Playing an EVIL character the other day got me thinking about Alignment in the D&D system, and how much it sucks. Yeah, I know. Another post on Alignment? Everybody knows that Alignment blows. Why write yet another post about it?
I don't know. Why do the makers of D&D insist on keeping the Alignment system in place when everybody and their mother hate it?
Way back when, the original D&D had a pretty simple Alignment system: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic. It was probably somewhat influenced by Moorcock. The best thing to say about it was that it was easy. But, being a sometime player of D&D when I was a kid, I remember not really "getting it". What was Lawful, and what was Chaotic? Lawful represented a desire to uphold order and justice, and Chaotic represented a "frontier spirit" sort of thing, all for the good of the individual. I guess. I don't know. I always tried to interpret it in the spirit of Star Wars, but that led to the interesting conundrum that the Empire would have to be Lawful (at least by the time of A New Hope), and the Rebellion Chaotic. But the Empire is bad. And the Rebellion good. Right? Right?
Right. It didn't make any flipping sense. Then out comes AD&D, and their whole 9 alignment system, which introduced Good and Evil. Now you could be Chaotic, but still be Good at the same time. And you could be Lawful, but still be Evil. So there you go. The Rebellion = Chaotic Good, and the Empire = Lawful Evil. But still, after a little bit of thought, that system sucked too.
I mean, what sort of person is ONLY good? Which one of us has not been a dick to somebody else at some point in our lives? What, that's not good and evil? That's just too personal? Alrighty then. So what defines evil? Comic books sometimes make it out to be a killing vs non-killing thing. If you take a life, you're evil. You're a villain. If you don't take a life, you're a good guy. Yeah, I know. Ridiculous. How about assassination, then? That seems pretty clear. You kill a person for no other reason than pure unadulterated profit. Evil, right? Not necessarily. What about a sniper, in the military? Alright, not working for profit. Working for patriotism, supposedly. But assassinating people, regardless. So soldiers in a war = good, but mercenaries in a war = bad. What's the difference? Patriotism. Law and order vs Ego and the profit motive. In other words, Lawful vs Chaotic. Not good and evil. So, what's evil then? Good question. It has always been my belief that there is no such thing as good and evil, that these terms are societal constructs/labels that are used to control behavior (which is a post and a half all by itself, so we won't get into that here). But the game already has a set of labels to define whether your anti-social or not: Lawful and Chaotic. So then, aren't Good and Evil, in the terms of the game, redundant?
It would seem so. Or at least, in D&D 4E it would, because they've gotten rid of 6 of the 9 alignments. Now there's only Lawful Good, Good, Neutral, Evil, Chaotic Evil. In other words, Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil, being redundant terms, are REALLY REALLY Good or REALLY REALLY Evil. Whatever. Nobody's going to play a Lawful Good character as it should be played, and nobody's going to play a Chaotic Evil character as it should be played, so what's the point?
There is no point. Alignment sucks, it always has. Let the players play what they want to play, how they want to play. Don't force them into a moral straightjacket, especially when the definition of that morality is a slippery thing, and evil to the character might not be evil to the DM might not be evil to anybody else.
I mean, I played an Evil character a couple of days ago. What was the most evil thing I could think of to do, short of killing other players, which is always always a great big no no? I didn't help out a merchant in need, and then I peed in the fountain. In public.
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