Alignment

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The old reliable

Alignment is a way of quantifying ethics/morality in Dungeons and Dragons. People, creatures, spells, objects, and places can have an alignment. The term is used in other role-playing games whenever characters or NPCs have a simple stat for their own code of conduct.

Alignment has spawned more debates and motivational posters than anything else in D&D. Alignment threads now belong in /co/ after we swapped them for Empowered. Post alignment threads at risk of sagebombing.

Some argue that taking alignment seriously in any way entails failure because it tries to simplify and categorise something philosophers, sociologists, theologists and psychologists have been debating for thousands of years with no tangible results. A famous example shows the goddamn Batman in various periods of his comic and his actions and words correspond to pretty much all existing alignments. Recent developments in D&D (Eberron, 4th Edition) have been relaxing and ignoring the old rigid structure.

Others argue that those people don't understand fuck about how the two-axis alignment system is meant to work and that using an inconsistent comic book character who has been written by dozens of different people over the course of his existence to try and demonstrate that the system fails is completely missing the point.

Debate continues.

Alignment in different editions

• Original D&D had just three categories: Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral, which corresponded to "good guy," "thieving scum," and "regular person." Probably got the idea from Michael Moorcock novels.

• Advanced D&D (aka 1st edition) replaced the three alignments with Good, Evil and Neutral, and then added another axis for Lawful, Chaotic and Neutral. It was laid out in the back of the Player's Handbook in an appendix with the diagram at the top of this page. The Good/Evil axis was pretty much "Hero/Villian", Lawful meant law-abiding and Chaotic meant rebel. You could have mixes of the two axes, like Lawful-Neutral or Chaotic-Good to get more variety. Your alignment also determined what sort of an afterlife awaited you, and the diagram of the "Outer Planes" (also in an appendix) corresponding to the character's alignment.

• AD&D 2nd Edition, and 3rd (and 3.5) Editions made no changes to alignment. Same two-axis method, same class restrictions, same hating people who were on the other side of the chart from you.

• 4th Edition made a controversial change. Instead of the classic 3x3 grid which has served us well since the 1970's, the alignment system was changed to a single axis with five positions: lawful good, good, unaligned, evil, and chaotic evil. As with many of the changes implemented in 4E, this has caused much heated, vigorous discussion about the subject.

Dunno why they just didn't call it "very good", "good", "meh", "evil" and "very evil".

Alignments in other RPGs

• White Wolf's World of Darkness games use a shopping list of Jungian archetypes to describe a character's personal code of conduct, described as their "Nature." The games have much emphasis on social interactions, betrayal, deception and general being a bastard, so there's also the archetype they present publically, called their "Demeanor." Good or evil can be a bit irrelevant when the player characters are all vampires/ werewolves/ demigods/ dead/ half-imaginary. Characters that behaved appropriately to their Nature archetype were gained a stronger self-confidence, evidenced by awarding "willpower" points they could spend later to make tasks more likely to succeed.

• d20 Modern uses "allegiances" instead of ethics, indicating the character subscribes to an established code of conduct, or the mores of a social group. Dealing with an NPC with a matching allegiance gives the player a +2 circumstance bonus to social tasks. If an NPC witnesses you violating one of their allegiances, that's a -2 for any social tasks with that NPC evermore. Characters can have multiple allegiances, each providing the +2/-2 when appropriate, but not cumulatively.

• Palladium Fantasy RPG (and all Palladium games that came later) used three categories for alignment: Good, Selfish and Evil. These broke down into seven alignments: Principled, Scrupulous, Unprincipled, Anarchist, Aberrant, Miscreant, and Diabolic. They added "Taoist" for their Kung-fu games, but nobody used it.

• GURPS didn't have alignments. Instead, it was a long list of mental disadvantages you could take during character generation to restrict the character's behaviour. Since characters were on a point-buy system, these disadvantages could be traded for other advantages. You could take Compulsive Honesty (-10 point flaw), for enough points to get you Ambidexterity (+10 point advantage), or Kleptomania (-15) for a military rank of Lieutenant (three ranks @ +5).

• Warhammer Fantasy had five alignments on a linear scale: Law - Good - Neutral - Evil - Chaotic. This was used as a rule of thumb for reactions between people -- identical alignments would be well-disposed towards each other, but the further apart alignments are, the more likely things will come to blows. A character's alignment could shift at most one step left or right from where they started. Later editions of Warhammer de-emphasizes the alignment system in favour of allegiances and broad personalities.

Gallery

Did we mention that alignment charts are a meme?

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  An alignment chart for gradient alignment tracking.
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  Optimus Prime, Hero to Good, Greatest enemy to Evil, is the textbook example of Lawful Good with some leanings towards Chaotic(See War Within) and God in the eyes of Transfans.