smolderingcorpsebar:
dr-archeville:
tracyalexander:
curriebelle:
I’ve seen a few interesting posts about Dungeons and Dragons alignments that all share two interesting commonalities:
1) They think the two-axis system of Law vs Chaos and Good vs Evil is too restrictive for people who like to roleplay.
2) They try to redeem the two-axis system by redefining Law and Chaos in ways that make sense to them personally.
Good and Evil aren’t usually a topic of debate on these posts - it’s easy enough to play a character as generally doing the right thing or as being a total bastard. Discussion on acts of more debatable morality (e.g. torturing a villain for vital information, killing an innocent person by accident, sacrificing one for the good of all) tends to veer towards whether the action itself qualifies as good or evil, and not whether good and evil themselves need to be redefined. Conversely, I’ve seen Law and Chaos rewritten as Community vs Individuality, Tradition vs Cultural Mutability, Authority vs Anarchy - all interesting ideas that tend to reflect more on the person writing them than the actual purpose of the Law vs Chaos axis.
I’m not saying these people are wrong, but that these players (as well as the fine folks who wrote the 5e Handbooks) are placing too much significance on the purpose or intention of Law vs Chaos. The historical secret is that Law vs Chaos alignment never had any deep meaning behind it - or, at least, it never had any meaning deeper than the Pittsburgh Penguins versus the Vancouver Canucks.
I’ll explain how, but it requires a bit of a history lesson. The idea of Lawful and Chaotic alignments - as well as a number of other cornerstones of Dungeons and Dragons - came from a different game: a miniature wargame called Chainmail. It’s time for a deep dive.
Keep reading
Ahh, I’ve been looking for this essay again FOREVER
Hunh. I’d always assumed the Law v. Chaos stuff was from Michael Moorcock’s
Elric of Melniboné and other Eternal Champion stories.
So, it IS though. @curriebelle explains how the alignments functioned in Chainmail, but not where those concepts came from, which was *almost certainly* the Eternal Champion stories. That’s why Chaotic Neutral is explained as an alignment of pure randomness – because in Moorcock, Law and Chaos weren’t human concepts, but rather unknowable cosmic forces. Most of Moorcock’s heroes are on the side of Law, not because Law is better (in fact, in the Corum books, the gods of Law are pretty explicitly shown to also be assholes), but because the predictablity and stability of Law isn’t as dangerous for human life. On the flip side, Jerry Cornelius is a hero of Chaos in a world gone too far over to Law, and is imho the quintessential depiction of what Chaotic Neutral *is* (seriously, just read the wiki entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Cornelius)
Thing is, Gygax’s understanding of Moorcock’s ideas is… limited, at best, and he reduces it to a boring and kinda racist Nature & Tribal Barbarism (chaos) vs Civilization (Law) nonsense. That’s why Gygax’s Elves are Lawful; they represent Proper Western Civilization. You CAN get that feeling from Moorcock, IF you’d only read his Dorian Hawkmoon & Elric stuff (which tbh was all that was out at the time! Moorcock was a new, hip, edgy dude on the scene in 1971, upending the more traditional notions of fantasy with Weird Shit). But it’s basically the postmodernist problem of continued interpretation and reinterpretation: Gygax’s model was already a simplified version of Moorcock’s, in turn misinterpreted by other people.
*deep breath* Also, @curriebelle ’s take on the Xaosciects in Planescape: Torment is unfair and doesn’t examine the entire situation. Planescape the pre-existing campaign setting was literally designed to examine D&D alignment and take it to its furthest, most absurdist conclusions. To go whole hog and ask, “if we take two axis alignment completely seriously and use it as the cosmological underpinnings of a universe, how does that look..?” It goes back to the Moorcockian ideas of these versions of Law and Chaos being *very much beyond petty mortal understanding*, and asks what does a universe where that is true look like? Which is how we get Absolute Law represented by dice-shaped robots, and Absolute Chaos by giant parasitic carnivorous rainbow frogs. The Xaosciects represent what happens when mortals try to understand absolute chaos and to live under its’ precepts: *it’s not meant for us.* Similarly, the Mercykillers represent what happens when we try to adhere to absolute law with no concern for silly mortal stuff. Planescape at its best is D&D interrogating its own alignment system; at the time of publication, 20 years worth of players and GMs wrestling with it and trying for their own interpretations. And, notably, Planescape’s titular planes actually have seventeen gradients/interpretations of the alignment system, ranging from law-as-just-blind-rules to law-as-civilization to chaos-as-madness to chaos-as-a-state-of-nature. Planescape offers no absolute answers, but at its best is a neat interrogation of all this nonsense.
This is a great addition! I’ll admit, I hadn’t heard of Moorcock before this, so it’s neat to learn about.
I think you’re close when you say it’s a problem of reinterpretation (although I wouldn’t agree it’s postmodern - to get postmodernism you either have to use the reference in an ironic way or juxtapose it with something else. This is just someone misunderstanding what they’re referencing). Gygax used Moorcock’s morality for Chainmail and oversimplified, and then because he oversimplified it, he misused it in D&D.
If Law and Chaos are “not meant for mortals” as you put it, but are meant to be more nebulous overarching godly concepts beyond our understanding, then I think you’ve made my main point better than I did: that Law and Chaos are pretty poor concepts to guide mere mortals in their roleplaying! They’re philosophical discussions beyond the scope of the table - depending on the table. It doesn’t help that Gygax defines the terms so sloppily. D&D IS a separate entity from Moorcock and even from Chainmail. He can’t expect all players to have read the work he’s clumsily referencing, and Gygax’s own definitions are truly, truly garbage. If he’d understood his own nine-category morality then Planescape wouldn’t need seventeen categories to explore it properly, you see?
Planescape does seem to be the exception to the rule, though - I’m glad there’s some self-awareness of the awkwardness of the D&D moral system - but I find some of Planescape’s “explorations” more interesting than others. The association of chaos with gender non-conformity is an interesting one, which I think deserves a lot more prodding. Associating gender fluidity with chaos implicitly associates rigid gender roles with law. That’s an essay right there.
On the other hand I find the definition of Chaos as “gibbering madness because We Cannot Understand Chaos’s True Nature” to be tedious. “What is chaos?” “Well, if you know, you’ll go mad.” Okay, well, then what is there to discuss? That’s why I’m not so hot on the Xaosciects. Nonsense is the end of the conversation.
Oh sweet baby– thank you SO MUCH for finally explaining the rabbit hole that led to the D&D Alignment System, which I 100% admit up front is, imo, an absolutely terrible thing that I want to stake through its withered heart.