later Moorcock stuff they also have a tendency to be hard to distinguish:
https://readcomics.io/michael-moorcocks ... apter-7/10

https://readcomics.io/elric-the-balance ... apter-4/17

Unexpectedly, the difference is that the Lawful world-eating insect god (that's the first one) has a better and more unhinged rant. The Chaos Lord looks cooler, though.

But the term occasionally used in 3rd edition does mean something and it could sustain a meaningful alignment distinction if you cared: Good and Evil are moral alignments while Law and Chaos are ethical alignments.

Ethics may not be the same as morality, depending on your philosophical school. For the purposes of this rant, ethics may or may not be codified, but they are rules; morals, on the other hand, are a feeling, sensibility or aesthetic, and not a rule.

So Lawful characters are committed to doing what the rules say they should do; while, Good characters are committed to doing what they feel/know to be right. Lawful characters do not have to be straight-laced and Good characters do not, in fact, have to be the good guys. (EDIT) have to be on the same team as the protagonists, or allied to one another just because they are trying to be moral.

[*] So Lawful Good means you are committed to be moral, and committed to be ethical, at the same time. Probably you think it's moral to be ethical and thus Lawful Good characters don't believe in the alignment system.
[*] Neutral Good characters are committed to be moral, and would like to be ethical but aren't committed to it.
[*] Chaotic Good characters are committed to be moral, and not only aren't ethical but believe that ethics are a barrier to morality, because they provide sophists with a veneer for their immoral acts.
[*] Lawful Neutral characters like to be moral but aren't committed to it, but they are committed to being ethical.
[*] Neutral characters like to be both moral and ethical, but are committed to neither.
[*] Chaotic Neutral characters regard ethics with contempt, but aren't bad people otherwise so they prefer to avoid doing something if they feel it's wrong.
[*] Lawful Evil characters are ethical and regard morals with contempt, maybe because morals are subjective or maybe because the Lawful Evil character simply lacks a "moral compass". In any case, Lawful Evil characters view themselves as doing right and so also don't believe in the alignment system.
[*] Neutral Evil characters prefer to be ethical, maybe just for practical reasons related to maintaining mutually beneficial social relations, but either have no sense of right and wrong or ignore it, and in any case don't respect efforts to do right.
[*] And Chaotic Evil characters are sociopaths who hold feelings and codes of conduct in equal contempt.

Now, individual Lawful (and to a lesser extent Neutral) characters have to choose ethics to which they hope to adhere; or, it might be better to announce some universal ethics that matters for alignment purposes in the magical logic of fantasy-land. But, in any case, it produces the desired outputs even if it doesn't provide some feeble excuse why Elves and Dwarves don't like each other.

Alignment Conduct Wheel, version 2.0:

Lawful Good
[*] Obey the edicts of the mandate wherever they may be, unless these edicts directly conflict with the strictures of their alignment.
[*] Actively protect the innocent and vulnerable from harm, whenever they have the power to do so. Passive cowardice does not compromise a good alignment, unless taken to a great extreme.
[*] Will keep their word of honor, unless it conflicts with other terms of the alignment.
[*] Will tell the truth, unless it conflicts with other terms of the alignment.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Neutral Good
[*] Prefers to work within the edicts of the mandate, unless these edicts directly conflict with the strictures of their alignment.
[*] Actively protect the innocent and vulnerable from harm, whenever they have the power to do so. Passive cowardice does not compromise a good alignment, unless taken to a great extreme.
[*] Will keep their word of honor, unless it conflicts with other terms of the alignment.
[*] Avoid lies for personal advantage, but will use deceit for the benefit of others.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Chaotic Good
[*] Will generally ignore the edicts of the mandate, and do not respect them.
[*] Actively protect the innocent and vulnerable from harm, whenever they have the power to do so. Passive cowardice does not compromise a good alignment, unless taken to a great extreme.
[*] Only make promises they intend to keep, unless this conflicts with other strictures of the alignment (e.g. a false promise is needed to rescue slave children, that sort of thing.)
[*] May be tricky or deceptive, but will not tell hurtful or destructive lies.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Lawful Neutral
[*] Obey the edicts of the mandate wherever they may be; conflict with the other structures of this alignment should be rare, and may lead to indecision or unexpected behavior.
[*] Avoid actively harming the innocent and vulnerable, unless it conflicts with the other strictures of their alignment.
[*] Will keep their word of honor.
[*] Will tell the truth, unless it conflicts with other terms of the alignment.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

True Neutral
[*] Prefers to work within the edicts of the mandate.
[*] Avoid actively harming the innocent and vulnerable.
[*] Sincerely desires to keep their promises.
[*] Tells the truth unless sorely pressed.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Chaotic Neutral
[*] Ignores the edicts of the mandate and does not respect them.
[*] Avoid actively harming the innocent and vulnerable.
[*] Breaks promises with abandon.
[*] Lies whenever it is convenient.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Lawful Evil
[*] Obey the edicts of the mandate wherever they may be, but actively seeks to subvert the edict to their own power and advantage.
[*] Has no compunction against harming the innocent and vulnerable, especially if they do not follow rules to the letter.
[*] Will keep their word of honor.
[*] Will tell the truth, unless it conflicts with other terms of the alignment. However, Lawful Evil characters take positive glee is deceptive truths, lies by omission, etc.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Neutral Evil
[*] Prefers to work within the edicts of the mandate.
[*] Has no compunction against harming the innocent and vulnerable.
[*] Recognizes the value of respect and reputation, and will keep promises to maintain their reputation.
[*] Will generally avoid lies if they are going to get caught.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

Chaotic Evil
[*] Ignores the edicts of the mandate and does not respect them.
[*] Has no compunction against harming the innocent and vulnerable.
[*] Breaks promises with abandon.
[*] Lies whenever it is convenient.
[*]
[*]
[*]
[*]

[DrPraetor]

http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_la ... 29_19.html

[erik]

This is terrible. Possibly even worse than standard D&D alignments.

You have Good characters not being good. Why have words be words? Askcarbwarble bedop goob. Megabs bgi sckarb, dlpo? 23!

[WiserOdin032402]

Can we go back to dry/wet and crunchy/sticky?

[DrPraetor]

You have Good characters not being good. Why have words be words? Askcarbwarble bedop goob. Megabs bgi sckarb, dlpo? 23!

Edited for clarity (you may still not like it, of course.)

Can we go back to dry/wet and crunchy/sticky?

It's Michael Moorcock, rapidly everything becomes sticky.

[Korwin]

If you want Moorcook Law / Chaos, it should be simply a team/factions descriptor with different benefits. No relationship with good and evil.

[erik]

No. The more I read it the more I hate it. I wish rage made me sleepy, because I could be fucking out right now. Ghost, my jimmies. They've been rustled so hard.

I put this alignment system around a 6.5


Incidentally, that chart is also a better alignment system foundation. I just don't even know what you'd use your system for. Certainly not for setting up allegiances or who is aligned with who. And you cannot predict behavior based upon alignments. I don't know what I'd even do with this sloppy turd in a game. You sure won't be using Holy Word or any other alignment-based effects in game.

This system does nothing to address the quandary of what external rules a lawful character will follow when presented with multiple opposing rules. If anything it makes worse the good-evil track because it has nothing to do with good and evil, but still uses those words. Neutral even gets misused in your system because it keeps boiling down to "want to be good/lawful but isn't", Shitty Good or Shitty Lawful. It can't even get amoral right.

You have crafted an alignment system where Nazi's can be good, and up is up and up is down and up is full of fuck. There is nothing to salvage. If morals aren't rules or principles then don't call the morals. It would be an improvement to call the alignment axes external rules and internal rules, or rationality and emotion, but the destination is still a jagged rock of failure. So better yet, don't. Just don't.

[NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur]

Stop.

Don’t do this.

This has been attempted. Constantly. It cannot go well. Nor should it.

It can be trivially imploded. Look, what’s already here is utterly self-defeating:

[*] So Lawful Good means you are committed to be moral, and committed to be ethical, at the same time. Probably you think it's moral to be ethical and thus Lawful Good characters don't believe in the alignment system.

[…]

[*] Chaotic Good characters are committed to be moral, and not only aren't ethical but believe that ethics are a barrier to morality, because they provide sophists with a veneer for their immoral acts.

Chaotic good character takes over a government with chaotic good buddies and sets up a bunch of laws that encourage people to be good and believes those laws will help people be good. Right there, things are already fucked. If it takes you more than a sentence to explain why this isn’t a contradiction, that’s a sign that the system for emulating human behavior you’re coming up with is, by definition, more trouble than its worth. Being against a set of laws doesn’t mean that one hates all laws. (That’s a rightwing propaganda element; seriously, President Shithole just finished accusing democrats of wanting anarchy (and MS-13) not a week ago in an interview.) Creating a set of laws doesn’t mean that one fetishizes, or even particularly respects process; it merely means that one expects a law to get good results.

So if a chaotic good person notes that an ethical system gets good results in a given context and doesn’t otherwise cause immediate or potential harm, why should they be bothered by it? Answer: they wouldn’t be. The fact that sophists can misuse them doesn’t mean shit; bad people misuse anything. But wait, if they’re against ethical systems, wouldn’t that prohibition be an ethical system? So their ideology is that they’re against ideologies, as an ideology, which barfagalfdsjkljflka dfjfdslk; fd FUFCK FUCK FUCK STOP DOING THIS.

…


Note that alignment nomenclature utterly obscures these obvious ideas.

A: The defendant murdered six children!
B: And then he atoned — look, his aura is lawful good!
A: Fuck his feelings, he still did it — and two years ago, he murdered three children!
B: He atoned after that one, too. Do keep up.

The atonement spell also gives the game away. If you’ve murdered a child and your alignment says “it’s okay it’s cool” but the people of your region say it’s definitely not cool, they are going to call you evil. And they will be right. Utterly correct. It doesn’t matter what you say or feel. But the rules of the universe say that it does. Hell, if a paladin rolls up and scans you, he’s going to declare you totally kosher. This means that the term “good” being used by D&D is obviously not the same as the term “good” in English.

The first problem here is that the names of alignments themselves are pure cant. If “good” is a moral characteristic it can’t also be the self-aware source of my lazer beams. That’s a different fucking thing. It needs a different name. And once it has a different name, the entire alignment problem evaporates, as does its completely undeserved mystique. If my lazers and my mystical mindrape powers and my personal ectoplasm army all have a source and that source requires me to “be good” and an outside observer names that source “Furious Tapioca” that name is a billion times better than “good” because “Furious Tapioca demands that I be good lest I can’t mindrape anymore” is fucked up but parseable while “good demands that I be good lest I can’t mindrape anymore” is worthless gibberish before we get to the fact that mind control, e.g., the annihilation of the personal sovereignty of another sapient being, is perfectly kosher in your ethical system.

If D&D had a single throwaway line in the PHB noting that the names of the alignments were pure political propaganda, this thread, and 20 years of threads like it, would not exist.

The very fact that someone can act “out of alignment” makes it clear that alignments aren’t moral codes.

Consider:

If you do evil shit, you’re evil.
If you do evil shit when you do cocaine, you know the former fact, and you do cocaine, you’re evil because you chose to do cocaine while aware that evil would result.
If you do cocaine, you’re not cocaine-aligned, as cocaine-doing isn’t a moral system.
If cocaine gives you abilities you didn’t have before, you haven’t discovered a moral system, you’ve discovered being fucking high on cocaine.
If cocaine gives you paranatural abilities, the former statement still applies.
If cocaine gives you paranatural vulnerabilities, ditto.
At no point does cocaine take the name “evil” even if it facilitates the doing of evil as even people not on cocaine can do evil.
Assume that cocaine is sapient. If people who don’t do cocaine do evil and then cocaine sends cocaine to those people so they can do cocaine and those people choose to not do cocaine, do we therefore conclude they have not done evil? Obviously fucking not. If they regret doing that evil but don’t do cocaine have they still done that evil? Obviously fuckin’ so. Can we call them evil even if they don’t do cocaine? Damn right you can.

Everything in the proceeding mildly inane dialogue is obvious because the terms “cocaine” and “doing cocaine” are not interchangeable with the term “evil.” If you replace “doing cocaine” with “aligning with evil” and cocaine with “evil” you get complete gibberish because of course you do.

…

The second problem:

D&D alignments aren’t morals. They aren’t codes. They aren’t even norms, or customs, or cultures.

They’re parasitic sapient aesthetics.

Step back and ask how these forces — and they are forces, not behavior codes — ask how these forces function in D&D (and nowhere else for the D&D alignment system is not even in the same conceptual category as the ethos or honor codes seen in other games)*.

*There are other games that treat alignment this way. Lamentations of the Flame Princess has chaos be crazy stuff that happens to magic users when they magic. More notably, Kult had “mental balance,” a position between two poles: being really bad made you into an utterly solipsistic asshole, and being really “good” made you into a cold, unfeeling vulcan with super intellect powers. In both cases, human behavior was, instead of being emulated by the game, instead utterly warped. Which was probably the point, if in at least the latter. In neither case did these forces actually represent ethics or morals; they were cosmic forces that had severe impact on ethics and morals by virtue of having severe impact on behavior and agency.

If you align yourself with Lawful Good, you get bennies. Tangible, material bennies. And tangible, objective penalties (example: Blasphemy).

During this alignment, you are effectively instructed to carry out hostile acts against those who don’t share your alignments, where said acts reinforce interalignment hostility. You are — whether you be peasant or knight, child or adult — you are, in effect, a mercenary, trading the death of other beings by your hand for material gain.

So here’s the question, the question that isn’t asked in these discussions: what does the alignment gain?

The alignment can determine who and what you marry, where you live, and who you kill. It determines your afterlife. It gets, basically, the entirety of you, without question, both for a purpose and by using a method that are all completely unfathomable by mortal and god alike.

Nor is there escape. There is no “fuck that” option. “Neutral” isn’t an escape: it grants super-powers and super-vulnerabilities and claims your goddamn soul just as thoroughly as “Good” or “Chaotic.” The name “neutral” is, again, political cant.

Lawful Good isn’t a moral system, or even a mere point of view. It’s a completely unknowable sapient s h a d e of eggshell white that lives in your junk and your sword arm and your armor and leeches something from you that you cannot see and if you refuse it it seeks your destruction and when you die it claims your soul and if it cannot devour you it seeks to damn you to oblivion and if you survive oblivion you are declared the perverse and unholy thing for not choosing annihilation.

Alignment is a fucking SCP.

If you insist on running alignment, run it that way. Treat alignment as a cosmic horror that grants powers and penalties based on arbitrary aesthetics. Make it very clear that the names of alignments (Lawful Evil, Neutral Good) are complete political horseshit and that everyone calls their own alignment good and anyone without a dog in that fight names the alignments mauve, pumice, irritated horseradish, upsy-daisy, Floyd and whatever other arbitrary signifiers come to mind because they are, like quantum states, cosmic forces that lack a mundane reference point.

Because that is the closest you’ll ever get to who alignment actually works in D&D.

[nockermensch]

Can we go back to dry/wet and crunchy/sticky?

^ This.

Also this:

This is terrible. Possibly even worse than standard D&D alignments.

It solves no problem created by the alignment system, and probably introduces a couple more: if you can talk people into rationalizing their beliefs, they seemingly change alignment now.


These are the facts about D&D Alignments:

1) Alignments determine the organization of the outer planes, which not only are major adventure locations but also are where D&D afterlife happens. So, while just powerful characters need to care about the actual conditions of Elysium, everybody with a religion in D&D has to care at least nominally about some alignment or another. When people go to the outer planes, it's just a fact that some of these places are so strongly attuned to an alignment as to leave people of opposite alignments feeling sick.

2) Alignments are also energies. Spellcasters summon blasts of concentrated Good in a way that leaves Good people unscathed and fuck with everybody else. Negative Energy and the Undead empowered by it are somehow linked to Evil, as seen by the [Evil] tag on several Negative Energy spells and by Hades being inhabitated by lots of undead. But strangely, Positive Energy isn't as strongly linked to Good.

3) Besides the very tangible things above, alignments also serve as roleplaying prompts for DMs and players, and as moral/ethical ideals for cultures and characters living in these worlds.

The thing about 3 is: You can whine all you want about how alignments are retarded, but this won't stop TV Tropes geek pop-culture from talking at lenght about them. Alignment Charts are a meme, so it's pointless to insist that they are incoherent and shouldn't be used. If the alignments were shit when they were created, D&D inspired Pop Culture did enough mind-caulking for the last 30 years that today you just can convey information about a character by saying that they are "Lawful Evil" or "Chaotic Good". So go ahead and use them.

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.

[Falgund]

* Lawful:
- Focus: Groups
- Subfocus: My group (can be a country, a familly, a gang, an adventuring group, etc...)
- Opposite: Individuality

* Chaotic:
- Focus: Individuals
- Subfocus: Me/I
- Opposite: Communauty

* Neutral
- Focus: A balance between Groups and individuals
- Subfocus: A balance between my group and me
- Opposite: Excess of individuality/communauty


* Good:
{Focus} are the most important. {Subfocus} is little more important than others. {Opposite} should not negatively impact {focus}.

* Evil:
{Subfocus} is the most important. I don't care to what happen to other {focus} as long as it benefits {subfocus}. {Opposite} should be removed when encountered.

* Neutral:
{Subfocus} is the most important, but other {focus} are just behind. {Opposite} should be discouraged.



So LE are focused on their own group above everything else, while CE only care about themselves.
And CG prefer individual liberties, while LG sacrifice some of them for the betterment of entire society.

[Chamomile]

I still advocate for switching to the five MtG alignments. To the extent that alignments have a purpose, it's to provide roleplaying prompts to new players by giving them a finite list of options they can pick from, and MtG alignments are better for that because they're so much more clear.

[Starmaker]

I still advocate for switching to the five MtG alignments. To the extent that alignments have a purpose, it's to provide roleplaying prompts to new players by giving them a finite list of options they can pick from, and MtG alignments are better for that because they're so much more clear.

How? Let's say

White - paladins, healers, rebels - Lawful Good to Chaotic Good
Green - elves, druids - Chaotic Good or Neutral
Red - barbarian raiders, fire mages, smiths - Chaotic Neutral and destructive, but also maybe creative
Black - undead and all sorts of Evil (MtG players hate Black == Evil though.)
Blue - wizards, tricksters - Lawful (because book learning), Chaotic

This system already can't differentiate between a paladin and a "lovable rogue", or a good ranger and a druid, or a tyrant and a mad cultist. Color combinations don't help either because they multiply a vector of disparate aspects by a vector of disparate aspects and then draw stupid borders around groups of cells. Is UW intelligence + civilization or trickery + humanism? Is GW civilization-building (growth + law) or paradisiacal violence-free frolicking in the woods? Is BW a tyrant or an "antihero" in black leather?

[Username17]

How?

The five MtG colors aren't ideal, because Black is bad and White is good as a pretty strong first intention, which puts a lot of it on pretty boring moral ground, it's a lot more interesting than anything out of the nine alignments. It's fairly easy to explain how you could be a good guy or a bad guy in any of the five colors, and if you had a color system where the colors were a bit more balanced in virtues and vices it would be better still.

But even in the MtG five color wheel, just the fact that you can imagine and describe a White good guy and a White bad guy in a way where they don't sound like they might be Green instead is pretty fucking cool. For an
RPG you'd want the two-way association of heroism to White and the two-way association of villainy to Black to go away, but the fact that each color has a defined set of heroic and villainous tropes to work with is a huge step forward over every alignment system D&D has ever had.

-Username17

[Starmaker]

but the fact that each color has a defined set of heroic and villainous tropes to work with is a huge step forward over every alignment system D&D has ever had.

-Username17

Color-coding is awesome, but it doesn't serve even remotely the same function as alignment does for people who use it. Color-coding is more a worldbuilding prompt where you can have colored factions or lands and start figuring out how they interact Like, elves are green, goblins are red, they're adjacent on the color wheel so they often create alliances, and of course single-color factions can be easily differentiated by the kind of forces they can field. You can make colored planes and the average MC can have a wider variety of adventures there instead of throwing out about half of the alignment wheel. By tying every class to a magical source of power, the problem of fighters is eliminated. Magic items can work better in the hands of a color or against a color. That I get.

When applied to an individual player character, color is more of a function of or inspiration for a build, it stops being a useful prompt when play has started. In a "Good" party, a Green hero enchants fields to produce more crops because he happens to be a druid and White trains armies because she happens to be a paladin and those are the respective druid and paladin abilities. Bad blue can enslave minds as a beguiler, bad black sacrifice people for magical power as a soul-powered necromancer, good black assassinate key targets (plus many non-archetypal examples fro MtG, like leading a vampiric revolution). It's good to have "growth" to mean "feeding the weakest" and "eating the weakest". But specifically D&D alignment is a morality prompt, it's something people use to differentiate between the two.

[Eikre]

The five MtG colors aren't ideal, because Black is bad and White is good as a pretty strong first intention, which puts a lot of it on pretty boring moral ground,

It's not really about taking a moral ground in the first place, it's all just aesthetics. But that's all you want, because the only work that alignment ever does is either "These people are more comfortable among these societies and afterlives," "These magic items and assets are arbitrarily more powerful in these people's hands," or "Having this magical ward or character ability gives you benefits against enemies just under half the time."

When the White religious extremists show up and you start reading passages out of the Handmaid's Tale for exposition, the White-aligned married paladin with 2.5 kids and a dog isn't going to clock them as a villains as quickly as the Black-aligned libertine punk who likes to snort ketamine, but both of those guys can still creditably assemble on the same heroic committee to assassinate Mormon-Hitler. Those guys could clash about techniques, but there is not nearly as much of a desire for a DM to say "Yeah, no Black alignments in my campaign, that has never worked out for me" as it is with the three Evil alignments.

Also, it's been well demonstrated what multi-color factions look like, which makes a deep cut against that prima facia association (long since denied as the ongoing intention) between White and Black with Good and Evil.

There might even be value in one of the heroic tags for White being "Totally uncomplicated altruism, please look elsewhere for my rich characterization" and Black being "I really loved the turn that comic books took in the 80s, now this is the result."

[Username17]

But specifically D&D alignment is a morality prompt, it's something people use to differentiate between the two.

The issue though is that despite having had literally millions of words dedicated to trying to theosiphize a moral framework that contains Lawful Good, Neutral Good, and Chaotic Good as distinct moral concepts, that field has proven entirely barren. No one has ever been able to make a coherent ethical construct where Neutral Good is distinct from Lawful Good and Chaotic Good but also distinct from Neutral. Indeed, the very concept of being "neutral" to Good and Evil incoherent to begin with. It's easy to imagine or describe a character who isn't Good or Evil enough to qualify as one or the other, but the idea of someone who is actually indifferent to Good and Evil much less seriously committed to maintaining a balance between the two is simply ridiculous.

So having a moral element to alignment is pretty much completely a failure. No one has made an alignment system in which they effectively signpost moral correctness on major issues, so worrying that an alignment system that provides other benefits might not provide .

Basically, your alignment system, should it produce any benefit at all, is going to do so by providing a reason for Legolas and Gimli to initially have friction. Gimli is Red, Legolas is Green, for example. There's no particular benefit in having a signposting for team villain and team hero because the players know who is on team hero and who is on team monster and there doesn't need to be a specific tag on it.

-Username17

[erik]

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.

People, myself included, love to try and put things into boxes. A 2 axis 3x3 grid of boxes to categorize moral frameworks is elegant. It just doesn't work.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/12/24


I much prefer grouping by aesthetics, especially if you can shoehorn in some mechanical juice and general agendas/principles.

[DrPraetor]

Askcarbwarble bedop goob. Megabs bgi sckarb, dlpo? 23!

I was just in England, and I learned that "Four Tom" is cockney slang for prostitute.
Because it rhymes with your mom.

I put this alignment system around a 6.5

It rhymes with your mom, Erik.

Neutral even gets misused in your system because it keeps boiling down to "want to be good/lawful but isn't", Shitty Good or Shitty Lawful. It can't even get amoral right.

and yet...

Indeed, the very concept of being "neutral" to Good and Evil incoherent to begin with. It's easy to imagine or describe a character who isn't Good or Evil enough to qualify as one or the other, but the idea of someone who is actually indifferent to Good and Evil much less seriously committed to maintaining a balance between the two is simply ridiculous.

So Neutral characters aren't good or evil enough to qualify as one or another, but it's pretty obvious that such people will generally prefer good (and mostly law.) If someone actively prefers chaos or evil it's pretty easy to make the jump, I'm saying.

Then NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur and nockermensch have the viewpoint that AD&D alignments are an exploitative magic force and not morals at all, but this is based on the assumption that alignments are somehow bolted onto the real world. This is fantasy land. In the real world, morals are a consequence (however many degrees removed) of our neurobiology, but in fantasy land, the metaphorical voice in the heart is an actual thing. And, people do wrong because of the influence evil has on them, see: http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_One

That said, even within the real world viewpoint, they're raising two concerns that aren't concerns at all:

Chaotic good character takes over a government with chaotic good buddies and sets up a bunch of laws that encourage people to be good and believes those laws will help people be good.

A chaotic good person wouldn't do this; a person who did this wouldn't be chaotic good (especially in so far as it was successful.)
Look, committed anarchists exist; sometimes, they get elected to government, and sometimes when that happens they become considerably more moderate and start enacting laws they would've opposed as anarchists.
This is not a failure of the alignment system.

Being against a set of laws doesn’t mean that one hates all laws.

No, but in this alignment system such a person wouldn't be chaotic.

In the real world, very few people are chaotic - but fantasy land has a lot more anarchists in it both for storytelling purposes and because it's a more primitive society with exploitative feudal overlords, little concept of social contract theory, and so forth.

So if a chaotic good person notes that an ethical system gets good results in a given context and doesn’t otherwise cause immediate or potential harm, why should they be bothered by it?

Cognitive dissonance; or, they'd cease to be chaotic.

if you can talk people into rationalizing their beliefs, they seemingly change alignment now.

That isn't quite it, but you can certainly change people's alignment by convincing them of things. That turns out not to be easy in the real world, and in fantasy world you can make people about as stubborn as you like.

[nockermensch]

Re: "Alignments are forces / cosmic horrors and not morals"

Dude, if you're not intending to keep the bizarre but nostalgic D&D content like Detect Evil, Blasphemy, the outer planes of Nirvana and Giant Frog, etc. then why the fuck are you worrying about alignments at all? Use Frank's MtG colors suggestion, WoD Natures and Behaviors or nothing and you're probably better. Alignments must come with the entire legacy package to be interesting.

Then you can run the game in a straight Silver Age way where the heroes draw power of Good to do good and it's alright, or do post-modern subversions like NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur's suggestion where the actual nature of Alignments is Cosmic Horror and then the alignment system works as a stand-in for our actual Universe inherent unfairness and horror, allowing you to run Planescapey setups where everybody is more cynical about it and NE and NG types can have a drink together and nobody cares.

[NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur]

So Neutral characters aren't good or evil enough to qualify as one or another, but it's pretty obvious that such people will generally prefer good (and mostly law.) If someone actively prefers chaos or evil it's pretty easy to make the jump, I'm saying.

No, it’s not obvious what a neutral person would prefer because it isn’t obvious what it means to be neutral.

Then NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur and nockermensch have the viewpoint that AD&D alignments are an exploitative magic force and not morals at all, but this is based on the assumption that

Stop. No. Wrong.

There is no assumption here. I’d like to point out that there are tons of assumptions being made in the alignment formulation abortion in the first post and in D&D in general, some of which I pointed out before, some of which others have pointed out, and none of which the OP has addressed. But there are no assumptions made on my part in this particular case.

The evaluation of D&D alignments by myself and others here is derived from the properties of the alignments themselves. We do not assume that they are cosmic forces. They work as cosmic forces so we call them cosmic forces.

Then NixingAlignmntCrap>Lur and nockermensch have the viewpoint that AD&D alignments are an exploitative magic force and not morals at all, but this is based on the assumption that alignments are somehow bolted onto the real world.

Wrong. The fantasy world gives us sapient beings that are derived from real-world beings. We aren’t assuming that Chaos and Evil are bolted onto real-Earth. We are being told by the rpg text that real, honest-to-gosh humans are stuck in crazy-Earth and said humans are the same as us except for {huge list of paranatural phenomena}.

in fantasy land, the metaphorical voice in the heart is an actual thing

Irrelevant, because you haven’t shown that any such voice undermines the description of alignments granted by any of the other posters herein. You’re still avoiding defining alignments in a thread you created to define alignments. Literally everyone calling your position wrong has done a better job at defining existing D&D alignments than you have.

And, people do wrong because of the influence evil has on them, see: http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_One

It seems likely that you did not read what I wrote. I explicitly gave an example of an outside influence not removing moral agency — do a search in this thread for “cocaine” and read the whole post. And if the outside influence completely eliminated personal sovereignty, that would eliminate moral agency completely.

And you’re still pretending that the names of the alignments make the substance of the alignments the same as the substance of a moral system when that was debunked above.

Chaotic good character takes over a government with chaotic good buddies and sets up a bunch of laws that encourage people to be good and believes those laws will help people be good.

A chaotic good person wouldn't do this; a person who did this wouldn't be chaotic good (especially in so far as it was successful.)

That statement is ambiguous. Either you’re saying:

A human ruler wouldn’t make laws.

- or -

A human leader wouldn’t rule.

Both of these things are fucking stupid. Like, mind-boggling alien. This behavior maps to no one. It provides a model of no human experience. It is found in conjecture or speculative fiction in no genre. It’s not worthless, it’s worse than worthless, it’s sub-worthless. It increases the signal-to-noise ratio built into communicating the nature of a character or a society. If bullshit could take a dump, it would poop this.

Your thesis is effectively that once a person is infected with Appointment Prosper (a random-word generated term for the political propaganda phrase “chaotic good”) they cannot EVER enter into an administrative position of ANY kind because that would result in the maintenance and the promulgation of rules. Thus, there are no chaotic good kings. That’s . . . wretchedly fucktarded. Keep in mind you’ve already violated the principle of simplicity above: if it takes you more than a sentence to explain what the actual fuck Appointment Prosper is you’ve already miserably failed to create a roleplaying aide — it’s obviously a burden on communication at this point. But you go a step further and knock out a huge chunk of existing humanity and a demographic that possibly represents the majority of heroes across the entire species of humanity, both real and fictional: the victorious leader who hates bad laws and beats the old government up.

Look, committed anarchists exist; sometimes, they get elected to government, and sometimes when that happens they become considerably more moderate and start enacting laws they would've opposed as anarchists.

The ability of a person to cease to follow an ideology once they’ve changed political status does not show that ALL persons will do the same. That quotation is, simply put, bullshit. I don’t mean that maliciously: I mean it is a classic example of bullshit. Your project was to, among other things, define working alignments. You didn’t. Instead of defining them, when subject to criticism, you assumed you had a coherent definition and then claimed that because some people change from one (undefined) alignment to another (undefined) alignment then all persons therefore follow their stated alignments. At least define what you’re bullshitting about before bullshitting about it. (ProTip: you can’t define what you’re bullshitting about. That’s what everyone is telling you.)

The above quote is even more wrong than that, however. To wit:

Look, committed anarchists exist; sometimes, they get elected to government, and sometimes when that happens they become considerably more moderate and start enacting laws they would've opposed as anarchists.

Being against a set of laws doesn’t mean that one hates all laws.

No, but in this alignment system such a person wouldn't be chaotic.

In the real world, very few people are chaotic - but fantasy land has a lot more anarchists in it both for storytelling purposes and because it's a more primitive society with exploitative feudal overlords, little concept of social contract theory, and so forth.

Anarchists aren’t against laws, they’re against unjustifiable power structures. You’re using a completely wrong take on a real ideology to defend a completely nonsensical fictional entity that you are completely misidentifying as a moral code. You’ve declared that 2+3 = -7.2, haven’t shown your work, and are defending the conclusion by pointing out that some parrots can talk. A goal of anarchists is to form good governments with good laws. I say again, anarchists want to make laws. You have no fucking idea what an anarchist is, but that misconception is in good company because you have no fucking idea what “chaos” means in an alignment context, but that’s actually okay because, outside of the parameters defined by the critiques in this thread, nobody does. You’ve made a completely unsubstantiated assumption that anarchist=chaos where both terms are big ol’ Super Mario Bros. question boxes in your head.

You’re trying to declare that you’ve made an alignment system when you can’t manufacture, even as a hypothetical, a single plausible sapient person as an example of one of its branches.

And everyone who isn’t you knew you couldn’t do this shit more than two decades ago.

(P.S.: I may post a thread about a suite of alignments that works, but there’s a sticking point (besides irl time considerations): as nockermensch has mentioned, unless you go Planescape with this shit, it really isn’t that interesting. You’ve just replaced “gods” with “forces” or just added “super-gods” to your gods. Not compelling. A world were alignments are fighting D&D style is a world where people are literally fighting geography. Each plane has decided that it should be the only plane that matters. Everything is a Unicron that has decided that Everything Else is a Cybertron that shall no longer be spared its hunger.)

Congratulations to all for going this long without abnormally large amphibians showing up.

[Chamomile]

I still advocate for switching to the five MtG alignments. To the extent that alignments have a purpose, it's to provide roleplaying prompts to new players by giving them a finite list of options they can pick from, and MtG alignments are better for that because they're so much more clear.

This system already can't differentiate between a paladin and a "lovable rogue", or a good ranger and a druid, or a tyrant and a mad cultist.

You say this is a bad thing, but so far as I can tell the only thing that bothers you about is that it doesn't perfectly map to the nine alignments, i.e. you can't automatically tell whether a Chaotic Evil character would be Black or Red aligned, a Lawful Evil character could plausibly be any of Black, Blue, or even White aligned, and so on. But that's because the nine alignments are dumb and you should forget all about them. The alignments serve as a morality prompt because they have "Good" and "Evil" written right into their name, but all that does is lead to arguments about the nature of good and evil, which have been ongoing for thousands of years and aren't being resolved to everyone's satisfaction by a random D&D group. Requiring players to solve the problem of good and evil, even just among themselves, before they can agree on who should or shouldn't scan as Evil isn't a feature of the game we want to preserve. It's the worst part of the 3x3 grid.

The utility of the alignment system is not in its ability to cause vitriolic arguments over whether or not something counts as "Good" or allowing (in some cases, requiring!) GMs to pronounce moral judgments on players for their actions to determine what kinds of materials harm them. It's in providing a set of roleplaying prompts few enough in number that new players can quickly read through them and pick out a new one to try out, as training wheels to help them along to making complete character concepts from scratch.

[tussock]

Team jerseys, eh. Just do away with the moral and ethical, it serves no useful end.

--

Lawful Good is team Dwarf/Paladin. Because they dig up secret and hidden stuff and bring it into the light for great justice and metalworking, and they call it Good.

Neutral Good is team Human. Because they build, and then they build on the things they built, and then they build on those things, so there's a house on the roof on the bridge, and they call it Good.

Chaotic Good is team Elf/Fairies. Because they make the most of the minimum they have to take, and hardly have to kill any loggers at all most days, and call it Good.

Lawful Neutral is team Kobold. Nesters, trappers. This is theirs. You come into theirs, they gunna make you theirs too. Why raid when you can keep those who come to you.

True Neutral is team Lizardfolk. Take just enough to make just enough to sit around and get by until tomorrow, or maybe next week. Team just leave us alone, m'kay.

Chaotic Neutral is team Gnome/Frog. Tricksters? More like bullies. You know what's funny? Other people hurting themselves because they were too stupid to understand the spell effect. Also, laying eggs in people, ha!

Lawful Evil is team Goblin. Wasters. Kill half your cattle to make a meal of the leg of one, cut half a forest to make a boat. What? It was only half, plus you said we could make a boat, and take some meat.

Neutral Evil is team Orc. Burn it all to the fucking ground. Fuck yeah. Builders? Fuck 'em. The strong rule a realm of ash with a bigger stack of coin, or souls, or knowledge, than you ever will see. War? WAAAAAAAAGH!

Chaotic Evil is team Drow. Raiders. Steal it, just to hide it, keep it all secret and hidden forever, where only we can see it, so it's truly ours. You can be ours too, hidden away.

--

Opposite corners are just at a permanent state of war, top and bottom are opposed, and left and right argue to occasional lethal effect. More friendly the closer they are, and Lizards are OK with everyone passing them by.

Everyone in the same box just sort of works together, so Horses and Dogs and Cattle and Pseudodragons are Neutral Good like the Humans, and they "help" Humans build stuff on the stuff they built.

Where Trolls, Fire Giants, Red Dragons, and Demons are aligned with Drow, and tend to hang out together despite not having great obvious reason to, other than they're all into raiding from secret lairs and hiding the take away forever and are cool like that.

And then push the rest of everything around here and there so the teams are a bit better balanced than the D&D default where the AD&D MM1 really only had five alignments and that's never been fixed.

It's in providing a set of roleplaying prompts few enough in number that new players can quickly read through them and pick out a new one to try out, as training wheels to help them along to making complete character concepts from scratch.

See, for me, it's a useful tool for having reasons for things to oppose each other with often lethal intent in a game of D&D, and then also have a lot of variant creatures they just work with like it's normal to not murder everything in sight. That is the thing the big ass kitchen-sink D&D worlds need, default alignments, which is to say, who you are aligned with.

PCs shouldn't actually be having lethal fights about basic roleplaying prompts, drow being careless with innocent people and a bit unreliable regarding contracts isn't a good reason to go murder their high priestess, while them having stolen all your nice stuff and enslaved your people totally is, and lots of monsters just automatically agreeing to side with the Drow in that fight and raid you even harder is a useful thing for the game.

[Iduno]

I'm in agreement with the idea that people only really want alignments as a reason to have Planescape. Was it a trash fire? Sure, but it was a trash fire with interesting ideas, worldbuilding, and art.

If you're going to build a new alignment system, do the Planescape thing but better. Come up with a pile of philosophies that are meaningfully distinct and are coherent enough that you can say why someone would believe them, explain how they all contribute/exist in society, and why they think they're the only ones who are right. Religion is replaced by those philosophies, and people why try to personify those philosophies all live in the same city like some kind of terrible Odd Couple.

You might also want to look up what those philosophies actually believe, because having (probably simplified) versions of things real people believe makes it easier to understand. We all want swordfights between the person who believes you are born richer because you're inherently better than others and deserve to rule over them, and the person who believes we should fight oppression and give everyone an equal chance to better themselves. "Good" and "evil" are stupid over-simplifications that don't map to real people.

[Wiseman]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't even need the alignments to have planescape.

[Whipstitch]

I'm in agreement with the idea that people only really want alignments as a reason to have Planescape. Was it a trash fire? Sure, but it was a trash fire with interesting ideas, worldbuilding, and art.

If you're going to build a new alignment system, do the Planescape thing but better. Come up with a pile of philosophies that are meaningfully distinct and are coherent enough that you can say why someone would believe them, explain how they all contribute/exist in society, and why they think they're the only ones who are right. Religion is replaced by those philosophies, and people why try to personify those philosophies all live in the same city like some kind of terrible Odd Couple.

You might also want to look up what those philosophies actually believe, because having (probably simplified) versions of things real people believe makes it easier to understand. We all want swordfights between the person who believes you are born richer because you're inherently better than others and deserve to rule over them, and the person who believes we should fight oppression and give everyone an equal chance to better themselves. "Good" and "evil" are stupid over-simplifications that don't map to real people.

This just sounds like you're advocating for building a setting and then calling some of that stuff alignment. If your factions are coherent enough that people can make sense of them with or without the alignment tags--and then jolly well should be--then you're not accomplishing very much by slapping an alignment tag on them. It's just a ceremonial offering to the sacred cow.