Race in Dungeons and Dragons Part 3 - Alignment 

I decided to give it a few days before commenting further on the Orcs in D&D debate. I’m an academic, and I’ve read enough history to know that the “savage other” concept is definitely baked into D&D. For AD&D, how could it not be, it was one of the primary tropes of pulp / fantasy literature, and AD&D is a pulp fantasy literature emulator in RPG form. The game emulates a view that the world has a savage other who threatens civilized people, and historically, that view has been directed at POC. I agree with this argument.

Where I have issues is its implications for the game and gamers. I think these are wildly off, for a host of reasons. Today I’m going to tackle alignment, as it is central to much of this discussion. In doing so I’m going to use 1e AD&D as my reference point, as it is the edition with which I am the most familiar, and Gygax, for better or worse, is the focus of a lot of the criticism. I have seen a few threads already saying that the idea of alignment is racist, as it is essentialist. I want to look at that a bit more closely.

Alignment

Start with the text (always start with the text!):

Gygax is precise but elliptical, it’s an odd, disorienting writing style, but it demands a detailed reading.

1. Alignment is a broad ethos (set of beliefs)
2. Alignment does not dictate religious affiliation, but the reverse can be true 3. Alignment suggests overall behavior 4. For PC’s, their behavior determines their alignment, not the other way around 5. Alignment groups creatures into non-hostile divisions 6. Similarly aligned groups can be in conflict 7. Alignment helps to define actions, reactions and purposes, but not on its own 8. Alignment helps with role play

So note a few things, alignment is broad, impacts overall behavior, it is not specific. 1,2,3,6 and 7 imply very heavily that alignment is NOT deterministic or essentialist, it doesn’t determine your behavior, it influences it.

Look at those definitions, they are very general. Alignment is a loose concept. It doesn’t determine what you do, it influences what you do.

Alignment here is idealistic, “philosophical and moral reasonings are completely subjective according to the acculturation of the individual.”

Translation: your beliefs are determined by the interaction between you and your culture, so alignment in the game is an abstraction of your culture’s impact on you. It isn’t specific to your particular set of beliefs, they can vary, but it is representative of your broader group.

Note here that Gygax is already showing more nuance about this concept than 95% of people commenting on alignment. One of the reasons it gets critiqued is that it is treated simplistically as determinate, e.g. if you are chaotic good you will do X. Gygax treated it more organically, alignment was acculturation, it wasn’t determinate, it was influential.

Note the discussion of a lawful society, “Lawful societies will tend to be highly structured, rigid, well-policed and bureaucratic/hierarchical.” 

Imagine someone described Western society as “lawful, structured, rigid, well-policed and bureaucratic/hierarchical”. No one would bat an eye at that. Now what if I said that people who lived in lawful societies would tend to be lawful in this sense. That’s what alignment is saying. 

So, religion often determines alignment, similarly aligned groups can conflict, and alignment doesn’t solely determine actions, reactions or purposes… What does this sound like to you? Does it sound like something biological? No, it sounds like  political affiliation, or nationalism, or sports enthusiasm. 

Substitute in.

Political affiliation is broad, impacts overall behavior, not specific, religion often determines political affiliation, groups with similar political affiliation can conflict, and political affiliation doesn’t solely determine actions, reactions or purposes.

Alignment is your team, it is a broad set of values and beliefs that determine how you generally sit on issues, it isn’t exhaustive or determinate. Gygax borrowed from the pulp/fantasy literature and organized the teams by law/chaos - good/evil, but if it were a game about modern conflict or a historically specific game (rather than a fantasy game with historical flourishes) then he could have used any political division or ethos he wanted.

I assume that no one has a problem with the idea that your political affiliation might work in this way. To say that one group of people would be primarily of a particular political affiliation. It’s not deterministic, as there can be exceptions. We are comfortable with the idea that your class, gender or race might shape your beliefs in this way, alignment is just representative of that cocktail stew of social things that influence your behavior, flavored for a fantasy game. 

What purpose can a concept like this play in the game?

Gygax tells you, it groups creatures into non-hostile divisions. D&D evolved from wargames, alignment is a sorting tool for organizing group conflict and factionalization in your game world. Want to know if the treant’s hate the ogres? Check out their alignments and see. 

So when an orc is labelled as lawful evil, it tells you that orcs will be selfish and organized, that they will pair with strong allies and be cruel in securing power. It tells you what other creatures they will be likely to work with. It’s cultural determinism for game purposes, it simplifies a complex situation by assuming similarity.

In short, if you have no problem grouping people in the real world into groups based on teams (whatever that team may be, “team SJW”, “Team Trump”) knowing there will be exceptions, then you should have no problem grouping people into alignments, knowing there will be exceptions. Alignment is no more deterministic a concept than “social grouping”, if you are comfortable saying most white people are ultimately conservative because the status quo supports them, then you should be comfortable saying orcs are lawful evil. 

NPCs and PCs

An important aspect of alignment is that player alignment and NPC/Monster alignment are different.

Your alignment is your starting point, but once you start playing, your character’s behavior, directed by the player, determines alignment. Alignment is descriptive for player characters, not normative or deterministic or proscriptive. PCs do what they do, and the DM determines if this causes alignment drift and any subsequent in game consequences (e.g. loss of class status). So in PCs alignment is definitely not built in or deterministic or racial, it’s individual to the PC in question. 

The crux of the argument that alignment is a deterministic or essentialist concept is the fact that certain creatures have fixed alignment, in a biologically essentialist way. But check out the monster manual entries for elves, dwarves and halflings.

As NPCs elves, dwarves and halflings all have a single listed alignment. But PC dwarves, elves and halflings have whatever alignment they choose to play. You have “essentialism” for NPCs but variability for PCs. What does this imply?

Think this through for a moment. It’s not like PCs become a different race than NPCs when the PC starts adventuring. They are still dwarves, halflings and elves. NPC and PC elves are the same elves. It’s not that all elves are chaotic good, or all dwarves are lawful good, it’s that dwarves and halflings get along OK, dwarves and elves don’t, for the most part. Individual dwarves and elves can have any range of alignments, but as an aggregate or group the listed alignments help the DM to organize the factions of the game world.

So the alignment listings in the monster manual are not essentialist, they don't assume that everyone is exactly the same based on biology, they are no different than saying that any group of people is likely to share a set of beliefs. They say that, for the purposes of the game, NPCs/monsters need to be organized into factions, alignment helps the DM to do that. The game only has certain playable races, that’s a conceit from the source literature as well, but that doesn’t mean that NPC dwarves are a different race than PC dwarves, that NPC dwarves are essentialist and PC dwarves are not. It’s a gaming concept that creates some structure for PC behavior, to aid in the role playing, and to manage NPCs/monsters into factions in the game world. Now, just to be clear, none of this impacts the argument that orcs are coded as POC. They are, but it impacts the idea that alignment is somehow a deterministic or essentialist concept. It’s no more deterministic than the idea of a social group, or political affiliation.  Importantly, it means that any concept of orcs as “inherently evil” isn’t based on the alignment rules, as they are not that deterministic, certainly no more deterministic than the idea of social class or religious affiliation. 

I’m assuming that no one who is criticizing alignment as racist thinks social class or religious political affiliation are deterministic, and that they would be fine with the idea of social class or religious political affiliation impacting people’s behavior and choices, so why not alignment?

Colonialism in the Mix

The other point that occurred to me recently was tied to the argument that D&D has baked in colonialism. Again, I agree with this, as it’s source literature was deeply colonialist as well. This is no more controversial than suggesting that capitalism is a background theme in much modern literature. 

But what does that mean for the idea of racism in the game?

I think this topic is too nuanced for most social media discussion. Take the idea that humanoids are coded as POC. I agree with that idea. However, in AD&D, and as far as I know in every edition of D&D, if your race is human there is no specific designation of your real world “race”. There are a few supplements and modules that do this, but nothing else.

So in AD&D, being human doesn’t mean you are white. Indeed, it is one of the strengths of AD&D that your PC can be gay, bi, trans, black, white, latinex, anything you like, and there are no game mechanical impacts from that. You don’t lose out on class options, or suffer penalties. And there are some (not many) illustrations of POC as PCs in the game, not just faceless NPCs.

The only penalties AD&D assigns for race are racial antipathy modifiers on reaction rolls, and there are no modifiers for humans of one race versus another. So insofar as racism is in the mechanics, AD&D admits to no racial antipathy between different “real world” races. Humans in AD&D are of all Earth races. The game rules make no assumption that every human NPC or PC is white.

Of course, this would be screamingly obvious to anyone who has actually played D&D with POC, as I don't recall ANY POC in the last 35 years I've been gaming running white characters. This is one of those reasons (a subject for another post as it's another issue) that I'm suspicious of the argument that playing D&D promotes racist ideas due to its design, if you look at how the game is actually used, you would see a lot more variety in how the game is used. But expecting politicized commentators with theory bias to look at praxis is probably too big of an ask. It's like asking them to consider material culture, you might as well be asking about alien life.

Now, back to colonialism for a moment. In the colonialist narrative, there are those in power, and those who are marginalized, historically, particularly since around the Early Modern period, white Europeans have been in the powerful classes, and POC have been the marginalized. 

So who in AD&D is the powerful group, and who is the marginalized? Who assumes the role of colonizer, and who assumes the role of the colonized? AD&D is a humanocentric game, explicitly so, that means humans are the colonizers, demi-humans and humanoids are the colonized. D&D definitely bakes colonialism into the game. In D&D human civilization is besieged by humanoid races, the demi-human races are on the wane, and the PCs play the part of adventurers who eventually create strongholds and clear out the wilderness around them. The game is about wealth acquisition through guile, deception, and when needed, violence. These are tropes of colonialism, and D&D has them all.

Which means that, with respect to the RAW, in AD&D at least, and possibly in other editions, both white people and POC are the colonizers, which makes the easy interpretation of the issue a bigger ask.

In short, AD&D has two groups which can stand in for POC, one is humanoids, another is humans. Or put differently, POC are coded in two ways, as colonized (implied by analogy, humanoids “stand in” for POC) and as colonizers (directly, humans as POC).

So what does this make D&D with respect to it being a “racist” game, or having racism “baked in” to the game? What is the “message” about race that AD&D gives when it presents POC explicitly as colonizers and implicitly as colonized humanoid races? 

AD&D borrows from the pulp/fantasy literature which was itself steeped in colonialist ideas, so the game has these ideas, but it also reconceptualizes the narrative by casting real world colonized people as part of the colonizers, the ones carving out freeholds and pressing back against the barbaric hordes.

I don’t really know what this means for the current discussion. To me, the idea that alignment is very general and meant primarily to group monsters/NPCs into factions, and the idea that POC are represented analogically in humanoids and directly in humans, both undermine the idea that D&D has “baked in racism”. 

It certainly suggests that this is a far more nuanced discussion than “D&D is racist”, “alignment is racist” and “orcs are racist”. AD&D codes POC in different ways, and any argument about race in the game will have to address the variable coding rather than reducing the game to one note about race.  None of this, just to be clear, impacts the argument that humanoids are coded as POC, and that D&D has colonialist elements baked in, I think both of these arguments are solid and worth understanding. Where we go from there, however, is a more complicated question, and one that would do well being separated from it's politicized context.