oh, shit, people actually asked me to follow up on Preaching The Good Word of A Functional Alignment System, okay
i hope you people know what you’re unleashing here
(whole thing prompted by this right here, notably including the tag #unpopular opinion: the definition of lawful and chaotic has been thoroughly twisted over the years since od&d)
So some of you (the ones who didn’t request this) might be wondering: “Alterz, why would you want to go back to the old alignment method? If people generally agree on the new alignment definitions then why confuse things by trying to change them? Is this just some old system nostalgia?”
Well 1) I’m too young by far for old system nostalgia but more importantly 2) people don’t? agree????? on the alignments???????
And that’s a problem, because the whole point of the alignments is to give some rough guidelines on how any given character is likely to act. It should be inarguable. The very fact that people can have arguments over what an alignment is means that the system has failed.
If you look in the alignment section on the more recent D&D editions, they literally have to go into detail on each alignment to explain what each one means. Worse still, for a system theoretically set up as a gradient, the different alignments are basically buckets and it gets really confusing if a character doesn’t neatly fit into one of those buckets.
Some examples from characters I have actually played: a mercenary who I labeled as neutral because I could make equally compelling arguments for why he should be lawful neutral, chaotic neutral, neutral good, and neutral evil. A hermit who at any given time was chaotic neutral or neutral good, but could never reliably be described as chaotic good.
Under the system I’m about to provide you, the mercenary is inarguably chaotic neutral and the hermit is unambiguously lawful good. End of sentence, all cleared up.
“…And ultimately when you put these two together, the issue boils down to this: under the modern interpretation of the alignment system, Good and Evil are what you are, and Lawful or Chaotic are how you do it. […] But if we go back to the old, like really old iterations of D&D, it wasn’t like that, and it made a bit more sense, because: Lawful and Chaotic were What You Are, and Good or Evil was How You Do It.”
WOW OKAY, I’M DOWN FOR THIS?? Really good read! 🙂
(…interestingly, this alignment makes my Melkor suddenly Chaotic Neutral, or perhaps Chaotic Evil/Good simultaneously depending on the situation. Meanwhile Sauron remains as Lawful Evil as he’s ever been. Lawful-Evil-Imitating-Chaotic-Neutral is a great recipe for fucking over relationships and entire civilizations…)
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 