Alignment to be Crossed: Better Aids for Morality
There’s a popular meme in which characters with some relation to each other — being from the same series or possibly genre — will be compared in a 2-dimensional chart. You may have seen something like the following:
According to Wikipedia, the categories of “Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic” and “Good-Neutral-Evil” come from the Role Playing Game, Dungeons and Dragons or “DnD”. The “Lawful-Chaotic” axis came out first, where “lawful” was intended to mean “honor and respect for society’s rules” and “chaotic” meant “rebelliousness and individualism” with neutral clearly being somewhere in the middle. The 1979 Dungeons and Dragons basic set included an additional “good-evil” axis, where “good” meant “altruism and respect for life” and evil meant “selfishness and no respect for life”. Like many components of the game system such as encumbrance or rations, the alignment system has remained in the game as a largely vestigial component from earlier additions with less mechanical relevance as the game has evolved.
Alignment as a Narrative Aid
I’m writing this largely as a result of listening to one of the more recent Classic Gamers Guild podcasts (which I enjoy, you should give them a listen!) which describes alignment as useful for “planning characters for writing” and “an interesting view in which to try to understand characters, their arcs, their motivations, and who they are.” I hope to convince you, dear reader, that not only are there far better tools for this, but alignment is genuinely bad for this purpose.
Every Alignment Name is Terrible
While Good versus Evil does describe opposites, Chaos is the opposite of Order, not Law: the opposite of law is lawlessness, or anarchy (not to be confused with Anarchism).
In the modern edition as of writing this (5th edition) these axis are different in subtle yet very far reaching ways. For example, Chaotic Neutral is described thus:
Chaotic neutral (CN) creatures follow their whims, holding their personal freedom above all else.
Why not simply call them whimsical, freedom loving, or similar? Chaos has a traditionally negative connotation: one that might be attributed by a character calling themselves lawful.
Along with lawful, “good” is one of the most poorly named alignments. There is a quote, “everyone is the protagonist of their own story”, or in other words, everyone thinks that they are the good guy. “Good” can’t be a useful descriptor if it simply means “one’s own morality”, so let’s look at the player’s handbook:
Neutral good (NG) folk do the best they can to help others according to their needs.
If the unifying concern of Good creatures is helping others, then “good” is really about “altruism”. Similar to chaos, “evil”:
Neutral evil (NE) is the alignment of those who do whatever they can get away with, without compassion or qualms.
would not describe itself as such, but rather as “pragmatic” or even “amoral”.
Like the connotation of “chaotic”, evil is described from a perspective of something that considers itself “good”. This kind of objective morality may be useful in a world like that of Lord of the Rings where “good” is by definition “serving the will of Ilúvatar”, but it is not so useful in writing deep characters.
Lawful Deserves its Own Section
Finally, we come to “lawful”, the most confusingly named of all.
Lawful neutral (LN) individuals act in accordance with law, tradition, or personal codes.
A personal code is extraordinarily different from acting in accordance to the law. Clearly, a character who is “lawful” is one who craves order of some kind. What “lawful” means then, in the modern context of alignment, is actually “Orderly”. This makes sense, as order is the true opposite of chaos.
Because of the inevitably self contradictory meaning, the term quickly becomes useless as a tool for assessing moral beliefs. What happens when a character’s personal code violates the letter of the law?
Let’s imagine a character with a strong moral code. They are known for trying to restore equity to the disenfranchised, fighting fair, and having an unwavering loyalty to the rightful ruler of their land.
Oh and also for dressing in Lincoln green!
Robin Hood is often used as the epitomizing example of Chaotic Good, which reads thus:
Chaotic good (CG) creatures act as their conscience directs, with little regard for what others expect.
Robin clearly has a personal code: he will consistently demand honorable fights where he does not have an advantage, he takes from those who have too much and gives to those who have too little, and he accepts the judgement of the rightful King Richard but not the corrupt Sheriff of Nottingham or Prince John, depending on the individual legend.
While Robin certainly has a whimsical side, for arguments sake we could imagine a character that didn’t. Such a character would be against the law because of the strength of their moral code. In the DnD definition of the term, they would be too lawful to be lawful.
Because of the misleading naming schema and its contradictory nature, I don’t think people should use the alignment system as an aid for creating characters with morals; in fact they should actively avoid it.
Alternatives to Alignment
There exist many better alternatives to alignment, some of which are themselves multi-axial morality systems. Since humans in real life tend to fall into normal distributions in regards to just about any category, binary categorization is often overfitted. It can often be better to see individual’s priorities to different, separate moral views.
Magic: the Gathering
MtG uses a 5 axis morality system in its design. In this system each point represents a core desire or goal. Points generally agree with adjacent points, and generally disagree with opposite corners.
While I don’t agree with the description of each description in the above image exactly, it’s close enough to what they represent. Characters are generally described by one or two colors foremost, with the understanding that all people will agree with each goal to some extent. The colors and their relationships give a good idea of how to push characters buttons.
Torment: Tides of Numenera
Torment, similarly, uses a 5 point morality system, but its points do not have special relationships with one another. A player can equally likely be passionate and justice seeking as zealous and ambitious.
I believe choosing between aspects the character views as positive is important, because these are where the real moral dilemmas come from.
Making your own Questions
Ultimately, there is probably no true substitution for coming up with what drives characters on a person by person basis. Having a couple beliefs is ideal, as it sets up characters for internal conflict when their ideals clash and they are forced to choose only one. The more the setting can respond to those personal beliefs, the better.
And beliefs don’t have to be just for characters: settings can have beliefs too. Whatever big questions are formed by how the world is changing, those are things the characters will have to grapple with no matter what.
Do you have an opinion on moral systems as narrative aids? Shoot me your opinion here on Twitter, I’d be more than happy to hear it.
Thanks for reading!
