Games - Alignment

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	Games - Alignment

In Dungeons & Dragons
and some similar role-playing games, alignment refers to the moral and ethical perspective of the player characters, non-player characters, monsters, and societies in the game. Not all role-playing games have such a system.

Dungeons & Dragons

The canonical system derived from Dungeons & Dragons creates a two-dimensional grid, one of which measures a "moral" continuum between good and evil, and the other "ethical" between law and chaos. Those characters that fall on one of the extremes are "good" or "evil", "lawful" or "chaotic"; in addition, there is a middle ground of "neutrality" on both axes, describing characters that are indifferent, balanced or conflicted about good or evil, law or chaos. By combining the two axes, any given character has one of nine possible alignments:

Game creator Gary Gygax largely derived the alignment system from the cosmology imagined by science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. This is especially evident in the original Dungeons & Dragons game, in which "lawful", "neutral" and "chaotic" were the only three alignments available, with "lawful" including characteristics ascribed to "good" and "chaotic" those ascribed to "evil". The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game revised the alignment system into the biaxial system that is currently used.

Gygax was also influenced by a novel by Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions, in which the forces of law, the paladins of Charlemagne, were at war with the forces of Chaos, the faerie kingdom. Note that elves were of chaotic alignment in the original Dungeons & Dragons.

The first edition of Dungeons & Dragons suggested that Lawful Good was the "best" alignment and Chaotic Evil the "worst". Later editions moved away from this perspective, but continue to discourage player characters of the three evil alignments (Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil).

Certain character classes are restricted in the sorts of alignment they can take. A paladin traditionally must be of Lawful Good alignment; rogues and barbarians are seldom lawful in alignment. Clerics and other priests must typically uphold the alignments favoured by their deities. Druids must be wholly or partially neutral in their allegiances. Assassins are usually evil. These restrictions have been somewhat relaxed in the third edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game, although a Dungeon Master may penalize a player character who acts in marked variance from his declared alignment or may shift the character's alignment to match his actual behaviour.

Players are usually discouraged from playing outright evil characters, leaving these alignments only for non-player characters, as evil characters don't make for heroic fantasy.

The alignment system was originally designed as a tool for the Dungeon Master, and not something the player needed to be much concerned about. As the system became more detailed, many Dungeon Masters used alignments as an encouragement for role-playing, by making stricter judgments over whether a player character's actions matched their alignment.

Dungeon Masters often allow characters to be of an alignment falling between one of the traditional nine alignments; for instance, a character could be neutral good / lawful good, meaning that he is primarily neutral good but has lawful tendencies. Indeed, this system was supported canonically in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Edition, particularly in alignments of the Outer Planes as depicted in the Manual of the Planes
; for example, neutral good / lawful good is the alignment of the plane of Bytopia. These Dungeon Masters treat alignment as a two-dimensional plane rather than a grid, allowing for a much greater range of alignments. Dungeon Masters using nine strict alignments have often had conflicts with players over punishments for behaviour on the borderlines of one alignment and the next (earlier editions of the game included severe penalties for changing alignment, or for repeated or flagrant violations of one's current alignment).

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Games - Alignment

Dungeons & Dragons

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