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Character Matters #4: Alignment, Part 1
History
The original version of Dungeons and Dragons featured only three alignments: lawful, neutral, and chaotic. This arraignment seems to make sense; alignment is not really a moral concept at all, just a simple indicator of where the character’s loyalties lie when it comes to the powers that be. It was probably assumed, however, that being lawful was better than being chaotic, and even that chaotic was equated with evil based on some of the source material that the game was inspired by. Looking at it that way, your chaotic characters are automatically bad guys, at which point the whole thing stops making sense.
Researching this topic, I have come to understand that Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign (which seems to pre-date official D&D) divided things up along the lines of good, evil, and neutral. However, I have not been able to determine if this really represented an alignment system or if, sticking to the war game roots of the hobby, these terms were just used to describe the various sides of a conflict. However it was originally used, the system makes sense as an alignment guide. Nazis and pirates are both evil; Robin Hood and the knight in the bling-bling breastplate are both good. We are still left with the mission of determining what is good and what is evil, but that gets into a whole different debate.
By the time AD&D rolled around, we had the nine-branch, two-axis system that appears today. The classic alignment chart combines the two ways of looking at things, making a clear distinction between the lawful good knight-in-unexplainably-unblemished armor and the lawful evil tyrant.
Of the many heresies committed by the black book that shall never be mentioned (4th edition), the one that possibly inspired the most pointless nerdrage was the new alignment system. For once, the game had a system that really made sense; you were either a hero, a villain, or somebody just trying to get along in the world. In a hopeless effort to stifle the inevitable “how dare this new edition be different from the last one” the people at WotC shoehorned Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil into the system.
Of course, there are other games that use alignments as well. Palladium divides alignments into good, evil, and selfish. If you aren’t saving the world or trying to conquer it, then you must be selfish. These broader categories are broken down into more specific alignments like principled and scrupulous (which both basically mean honorable), and anarchist (which does not mean you believe in a political philosophy that argues that the state is an inherently oppressive tool of the ownership class and becomes unnecessary in a society where the workers control the means of production, but in fact means you are some crazy jerk who does stupid crap for no reason). I will avoid the temptation of turning this column into a rant about how words mean stuff or how Palladium books have the clarity of a 9th grader’s fan fiction and the internal consistency of a Marvel comic. I don’t try to understand it, and neither should you. Anytime someone tries to make sense of the Palladium rules, Kevin Sembieda eats a puppy. ***
Alignment as a Means of Character Description
Big trouble is on the horizon if the members of the gaming group do not have an agreement as to what the different alignments could mean. The following example should prove my point.
I once created a chaotic neutral cleric called Kyron Bloodrose, worshiper of the mad god Demious. I wrote out an elaborate back story for Demious and his religion. You see, reality would fall into stasis if order went unopposed, only the actions of this god keep things from becoming so stable that the universe becomes essentially frozen. Chaos, in the view of this religion, is a force of creativity, tearing down old forms so that something new could be made. Of course, being aligned with the unpredictable force of chaos drove Demious and many of his followers a little kooky.
That is how I thought my new religion should be. The DM, well, let’s just say that my deity ended up being a dirty slob who gave my character a stained T-shirt that read, “Mad as I want to be.” The shirt gave Kyron the power to make other people defecate in their breeches. What I had envisioned as a serious, if eccentric, religion that took joy in the unpredictable nature of life ended up being…something else. Of course, this was back in the day when chaotic neutral was equated with crazy. Not eccentric, not weird, hothouse rat crazy. Because if you aren’t evil, but you’re not trying be a hero, but you really don’t like being told what to do, you must be some kind of total nutter that jumps off of bridges for no reason and attacks his friends in the middle of a battle.
Modern Alignments
The later versions of the game removed some of the totally asinine and stupid views on alignment and replaced them with an updated set of alignment descriptions. Pathfinder probably does the best job of describing alignments in a way that makes playable sense. Still, a gaming group has to make some decisions, either collectively or as individuals, about what the alignments mean and how to incorporate them into the game world.
First and foremost, which alignment axis takes precedence? I return to the age-old question of how a lawful good character responds to a lawful evil king. Does he do what tradition and his sense of honor require by following the edicts of the legitimate king? Or does he do what his moral sense tells him to do by fighting against a blood-stained dictator? In samurai movies, dilemmas like these are usually solved by someone killing himself, either in protest against an order he can’t obey or to redeem himself after betraying his liege.
Someone out there will probably take this opportunity to suggest that the LG character work “inside the system” to serve the cause of good. That’s the thing about oppressive regimes; they don’t really have a system in place by which you can make things better. How would that even work, ask nicely? “Please stop taxing the freemen to death so you can fund your bloodthirsty war machine, pretty please? Oh, and if it’s not too much trouble, could ya cut back a bit on the virgin sacrifices?”
Of course, it gets ridiculous if you try to flip the script. How would a chaotic good character respond to chaotic evil king? Does he serve the “cause” of chaos by raping and pillaging, or does he fight against a marauding warlord? Stupid, right? A lawful character serves tradition for its own sake, but a chaotic character does not rebel for the sake of rebellion. If law means honor and tradition, while chaos means freedom and individuality, then are these really linear opposites? Does a chaotic character jump into oncoming traffic just to rebel against the law that forbids jaywalking? The LG character might find himself in a bind and have to choose between duty and decency, but the CG character never has to choose between freedom and decency: that doesn’t even make sense. A chaotic character might not be a fan of tradition or rules, but he isn’t going to murder someone just because there is a rule against it.
Now someone will try to make the argument that a LG character’s honor is based on always doing the right thing, in which case he or she is no different than the NG or CG character, who also does the right thing. If you only follow a code of honor when it matches what you want to do, you don’t have a code at all. If you swear an oath to serve the king, but get to change your mind if you disagree with him, that’s not much of an oath; it’s more of a, “yeah, I guess.”
Of Law and Chaos
Taken as a whole, we see that the whole law-chaos thing is always second fiddle to good-evil. The CG bard never sides with the CE barbarian instead of the LG paladin. “Sure this guy’s an evil monster, but you don’t expect me to be friends with a guy who believes in laws do you?”
But what if we changed it around? Because alignment is both a personal choice AND a description of the metaphysical laws of the universe, we could argue that being chaotic did not denote a love of freedom and rugged independence, but rather it was a state of being influenced by a force of unstoppable turmoil. Now the chaotic character has something in his head that scrambles his thoughts around, making him or her insane. Not just the CN character, but all chaotic alignments. Even the chaotic good character is influenced by disordered thoughts and must constantly fight against bedlam. In this sense, a chaotic alignment is not a choice, it is an affliction. The lawful character is aligned with a force of absolute order that gives him supernatural clarity in the face of the chaotic scourge, and the neutral character has neither madness nor inherent stability. At this point we can see that looking at order a different way has a massive impact on both the characters and the world at large.
Another way of switching it up is to say that order and chaos do not really exist. When you roll a die, the outcome is random, right? But if you had a team of physicists and a super computer, you could look at the mass of the die, the way you hold it, the force used to roll it, and the surface you roll it on, and then determine exactly what number would come up. This “random” event is actually predictable and works in accordance to the very orderly laws of physics. So nothing is really chaotic, or everything is, depending on how you look at it.
Of Good and Evil
We can play a similar game with the nature of good and evil. What if evil was not a denotation of violence and greed, but rather a more abstract notion of “wickedness.” For example, what about a person who likes having sex with multiple partners? Surely there are people who believe that sex outside of marriage (or with the wrong person) is immoral and wrong, therefore we can extrapolate it to mean evil. Good is not about heroically standing against theft and murder; it denotes temperance and restraint from worldly pleasures. In this world, the evil characters are not just marauders and assassins, but also drinkers, overeaters, and those who indulge in the flesh. This change also alters the definition of neutral, because these people are changed from not putting his neck on the line for others, to not hedonistic but not entirely chaste either.
A reoccurring trope found in roleplaying games is the villain who is evil “for evil’s sake.” If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s because it’s stupid. First of all, evil people tend to think that they are good. Hitler didn’t sit around the Eagle’s Nest cackling about how EEEVVVIIILLL he was like a bad guy from a kid’s cartoon.
Some would believe that people like Hitler or Stalin has something in their DNA that made them inherently bad. A more realistic explanation holds that these people were just like us and made bad choices; anyone is capable of performing the hideous acts that made these men infamous. Hitler honestly thought that conquering other countries to build an empire for the Germans was okay. He also thought that Jews and Gypsies were really bad people and that communism was the worst thing ever. Was he alone in these beliefs? No one likes to talk about the Americans and British who supported fascism. The Nazis hated Jews and communists, and that sounded just fine to a lot of people in that era. As far as empire-building goes, which European countries didn’t participate in brutally conquering Africa and Asia? Concentration camps? The term entered out lexicon during the Second Boer War; the British thought that the Afrikaner guerillas would come out of the hills if their children were rounded up and systematically starved to death. Yet, we don’t think of Lord Kitchener when we think of absolute evil, nor do we think of Andrew Jackson, despite the atrocities he ordered against the “five civilized tribes.”
But again, we can turn it around. In D&D, does not have to be about poor moral choices made from ignorance, selfishness, or expediency. It doesn’t have to be about a lack of compassion or empathy that makes it easier to inflict cruelty upon others. Evil as a cosmic force means that its influence can invade a person’s very being, filling that person with hate and unfulfillable desire. Thus, these people have no choice in the way they act so are not immoral, but they are as dangerous as wounded animals. The good in this setting will be filled with a supernatural source of love and generosity, while the neutral would not.
A slightly more Eastern view of this would hold that evil is not a force, it is merely the absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light. A similar view would hold that good and evil are just names we apply to things we like and dislike. Good and evil are concepts, and have no inherent reality. If you see through the illusion of duality, you begin to have compassion for all. The person who kills for good is as much a killer as the one who kills for evil, so the only ethical thing to do would be to stop killing. That might make for a boring campaign, but any of these views on alignment can be used to shape the world of a campaign in unique ways.
***I actually met Kevin once at Gen Con in Columbus. He seemed like a really nice guy.
