Alignment in TTRPGs

Anyone who has played D&D has seen the alignments of law vs chaos and good vs evil. While the alignment system was an important part of old D&D, it no longer fits with the more modern sensibilities of our TTRPGs, and that's a problem for D&D.

Why Alignment Mattered

When Gygax and Arneson first created D&D, it was originally an extension of their Chainmail wargame, but once it took on its own life, the core gameplay loop of D&D was about exploring dungeons, killing monsters, and taking their loot. In this context, alignment was a helpful tool. If you invade someone's home, killed them, and took their stuff, you were obviously evil. However, by labeling monsters as evil, it provides a framework that these monsters are a threat and probably obtained their loot through questionable means, so the players can feel justified in attacking them.

Alignment served as a simple and easy shorthand that allowed players to know what to expect. If the monster is evil, it's probably going to attack you. Chaotic? It's highly likely to lie to get what it wants. Lawful? You can trust them to keep their word.

D&D Has Changed

Over the years, players have come to expect more from Dungeons & Dragons than dungeons. They want quests, stories, and to feel like their characters matter. D&D's core gameplay loop is no longer just explore a dungeon and find loot. Now, players expect a goal, they want villains to defeat, and a D&D adventure can involve just as much time outside of a dungeon as inside.

As we come to expect more from our TTRPGs than the simplistic style of the 70s and 80s, D&D has expanded to include more interesting locales to explore and official products sometimes contain a variety of plot hooks you can use to get your players interested in the adventure. However, alignment hasn't changed.

With increasingly complex plots and a quest-driven structure, this mechanic still sticks out like a sore thumb.

What is Evil?

Good and evil are social constructs. You can't objectively state whether something is good or evil without some higher sense of a moral compass. Well, killing someone is definitely evil. Is it? If your god demands a human sacrifice once a year during an important festival, is that evil? It can't be, because your god demands it. Is that example too extreme for you? Alright, how about this: is it evil to kill an animal if it's not a threat to you and you don't intend to use any part of its body afterward? Well, if you read the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, that used to be an important part of regular worship. Certainly, if you believe the Christian God is good, then you can't possibly think that an animal sacrifice is evil.

Good and evil aren't what we think they are. In the real world, good and evil are concepts, they aren't absolutes. Our sense of morality comes from what we as a society decided upon.

Alignment is Absolute

Within D&D, there exists spells and magic items that react differently depending on a creature's alignment. If good and evil are not absolute, then how would the magic know how to affect someone? There are gods who are good and gods who are evil. Why? In the real world, if you are religious, your sense of evil comes from what your god says is evil. So, how can there be an evil god in a fantasy setting? Either, they rebelled against the other gods and are evil in the eyes of the majority, in which case, they're outnumbered, or good and evil is an absolute not determined by the gods, therefore some gods can be evil.

In order for the magic and the pantheons of D&D to function properly, alignments can't be subjective. There must be some fundamental truth in the universe that determines what an alignment means, and that truth can't simply come from the gods.

Absolute Alignment Limits Modern Story

Consider an epic fantasy story. Your heroes are obviously good, the villain is obviously evil. This is fine for this type of story. The reader even knows what's going to happen: the villain will eventually lose. That's perfectly fine. It's what's expected of the genre. The goal of the narrative isn't the story, the journey is the story. Before you even get a few pages into a story like The Lord of the Rings, you already know that the ring will be destroyed. The fun is seeing how it happens.

Now, consider A Song of Ice and Fire. These characters are all over the place. You have no idea who's going to die, or who's going to end up on the Iron Throne at the end of it all. This is a story about intrigue and character interactions. Good luck figuring out the alignments of these characters.

As we come to expect our gamemasters to create more intricate and detailed stories for our characters, the concept of D&D's alignment becomes more and more of a hindrance. Imagine how political intrigue would go if you could simply detect who is evil? What about if their alignment can't be detected at all? On the one hand, you immediately know who not to trust. On the other, you immediately know who not to trust.

Absolute Alignment Limits Players

When you create your character, you probably have an idea in mind for how they will act and what they care about. Now, fit them into one of nine predetermined alignment labels. You have to portray that alignment now.

Once you put a label on your character's morality, it now looms over everything your character does, right? "No, alignment is open to interpretation," you say. Well, no, it's not. As I already pointed out, alignment within D&D can't be open to interpretation, because of the simple fact that there is magic which can definitely identify good and evil, law and chaos. If it can be defined by a spell, then there must be a universal definition for it. If there is a universal definition, then you, as the player, don't get to interpret it how you want.

Conclusion

The alignment system was fine for what the game used to be, but now that D&D has become something more, it's an outdated remnant that needs to be changed. Some modern TTRPGs don't even use an alignment system. Unfortunately, if you change the alignment system of D&D, you also have to change a handful of spells and magic items, so we're not likely to see WotC change alignment with the newest version of D&D. As a gamemaster, you can, of course, ignore alignment, but then you also have to tell your players that all of the magic that interacts with alignment won't be used in your game.

Whether you like it or hate it, D&D's alignments no longer serve their original purpose. It's a flawed system that has become such an entrenched part of the game that it's likely to never change, and ends up being largely ignored by players and GMs alike, until a paladin wants to detect or smite evil...