Outside of D&D, the only other significant use of alignment is in “Adventure Time.”

I was shouting into the void on Twitter recently when a thread about alignment caught my attention. The poster felt that they were in a moral quandary: they were playing a Good character in a party of Neutrals, and they were planning to steal a specific item from a mansion. The player had no issue with stealing said item—it was currently in “the wrong hands,” so taking it would be “a Good thing to do”—but the rest of the party wanted to ransack the entire mansion while they were there. This made the Good player rather uncomfortable; they didn’t think that their alignment “allowed” them to do something so immoral. At the same time, they didn’t want to be a spoilsport and ruin the party’s fun, so they were at a loss as to what to do.

Welcome to the perennial alignment debate.

Alignment is one of those things that is unique to Dungeons and Dragons; so far as I know, there is no other tabletop RPG that uses the system. People have been arguing over how to utilize alignment since the beginning of Dungeons and Dragons, and a lot of ink has been spilled over the subject over the years. For the uninitiated, Dungeons and Dragons requires all players to choose an alignment for their characters that is both Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, and Good, Neutral, or Evil. Alignment has been around in some form since the game began, but the mechanic has gone through significant change since the 1970s.

In the original edition, there were only three alignments: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic. Different races and monsters were restricted in their alignment choices. For example, Elves and Dwarves could only be Lawful or Neutral, while Orcs could only be Neutral or Chaotic, and Hobbits could only be Lawful. If this system seems rigid, that’s because it was. Choosing a certain race meant that you were deciding to a large extent how you wanted to interact with the world. According to the original rules, this could be reduced to the question, “how likely are you to stab your friends in the back?” This made a lot of sense in the early days of the game, when Dungeons and Dragons was almost solely about going through dungeons and clearing rooms of enemies and traps to get treasure. You had to watch yourself around a Chaotic character, because they, by definition, didn’t play well with others, while you knew that your treasure was likely safe around a Lawful character. As the complexity of the game has increased, however, alignment has become more difficult to utilize.

Alignment: the Appendix of the Character Sheet

One of the things that makes alignment difficult to utilize effectively is that it’s simply not as important as it used to be. Wizards of the Coast has slowly removed many of the mechanics that directly affect alignment. In previous editions of Dungeons and Dragons, there were a number of spells and abilities that could change a character’s alignment either temporarily or permanently. For example, a lycanthrope player might have a different alignment in their transformed state than they would in their normal state. Nowadays, there are only a handful of powerful artifacts, such as the Hand and Eye of Vecna, that affect alignment, and most of those serve only to make players Evil.

At the same time, WotC introduced Backgrounds to character creation. Backgrounds are a means of incentivizing backstory for player characters. There are distinct benefits to different backgrounds, as each is proficient in different skills: Outlanders, for instance, are proficient in Survival, while Charlatans are proficient in Deception. Each background also comes with its own Traits, Bonds, Ideals, and Flaws. Though these have no mechanical impact on the game, they inform how that character interacts with other players and NPCs.

If this seems redundant, that’s because it is. Backgrounds have supplanted much of the functionality originally given to alignment. Nowadays, alignment is a useful shorthand for understanding a character’s personality in the broadest possible strokes, but mechanically, there is almost no use for it.

They’re more like Guidelines than Actual Rules

When a player justifies restrictive behavior by saying that they’re “just playing their alignment,” you should remind them that alignments do not proscribe actions. Put another way: good people can still do bad things, and bad people are can still do good things.

Take, for instance, the climactic fight in Return of the Jedi: Luke Skywalker flies into a rage and cuts off Darth Vader’s hand; later in the same scene, Vader saves Luke’s life by killing the Emperor. Each acts in a way that is consistent with their character in the moment, but is arguably not consistent with their broader moral compass.

The same is true of D&D characters. A Lawful Good paladin may have a strict personal code, but they are still mortal, and therefore fallible. They are going to act in ways that, in hindsight, they regret, just as we all do. To return to the original example, if a Good player is asked to participate in targeted burglary, what is a more interesting choice: simply saying “that’s against my alignment” and not engaging, or going along with the heist only to grapple with the moral repercussions later on? I know which one I’d choose.

Character stats are meant to encourage creativity, not limit it, and ethical ambiguity is inevitable in a game full of treasure hunting and monster slaying. Encourage your players to embrace the moments that make them—and by extension theirs character—uncomfortable , because those are often the moments that produce rewarding stories.

Alignment is Fluid

In its current iteration, alignment is best understood as a reflection of player behavior rather than the other way around. Therefore, patterns of behavior that do not conform to your alignment can cause that alignment to shift. A paladin can only kill so many defenseless villagers, for example, before they can’t go around calling themselves Lawful Good any longer. As the dungeon master, you are the ultimate arbiter of alignment changes. If it appears that a player’s moral compass has shifted, then you should adjust their alignment to reflect that shift.

Generally speaking, this usually means moving a player along the Good-Evil scale, rather than the Lawful-Chaotic scale. The difference between, say, Lawful Good and Neutral Good is pretty small compared to the difference between Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral. Focusing on larger-scale moral transformations will give alignment changes emotional and narrative weight. Telling a player that they are moving closer to Evil means something; telling a player that they’re getting less observant of laws means significantly less. Some players are born to chaos, but that doesn’t mean that they want to be seen as villains.

Alignment, like certain other stats on the character sheet, is both an iconic part of the Dungeons and Dragons experience and largely a vestige of an earlier point in the game’s history. Mechanically speaking, it’s not ideal; some would go so far as to say that it’s just bad. That said, I don’t think that it will be going anywhere anytime soon. In the meantime, the prior suggestions are meant help you utilize alignment in a way that feels meaningful without being intrusive.

Hopefully, this puts the perennial alignment debate to bed for you until the next time that it rears its head, which, judging by history, it will continue to do until the inevitable heat death of the universe.

Did you find this article helpful? If so, there’s plenty more content just like it! Subscribe to the mailing list and follow SpellTheory on Facebook and Twitter to keep up-to-date with all of the articles and resources that I publish.