#alterz talks

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I’ve gotten a random influx of new followers lately so here’s your casual reminder that you are always welcome to drop into my inbox (anonymous or not) to request things you want me to tag for your tag blocker

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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.

There’s two main issues, as far as I can tell. The first is that the terms lawful and chaotic are, well, unclear. That’s why, for example, the argument in the post that spawned this is premised on following the rules. But this ends up getting just... incredibly ridiculous, because like... okay if my character was perfectly law abiding in their original culture but then keeps getting afoul of the laws in the place the campaign takes place because of culture clash, are they lawful or chaotic? I have repeatedly seen characters who follow no laws at all be classed as lawful because “they follow a code/their own code”.

But that doesn’t reliably tell us what a character of any given alignment is likely to do. If you have a lawful character faced with a situation regarding breaking a specific law, the argument over their behavior shouldn’t be dependent on whether that character is lawful by the standards of society vs lawful by their own code vs lawful by foreign standards.

The other issue is the good vs evil axis, in its entirety, because we’re told that alignments are something the characters choose and no person thinks to themselves “I choose to be evil.” And then you end up with whole arguments about “this character thinks they’re purging the world of evil and doing a good thing, but they’re acting evil, but they’re doing it for a good cause, are they good aligned or evil aligned???”

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. So a character Is Good, and either follows rules or doesn’t. Or a character Is Evil, and either does so within the rules or outside them.

(Note how what lawful or chaotic mean are different based on whether the character is good or evil, rather than being their own independent axis.)

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. What does that mean? I’m going to just directly quote from the old Basic handbook, published in 1983. This is so old that Lawful and Good were almost synonymous (same for Chaotic and Evil), so I’m going to cut out the stuff that confuses the issue and just quote the parts that define Law and Chaos. On page 55 of the Player’s Handbook, it provides the following:

Law (or Lawful) is the belief that everything should follow an order... [Lawful creatures] will try to obey laws as long as such laws are fair and just.

If a choice must be made between the benefit of a group or an individual, a Lawful character will usually choose the group. Sometimes individual freedoms must be given up for the good of the group. [...]

Chaos (or Chaotic) is the opposite of Law. It is the belief that life is random... Everything happens by accident... It is not important to keep promises, and lying and telling the truth are both useful.

To a Chaotic creature, the individual is the most important of all things. Selfishness is the normal way of life, and the group is not important. [...]

Neutrality (or Neutral) is the belief that the world is a balance between Law and Chaos... The individual is important, but so is the group; the two sides must work together...

Basically, a spectrum with individualistic ideals at one end and communistic ideals at the other. That’s it, it’s that simple. Do you act in the interests of the many, or the interests of the individual?

And I think most of us could agree that those ideals, of community vs the individual, are ones that people hold onto Very Strongly. It makes more sense to me that these ideals are the ones that would make a character’s core. And it has nothing to do with literal human laws. Laws can be wrong, laws can be in the interests of individuals rather than communities. Lawful isn’t following the laws, it’s saying there should be an order, that Truth and Justice and Morals should be immutable and existing things. Chaotic, meanwhile, isn’t a failure to be lawful: it’s saying that there is only as much Truth or Justice or Morality in the world as we make there be.

And then Good or Evil as methodology makes a lot of sense. Watch:

Lawful Good says that the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few, and therefore I, the LG person speaking, will sacrifice my best interests for the good of the community.

Lawful Evil says that the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few, and therefore certain people can quite reasonably be sacrificed for the good of the community, because those few people don’t matter as much.

Lawful Neutral sits somewhere in between, not necessarily harming others but not sacrificing oneself either.

Chaotic Good says that the rights of the individual matter the most, regardless of the desires of the many, and therefore I, the CG person speaking, will fight for all individuals to have their own individual rights.

Chaotic Evil says that the rights of the individual matter the most, regardless of the desires of the many, and therefore I, the CE person speaking, am going to do what I want for me because there’s nothing wrong with being selfish and looking out for yourself first.

Chaotic Neutral, again, sits somewhere in between.

Neutral on the Law/Chaos spectrum, as mentioned, says the rights of the individual shouldn’t be completely sacrificed in favor of the greater whole, or vice versa. Neutral Good tries to balance these by compromising for everyone’s sakes, while Neutral Evil is more ruthless in balancing these things.

So there you go. Everything has a nice simple spectrum, from community oriented to individualistic and from compassionate to ruthless. Any character in any of those alignments can say they believe they’re doing what’s best and right, and all of them will be telling the truth, whether they’re being selfish or self-sacrificing. Characters who “follow their own code” because they believe there’s only as much justice as we put into the world are Chaotic, characters who follow their own code because they believe there’s a Right Way Things Should Be that other people have forgotten or ignored are Lawful. And it’s very easy to slip up and down the Good/Evil spectrum because you’re following an ideal that you believe is Right, and how you treat others in the pursuit of that ideal can easily go to extremes (how many stories about that have we seen? Well-Intentioned Extremist trope, anyone?)

Bringing this back to my original point re: Steve Rogers, he’s absolutely Lawful Good. He believes that there is a Right and Good way that things should be, he will absolutely sacrifice himself to make that way be reality for others, and if your petty human-level rules and regulations get in the way of doing What Is Right then he’s not going to follow them because following The Law is more important that following the law.

ANYWAY THAT’S HOW YOU FIX A THE ALIGNMENT SYSTEM, PLEASE STOP WITH THE CURRENT INTERPRETATIONS POST-HASTE, HALLELUJAH AMEN.

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maelace replied to your post “i’m putting a bunch of /// through it ‘cause i don’t want this in the...”

I only read those books once and it's been almost 10 years but what I remember of Bart/i/maes is screaming 'hufflest of puffs to ever puff'. But I might be remembering a different character? Kitty I do remember, and she's totes Gryffindor.

ah but you see according to the op ‘people would just put kitty into gryffindor without thinking’ so obviously both our interpretations are just shallow

and yes barti/ma/eus is HUFFLEPUFF AS FUCK??? he’s not ambitious, slytherin doesn’t have a lockdown on “clever” or “resourceful” (honestly when you have those minus ambition that’s more ravenclaw), and he looks out for himself first due to having been fucking abused for thousands of years???? the moment anyone shows him an ounce of genuine care or compassion or trust he instantly flips to ride or die? and whenever he needs to do something for any reason other than “a person i hate is making me do this on pain of pain” he sees it through to the fucking end? stalwart and loyal = very yes?????

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i’m putting a bunch of /// through it ‘cause i don’t want this in the tag but @ my mutuals who’ve also read the ba/r/timae/us trilogy: should i or should i not wade into a discussion between strangers (they explicitly invited conversation okay!!!!!) because people are still claiming bar/tim/ae/us is a slyt/herin “because he’s self serving” in this, the year of our lord 2k17

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Hey, I read your alignment-fix-post, and it was interesting! I'd never heard it explained so cogently before. What I'd like to know is,My question is why do we need the system? Isn't it just an attempt to unnecessarily apply mechanics to a social feature? If there's a drive in players to differentiate from one another (and I'd argue there is), they are encouraged to oppose one another fundamentally, making cooperation nigh impossible/group dynamics super fraught. Why do we need alignments?

A fair question! And the simplest answer, in all honesty, is: we don’t. There is no need for the alignment system. Once upon a time it served mechanical benefits (detect good/evil, protection from good/evil, etc) but those have been removed and/or completely retooled by later editions. And wisely so, IMO! Because of the exact sort of interference to cooperation that you’re mentioning.

I’ve even got some notes on that post that (rather rudely, honestly) said a better idea was to toss the alignment system all together. And like: okay? You don’t have to use it. It serves no mechanical benefit. If your game group doesn’t want to use alignment, then feel free to toss it out! Anyone who gets a bug up their butt about you not using alignments (oh the wank when 4e tried to change that up) needs to chill out and maybe reevaluate their priorities.

What I would argue, though, is that it does serve a potential purpose as an RP guide. If you’re new to RPing and not used to trying to stay in character and something comes up that throws you off, there’s a simple guideline to say “how would me character act here?” Or say you’re a DM running a prewritten adventure: you’ve been handed some NPCs and a script for them, and your players just jumped track entirely. How do the NPCs respond? Here’s a quick cheat-sheet.

Or maybe you’re really into worldbuilding (as I am). The generic orc stats say they’re chaotic evil. What does that tell me about their society? I hate a lot of the details D&D has published for the orcs (Volo can kiss my ass), but I still want to flesh them out in a way that will be recognizable to my players. Those two words (chaotic evil) can help act as a guidepost for keeping stuff recognizable even as a I do whatever I want.

Etc etc. You don’t even have to be a beginner RPer, plenty of experienced RPers use different tricks to establish their characters in the first place. Sitting down with your new character and thinking about what alignment they’d be can be a good way to figure out what their ideals are and what they’re willing to do for those ideals. Hell, 5e added the personality traits/ideals/bonds/flaws thing, and it serves no mechanical purpose. Yes, yes, it theoretically grants Inspiration, but I’ve seen people leave those sections of the character sheet totally blank. It’s an RP tool. Since it no longer serves a mechanical benefit, people can feel free to use it however they like.

And then of course there’s the fallback that it Just Doesn’t Feel Like D&D Without Alignments, which is silly but definitely a feeling people (including me) have. But ultimately for me it’s this: the alignment system, for good or ill, has spread out through cultural osmosis so that people use the terms in completely unrelated settings, and it is probably still going to be around when we hit D&D 20e. It’s not going away. But it is getting more complicated and confused by different interpretations of it and confusion over the terminology, so occasionally pruning back the growth and simplifying back to essentials is a good idea. I like it as an RP guide, but it’s a useless RP guide if you can literally argue any character to fit into any alignment bucket.

One last note: while the original alignment stuff definitely included a fundamental divide between the extremes of the table, that’s dropped by the wayside (at least on the lawful/chaotic axis) and I think that’s a good thing. You’re right that encouraging polarization in the characters is a bad idea. There’s a reason I didn’t bring that up in my fix-it post, and that’s that I think it’s a relic of a bygone RP age and good riddance. Besides, there are literally BECMI era books that have lawful and chaotic people partying up together, so clearly the creators were never actually that married to the concept of individuals taking sides in a cosmic battle, either.

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hey new followers

(and old followers who forgot or came in after the last time this was said, whatever)

quick reminder that if you have things that you need tagged, feel free to send an ask (anonymous or no, it won’t be published). i try to tag for all the usual predictable upsetting things but if you have something else, or if you want me to make double extra sure that i tag all instances of a specific thing, let me know!

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why does tumblr have a weird horse game in the corner :0

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THE FIRST EP OF STAR TREK DIDN'T AIR UNTIL 1966. THIS MEANS THE DARK HAIR/BLOND HAIR THING PREDATES KIRKSPOCK. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS INFO, I'M

holy shit

idk what to do with this info either, anon, i really

i just don’t know :0