The Ravens Nest

The Question of Alignment In D&D & Pathfinder.

The question of alignment in games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder is popping up and making the rounds again.

It’s not the first time it’s happened and, as always, the radical tourists coming into the hobby want to change fundamental aspects of established games and thereby, destroy them.

For those that aren’t familiar, D&D has had nine alignments from which, players could choose for their respective characters. They were as follows:

• Lawful Good

• Neutral Good

• Chaotic Good

• Lawful Neutral

• Neutral

• Chaotic Neutral

• Lawful Evil

• Neutral Evil

• Chaotic Evil

For a complete breakdown of these alignments and what they mean, you can read about them here.

The radical tourists and professional victims have eschewed the alignment system because they’re moral relativists constantly playing a game of whataboutism without regard to what anyone else may think about it. In truth, this was yet another in game-balancing mechanics that were introduced because it meant that some creatures would be succeptible to certain types of attacks and which ones to which they’d be immune.

Fact of the matter is that these self-insertions have become so ridiculous that there are other games that have made representation a priority, and have even eschewed the alignment system in favor of, in the case of The Red Room’s Wretchedverse, sought to replace it with a system of transgressions as a theme and the radical tourists and professional victims are little more than frauds as they’ve either ignored the very games that give them exactly what they want or they try with every fiber of their being to cancel them.

Throughout our history, sagas and stories of good people becoming heroes via selfless and brave actions, battling against the forces of evil and entropy have taught a lesson that even Galina Krasskova mentioned in her book A Modern Guide To Heathenry which sums up what I’m about to say very well and I quote:

Our capacity for thought allows us to decide cleanly to turn our lives to our Gods, to make choices about how we will live in the world and what kind of person we shall become, what kind of world to create. There is tremendous beauty and profundity in the way we were designed, in the power of our minds to reach out to the Gods and experience in some infinitesimal way all that they are. We connect with the mysteries of creation every time we make a decision that aligns us with our Gods and against entropy, despair and all the empty promises of modernity, monotheism and Marxism. In some respect, we are called to be co-creators with our Gods—not that we have a hand in creating the worlds, but we can again and again align ourselves with the primordial acts of creation by aligning our minds and hearts and wills with our Gods. We participate by consciously choosing to order our values as polytheists, no small thing.

Now there are some key takeaways from that quote. While I may be coming to you from the perspective of a polytheist, I’m certainly not pressing you into such. The things that I’ve personally taken away from the text is that it is up to us, as has been told in fables, folklore, sagas, stories of Conan The Barbarian, Elric of Melnibone, and so on, so forth is that these are stories of people who took that very idea upon themselves.

Gygax & Arneson created a hobby based on those ideals, which was derived from wargaming, which came about when military families gave dioramas and miniatures to their children and let them play with them. Gygax & Arneson made it possible for all of us to take that hobby and press it into fantasy worlds where the heroes rise up against dark forces bent on destruction and/or domination. This very theme is what gives the games conflict and resolution alongside elements such as man vs. man, man vs. nature & man vs. himself. Using it as a mechanic to balance the game is one thing but even then, the lines between black and white, good and evil were had grey areas in the Neutral alignments.

When it comes to the hobby of tabletop roleplaying games themselves, if you ever want to know where your conflict is coming from, look no further than the Game Master, Referee or Judge, pick your term. The GM will embody and present the conflict for the characters to face and interact with in order to grow as characters through experience points. The professional victim puritans seek only, not sanitization, because that’s been attempted to no avail, but sterilization.

The motive for these actions is simple: If there are no heroes and heroines to which to aspire, no one is motivated to strive for better and that’s because they, themselves have never aspired to strive to be better than what they are now. Burning out heroes and heroines is their business. Again, occulting your history by revisionism and ensuring that no one will ever have those inspirational elements unless all roads lead to them and their virtue-signalling.

These people have had a long-standing feud with the concepts of good and evil, wanting to portray honest, dyed-in-the-wool villains as “misunderstood” and “fixable” when it’s been clear they’re anything but.

They Are Called Monsters For A Reason, Peeps.

For some, those heroes take the form of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Iron Man, The X-Men, etc. For others, it’s Sigurd battling Fafnir the Dragon, Odin going to meet his doom at the hands of Fenrir only to be avenged by his son, Vidarr. Balor being defeated by Lugh, the examples are endless and spread across cultures.

While I am still a proponent for Your Table, Your Rules, this is still a point where I think such a mechanical change is unwarranted. If the alignment grid is not something you wish to explore, the I suggest simply ignoring it for your table but be mature and sane enough to allow others to enjoy it.

Alternately, the professional victim crowd could show just a little courage themselves and perhaps try The Wretchedverse at their tables instead because, yet another motive I suspect may be at hand, is the desire to have an excuse to play such anti-heroes.

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