D&D Alignments Outside of D&D

D&D is fun! For many people, D&D is the first foray into roleplaying fantasy and from there into purposeful character building, with these characters becoming valued or sentimental for the memories of games with friends inherently tied to them. This being the case, D&D’s influence is extremely present in creative communities. I pop over to Artfight, a site with a ton of character variability, which works as a good sounding board of what everybody’s creating, and randomly roll for a character. The third pull is a D&D character. I guarantee if you do this test, you will also find a D&D character in less than 10 pulls. Okay maybe I don’t guarantee that, but it’s definitely a popular character type that you will pretty quickly bump into!

From this popularity, elements of D&D have become relatively common fixtures, or conventions to think about, even when discussing characters that have nothing to do with D&D. Such as, what class, race, and the topic today: alignment, would so-and-so character have in D&D. This last element is particularly interesting, as it’s one that conveys a lot of information about a character’s ‘core’: their basic moral attitude and story role, without necessarily tying them to a fantasy or RPG context. Thus it can be not just a fun element to consider as a silly ‘what-if’, but a relatively useful tool to communicate quick information about an OC… except, it can also be hard to peg where exactly an OC should fall within the bounds of D&D’s 9-factor alignment system. This article is to explain why that is, and present a metric to help YOU! place your characters within it, outside the system of D&D.

What is Alignment?

D&D Alignments are the categorisation of a character’s basic moral attitude within one axis of Good to Evil, and another axis of Lawful to Chaotic. Each axis has three streps (Good/Neutral/Evil and Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic) to a total sum of 9 categories, or boxes, that a character can fall into. Tabulated, it looks like this:

This is the fundamental gist of the D&D alignment system, or character alignment, which at a glance is rather intuitive and from that intuition appealing. Once you know them, you can ‘roughly’ sense what a character inside these buckets is like: a Lawful Good might be like a heroic just knight, a Chaotic Good may be like a Robin Hood figure, a Lawful Evil might be like crooked lawyer, and a Chaotic Evil like a rampaging serial killer. …Okay, easy!

Maybe not so much. Often people struggle to place characters into a definite one of these categories because there naturally arise issues of moralistic nuance. If this character winds up doing Evil things, but they think they’re doing Good, (so they’re a naive kind of idealist, perhaps), does that place them in the Good or the Evil axis? Or conversely what about a character that knows they’re doing Evil, but aspires to Good ends with it? What on earth does ‘Lawful’ and ‘Chaotic’ really mean anyway; is a character that stringently follows their own code being Lawful even though they refuse the code of the local authority figures? And so on. These are confounding questions.

To untangle them, it’s important to firstly understand how the D&D Alignment system works within its own setting, and thus fundamentally what these ideas are reflecting by their intended design.

How Alignments work in D&D.

D&D is an objective morality universe. This means that, in the context of out-of-the-box D&D as dreamed up by Gary Gygax, certain things or actions are always, inherently good and others are always, inherently evil. For practical examples given by Gygax of what that means, to unquestioningly exterminate Evil-axis creatures or their children, to kill Evil-aligned prisoners, or to kill Evil-aligned beings that surrender to the party, are all utterly Lawful Good aligned actions. It’s stated as being at best a stupid, at most an Evil action to spare Evil-aligned beings that surrender; as the forgone conclusion is that these beings will use their freedom to commit Evil again. (While we’re at it, an example of Evil or Neutral behaviour would be to hire or enslave such surrendering Evil-aligned beings.) In fact it goes so far that to kill a known Evil prisoner who has renounced that Evil for Good, is also actually a Good action, as it guarantees the subject won’t backslide into Evil.

This is extreme. Why is this?

All of it is rooted in the fundamental design of the D&D universe. To give a quick rundown of D&D’s worldbuilding, reality is built from multiple fantastical ‘planes’, each of which discretely embody some kind of fundamental force. To give an idea, there’s a Fire Plane that is basically all things of fire, a Water Plane that is basically all things of water, a Shadow Plane that is all things of shadow, and so on. These planes intersect on a central plane called the ‘Prime Material’ plane, which is essentially the ‘normal earth’ plane, each having a certain influence upon it and being reflected in it to limited degrees, but that fundamentally balance into an equilibrium there by the influence of their opposing element.

This is important, as in addition to basic things like Water or Fire, Good and Evil (and Law and Chaos) are also fundamental forces with their own plane; planes actually, each having multiple. This means there is a fundamental essence of Good and a fundamental essence of Evil active in D&D. When a creature is of a good/evil alignment, or does a good/evil action, what it means is that this creature or action is aligned to the fundamental Good/Evil essence. This means they are either acting as an extension of that essence, or are being heavily influenced by it, or are tapping into its power. Creatures who by bloodline are always Evil-aligned are always Evil-aligned because they’re inherently tied to the Evil plane (usually by some pact or influence of an Evil god somewhere way back). This is why wholesale slaughter of them is genuinely, actually Good; because they do not have the capacity not to commit Evil. They’ll inevitably return to it as naturally as a bird takes to flight. In the case of things like demons or undead, this principle is usually pretty intuitive, but it’s also in effect for ‘smaller’ or material things like kobolds, orcs, or goblins. Given the context of D&D as a dungeon-crawling game where the gameplay revolves around combat, to have unambiguously Evil enemies like this is relatively important, so that not every session or every level 1 quest of ‘go kill the goblins’ is a huge moral debate.

Further, the souls of mortal creatures that die on the Material Plane (typically) go to be reincarnated as immortal entities on the plane reflective of their alignment. Good-aligned beings become angels and the like. Evil-aligned beings become demons and the like. Gods within D&D are also tied to these fundamental polarities, and bring their dead worshippers into the positive or negative plane they inhabit. This is the rationale of why preventing a backslide of a known longtime Evil-doer is Good, as it ensures their soul will reach the positive planes, and why the Prime Material plane is so exceptional; it’s the one where its native inhabitants (mostly) have the free capacity to choose their eventual, eternal alignment.

I find this worldbuilding setup compelling, and quite flexible for consequential storytelling too. But not every D&D setup, nor of course every fictional world has such an explicitly defined Good/Evil (or Law/Chaos) dichotomy baked into its metaphysics; and this is why it’s hard, and why confusion arises when trying to apply D&D’s alignment system outside of D&D.

What to do about it?

So how do you apply these alignments outside of D&D? Are they even still useful? Sure, but we have to slightly adjust our perspective in how we’re looking at these terms, while retaining an objective definition within them to measure a character’s attitudes or behaviour against. The most elegant solution I’ve seen, which is really the whole reason I wrote this, because it’s so good I want to promote it, comes from a Japanese twitter user called akutootuka, and goes like this:

Good/Evil axis:
Good: ‘Trying to do the right thing...’
Neutral: ‘Responding to circumstances...’
Evil: ‘Even supposing that this is wrong, I’d do it…’

Law/Chaos axis:
Lawful: ‘For the good of everyone.’
Neutral: ‘For the good of those close to me.’
Chaotic: ‘For the good of myself or my ideology.’

“I’ll say it again, but ‘Trying to do right’ doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll invite good results, and ‘Even supposing that this is wrong, I’d do it,’ doesn’t preclude someone who’ll do anything for their goals from potentially doing good things. It’s all about their mentality and approach towards society, so divergences naturally arise between their stance and results/public opinion.

“’Everyone’ means, ‘Even strangers who aren’t immediately present; people I haven’t met, but who exist in the world.’
‘Close to me’ means, ‘Those immediately in my presence; those I regard as special even if they’re not immediately with me.’
Put in those terms, the distinction between Law and Neutral should hopefully be more clear.

“My wording opens room for criticism, but I’m working from the position that ‘A Lawful Society’ is interchangeable with ‘Everyone’. Because a society is just a huge collection of Everyone (people we don’t know, and never interact with, but who absolutely do exist).”

I think this is genius. This accounts for naive ideologues who don’t realise they’re going wrong (Lawful Good, that may slide into Neutral Good or lower on the G/E axis later, depending on how they’d respond to the realisation they are going wrong), and the ‘philanthropist’ maniacs who are breaking eggs for their utopian omelet (Lawful/Chaotic Evil, where they belong). Meanwhile the neutrals feel sane in their own right as the middle ground an average person would likely fall into if they weren’t actively trying to be one or the other on their respective axes. The G/E indicates the character’s overall ethical stance, and the L/C their lens by which they apply those ethics towards others; it’s smooth.

This is the matrix I used when playing around with GoH character alignments, and tickles me for some of the silly (but consistent) results that I get, like Verti (the most ramrod straight-laced by-the-books legislator in the Prime Universe’s space court) being a Chaotic figure (because he’s trying to do right before his understanding of God and hates everyone), while all the Lawfuls tend to be lawbreakingly murderous (Camellia, Phoenix, Renard, Lisbet’s like the exception but even she’s not entirely off the ice).

This is an interesting pattern, or disparity, that I think arises from the initial division between ‘lawful’ and ‘good’, or ‘evil’ and ‘chaotic’, as being separate elements at all, as well as the author being Japanese and so not hugely culturally exposed to objective morality type theologies. If you’ll excuse the dovetail into Bible talk, Biblically no distinction is made between these elements (Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law), with ‘law’ here not meaning earthly laws instated by governments necessarily, but the divine laws written by God into the fabric of creation; the way creation works or should work. Within the D&D metric, then, anything on the Good axis should slant towards Lawful Good, and anything on the Evil axis should slant towards Chaotic Evil; and you do get the sensation of those alignments being the most ‘pure’ specimens of their respective row. I think akutootuka unintentionally hit on ‘why’ that is; that is an association between Chaos and selfishness, and an association between Law and altruism, but the catch of why even this makes weird results is that people can function by a sense of universal altruism that doesn’t preclude them just being evil, (by this I mean it’s possible for people to mistreat or become controlling towards others while thinking they’re doing right), while the nature of actual altruism simply isn’t evil at all.

Because no such distinction is made between earthly laws and divine laws, my most devotedly ‘lawful’ guys are chaotic! That’s funny. And if you took your classic D&D tricky lawyer devil, for selfishness here they also would fall under ‘chaotic’! That’s a bit sad, since that conception of ‘Lawful Evil’ is a fun archetype. But overall I enjoy this heuristic, and think it’ll work for characters in settings with less strongly defined good-evil/law-chaos regimentation.