One of the most important facets of my vision for Digital Dungeoneering (aka my nifty website) is sharing and explaining about how to improve your experience and ability with Dungeons & Dragons. Today, that goal becomes a reality! I feel that an easily accessible way to start off blogging discussions about D&D is with a series about how to better roleplay a D&D alignment.
A character's D&D alignment is often mistaken for a set of rules that the character has to obey and the player has to work around. In fact, the opposite is true: D&D alignments should be moral tendencies on the part of the character that are determined and acted upon the player. In this article, I hope to explain why that is the case and how to better envision alignments.
What is a D&D Alignment?
If you are at all connected to literature, television, or pop culture elements in the present day and age, you've likely seen a chart like this one with some of your favorite book/movie/whatever characters assigned D&D-stylized alignments:
The ideas that charts like these suggest can provide an additional lens that we can use when analyzing a known character's traits and behaviors. Also, they're fun to make and look at.
The moral alignment system that D&D uses presents a matrix of characterization options to the players. During the character creation process, the player chooses where the character's ideals, morals, plans, and behaviors rest on a scale of good to evil and law to chaos.
This system has its roots as far back as D&D's immediate ancestors. Gary Gygax's medieval war-game Chainmail, produced in 1971, included fantasy supplements that involved creatures fashioned after J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth works. In order to create a scenario for warring armies to clash over, Gygax created a system that pitted the forces of Law against the hordes of Chaos, and assigned creatures to each side based on their canonical tendencies in literature and mythology.
In later writings produced through war-game fan-published magazines, Gygax followed up on his system by clarifying that Law and Chaos were not by any means representations of the concepts of Good and Evil, as many had mistaken the distinctions between creatures as between their good or evil tendencies. Gygax explained that, while there are many Lawful creatures that are also Good, there are also Lawful creatures, such as devils, that are clearly and blatantly Evil; and likewise Chaotic creatures that are Good, such as elves or gnomes.
In the following years of game development, testing, and revising, the original Law/Chaos system was expanded in a new dimension by adding the axis of Good/Evil, as well as including a position for Neutrality on each of the two spectrums. This went on to morph into the nine options that are used in D&D today, inviting players to plot their character's position as Good, Neutral, or Evil, and as Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic.
This is all well and good. So what's the big deal about your character's alignment?
The Misconception
The problem comes when a player uses their character's alignment to cause havoc or unrest within a party. Everyone has heard of the player who constantly asks if he can pick the pockets of everyone in his party because "I'm chaotic, and it seems like something I would want to do;" or the Lawful character who immediately positions themselves as the arbiter of party justice, stepping on the rights shared by players and DMs to punish others who don't agree with their plans. If your party accepts and agrees beforehand to the logic involved there (and your DM isn't against the idea of inter-party mayhem), then by all means carry on, but most players with whom I have spoken appreciate that adventurers such as these are often few and far between.
Ideas like these come from the misconception that a character's alignment governs their behavior, and so if you want to be "allowed" to play a certain way, you have to choose a particular alignment that "lets you" do what you want to do. Understanding this mindset gives us an idea of why players may behave this way: they feel as if they have to take their alignment to an extreme in order to follow the "alignment rules," and so, logically, they choose and exaggerate alignments that seem as though they give them the greatest ability to play the way they want.
This is, of course, not the purpose of an alignment. D&D's alignment system should not be either a means to achieve an end; nor should it be viewed as a concept that governs how your character behaves and reacts to situations.
How to Envision Alignment
I define a D&D character's alignment as follows: a moral tendency on the part of the character that is determined and acted upon by the player. This definition emphasizes the two essential parts of an alignment: (1) it is a tendency on the part of the character, meaning that an alignment is only as strict of a guideline as the player decides it should be (although if you go too loose, your DM might suggest you switch alignments based on your behavior); and (2) the player determines how their character operates within their alignment, and how the character responds to dilemmas and makes decisions based upon their perception of their alignment.
Even more simply, a character's alignment should be how the character views their individual role in the world. In order to play a character well, the player should be willing to put themselves into the shoes of their character and think about situations and problems from the perspective of the character. In order for this to work, the character needs to have a fleshed-out moral standpoint that factors into their decision-making process, and this is moral outlook is what should be represented and summarized by their D&D alignment terms.
It's also important to understand what the term "tendency" means in reference to a character's actions. A character is almost always in a state of change, whether from a gameplay perspective of spell slots or hit points, a storytelling perspective of character experiences and campaign journeys, or a meta perspective of levels and abilities. Why, then, is it so strange that a character's perspective on the world in which they exist should change and grow as they gain experiences and learn? It makes sense that a character's planning, choices, and alignment standards should be influenced by what they have gained from their adventures. Yet occasionally players assume that there is only one way to be lawful and good, or to be chaotic and neutral, and then they never deviate from those assumed base concepts, in effect creating a rule system around their alignment.
For instance, a Lawful Good paladin may decide that in order to be both Lawful and Good, they must uphold the law and serve the common good. That's a fine starting place for a paladin's moral ideals. Perhaps the character helps thwart the bandits along the trade highways and spends downtime serving the poor and needy. But what do you do if your player doesn't understand that their alignment isn't a rigid demand that they must always follow, all of the time, without allowing adaptation to new or different situations?
Perhaps this character obtains knowledge of a law that has been broken by an individual who is a superior towards them. But what if the superior broke the law in order to further the common good of the kingdom? A character who takes both halves of their alignment to extremes and doesn't allow for variance cannot grasp the idea of unlawfulness being Good, may classify the entire thing as Evil because it opposes their understanding of Good, and then we get a prime directive situation like Miko Miyazaki from The Order of the Stick. (Side note: If you haven't read this awesome D&D webcomic, you should. Link below article.)
When I say a character with a particular alignment should have a tendency to behave in a certain way, it does not mean that a character must, should, or has to follow a specific line of behavior. Instead, it means that a character that behaves in a certain way creates one example of how to play that alignment. The flow of direction is important to understand. A character can still be Lawful and Good, for instance, by exhibiting a tendency to usually do things that are Lawful and Good when a choice is presented. This means that occasional actions that lean towards Neutrality or Chaos don't invalidate a character's Lawful alignment, depending on how seriously the character takes their Lawful bonds.
Great. We've deconstructed a fairly elemental concept prevalent in character creation. So what do we do with this information?
How We Should Use Alignment
This gives players no small degree of freedom in making decisions for their characters. Because actions should have a tendency to (rather than "only ever") match one's alignment, it's okay for players to come up with creative solutions that work within the wide boundaries and interpretations offered by one's chosen alignment. And it's okay for two characters with the same alignment to differ vastly in the way they demonstrate their alignment. What's important is the long-term trends that the character's actions present, and how closely the character adheres to their core ideals.
Players who want to add greater depth to their characters can work with their Dungeon Masters during the character creation process to establish how and why their characters exemplify their alignment, and determine where the character lies on the dual scales (Law/Neutral/Chaos; Good/Neutral/Evil) that compose the alignment chart. DMs can build depth in their worlds by adding conflicts into their campaigns that force the players to make hard decisions through the lens of their character and determine the course of action that is most moral for their character in a given situation. Character's behaviors can be influenced by not only their alignment, but also the situation that they are currently in, as well as everything they have learned from each scenario they've faced in the past. And when it all comes together during the game, it will make a pretty nifty story.
This ends part one of this discussion about alignments. In upcoming articles (which will be more concise, I promise!) I will move from a general perspective on alignments to write more specifically about how to play particular alignments, including some do's and don't's and ideas for moral conflicts that can test or prove a character's chosen alignment.
If you enjoyed this article or found it interesting, please consider sharing it with others who you feel could benefit from my perspective.
Sources:
Alignment System Creation History
Peterson, Jon.Playing at the World: a History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games. Unreason Press, 2012.
Harry Potter Alignment Chart
D&D Alignment Chart
Miko Miyazaki (Character)
Whole comic (makes most sense in context): https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html
Relevant episode (Spoiler warning): https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0406.html