Alignment in Dungeons and Dragons

I can’t speak for alignment in 5e, but in 1e it is oft misunderstood. So much so that it isn’t used except in the most minimal ways by many old school gamers. I think alignment serves a few useful purposes in the game, but only if it is clarified somewhat.

First off, alignment has two broad purposes in the game, one, to order the cosmology, and two, to direct NPC/monster group action and to a limited degree PC action. 

On the first topic, alignment organizes the cosmos, something that is useful in a game world that blends so many fantasy and mythological elements. How do you make sense of the different pantheons of gods all actually existing in the world? Alignment helps to organize that, and provides an ebb and flow for their interactions.

But the PCs won’t ever really engage with this except on the most abstract level. An individual DM might choose to have the supernatural forces of law or chaos direct the campaign as they did in a Moorcock novel, but that level of specificity isn’t needed for most games.

And the existence of chaos and evil as metaphysical forces also helps to drive the campaign, why do monsters continually oppose civilized men? Because they are evil and chaotic, that’s why! It absolves the DM from creating long, intricate game world histories to explain enmities and aggression, it’s just baked into the game that there will always be forces of evil and forces of chaos and forces of law at work, acting in the game world. You don’t need to use these forces to explain what is happening, but it is a common tool in the fantasy literature that inspired the game, so it makes a sensible fit.

So alignment as a cosmic principle is fairly in the background of most campaigns, and it is a useful organizing tool to help the DM decide on how various factions will align themselves. 

With respect to individuals, not groups, alignment has a different role.

Alignment is a passive role-playing tool. An active role playing tool directs a character to specific actions. So for example, the encounter reaction table is an active role playing tool. So are morale rules. In specific cases, dice are rolled and this directs the actions of the NPC/monster in question. 

The majority of role playing rules in D&D are passive, and alignment is an example of that. Alignment is not meant to direct your specific actions. Take a look at what Gygax has to say:

1. Alignment is a “broad ethos”
2. It does not determine religion 3. The “overall behavior” of the NPC/monster is determined by alignment 4. It organizes groups of creatures into “mutually acceptable” or “non-hostile” divisions, they can still be opposed, even to the point of killing, but alignment shapes how those oppositions play out 5. It determines the actions, reactions and purposes of groups 6. It helps players to define their role (like class does) 7. For PCs ACTIONS DETERMINE ALIGNMENT

Now take a look at a few descriptions of alignments:

What you should be realizing by now is that alignment is not specific, just like values, alignments do not determine specific behavior. And if you think about it, how could they? How could something this vague and general shape individual decisions in any decisive way? Do lawful characters ever lie? Well, lying is breaking the laws of society, but in the service of a greater lawful goal? 

Think of alignments like general political positions, you can in general believe that all people have a right to live without poverty or want, but object to particular forms of help for the disadvantaged as they have other important costs, or favor certain groups over others. You might believe in individual rights or that individuals have important rights that need to be defended against the will of the group, but still support forms of taxation on the individual for the greater good.

Importantly, alignments are not supposed to direct PCs to specific actions, as alignment is to be directed by player actions, not the other way around. Players are supposed to pick their alignments based on class restrictions at character generation, if they have no class restrictions, they pick what they want. At that point they play their character any way they want. If they want to hew to the alignment of their character (use it as a guide to playing their role) they are welcome to, but if their behavior doesn’t fit the alignment, the alignment is supposed to be changed by the DM. 

This doesn’t mean that the lawful good character who acts selfishly is suddenly chaotic evil. Alignment is supposed to shift after sustained non-alignment appropriate behavior. So your alignment doesn’t shift daily, it shifts over long time periods based on multiple actions. That’s why Gygax suggests that you track alignment over time.

In short, alignment shouldn’t be directing the players in any significant way until they have engaged in a sustained and consistent series of actions that track to a specific alignment that is not compatible with their listed alignment.

But even when that happens, and I would assume it happens fairly rarely, for the majority of PCs it won’t matter at all. Because some character classes don’t have alignment restrictions, and even those that do have some latitude (e.g. a ranger has to be good, a monk has to be lawful).

In short, for players, the only times alignment should be coming up in game for them is when they have: A. Engaged in a sustained and consistent set of actions that are incompatible with a class based alignment restriction B. Engaged with a portion of the game world that uses alignment (e.g. a weapon that can only be wielded by someone of evil alignment)  

Other than that, alignment is a non-issue for the players, as it wasn’t meant to be an active role playing tool. It’s primarily a DM’s tool, to organize the cosmology of a fantasy game created from diverse source material, to help determine what groups of creatures will do in a general way, to determine the outcome of interactions with certain spells and magic (e.g. protection from evil)  and to track player behavior to determine if it is incompatible with their chosen class. 

In a game that runs alignment in this way, the way I believe it is designed in the rules of 1e, it does a few things for players: 1. It helps PCs to pick a god to worship 2. It sometimes helps PCs to decide the makeup of their party (e.g. “only goods and neutrals) 3. It helps players  to decide what their characters might do in ambiguous or extreme circumstances. Note however that it is not deterministic, it influences the decision, it doesn’t make the decision. Past actions, class membership, existing relationships, etc. all influence these decisions as well 4. It keeps certain classes from doing certain things, broadly speaking, in order to retain their class membership 5. It sometimes brings up in game magical consequences or benefits 

Note that most of this is peripheral to regular in game decision making about “what my character would do”, it is not active, nor is it regularly used in game to determine what PCs will do.

Why introduce such a loose, and infrequent tool to the game? 

It helps DM’s to organize the cosmos of the game world and to direct the actions of NPC/monster groups in general, it provides general, loose guidance to players as to how their characters will interact in extreme circumstances, and it helps to maintain the divide between classes by limiting choices in certain ways. However, this is all very loose, and I think this is done quite self-consciously.

Gygax and the early game designers were not looking to come up with a system that micromanaged player choices or provided a mechanic to direct them at any level of specificity. I believe this is due to the fact that early edition D&D was meant to challenge the player, not the character, so the default was to give as much latitude as possible to player actions, in other words to maximize player agency. It was never meant to be a strong restraint on what players could choose to do, it was meant as a tool for the outliers, not regular play. 

Also, IMO, alignment has role playing benefits, even though it is loose and not strictly prescriptive. A recent example from my game will make this point.

Last year the party started to drift a bit in their goals. They started to become more aggressive and violent in achieving their aims, taking on opponents they didn’t have to in order to gain more power to achieve their ostensibly noble goals. I noted over many sessions that, despite the fact that violence rarely worked out well for them (indeed, we lost 3 PCs over that three month stretch, all to fights that could have been avoided), it was their chosen tool. They also actively sought out conflict. As a result, more and more often they were fighting, and killing, those whose only sin was that they were opposed to them.

This was all fine and good, the game world was teaching them a lesson in the consequences of unrestrained violence, and I figured they would figure it out (and they did) but there was one member of the party who was true neutral, the party druid, and his behavior was not tracking with that of a true neutral. 

Then one session the party did something truly heinous, something that was by any meaningful standard evil. I don’t believe they had really thought it through, their behavior over the previous sessions had made them dull to the drift of their actions. Still, this was enough, I changed the druid’s alignment, and with this he lost his druidic powers.

This initiated one of the most interesting, thoughtful, meaningful and constructive conversations about violence, power and responsibility that I have ever had the pleasure of being a part of. The players spent the majority of one session talking about how they got to where they were, what made them cross the line, and importantly, why crossing that line was a bad thing. Indeed, what came out of the conversation was that several of the players were not happy with their collective decisions as of late, and this led to a wonderful conversation about group responsibility versus individual responsibility, about how individuals can allow bad things to happen by inaction.  

It did all of this quite naturally and easily. If I had done what many DM’s do in circumstances like this, punish the players with powerful monsters and such to show them the “error of their ways” or teach a “moral lesson” I don’t think it would have had the same impact. Sending in the dragons to show the players that they have been bad is just muscle flexing on the part of the DM, it becomes a show of power.

When, however, the alignment rules, which are baked into the game, produce consequences for the PCs, it is not a case of the DM flexing, it’s a case of the game rules throwing up a wall. When I made the decision to change the druid’s alignment it manifested in game immediately, the druid lost his spell casting ability, his animal companions left him, etc.

And I asked the players at that point, why do you think this happened? Do you think it’s fair? We had a good conversation about this, and ultimately everyone agreed, they agreed on why it happened, and they agreed that it was entirely fair. Having alignment as an explicit element of the game gave us a framework for bringing up and addressing these issues. 

Alignment is not “broken”, it is not a vestige of “biological essentialism” either. Even in the case of humanoid races it isn’t really a form of biological essentialism as it isn’t deterministic in the way that essentialism demands. If you interpret it strongly, as an active rather than passive role playing tool, then it would certainly be deterministic. However, it isn’t meant to be that way, it is meant as a general guideline for large groups, and it admits too much variation on the individual level. An ability score maximum is biological essentialism, racial alignments are not, unless you use them in a much more deterministic way than they were intended.

I suspect that one of the reasons alignment is so maligned in modern D&D is that many modern players see D&D as more of a narrative based or story focused enterprise, so alignment must therefore be an active tool for determining how roles are played, how the story is to unfold. Modern players see alignment as a caricature because something that vague and general, which was never meant to direct specific actions, becomes a caricature when applied to specific actions. 

That’s not bad system design, that’s bad implementation. And in this case, it is easy to blame the implementation as the text is actually fairly clear for a change. Gygax states plainly that PC actions drive alignment, not the other way around, and that alignment impacts NPC/monster behavior only for groups, not for individuals. The descriptions of alignment are high level and general, and Gygax doesn’t give examples of specific behavior being driven by alignment based concerns. 

In short, this one’s on us.