So 4e has streamlined a few things. Among them: alignment. Morality, once a nine-course buffet, has been reduced to five offerings: Good, Lawful Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned.
I can’t decide if this is a good thing. My inner dialogue goes something like this:
Good: Alignments have been simplified.
Bad: They took away chaotic neutral.
Good: The roles of good and evil are clearly defined.
Bad: They took away chaotic neutral.
Good: … you said that already.
Bad: Yeah, but—
Good: Do I smell food?
Bad: Where?!
And it just goes downhill from there.
But seriously, 4e is designed in such a way that a D&D newbie could pick up the PHB and jump into the game with a fair turn of speed. The writers pruned a lot of rules that were unnecessarily complicated and replaced them with concepts that cater to a heroic mindset.
That brings us to the biggest difference in 4e PC alignment (besides taking away chaotic neutral): alignments are less about personality and interaction and more about the “cosmic forces” that govern someone’s life.
Good
Your character can hate every single person in the world, but still play on Team Good if he protects the weak because “it’s just the right thing to do”. Goodness, the idea, can surpass simple antisocial tendencies. If your PC also believes in the virtue of order, they should be lawful good.
The loss of neutral good and chaotic good alignments makes me a little sad. What happened to the heroes who were willing to ignore the rules or even defy them for the sake of the greater good? They kept their eyes on the omelet, even if it meant cracking a few eggs. Now they fall under the generic “good” alignment, because goodness, the idea, can surpass simple egg-cracking.
Unaligned
Unaligned, the alignment formerly known as neutral, explores the notion that choosing not to take a side is the same as choosing which side to take. PCs, paladins, and even gods can choose to be unaligned. This is a good choice if your PC thinks that both good and evil have a place in the world; if they’ve got an overriding goal that leaves them little time to bother with moral concepts; or if you just can’t stand the idea of playing a goody-two-shoes.
Evil
Evil seems a little underrepresented. I’m sure that’s because 4e is all about promoting a heroic mindset, and heroes should be good guys, etc. But a really well-done evils campaign can be so entertaining. Plus, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve explained that laws can be adhered to and exploited (lawful evil) and that evil PCs can cooperate with good ones as a means to an end (neutral evil), I might even be able to fill up my gas tank. (Then again, maybe not.) Now my futile explanations of those alignments are… even more futile.
But I do love this line from page 20 of the PHB: “Evil characters use rules and order to maximize personal gain.” Yes, it’s finally official: rules lawyers are evil.
How do you feel about alignments in 4e? Does the new system work better than the old, or does it feel a little incomplete? Share your thoughts!
40 Comments
1:34 pm on October 1st, 2008
I’ll admit - the loss of CG makes me sad. What with all of this simplification, where does the favorite (and well used) “lawful stupid” come in? :(
1:34 pm on October 1st, 2008
I can’t say I’m sad that Chaotic Neutral is gone. For every player who wanted to play chaotic neutral, there was 99 players who wanted a free pass to act like madmen - rarely a great way to move a campaign forward.
1:35 pm on October 1st, 2008
I haven’t liked alignment since I started playing D&D, so I like that they’ve been paired down. I think it has it’s place for certain things but I think for most people it was just an after thought, what is going to give them the least amount of grief and let their characters be who they are.
Overall though I think it’s better for the game to have them working this way. Good takes over for Chaotic and Neutral Good and Evil takes over for Lawful and Neutral Evil and then both of them have an extreme. This makes more sense to me because there never really seemed to be much if any difference between Neutral and Chaotic Good and the same for the axed evil alignments. And then Unaligned seems to perfectly sum up Neutral
1:38 pm on October 1st, 2008
i still think too much focus is put into it. alignment should merely be a declaration by the player to the dm on the intent of how the player will role play said character. the dm should the inform the player when s/he is not role playing in accordance with their declaration.
i like how 4e is petty basic, make sence.
2:57 pm on October 1st, 2008
It’s not just the trimming of alignments, but the reduced importance of alignments, that’s changed in 4E. No more alignment detection, no more power-loss due to alignment change, and very few alignment-specific spells means you could toss the entire system out without adversely affecting the game. Alignment is now more guidelines than actual rules.
3:05 pm on October 1st, 2008
While I haven’t actually had the chance to buy a 4e PHB, from what I’ve heard this loss of alignments makes me sad. As Yax pointed out, there are players who misused the 3e alignments, but I feel that for all their cons, they did have a lot of good things going for them.
4:12 pm on October 1st, 2008
I never really saw the point of alignment other than a simple RP guide, and players shouldn’t be restricted to nine basic options when deciding what their character thinks about the world.
For that reason, I’ve removed all official occurrences of “alignment” from my games. There’s no Chaotic Good, just, “I like good stuff but I don’t think the law can dictate what ‘good’ is.”
Also, great article. Much better than I was expecting from a third-party writer, or even… Yax… occasionally.
(hides)
4:47 pm on October 1st, 2008
They didn’t get rid of lawful evil or chaotic good. They renamed them into evil and good, respectively.
4th edition good = 3rd edition chaotic good
4th edition evil = 3rd edition lawful evil
It’s not 1-dimensional scale (or any kind of scale, for that matter), it’s four distinct alignments and an option not to be strongly swayed by any.
Oh, and unaligned is the new chaotic neutral, if my players are any indication. Sigh…
5:06 pm on October 1st, 2008
NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
what the hell happened to chaotic good?!?!?!?
jeeze how can i go and stuff my campaigns full of badass vigilantes for my characters to work with??
they wont be in any way distinct from that altruistic peasant who is mostly ambivalent about the law.
i dont care, i’m keeping alignments from 3.5 once we start playing 4.
cant believe they got rid of chaotic good…
what the nine hells.
5:30 pm on October 1st, 2008
I like the pruning and the idea of the alignments as Allegiances. Unaligned is a great place to dump characters who just want to roleplay someone without a higher cause, and the generic good/evil work just fine for motivation and choosing sides.
Besides, I can’t think of any fiction that tried to use the two axes explicitly. I think law/chaos was strongly borrowed from Moorcock, but even in his novels it was close to good/evil. Anyway, almost vestigial alignment is fine with me.
6:00 pm on October 1st, 2008
Great article! I think the idea behind the new alignment options was to have heroes that were rational and sane, so that adventuring parties could work reasonably well together.
Heroes are still capable of evil as well as good, but with this new system chaos is more for the baddies. Chaotic heroes never really made good party members. The player’s that chose chaotic usually seemed to fall under lone wolf characters, mysterious ‘I have a secret’ characters, one man band characters, and the guy everybody has either played with or played as, the I have no sense of consequences character.
6:03 pm on October 1st, 2008
As a DM and a player I am thrilled to see alignment slipping into the background. Alignments reduce realistic character development and role playing and bog down the rules needlessly. I would boot them all together if it weren’t for the clerical class, but I’m much more happy with the new system than the 3.x method. Plus, my players that are atheist or agnostic in their real lives can just go unaligned and ignore the whole issue (probably would work for fundies who are uncomfortable with the concept of all those “gods” running around as well) if they feel like it and get on with the gaming.
Well, maybe that last point was a little far fetched.
3:45 am on October 2nd, 2008
Perhaps I just haven’t gotten far enough into the meat of the game, yet, but is there any reason why you can’t just call your PC chaotic good or lawful neutral, provided you have a strong reason for doing so? With the exception of a few spells, those alignments were usually just guidelines for how to think about your actions. Aside from a “This is what the rules say” mentality, I don’t see why they can’t still be included in the game. Seems like the simplest house rule of all.
7:31 am on October 2nd, 2008
I’m just happy that alignment is no longer tied in with the game mechanics. The penalties associated with changing alignment, magic items based on alignment, all that has needed to go for a long time. Some players play the same way regardless of what is written on their character sheets. Others play their characters’ philosophy regardless of what is written on the character sheet.
7:39 am on October 2nd, 2008
I believe that the alignments really make it more difficult to roleplay in D&D. If there is one thing I think should be carried over from Vampire: The Masquerade it is the Personality Archetypes that go into Nature and Demeanors. This gives the characters true ways of roleplaying and deciding what side to be on and doesn’t make them draw a line in the sand. They don’t have to pick good or evil. No one in life is ever totally good or totally evil and this helps make sure that stays true. The demeanors will show how the characters portray themselves to the people and the world and the natures will show how they really are. Just my opinion.
10:44 am on October 2nd, 2008
From my own personal experience, most people never really got the alignments quite right in the past. By opening them up like this, there is more room for role play and no DM/Player arguments about what a character would or would not do because of the alignment they chose. there is nothing in the new rules saying I can’t be chaotic or neutral good, chaotic neutral, or any of the other missing alignments. It is up to the player to pick a general alignment and then figure out what that generality means specifically for their character.
10:54 am on October 2nd, 2008
Great comments and good points all around.
Thanks for the warm reception, everyone! :)
11:20 am on October 2nd, 2008
Its hard to play an alignment in a MMO which is what D&D 4E is.
I purposely play all my characters as Unaligned and just act like I want.
11:38 am on October 2nd, 2008
Asmor, where’s NG and NE then?
DNDCorner, if my chaotic evil fighter picks up a +5 holy avenger he should take some serious damage be it physical emotinal, psychological whatever.
OK here’s a D&D lesson for all you players under the age of 25. Dungeons and Dragons was designed to be a Role Playing game, not an MMO. (See my post above.) Therefore, alignments are in large part of story development. Paladins are LG for a reason. They are supposed to represent goodness, purity and honor. Paladin picks up a powerful CE magic item he could easily lose his free will and do something bad. That’s a story plot.
From what I’ve seen 4E isn’t about story as much as it is kill the monster/defeat the challenge and get the treasure. Thank god for Paizo who’s making Pathfinder which is based on 3.5
11:39 am on October 2nd, 2008
heh, strong words buddy… well maybe not strong. Hm, flammable may be more like it.
I don’t get the edition haters or fanboys. Can there be only one? Is the existence of another edition somehow a threat to the purity of your chosen edition? Will I receive self described witty reply, or an angrily typed defense? I probably don’t know. Ah, who cares…
Condolences over having your game ruined and being told what to do by people you haven’t met.
12:15 pm on October 2nd, 2008
To paraphrase Capt. Barbossa, “Alignments are more of a set of…guidelines”.
Sticking to the exact requirements of any alignment is taking an extremist view. One of my players and I had a rousing diatribe on how both extreme Lawfulness (LN) and extreme Chaos (CN) both equal insanity. I revamped the Paladins on my world to be “Holy Warriors” for their respected deity, regardless of alignment. They would take the extreme view of the deity’s faith…in a sense becoming D&D Jihadi.
What happens if a character doesn’t take the alignment’s details to heart? For instance, what happens if a Lawful Good character slips “from grace”? Consider for a moment the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. One of the unit’s men keeps the others from killing a German soldier that surrendered, a Lawful Good act. He has faith that this act will endear the prisoner to take no hostile action. The former prisoner returns later in the movie as part of the hostile force that nearly wipes out the unit. When the “Lawful Good” soldier discovers that his act of kindness led to the deaths of many of the men in his unit…should he turn the other cheek?
Whether you use alignments or not is up to the DM and the players. How they are defined is established in several editions of the PHB and supplimental material, but how your group uses them isn’t.
From personal experience, alignments tend to pidgeon-hole how the world perceives the character, but even the most noble of Lawful Good Paladins can have some unsightly traits. Even the most diabolical Chaotic Evil Sorcerer can have a kind spot in it’s heart for a small trinket it has had since it was a child. Why do this to a character?
They are guidelines and should be used as such.
Good Gaming,
Roll 3d6
12:15 pm on October 2nd, 2008
Enough flame.
I feel that the new system is simply a renaming of N, CE, LE, CG, LG and unaligned but that it does try and emphasise roleplaying. However the old system allowed some interesting conflicts and spells, plus you always knew that you could beat up anyone who registered CE without comeback from your deity. Can’t say I miss the old system.
However “Chaotic Good doesn’t mean nice” sounds better than “Good doesn’t mean nice”
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm193632512/tt0434409
12:41 pm on October 2nd, 2008
I will admit, alignment changes in 4e is the one thing about the new edition I genuinely despise. But fortunately, alignment is so easy to houserule out or in. There’s nothing stopping me from using the old alignments. I just wish they were fully supported by the game and I think WOTC’s explanation of “people were too stupid to understand alignment,” is frankly pretty lame.
Oh, well - my campaign still has CGs and LEs though, with all the variations of neutrals inbetween.
1:48 pm on October 2nd, 2008
@Russell: Sitting in a bar with CN and LN.
3:09 pm on October 2nd, 2008
I used to get XP for playing my “alignment” correctly in old White Wolf games. Maybe alignment would be more useful, or players would pay more attention to their actions with a similar system…
3:10 pm on October 2nd, 2008
Most of the campaigns I’ve been in have used an abbreviated alignment system for a couple decades now.
The Law/Chaos axis was always trouble for players and GMs alike. Especially when someone couldn’t get it through their heads that Chaos did Not mean Random.
No love lost here for the dismissal of Chaotic Neutral. Often we banned that from players anyhow. There has always been a correlation of trouble with that one. Seems the guy who wanted to be chaotic neutral always wanted to play an elven fighter/magic-user/thief scum that constantly betrayed, backstabbed, poisoned, and otherwise abused the party and basically wrecked the game for everyone.
On the new versions two extreme alignments, I feel they should have dumped the Lawful and Chaotic parts as those give too many people the idea that they are the same as the old versions of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil. Maybe something like Saintly and Abysmal would have been better choices. (I’m sure there are even better ones than these examples.)
3:21 pm on October 2nd, 2008
A small note to Post #12.
Agnostics and Atheists, at least the many I have played with, have no trouble playing with gods, priests, and religions in a fictional game. It’s when people try to force them to believe in it and worship in real life they get annoyed.
And just as a side note, Scientists don’t have a problem with magic in games either. It’s just with regards to the Real World that they get snarky when someone tries to use supernatural excuses for events.
(Few High Fantasy worlds have even one Atheist. It’s kinda hard to not believe in gods when they pop round every other weekend and throw flaming rocks through your windows for laughs… However, refusing to worship the arrogant so-and-sos will result in Agnostics.)
3:33 pm on October 2nd, 2008
@ barasawa: That’s one of the things I really like about Eberron… the gods are distant, and whether they actually exist or not is unclear and a matter for the DM to decide.
And yeah, speaking as an atheist, I have no problem with exploring religion and morality in an RPG, or in real life for that matter. Actually, I’d probably have more of an issue pretending to worship some fantasy god if I were religious (and assuming I didn’t already worship him… Hey, I should start a church to Bahamut!).
4:56 pm on October 2nd, 2008
I was sad to see it go but feel better that its gone. I have put such a huge personal investment of time in trying to frame a world view through a grid that the thought of it going was difficult to adjust too. It was like quitting Wow and realising that all that time leaves only memories and is otherwise now redundant.
11:01 pm on October 2nd, 2008
I don’t know, I feel kinda depressed about these changes. I really liked chaotic neutral, and that, at least for me, is a hell of a great reason to dislike the new alignment rules. I mean, are the old ones really that complex to new players?
In my view, a perfectly built set of rules was destroyed in order to reach more and more fresh players, but totally ignoring the old players’ opinion.
11:22 pm on October 2nd, 2008
i always found alignments too restricting… i like PC’s to be like their players.
BUT
the old system is WAY better. if i played 4e w/ alignments, i’d use the old system.
11:34 pm on October 2nd, 2008
I thinks its better, its simpler for NPCs and Mobs which means more time making them more than a stat block. PCs are mostly independent from alignment anyway, and you could always write the following in your character bio.
This character is chaotic! yet neutral!
6:58 am on October 3rd, 2008
#27 & 28
I agree completely, I intended that to be tongue in cheek. I tried to get that across with my last sentence. The kids in the science club were likely to be in the D&D club as well, after all. I think the skeptical and scientificly inclined are one of the most likely groups to enjoy sci-fi and fantasy. My experiences at the Dragon-con skeptics track this year reinforced that opinion :).
For the 4e haters: I am 40 years old and have been playing D&D since 1980. I skipped 2e in favor of my extensively house ruled AD&D, but I switched when 3e came out. I was never comfortable with that iteration and was constantly running into rules issues and imbalances. I have never played MMORPG’s so I cannot draw comparisons, but 4e feels like coming home in many respects to me. It’s relatively simple and very adaptable to playing style at the table. Me and my players love it and it has probably saved my gaming group from evaporating (we had given up on our last 3.x campaign). If you still love 3e, great, play it. But don’t talk to me like I am some pimply faced kid who can’t ROLE play unless it is spoon fed to me. As an experienced ROLE player I commend the new system for getting out of my way as much as possible. No offense to pimply faced kids or 3e players intended, but please stop telling me what I “can’t” do with the new system or what the new system “is”. You’re wrong. (IMHO)
6:22 am on October 4th, 2008
Cant realy go with whats said about alignments, having never needed them or used them, just play the game how you want has allways worked for me . Heroes are ment to be the Heroes and the bad guys are Bad what more is needed
7:16 am on October 4th, 2008
I think the simplified versions of the alignments were a great idea. I have a few new players, and for them to understand the concepts is a must in order to move the game forward.
2:47 pm on October 4th, 2008
3.5’s alignment was a nice, neat introduction to the psychological aspects of the world. This was an important aspect for me, being totally new to roleplaing games. (Zelda was the closest thing to an rpg I’d played before DnD).
I don’t mind it being tailored back a bit, but I wonder if newbies that start with 4E might miss out on that kind of insight.
11:35 pm on October 4th, 2008
@yax- i think they are missing out if they really like role-playing. with the old system, the heroes weren’t super-archetypes.
what makes me kinda of angry is that 4e has almost no RPing restrictions. the game mechanics are focused almost completely around combat, yet they decide to completely restrict alignments. I agree w/ #32, just role play whichever way you want to…
1:04 pm on October 5th, 2008
Hey Crypto - You’re wrong. :P
J/K
Hey Asmor - you wouldn’t be playing a Dragonborn would ya? All hail Bahamut! :)
Since DnD has always been about imagination, the move to allow for more freedom on the players end and for the “guidelines” to be more of just that, rather than hard and fast rules…I think, Is a good one.
1:15 pm on October 5th, 2008
@Craig: No, I wouldn’t be playing anything. I’m a DM, you insensitive clod!
I wish I had a chance to play too. :/
1:00 am on October 15th, 2008
You forgot to mention that they took away Chaotic Nuetral.