When I first sat down and started thinking about what I wanted write about on this site first, I had some trouble picking a single topic. Lately, I’ve had a lot of interesting discussions with several of my gaming groups about various topics, both from a GM and a player perspective, such as how to run social encounters, the right way to approach player “free will,” and handling social conflicts between PCs. At the same time, I’m also in the midst starting up a new Pathfinder campaign, and as such have also been putting a lot of thought lately into the concepts of world and adventure creation, as well as homebrewing systems to help the game fit the feel of the world for this new campaign.
I could have written an article (or several articles) on all of these things, and I likely will in the near-future, but in the end, the topic for this article came about after a conversation with a friend about creating this site. When I had mentioned the name of the site to him, he was a bit confused. Specifically at the “Chaotic Neutral” part. My reasoning for the name, I explained to him, was twofold. First, a site dedicated to my random musings on a wide range of gaming-related topics seemed to lie closer to the chaotic side of the spectrum. More importantly, however, chaotic neutral is the alignment I’d consider to be closest to my personality in real life. I’m the type of person who puts importance on acting in accordance with my own moral code and personal beliefs, even in situations where those beliefs might conflict with the rules and laws of society.
In my friend’s mind, this belief, the following of personal beliefs over rules of society, was more of a lawful trait, not chaotic. A personal code may not be the same as the code of society, but it was still a code. To him, acting strictly in accordance with a code – any code – is one of the defining traits of being lawful. This eventually springboarded into a broader conversation on the alignment system of D&D, and today, I’m going to take that discussion a step further and take a look at just what alignment is, the challenges and limitations of the alignment system, and how we can better frame our view of alignment so that we can use it to improve our games without feeling like its boxing players into a specific method of play.
Absolute vs. Subjective Alignment
In my experience, the root cause of most disagreements of what each alignment “is” comes down to a matter of looking at alignment through a subjective lens. If you look the two viewpoints my friend and I had over whether following personal beliefs over laws is lawful or chaotic, our different perspectives could really be distilled down to us looking at the issue through two different approaches.
The idea that following one’s personal beliefs and moral code over the rules of society is lawful comes from a subjective point of view. From the character’s perspective, they have a specific set of rules that they abide by. These rules may align with those of society, but they are still rules. From that frame of reference, you could certainly see where the lawful argument comes from. Under this point of view, a character would only be chaotic if they simply do not abide by rules at all. They act only on whatever whim suits them at a given time, and break rules for the sole purpose of breaking them. This definition of chaotic tends to lead to extreme, “force of nature” villain types of characters that aren’t well suited to most parties, and PCs made under this line of thinking are probably the reason why chaotic neutral characters have such a bad reputation in many gaming groups.
Using an absolute approach, we look at the conflict between a personal code and society’s code a bit differently. A character who knowingly ignores or violates laws because they conflict with their own personal code is still violating the law. They may have a reason for it, but they are still, whether it is their intention to do so or not, causing some degree of chaos in society by not following the rules. Depending on how different the character’s personal code is from the law and how far the character is willing to go to adhere to their personal beliefs, the degree of chaos caused by these conflicts could be practically negligible, or it could be significant, but there is always a degree of chaos that is created or that can potentially be created in these situations.
As a real-world example, lets consider the patriots of the American Revolution. Though many factors came together and compounded to eventually lead to full-on war between the colonies and Britain, ultimately the fundamental disagreement that led to revolution was the patriots’ belief that Britain’s rules and sovereignty was unduly restricting what they saw to be basic, inalienable human freedoms and rights. The most well-known example of this, of course, was the idea of “taxation without representation,” but there were other elements that came into play too – colonists being legally required to quarter British soldiers upon request, for example.
From a lawful perspective, if one believes that laws are unjust or that they need to be changed, the proper way to do so is to change them legitimately. That is to say, trying to convince Parliament or King George to change the rules using their legal authority. Until they can be changed, however, they are still laws that need to be followed. Long before things escalated to the point of full-on war, some early patriots tried to do just that, but were never able to succeed in bringing change. Eventually, the tactics of the colonists began to turn to disobedience – at one point, the Continental Congress adopted an idea suggested by John Adams, where the colonies would publicly abide by Parliament’s laws but secretly refuse to pay any taxes through boycotts of British goods and other means. Things would continue to escalate, bringing the Boston Tea Party, and the acts carried out by the patriots in Boston along with the British retaliation would set the stage for full-blown rebellion.
The actions of the patriots, civil disobedience and eventually rebellion, are undoubtedly chaotic when looking at it from an absolute perspective. Though they may have been fighting for a good and just cause and had good intentions, war by its very nature brings chaos. A large percentage of the colonists who were neither loyalists nor patriots were left caught in the middle of this war between their countrymen and Britain. The cost of the war would put great financial strain on the Americans, British, and French, almost leading to a coup d’etat in the former colonies that was infamously diffused by Washington himself. Though Britain and the newly-formed U.S. would soon see great economic growth from renewed trade between the two countries following peace negotiations, France never saw that same recovery, and the financial strain caused in part by the American Revolution in that nation would soon play a part in the coming French Revolution. Even though the founding fathers were acting in accordance with what they believed was a code of inalienable human rights and freedoms, their disobedience and rebellion against British rule sowed chaos throughout the globe.
Alignment as a GM Tool
In my mind, the D&D alignment system, when used properly, can only function under an absolute viewpoint. The reason for this is simple: alignment should be a tool intended for GMs, not for players. GMs have to manage a huge world with a wide range of NPCs encompassing a wide range of beliefs, some of which may not be particularly fleshed out. In order for us to be able to determine how our world and NPCs react to the players appropriately and realistically in situations were we might not always have well-defined beliefs and motivations, we need a frame of reference. We need those absolute axes of law, chaos, good, and evil to be able to quickly how the world and its NPCs is going to react to various types of actions.
Random onlookers who notice the party’s rogue swiping gems off the counter of a market stall in a predominantly lawful settlement are going to be shocked. They are going to call for the authorities. Some might even physically stop or restrain the rouge. In a settlement that leans more towards chaos, however, they might not care. Theft might happen all the time. Crime might be so common that the guards aren’t even concerned with small-scale theft, or might even be paid off by a local thieves’ guild or other criminal organization. This same theft in two different locations could cause completely different reactions, each of which could lead to very different encounters or potentially even adventures. And when we as GMs use alignment in this way, as a method of determining how the world perceives the players’ actions (regardless of their intentions), we can react to PC actions in ways that are more realistic and help our world come to life.
Players, on the other hand, have detailed, well-defined characters whose beliefs and motivations have likely already been fleshed out. Players shouldn’t need an alignment box to tell them what their character’s personality is and how to roleplay them, and using alignment as a crutch for roleplaying shoehorns them into making decisions based on what a Lawful/Chaotic/Good/Evil character would do, not based on what their actual CHARACTER would do.
One of the main pillars of a tabletop RPG is role-playing, and the entire concept of role-playing essentially boils down to taking a given situation and figuring out what decision this fictional character you’ve made would take. If that fictional character existed in real-life, they usually wouldn’t be sitting there thinking “what would a lawful/chaotic/good/evil person do” whenever they are faced with a decision. Instead, they are going to make a decision based on their knowledge, experience, and beliefs. That decision might be subconsciously made purely through instinct, but even if they aren’t completely aware of it, that decision is likely still going to be informed by those three things.
When a player makes a decision for their character, they need to look at the decision that same way. Based on their character’s knowledge, experience, and beliefs, how would they act? With a newly created character, the player might not know enough about the character to be able to give a definitive answer, and might have to guess or take whatever action they feel would be appropriate for their character. That’s okay. In fact, that’s a good thing. These sort of decisions and actions are how the players (and the GM) learn more about the PCs, and perhaps more importantly, how characters grow as people. They make decisions that they might not have normally made in the past. They might learn, they might falter, but they always change. That change, that growth, is what makes characters compelling and what makes the world and the game feel alive. If players are making decisions based on whichever alignment box they’ve put on their character sheet, they rob themselves of these opportunities for growth and change.
If you want to best promote this type of decision-making process for your players and provide more opportunities for character change and growth, you need to decouple alignment from the players’ decision-making. To do that, you need to reinforce that only actions can have an alignment. Not PCs.
Actions Have Alignment, Not Characters
When I deal with alignment in my games, alignment is an immutable frame of reference. It is the system that helps me determine how the actions of the PCs are perceived by the world as a whole. Characters don’t have alignments: their actions do. Depending on what type of actions a character generally favors, the world will probably perceive that character as being lawful or chaotic or good or evil or whatever. But no matter what, this frame of reference is absolute. From the perspective of the world, each action lies somewhere on the scale between lawful and chaotic and good and evil and that point on the scale is always the same. How individual characters interpret this scale might vary based on their subjective beliefs, but the overall framework is unchangeable. It is an absolute woven into the fabric of the world.
The key thing to keep in mind with this approach is that you are determining the alignment of an action based on the ACTION ITSELF, not the intent of the character performing the action. When you do this, and you use this alignment system to help determine how the NPCs and the world as a whole perceive and react to the PCs actions, you are actually replicating how we as humans perceive others. As people, we judge ourselves based on our intent but others based on their actions. We have to, because most of the time, we don’t know or understand the intent of others. We can’t replicate the thought process that led to the action someone else took, because every person has a completely different range of knowledge, experience, and beliefs that drive their thinking and decision making. We can sometimes guess at the intentions and thinking behind an action, but ultimately, the only thing we really know is the action itself and the result it brought, and that means that we naturally base our judgments of others based on how we perceive their actions.
Those perceptions could be wrong. Say you have a king who sits on a gigantic pile of gold while his people are destitute and literally starving and dying in the streets. Most people would probably describe that king’s actions as being pretty firmly in evil territory – he is, after all, purposefully ignoring the suffering of others for the sake of accumulating wealth. But maybe the king isn’t hoarding all this wealth for himself. Maybe he’s been warned of a giant army that is coming to utterly destroy his kingdom and his people. An invasion force against which his kingdom is woefully unequipped to defend. And perhaps the only way he can prevent the destruction of his kingdom and the complete slaughter of his people is by penny-pinching in whatever way he can to help fund the kingdom’s defenses and armies, even if doing so means leaving his people to suffer.
The king may be perceived by the world as an evil character, but is he really, truly “evil?” If his people learn all of this, they will have to make that determination. But reputation is hard to shake. Some people might understand that the king was making what he saw was a necessary sacrifice. But many others might not be able to see it that way because they have already formed this image of him being a ruthless, evil bastard. They may never be able to forgive him or understand why he did what he did. The king may even potentially be overthrown or assassinated, even though he only did what he thought was the right thing to do in a terrible situation. He may never get the chance to be truly judged based on his intentions, and that’s okay. Sometimes, that’s how things work out.
When you use alignment as a way of describing characters instead of actions, you force yourself to put each character in one of these nine boxes, and that makes it really difficult to handle characters who operate in a grayer area. And honestly, most people operate somewhere in that gray area. The actions they take might jump between one alignment and another, and those changing actions might eventually start to change how the world perceives them, but ultimately, it is the character’s decisions that drive their alignment, not the other way around.
Or at least, that’s the way it SHOULD be.
When Mechanics Ruin Everything
There is one huge roadblock to the concept of decoupling alignment from your players’ decision-making. If the designers of D&D and Pathfinder had limited the alignment system to being a way of describing characters and their actions, we’d be relatively okay and could decouple these things relatively easily without impacting the game. Unfortunately, they didn’t. And that’s where forced alignment restrictions come in to rain on our parade.
It’s easy to see the idea behind alignment restrictions. A just paladin who has sworn to help the needy and defend the innocent simply can’t fit the D&D definition of evil. A monk who has dedicated his life to discipline and self-control can’t be chaotic. The very nature of these classes imply roleplaying restrictions, whether that be through oaths a paladin has sworn to follow in exchange for divine power or vows a monk has taken during his initiation into a monastic order. The problem with these restrictions is that they, by design, force a character into one of those nine alignment boxes. It becomes completely impossible for that player to decouple their decision-making from alignment because they are risking serious mechanical penalties for doing so, and the overwhelming majority of players aren’t going to willingly take a penalty for the sake of a “character growth” moment unless it is a part of some character concept they had already planned out in advance.
The simplest solution to this problem is to just get rid of alignment restrictions entirely. Admittedly, before I knew better, that’s how I used to handle this issue in my games. But this is a lazy solution. The problem with just removing alignment restrictions is that it doesn’t make sense to have a character who is diametrically opposed to their class. A ruthless warrior who kills innocents indiscriminately couldn’t be a paladin. An antipaladin, sure, but not a paladin. Such a situation simply breaks any sense of realism your game might have.
The second problem with getting rid of alignment restrictions is that some classes are balanced around these restrictions. An alignment restriction, by definition, restricts what actions the character (and by extension, the player), can take. In exchange, characters of these classes might get access to more powerful or a wider range of abilities. The paladin is perhaps the best example of this. The paladin is the most restricted class in the game when it comes to alignment, but in exchange, a paladin gets the ability to smite evil, lay on hands, and limited spellcasting, all while still being a full-BAB class with good saves. By removing alignment restrictions entirely, you throw that balance out of wack.
So, with all that said, how can we help decouple alignment and player decision-making while keeping in mind the purpose of alignment restrictions? The answer is to look at exactly what alignment restrictions are supposed to represent, and find a better way to abstract it without forcing specific alignments on characters.
Oaths and Vows
If we think carefully about the idea behind alignment restrictions, we can see that most of the time, an alignment restriction is just an abstract representation of an oath or vow members of a certain class have taken. Paladins, clerics, and druids have usually sworn service to a deity. Monks have usually taken some sort of vows, often pertaining to discipline, humility, and self-control. We can easily represent these oaths and vows in ways other than alignment restrictions, and that’s by using, well, oaths and vows.
Rather than just eliminating alignment restrictions entirely like I used to, in my latest games, if a player wants to play a class that traditionally has a restricted alignment like the paladin or monk, I ask them to come up with an oath for their character to follow. This oath has to be in line with the teachings of their god or order and it has to be significant. It is something that they had to trade to gain their divine abilities or to unlock their ability to focus their inner ki. Once they have their oath and I’ve had the chance to review and approve it, that oath is their “alignment restriction,” and so long as their actions don’t violate their oath, whatever alignment their actions have is irrelevant. If they take an action that violates their oath, they risk falling and having their deity take away their powers, or losing their self-control and with it their connection to their ki. It isn’t an all-or-nothing type deal. Depending on how severe the violation of their oath was, they might only get a stern warning from their god, or alienate some of their god or order’s other followers but not lose their powers completely. But whenever they violate their oath, there will always be consequences.
Remember that the key piece when it comes to oaths and vows is that the oath has to be significant. If the paladin’s oath or the monk’s vow is something niche that will almost never come up in gameplay, then the oath or vow might as well not even exist. Their oath needs to be something that you can use to put them into difficult decisions and moral dilemmas, something that will, at times, force them to choose between the easy way out of a situation and their vows. And, most importantly, you need to USE that oath. Present them with situations that challenge their faith and their oath, that make them choose between the promises they have made and their own personal desires. If done well, these types of situations, and the decisions the character makes to handle it, will tell the players (and you) more about that character and their priorities. They are perfect opportunities for the types of decisions that can drive character growth, and ultimately, that is the goal we are looking to accomplish by all of this alignment talk.
One caveat to note here is that although you can and should use the player’s oath, you cannot, under any circumstances, abuse it. If every situation the paladin faces challenges their oath, that isn’t going to be much fun for the player and the impact of these decisions is not going to feel as strong. You should only intentionally use their oath to force a difficult decision when you want to create a key, potentially character-defining moment. That is something better suited for setpieces and major moments in the narrative, not random, run-of-the-mill adventuring decisions. This isn’t to say that you should purposefully avoid these situations outside of those intentionally-designed moments. If the actions of the PCs just so happen to put them into a situation where the oath has suddenly come into play, don’t shy away from that. Let the situation evolve naturally. But if you are going to intentionally design an encounter to challenge a player’s oath, you need to be very cognizant of when and why you are doing so.
There are some classes with alignment restrictions that don’t have “oaths” or “vows.” For example, the barbarian being restricted to chaotic only or certain archetypes like the Undead Master Wizard in Pathfinder being limited to evil only. To be frank, I find that most of these restrictions not based on an oath/vow or adherence to a deity’s teachings to be fairly pointless. There just isn’t really any strong justification for the alignment restrictions to be there, outside of ideas like “only evil characters could possibly want to use necromancy.” There is no force at work that requires them to follow a certain path to keep their abilities.
In most cases, these classes simply have these restrictions because they generally lend themselves towards actions of a certain alignment (e.g. the Undead Master is casting a lot of evil necromatic spells), so I typically just ignore the alignment restrictions for these cases. If they play that class/archetype optimally, they are going to constantly be making actions of that particular alignment anyway just by the nature of their abilities, which means that the world can just react to these actions normally using our interpretation of alignment. We don’t really need any extra restrictions on top of that.
One other thing to keep in mind as well: as a GM, you always want to be consistent, and oaths and vows are no exception. If you have an NPC paladin, you also need a general idea of what sort of oath he follows, and you need to consider that oath when making decisions for that NPC and enforce the same consequences you would on a PC if that NPC breaks his oath. Being consistent with your world and your rulings is one of the single most important keys to being a good GM – but that’s something for a future article.