[This is an essay I wrote way back in 2003 when I was falling in love with D&D 3E but was still irritated by the clumsy and nonsensical ethos implied by the alignment system. Since 5E STILL has alignment, I submit that this essay still has sad relevance. I hope you enjoy it.]
There’s a line in the 1983 sword-and-sorcery movie Deathstalker that makes this bad film momentarily even worse. Our beefcake hero has just beaten up a bunch of attackers in a sleazy tavern in a very bad part of a very bad town. In an attempt to rally people to his cause, he yells to the onlookers, “Do you want to join me in good, or will you fight for evil?” Cut to close-up of an unwashed leering moron holding a beer, who pauses long enough to think, and then scowls and cheers, “Evil!” And then everyone in the bar joins in the cheer: “Evil! Yeah! Evil!” Followed by a cacophony of hoots and howls and the music starts up and out come the dancing girls with more beer to continue the debauchery.
I may have forgotten the details–god knows I’ve tried–but I have remembered that cheer, “Evil!” for decades now. What human being would actually, honestly and unironically cheer, “Yay evil!”? What sensible person would ever say, “Let’s hear it for a philosophy that wants other people to suffer and die for no reason!” I still think of that movie scene every time I have to choose an alignment for some humanoid bad guy that I’m planning to pit my D&D players against. Naturally, since my players are good, the bad guy must be evil, right? But I find it hard to create an intelligent villain when I know, deep down, he’s also supposed to be willfully sadistic. (As the Players Handbook says on page 88, “Evil characters...debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.”) Obviously, there’s no problem with the fact that a character could do evil things. We see that all the time, although in the real world it’s more often for profit than for fun. What I can’t fathom is a supposedly sensible, socialized character selecting an alignment that suggests that causing innocents to suffer is, in fact, part of her chief purpose and aim.
The concept of “chaotic” (not to mention its lawful counterpart) often gets superficial treatment too. For example, we know that the moron in Deathstalker who yelled “Evil!” was chaotic evil. Why? Because there were dancing girls and drinking and loud music and no one was in charge! If he was lawful evil he’d be with a bunch of people all in uniform saluting their leader by torchlight and having no fun. And if he were neutral evil he’d be on the sidelines in both scenes, rubbing his hands gleefully but either not drinking or else out of uniform. This is how deep the characterization usually gets.
These two stereotypes–that evil is just out to hurt people and that chaos is willfully random behavior–leads to the tragedy that is the average chaotic evil player character. Nine times out of ten, any chaotic evil character I’ve met in a party has at some point gone randomly berserk and started stabbing people in the back until someone put them down with an arrow. You almost can’t blame such players: after all, isn’t that what their alignment commands them to do? What does chaotic evil mean if not chaos (random) and evil (death of innocents) combined? And yet, looking at the bodies of such unmourned players, you have to wonder (I always do) how chaotic evil races like orcs and goblins have ever managed to survive, and how anyone could possibly consider “chaotic evil” anything like a sensible ethical principle that is an equal-but-opposite alternative to lawful good. Instead, it starts to look like a diseased alternative to sanity, joy, and every form of happiness except the narrow pleasures of sadism. What could such a philosophy offer any sentient being?
I may be accused of dignifying a gnat with my obsession about this. I’m aware that there are tons of nifty villains throughout books and movies that you could easily call servants of evil–Darth Vader, Sauron, the Kurgan from Highlander, et cetera. But these villains are essentially cartoons and caricatures, who embody evil rather than exhibiting realistic human behavior. There are other, more interesting villains who have more on their minds than just conquest through sadism, and it would be nice to be able to create them within the confines of the alignment system. In a game that demands that people select an ethical path at the outset, and then severely punishes people who transgress their alignment, the distinctions in alignment are as important as they are misunderstood.
The purpose of this essay is to offer a new approach to the alignment rules in Dungeons and Dragons–one that permits, among other things, the creation of human NPCs who are both evil and psychologically realistic. It involves radically rethinking the conventional terms of alignment, but I think the results are worth it. If you are (or have) a player whose character relies on alignment–a paladin, monk, cleric or assassin, e.g.–I hope you’ll agree with me.
The Balanced Take on Alignment
Part of the problem is in the names. Just look up the words, and you’ll see that Good is nice, and Evil is mean. It would seem that if you have a good alignment, you like people, and if you have an evil alignment, you have the opposite emotion of hatred or malevolence. And you have the problem, as outlined above, that it becomes impossible, within this schema, to come up with an assassin who wouldn’t also kick every passing dog just out of sheer cruelty. Evil becomes a caricature because of this simple misapprehension.
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis points out that evil, as humans experience and practice it, is not actually the opposite of good. It is, he says, a kind of “spoiled goodness”–an attempt to achieve something perceived as good in a harmful, unethical, or otherwise problematic way. The Sheriff of Nottingham oppresses the peasants because he wants their money (having money = good). The queen tries to kill Snow White because she wants to be the prettiest person and have everyone admire her (popularity = good). The crazy rooftop sniper shoots people because he wants the pounding in his head to stop (no pain = good). All of these are reasonable aims taken to more or less terrible extremes.
It is tempting, then, to say that an evil alignment is not one that actively seeks human suffering, but one that seeks something else regardless of how much suffering it causes. In light of this, the opposite of love is not hate–the opposite of love is selfishness. This is what makes morality a delicate balancing act. Very few of us actively hate other people, and those we do hate are always a small minority of the people we know. But all of us, every day, have to balance our needs (selfishness) against the needs of others (selflessness). Every dollar we save for ourselves is a dollar that doesn’t go to charity. Every hour we spend helping someone else deal with their problems is an hour where no one helps us deal with ours. Although we recognize goodness in others, we have needs of our own and rarely have the strength to be as completely selfless or altruistic as we would like. This is what makes saints rare.
If we look at it that way, then suddenly good and evil start to seem like equal and opposite terms. And if we reconceive “evil” as “selfishness,” then “evil” as a way of life, which is still not particularly pleasant, at least makes a certain amount of sense. Now our assassin, although he kills for money and is certainly not a nice guy, can at least fit into society without causing random suffering of innocent bystanders or necessarily signing up with the local Death to Humanity cult.
Another virtue of this division is that, since the choice between selflessness and selfishness represents a very real balance that all human beings have to strike, then most people will probably wind up somewhere in the middle, practicing a neutrality I refer to as pragmatism: wanting good (of course), but willing to compromise when it seems necessary or when the ideal seems unachievable. It follows from this that the extreme end of the Good continuum might not be “good” (in the sense of healthy), personally or socially. Extreme altruism can wear a person out and erode their sense of self; and it’s a given that sometimes saints can be difficult to be around. They don’t always fit into society, which is the concern of the next section.
A Balanced Take on Law and Chaos
Generally speaking, the traditional graphs of Law and Chaos have the Law-Chaos axis running perpendicular to the Good-Evil one, and having the same length. We are meant, then, to suppose that Chaos and Law are also equal and opposite terms that are just as important as Good and Evil, but relating to entirely different moral questions. In other words, it should be possible to conceive of chaotic good elves and chaotic evil orcs joining forces to defeat an army of, say, lawful neutral monks who are threatening to impose order with no thought to whether the ultimate outcome is good or evil. In fact, if the Law-Chaos axis is equivalent to the Good-Evil one, then this should not only make perfect sense, but it should be a reasonably common occurrence!
Of course, in actual game terms, this is also not the case. In my experience, for all practical purposes, good is good and evil is evil and they’re always the main things opposed to each other. Questions of law or chaos are just so much quibbling over an organizational principle. In fact, the way I’ve usually seen it play out, chaos and law are actually little speed bumps along the Good-Evil continuum that prevent good or bad guys from going too far to the extremes. A chaotic good character is a little “less good” than her paladin friend, able to have more fun and make the occasional rude comment or go on the odd drinking-and-sex binge; a lawful evil magician is a bit “less evil”–more reasonable, perhaps, or more cautious–than his chaotic evil underlings; if you had to choose, the lawful evil opponent would be safer to be around.
I didn’t invent these terms of opposition, but if we’re going to give them serious ethical weight then we need to rethink them. I propose to do this by looking at another balancing act we do every day: the balancing of the desire to do what we want against the need to do what society requires. “Society” in this sense, can include any group larger than two, and covers not only actual laws and statutes, but also unspoken codes of language and conduct. The question of law or chaos, then, becomes the choice between the ego and the superego: to what extent do we stifle what we want or need in order to get along socially and not stick out? A lawful person values social order and social norms. A chaotic person values personal freedom, including freedom from both coercive morality and social respectability. And an average human being, regardless of preference, sees the need for both. Again, what’s nice about this is that instead of something sane (law) being opposed to something random (chaos), you have two reasonable choices, both of which have their good and bad points.
Since this is still a harder than usual concept to imagine, perhaps it will help to consider some examples from American politics. The ACLU, for example, might be considered an extreme “chaos” organization: they will defend the freedom of all forms of speech, including “evil” speech, and including hurtful speech that causes suffering, on the theory that freedom is the greater good. By contrast, the extreme Religious Right is often portrayed as meddlesome in their desire to establish all kinds of official rules for ethical conduct, even if it means giving up certain freedoms of sexual behavior or personal expression, and even if it risks flirting with tyranny. They are interested in “the rule of law” and view with suspicion any attempt to amend our Constitution.If you don’t like that example, think of the anti-communist extremes of the House Unamerican Activities Committee in the 1950s, which everyone agrees went too far in the pursuit of a greater perceived good.
In other words, it’s not that the ACLU wants chaos for everyone, or that the HUAC wants law for everyone. And it’s not that they take no stance about good versus evil. It’s that, to them, freedom or law is a kind of good–take care of freedom, one way or the other, and good will take care of itself as a natural result.
Of course, this is still a much weaker distinction than the one between Good and Evil, and the interests of Law versus Chaos dovetail enough with Good and Evil that there’s still a bit of the speedbump effect. (A selfish person who obeys social rules is still less “selfish” and easier to deal with than a selfish person who doesn’t.) But I would solve this by simply making the Law-Chaos axis smaller, since the difference between Law and Chaos only really becomes magnified the closer you come to True Neutrality. This doesn’t solve all the problems, of course. One big one might be, “what is society?” This can lead to all sorts of hairsplitting questions, such as, would a chaotic member of a counterculture organization–the Thieves Guild, say–do lawful things while part of the subculture? What happens to a lawful or chaotic person when there is no government–on a desert island, say? What actual difference does lawful or chaotic alignment make in the context of a dungeon party camping outside far from civilization? But these are questions it would take another whole article to deal with. For now, assume that all characters, for the purposes of law versus chaos, are talking about how much well-meant and socially imposed morality or government they’re comfortable with.
A Note on Neutrality
It almost goes without saying, but one final thing this new division adds is a sensible recentering of the category of Neutral. According to the old system, a neutral person, faced with the choice between defending a noble act of heroism and supporting a violent act of torture is somehow expected to flip a coin, as if either choice were ethically valid and part of the great Circle of Life. While some people do see things this way (see the next section on Extremes), this is hardly a position that most people would defend as ethically responsible. As mentioned earlier, not caring is the same thing as not good. Not caring about the spread of evil is evil. Not caring about the struggle for goodness is evil. Neutrality as traditionally defined has an inherently ruthless edge that is at odds with its supposed-to-be ethically balanced stance. It looks like it should be called Evil, But Passive About It.
However, if we view neutrality as a balance between looking out for yourself and looking out for others, it finally seems–almost for the first time–as if it were truly in the middle between actual, more or less equivalent extremes of reasonable human behavior. It also means that the average person can go to the average druid and have a reasonable–emphasis on reason–chance to get help.
Similarly, for someone who believes in Neutrality versus Law and Chaos (someone who’s neutral good or neutral evil, e.g.), we again have a useful division. The Lawful neutral person is a pure establishment type–my country, right or wrong; when something goes wrong, add more legislation. The Chaotic neutral person is a pure radical–someone whose knee-jerk reaction is to distrust other people’s imposition of power; who distrusts anyone’s authority to tell you what to do. But pure neutrality on the Law-Chaos continuum is someone who’s uncommitted to either extreme, trying to strike a balance between freedom and rules.
Extreme Categories
If this is such a simple solution, why hasn’t it been tried before this? I think the primary cause for the unfortunate imbalance of the traditional system lies in the D&D gameworld itself. Only two terms–“good” and “evil”–are being drafted to describe the goals of every creature in the world, and all those on the other planes as well. That’s quite a range! Without making this too complicated, it does seem clear that there needs to be at least some way to distinguish between the evil of, say, a common street thug beating people up for spare change, and the evil of a malevolent lich that wants to open a gate to visit doom on an entire city.
In my campaign, I use the term “extreme evil” to describe any extremely evil creature whose goal is to cause death or suffering wherever sentient mortals are found. This includes monsters like beholders, demons, umber hulks–and, of course, the occasional criminally insane psychopath. “Extreme evil” creatures generally absent themselves from humanoid society, because they wouldn’t survive well within it: either they, or the society, would have to go.
The same thing goes for “extreme good” creatures such as celestials, lammasus, lillends or unicorns. They are near-angelic beings who exist merely to intervene; not to become part of player-character society. The difference between such creatures and merely “good” mortals deserves to be drawn. Their reactions to moral issues will usually not be hampered by considerations of human weaknesses or mortal limitations.
Note, however, that some of these “extremely aligned” creatures are good or evil by nature–that is, they can’t be said to be making an ethical choice, since a demon just “is” evil, and a lammasu just “is” helpful. Some such characters may be considered “Unconsciously Good” (or Evil), and you may choose to have the effects of certain spells altered as with “Unconscious Neutrality” below. Remember, too, that there are some differences in ethics even at this extreme, generally on the level of the creature’s own intra-creature society. So even extreme alignments often take modifiers like “lawful” or “chaotic.” But, as before, these modifiers are far less important than the good-evil question.
While we’re adding categories, I also distinguish between two types of extreme neutrality. “Extreme neutral” is an alignment that sees all life as a wheel of ups and downs, goods and bads, and therefore sees suffering as part of a duality that includes pleasure. This is an unusual view, since most people, even neutral-sounding Buddhists, see suffering as inherently bad, and so I call “Extreme Neutral” the name for this viewpoint–the kind of person who really will flip a coin when you ask them for help, whether it’s because they hold a Zoroastrian idea that good and evil are equal and opposite and need to remain in balance, or because they believe, like radical Zen practitioners, that they’re illusionary categories that ultimately don’t matter. (In a sense, you could say that Extreme Neutral characters are balancing themselves between Extreme Good and Extreme Evil, rather than finding a happy medium between reasonable human choices–selfish and selfless–like standard Neutral characters do.)
Finally, because conscious morality matters to me, I distinguish between regular Neutral and “Unconsciously Neutral”–for creatures who aren’t smart enough, in human terms, to consciously think in ethical categories. Most animals–bears, dogs, etc.–are bestial this way. Similarly, automatons such as golems, and extraplanar creatures who don’t think in human terms–such as invisible stalkers or ethereal filchers–fit into this category. Not that they’re unintelligent, but that asking such creatures an ethical question would be speaking a language it doesn’t understand. In my campaign, ideological spells like “Protection from Neutrality” are only half as powerful against creatures that are Unconsciously Neutral, since it’s not like they’re actual advocates of an actual ideology.
Some Final Notes
Evil people and “evil” acts. It is sometimes said that “if a good character does an evil act,” they will suffer such-and-such a penalty. I don’t find this a helpful guide to behavior, and it leads to all sorts of silly abuses, like those DM’s we all know who try to devise various ways of tricking paladins into committing “evil acts” accidentally. Alignment is a guide for a person’s actions, and represents an ethical position that should inform their behavior. It does not mean that a person is somehow unable to act in any other way, or that their morality should always be consistent. It doesn’t even mean that their actions will have the effect they want. A lawful good queen could build a (helpful) defensive wall whose construction also accidentally fouls a river. A neutral evil cleric could personally profit from curing diseases at a discount rate. A chaotic good thief is just as free as a lawful neutral fighter is to decide whether or not to free, or kill, an imprisoned talking dragon who claims to be unjustly caged.
Alignment as a continuum. Related to this, remember that most alignments refer to a preference between options: all evil characters are not marauders, and all lawful characters are not pushy moralists. A chaotic character does not resist the law per se; he just prefers, more or less, to have as little restriction as possible. A chaotic good character won’t find herself fighting society much; a chaotic evil character probably will. But neither of them want to live in a world where there’s nothing but chaos; it’s just a question of degree. A chaotic good politician wants to be elected, not to dismantle the government, but to enact laws that ensure freedom. And not all lawful good characters are lawful and good to the same extreme. They’re allowed to disagree.
Clerics and deities. In my campaign, a cleric does not need to have the same alignment as her deity. In many societies, clerics of “evil” deities–that is, gods of disease, misfortune, death, and the like–were often serving their community by placating a god who might otherwise visit evil on them. This explains why a community might permit a temple of Nerull in the middle of downtown, or why a cleric of Hextor could walk around in polite society without risking constant mob action. Although it’s less likely, an evil cleric could also serve a good deity, so as to protect her tribe of goblin warriors, say, from the retribution of St. Cuthbert.
Slaadi and Formians. Slaadi (chaotic neutral) and formians (lawful neutral) are the only outsiders I’m aware of that come anywhere near the Extreme category I used to describe lillends and devils. (Other exceptions, the lawful neutral azers and the chaotic neutral chaos beasts, aren’t quite as powerful as you’d expect an epitome-of-an-alignment outsider to be.) In my system, precisely because they are Extreme, they don’t need to be considered exactly neutral. They have taken one principle–law or chaos–and they serve it to the extreme, regardless of what sentient happiness requires. Therefore, I consider them “effectively evil”, because for all practical purposes they’re going to attack humans regardless of philosophical outlook. Even a chaotic neutral mage isn’t going to sign up to promote slaadi culture if he’s reasonably sane! So they’re like evil creatures, except that they’re immune to Protection From Evil spells and the like. Fortunately, these creatures don’t come up very often. But just in case they do, remember: Extreme Law and Extreme Chaos are not good (in the sense of nice) alignments! Regular lawful neutral and chaotic neutral characters should find them every bit as offensive as everyone else.
In Conclusion
This modest expansion of the alignment categories offers much greater subtlety to color your adventures. My characters now realize that they can’t be sure someone is trustworthy just by casting Know Alignment, because a person’s good intentions won’t always pay off in “good” results. Characters can make intelligent ethical decisions and not feel constrained by a preconceived notion of what a “good” action necessarily is. And, finally, the occasional chaotic evil villain I construct can now exist without feeling any sort of pressure to lead a life of insane self-annihilation. And as my players who’ve had to fight these ethically complex villains will tell you, this is—well, good!