Forum > Design, Development, and Gameplay
Alignment is Being Removed from DnD
Thor's Nads:
--- Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 14, 2022, 09:45:37 AM ---Your recap about the history of alignment is inaccurate. It wasn't the struggle between good and evil, but law and chaos initially. Good and evil were added later and made the mechanic simultaneously stupidly complex and absurdly overly simplistic.
--- End quote ---
Where did I explicitly say Chainmail had good and evil? I simply generalized the history of alignment in D&D goes all the way back to Chainmail. That Law/Chaos, Good/Evil came from fantasy literature. You are being pedantic.
In fact Chainmail calls it General Line Up, not Alignment if you want to be extra pedantic about it.
Battlemaster
BANNED:
--- Quote from: bromides on June 14, 2022, 12:40:45 PM ---Yeah... red box was Lawful vs. Chaotic. The forces of civilization against the dark chaotic masses.
Chaos just struck me as a copy of the Warhamster universe's aversion to all things Chaos.
You might also look at it as "entropy". It's the formless, chaotic Other that overtakes civilization.
I like this approach, but it's 100% against Progressive dogma, so it will never work in the current industry.
--- End quote ---
The aversion to chaos goes back thru human history. The ancient Egyptians depended on order, the annual flooding of the nile delta which Egypt depended on for fertile soil. Chaos, the disruption of order, would cause mass starvation if the flood cycle was affected.
Thor's Nads:
You could say that a central concept in Norse Mythology is chaos and order. Ginnungagap was the primordial chaos that order emerged from. The Aesir fight to maintain order, but in the end lose to chaos at Ragnarok.
BoxCrayonTales:
Most mythologies divided the world into order and chaos, usually equating these with good and evil respectively. In Egyptian myth, constructive chaos symbolized by Set was also considered part of Ma'at's order. That was the inspiration for Moorcock's Stormbringer series, but he further explored it by saying that both order and chaos become dangerous at their extremes. D&D's two-axis alignment loses sight of this.
Kahoona:
Personally, I think the "Rigid" 9 Axis Alingnment chart is dated and much prefer the homebrew Circle Axis you see floating around as it's more granular and you just put a dot on the chart where you are at. This said.
The "Alignment Chart" is such a core feature to D&D and games inspired by it. The notion of Fantasy is there are Objectively Good and Objectively Evil entities. Its a staple and even if I feel aspects of it are dated doesn't mean it should be removed. It's like how we still have Skills in D&D when they included Attribute Checks. Why have both of these things? Well because the game had always had skills. A better example is the CR and EXP rules when the CR remains a broken mess that doesn't work and the game encourages you to play by milestone. They keep these "older" aspects around because they are what D&D is.
Overall, I agree they will probably remove alignment because "Ooooh no we can't have Objectively Evil and Good!" Unless they are "Insert Political Group" here.
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