Thread by @AlexandraErin

See, this is why I think "lawful" is where the alignment system breaks down completely as a descriptor for mortal ethics. In most meaningful interpretations of the lawful alignments, "lawful" means something different to each lawful alignment.

https://twitter.com/AnaMardoll/status/1394804929341046793

To answer Ana's question in his own QTed tweet, I see an evil character who uses the law as a tool as just neutral evil. An evil character who uses a tome of power to control reality for selfish gain isn't Bookish Evil, but just Regular Evil.

Same thing with a law book.

If I were running a game where a predefined villain character is coming to render a legal decision, I think my conception of the character would weigh more heavily on how I played it out than "But would a LE person do this, or is that more LN or NE?"

Honestly I think the best way to coherently render Lawful Evil is the old "villain with a code of honor" trope, but that introduces questions about what "evil" means vs. "good", and also doesn't really work for the Lawful Evil cosmic beings, which are more rule-entrapped dicks.

Like, devils in D&D aren't particularly honorable (they're not constrained from tricking people, for instance) but they *have* to keep their word. So it's less that law is their tool and more that it's their curse.

And this is getting into the other big problem of the alignment system, which is that the way it maps onto the very alignment-inflected cosmology of D&D is completely different than the way it describes mortal behavior.

And while I feel like I've got a good handle on how Lawful Evil devils in D&D work as being Lawful Evil... I will confess I've never actually got the Lawful Evil vampire thing. I don't think it's a great fit for most vampire characters.

I'm in the weird position of fundamentally disagreeing with most of the critiques I see of the D&D alignment system but also not liking it, or the paint-by-numbers/fill-in-the-blanks planar cosmology that gets tied to it.

I think 4E had things right in deprecating the alignment system by assuming most mortal beings are unaligned and simplifying the remaining alignments.

The difference between Chaotic Good and Neutral Good aren't that interesting outside of nerd forum fights because there fundamentally isn't much of anything that a CG would do that a NG wouldn't do, or vice-versa. They're both essentially just good.

For that matter, I don't think there's anything a Lawful Good character would do that would be anathema to the point of alignment-endangering to a Chaotic Good character in the same sense that the reverse is true, if it's for the obvious good.

But there are things that a Lawful Good character wouldn't do that would not be anathema to another Good character, and things a Lawful Good character would feel constrained to do, so Lawful Good is a more meaningful category.

And conversely on the Evil side... 4E flattened the Evil alignments into Evil and Chaotic Evil, where Just Plain Evil is "evil for one's own sake" and Chaotic Evil is "evil for evil's own sake" - do you want to rule, or to destroy?

And the labels of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil for the good-to-the-point-of-constraint and evil-to-the-point-of-no-restraint extremes were pure leftover legacy nonsense that led to confusion and consternation because they hinted at the fill-in-the-box boxes left unfilled.

And ultimately I think (as is often the case) 4E didn't go far enough in breaking ties with what came before because they clearly recognized that the alignment system was not actually worth keeping around but they couldn't quite bring themselves to jettison it completely.

So to be clear - I liked 4E's alignment and planar cosmology better than what came before and after in D&D, but to large degree it was insofar as there was so much less of it and it mattered less. None would have been better.

Where the alignment system is helpful is in giving players a prompt to think about their characters' motivations and their limits, which can give them a starting point and structure for answering questions like, "What would they do in this situation? How would they react?"

But I think there are better models for that than trying to reduce the moral/ethical universe to three points on two axes, and naming them after concepts that are highly subjective, ill-defined, or both.

Like, you can come up with a coherent descriptor for each of the nine canonical alignments that explains what good/evil/law/chaos means to them, but not in a way where those terms have consistent meanings from one square to the next...

...and at the point you're doing that, the two axes and their two polarities are a pointless affectation. Better to have players choose an ethos for their character and have nine examples to choose from and serve as models for building a custom one.

5E has kind of kept up the 4E deprecation of alignment while unfortunately doubling back and doubling down on the lip service to the past, as they restored the previous alignments but reworked most of the points it interacted with actual game mechanics, making it almost all RP.

Like all of the spells that interacted with alignment now instead relate to extraplanar origins, but they still refer to "evil and good" in the title, which... is unnecessary and confusing.

I really wish they would have renamed the spells to "Protection from Supernatural", "Detect Supernatural", "Dispel Supernatural", etc., instead of "...Evil and Good", and explicitly define "Supernatural" as planar origins outside the material plane to distinguish it from "magic".

That would have matched with replacing the Paladin's "detect evil" and "smite evil" with "divine sense" and 'divine smite", while being genericized to the other planes.