Alignment in Role-Playing Games

Lords of Chaos

As I understand it, the concept of alignment that the original 1974 D&D (the first modern RPG) uses was inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson (both of whom you’ll find in Appendix N). In 1961 Moorcock published the first Elric story. Elric, as you know, was a champion of Chaos, thus serving the god Arioch. They struggled against the forces of Law.

Anderson’s novel Three Hearts and Three Lions was also published in 1961. (Expanded from his novella published in 1953, in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.) In this one we see the forces of Law (epitomized by Mankind’s civilization) struggling for supremacy against Chaos (in this case embodied by demons, faery, sorcery and the like – things you’d most likely encounter outside of civilization). Both stories depict an actual struggle between two different other-worldly forces for supremacy, and both forces are explicitly referred to by the names Law and Chaos. Each side has its gods to champion the struggle, and those gods make use of mortals to carry out the fight.

Holmes’ Basic Set from 1977. This is where the nine alignments first appeared.

1974’s D&D also added a Neutral stance between Law and Chaos. When the first “Basic Set” for D&D was released in 1977, authored by J Eric Holmes, Good and Evil were added to the mix. We ended up with nine different combinations of alignment, and it wasn’t too long before a whole D&D cosmology developed around the concept. And of course, that 1977 Basic Set was meant as a bridge to 1978’s Advanced D&D.

So players were required to choose an alignment for their characters, monsters each had a designated alignment, and so did NPCs and deities. Opposed alignments were hostile towards each other, usually resulting in massive fantasy-style battles. And it was glorious. Just like in the inspirational fiction.

Evil monsters actually radiate Evil. Alignments can be divined via a spell. Gygax cautions us that humans are different though. It can be hard to spy the evil a man nurtures within himself. In game terms, you had to be above a certain level before you radiated Good or Evil as a monster would. You had to work to achieve that status, to wallow in it, to deeply internalize it. Only then could your PC be as Evil as a Kobold or a Goblin.

See how big a step that was meant to be? How great a degree?

Clerics and Paladins were required to adhere strictly to the tenets of their alignment, or suffer loss of spells or abilities. Other characters would suffer to a lesser extent. The Dungeonmaster was advised to keep track of PC behavior. The first edition AD&D DMG spells out specific consequences for not following your alignment when it came time to advance in level. The DM must judge each character’s behavior versus their professed alignment, and assign a penalty to advancement accordingly.

So what do we get by having the alignment system in D&D? An added measure of setting background, and a role-playing challenge. In a world where the alignment forces overtly oppose each other and continually struggle for domination, how would society act? How would a player character act? Especially when faced with ambiguities? And what would be the consequences? This is all fodder for campaigns of epic proportion.

There is a similar battle in Fritz Leiber’s Big Time series. Two opposed sides, universal constants, that struggle for supremacy across time and space. They are beyond human comprehension. They both recruit “agents” or “soldiers” from the ranks of mortals to fight their battles for them. They are so far beyond our ability to understand that even their own agents refer to them as Spiders and Snakes. And there is no escape from the reality-bending consequences, not for those who are ignorant of the struggle, not even for those living in the past. History is constantly changing as a result of the war’s ebb and flow, as is the future. So both mind-bending, and reality-bending.

Certainly the D&D implied world includes the overall alignment wars and all that inherent baggage. But can you play RPGs without it? Certainly, and the concept may not even fit well with every setting. For instance, should there be a force of Chaos and a force of Law struggling beneath World War Two?

A-HA! Got you there! Three Hearts and Three Lions specifically has the alignment wars underlying our own World War Two. So I think you *can* implement it wherever you like. But I also think you can choose not to implement it in other cases. Just like you don’t have to have active, undeniably real deities in every genre of game, either. It’s a similar type of decision to make when world-building.

Warhammer

Can the alignment system be abused? Certainly, as can any other system in gaming. Can it be implemented poorly by a DM? Certainly, see above. But the use of the alignment system adds a whole level to D&D that most other games lack. (Obviously the games set in Moorcock’s worlds use the alignment struggle. So does Warhammer.)

But alignment has been watered down in contemporary D&D, and it’s not used in most other RPGs. There may be guidelines set up for player behavior though. Call of Cthulhu PCs are not supposed to be evil cultists, otherwise you have a very different game. Superheroes are usually played as adversaries to evil villains. Etc. If you have no objections to those restrictions on player behavior, it seems perplexing if you’d object to alignment in D&D.

But if you reduce D&D alignment to simply a “guideline” shorthand label that describes your character’s overall pattern of behavior, instead of the fundamental struggle of the universe, you’ve skinned the beast and are merely pantomiming. Without the underlying struggle that permeates reality, alignment becomes meaningless and empty. Of course we already know you can play RPGs without alignment, but alignment is one of the fundamental components of D&D’s 1974 identity. You might as well take out hit points and levels. Excising either component changes the game in equal measure.

In this grognard’s opinion, of course. New players can’t miss what they never had.