All of these discussions of « monster
as people » and « evil races » that are all the
rage right now actually hit a chord in me, as I remember as a teen I
would look up in the monster manual to find monstrous races to play
for my next character, and my inability to play as an evil
alignement.
The alignement system is very boring to
me. It always was. I can't tell what an evil character thinks or acts
like, besides killing people, and our characters always end up killing
people even when playing good or neutral characters anyways. Maybe
we were just bad at playing the game, Maybe no one really undertands
what alignements are supposed to be, I don't know...
It seemed that the alignement was
refering to something outside of the character, and not to a
characteristic inside of them. How do you do intrigue inside of a
clerical order, whent hey all worship a lawful good deity and
everyone can cast detect alignement ? What if the lich truly
thinks they are doing their nefarious plots for the common good ?
Can a band of revolutionary people be anything else than Chaotic if
they go against the established order (backed by a Lawful godly
power), even if they have a very stable set of moral rules ?
Stealing food is bad, even if it is to feed your starving family ?
Like what the hell does « chaotic »
even mean for people ? Do you hate the law ? Are you
tossing a dice to take any kind of decision ? Is the law never
wrong ? What is the alignement of someone who follows the law
without faith in it ? Is the alignement set by core beliefs or
by the actions of a character ? No one knows, everyone is
winging it. Law and chaos really is the messiest part of this system,
it is just good and evil, but set to an administrative setting.
These are charicatures of people inside
a system that KNOWS what good and evil are. This is a deeply
manicheic view of a world where there IS a RIGHT and a WRONG and
where you have to chose to be wrong if you want to go against it, and
no one choses to be wrong, aside from your occasionnal evil mad
cultists. This system takes for granted that there's a correct way to be, a
correct way to think, a correct god to worship, and that everyone
else wants the end of that world because they disagree with it.
In a word, it is very monotheistic, and
from a monotheistic point of view : my god is good, my city is
lawful, therefore, our enemies can only be the opposite of that, they
are enemies of our civilisation, and of our way of life, or
something. They must be evil and want to bring about chaos. Nonsense.
You can play a character that thinks
like that, and playing a zealot can be fun, but I refuse to live in a
world where this is the right way to be. Not everyone has to be a
pure zealot.
I needed something more personal than
good/evil and chaos/law because those things don't mean anything to
me for people. Nobody is really Evil in real life. So I started
thinking about a way to make an alignement system that looked more
like what I think people can be defined with, from the inside.
It had to be a system to explain
relationship with people between people and not as a society. If your
system can't have nuance, don't give me those big axis with huge
concepts like good and evil is what I'm saying.
SELFLESS/SELFISH, your relationship to
others, or ALTRUISM/EGOISM
« I act to help others/I act in
my own interest »
What do you think of when you start a
quest ? What you get out of it, or the people you are helping ?
You can be good or evil while being selfless, same with being
selfish.
A religious person can still worship
the undiying light (or whatever), believe very hard in everything it
teaches, and act selfish or selfless. It shows the reason they are
doing something instead of what they are doing. You can break the law
if it helps you, or to help other people in need. You can be a
hardcore process-following bureaucrat for the exact same reason.
Everyone believes the system they are following is doing the right thing, if they didn't, it would make them sick to do it.
You are not just "GOOD" or "EVIL"; those are moralistic principles and are relative based on space and time. Putting others first or putting yourself first is a very concrete thing that you can use to make decisions.
What a "GOOD" person would do changes based on where and when you are, stepping on someone for your own gain rarely changes based on the times, you either do it or you don't. You either want to benefit from the situation, or you don't.
Which leads us to...
SET/FREE, how you act about
institutions and power, or HIERARCHY/ANARCHY
« The law protects us all/I
decide for myself »
You follow the law, not because you
think the law is particularly good, but because following the law is
the right thing to do. It is what keeps our cities from crumbling
everyday, even if the law has to hurt an innocent, or a justified
person from time to time.
You are SET in this system, you don't
want to change it, wether you are living in a utopia, or the worst
dictatorship, you believe that the hierarchy is the way to social
order, and that the system has to be changed from the inside, updated or
kept the exact same; but more importantly, it has to be obeyed.
At the opposite end, you can believe that
the law is faillible, put in place by people with interests, that
want to remain in power. The law does not decide what is right or
wrong, your guts do, or the people do, your moral code, whatever, the point is that
the law of the local king is not going to stop you from making
decisions. You could be a bandit, you could be a revolutionary; breaking the law is no longer good or evil, and you don't have to be
labeled chaotic if you disagree with the way a lawful evil god-king
opresses his citizens through a complicated legal sytem. You are
FREE (at least in your mind), this is what is defining your relationship to power.
I don't want law/chaos to be
civilisation vs savages, because I think it is way more complicated
than that.
It can be simplified as "Do you trust the establishment, to begin with ?"
CONCLUSION
I just want an alignement system that
does not tell me from the get-go that there is a correct way to be,
and that I can choose to be wrong. This just leads to essentialism,
and I hate that.
A lawful evil person seems like a fake thing to me, a selfish « hierarchist » person does not, I know what this person is like, I've met a few before...
Maybe it is just a reflavoring of the
basic alignement system, that I maybe never understood right, but
these words seem better to me than the previous ones, and maybe I'll come back to it at some point, who knows ?
