The first article on this hit a nerve. But, honestly, this is how I feel. Alignment is such a great tool, and it says so much with so little. A city is lawful evil, and everybody knows what that means. The reductive argument against that is that, "Well, not everybody there is!" But, we all know that, don't we? We know better than to apply a broad description to a group, and we are more discerning than that. Yes, there can be a few lawful good people in that city. But the majority is lawful evil, and maybe worship a demon lord.
Removing the alignment from the demon lord is also pointless. "There could be a lawful good demon lord." This is a pretty stupid statement. While in the infinite probabilities in an endless universe, yes, that is possible, but for the vast totality of all demon lords and what they represent? No. You are making it harder for these creatures to run. The removal makes the game more challenging to play, and it introduces unnecessary confusion into the game's theme. It is like telling Monopoly players to "roll the dice" every turn to move, including ten of them in the box, but not telling them how many to roll. One? Two? Three? Five?
Removing humanoid monsters is fallout from the removal of alignment. These monsters are not metaphors for real-world races. They are metaphors for humanity's sins. Ogres? Gluttony and wrath. Orcs? The brutality of war, and how any civilization can descend into barbarism. Goblins? Wrath, greed, and envy. Again, removing alignment removes the battle between good and evil, and you need to eliminate the concept of sin and any representations of the idea.
There is no sin in D&D.
There is no battle between good and evil.
There is no reason to play the game.
Why play? To simulate my ordinary life, but in a much worse way with dice, character sheets, and paying corporations monthly fees to store my characters? Go to a coffee shop and a magical university? How about I go to an actual coffee shop and enroll in continuing education in real life? Just so I can play an "MMO combat minigame" every so often, for no real reason or consequence, and play pretend? Just to fiddle around in a pretend rule system with pretend advancement?
You put D&D up against real life, and real life will win each and every time.
Or at least, it should. If it isn't, you need to reevaluate your life.
And if 'gaining power' is your only motivation in life, you are wasting your time on this world. In fact, you are freely giving your time and energy to others who don't deserve it.
There is so much more than power and money to chase.
And this is the trap of abandoning faith.
A zeitgeist of silly ideas has become the college education du jour over the last decade, and now these ideas are infiltrating our games and being rejected. They are macro pseudo-social concepts, and people who wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on worthless educations, rejecting the classics, are trying to justify the money they now have to pay back. The games they are working on are based on classics, and they have no idea what they are being hired to work on. The clear sign of this cultural illiteracy is the removal of the battle between good and evil, the concept of sin, and alignment.
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
That's Shakespeare, Sonnet 20. Here's a thought: the people who wrote the classics were probably more liberal and free-minded than you. They just had to hide it from the church of their day with creative twists of phrase and tone. They were clever in many ways, which today's writers are not.
Read between the lines; it is a critical thinking skill.
Here's another thing to ponder. The thought-leaders of today are trying to sell you all these as new ideas, and they deride the classics because they don't want anyone to know the well upon which they draw. Education is no different from the Wall Street corporate grift we see in our games; they set you up for a lifetime of exploitation, and make you hate the classics from which they draw false wisdom and revelation. Of course, it isn't revolutionary unless it has a paywall attached.
However, I need to return to the Bible once again. This is where some in the OSR stray away from the truth. We don't reject people, we reject ideas. I don't care what you look like, who you identify as, what color your hair is, if you wear a furry mask, or with whom you hang out. I don't care if you are a 'man who steals men's eyes' as per Shakespeare. Everyone is welcome. What we want to do is bring people in and preach the truth, explaining the concepts behind why our games are the way they are and why this makes them compelling.
This is not about rejecting companies or different parts of the fandom; this is about spreading a message of truth and letting the power of that create believers. You can still preach truth in darkness.
If you have no faith in the truth, what are you doing here?
The battle between good and evil and the concept of sin are in my "master rulebook" for life. Those are the truth. Those should be in our games. You can't fight that or deny that it exists. You can't remove it from our games. Even in games minus an alignment system, such as GURPS, the concept of sin is clearly in there (check the disadvantage list), and the battle between good and evil is the universal concept behind why you play the game. I can point to a certain sourcebook in GURPS calling "The Devil" the master of evil, and there you go.
The concepts of the Bible are reflected in our games and serve as an underlying foundation for the game, as they are in AD&D, Rolemaster, RuneQuest, GURPS, Tunnels & Trolls, Warhammer, and many other early role-playing games. Part of why the original Traveller was a more challenging game to play was that it lacked a clear battle between good and evil, and its core was a generic space-trading simulation and ship battle wargame. Once you started adding enemy factions, space pirates, criminal gangs, evil space navies, and unexplored worlds with monsters, then the game became compelling.
In the original first edition Palladium Fantasy RPG, Satan was in the game's monster list. Palladium's concepts of alignment are fantastic and very rooted in the classics and religious inspiration.
We lost so much in AD&D 2nd Edition when the demons and devils were stripped out of the game. Maybe the games went too far, and this was society pushing back. D&D started to infringe on religion. However, where we are today, in stripping the game's ethos and soul by removing the concepts of evil and sin, it's far worse than where we were with AD&D 2nd Edition.
And this is why it feels so challenging to get started with a "no alignment" game such as Tales of the Valiant. The game's name has the concept of "good" in the name, yet nowhere in the rules is there that essential battle between good and evil. Sure, some monsters "look" evil, and I am not simple enough that I have to be told that, but something huge feels like it is missing. I am back to being the original Traveller again, and I need to do a lot of work to flesh out factions and evil organizations to create a compelling world. The game is more difficult than it should be since it presents a neutral base with zero conflict.
At least ToV still has the humanoid monsters in the Monster Vault, so the original concept of that battle is still hanging around, but not much is said about them. However, alignment is gone, a crucial tool is missing, and I am doing more work without it. With AD&D? Town meets Orcs. There is your motivation. It is built into the game. Is it simplistic? Yes, but the game doesn't require me to have a psychology degree to think of a thousand reasons why the Orcs hate the town, and then psychoanalyze the Orc's faction leaders. Yes, that is a better "story," but on a level, who cares?
The players have the stories we should care about.
Dungeon Crawl Classics puts the battle in the game, but walks the line, and lets you serve any side. You will regret serving evil, but at least the game enables you to make that choice and suffer the consequences. There is a Puritan streak in this game of, "Dost thou connive with evil, and thou shalt pay thine price!" This is also rooted in that battle, and the game shows you the consequences of walking the dark path.
I am building out my DCC and Goodman games shelves and stocking them with inspirations. A few of these books are early comics by Wally Wood, especially his science fiction work. There is a "crime does not pay" story here later in the "Eerie Tales of Crime and Horror" book of the rise of a female "kissing bandit," and how it all ends terribly for her. Newer games often exhibit a "hero complex," where characters are perfect, never falter, stay unblemished, and are immune to harm.
DCC is not like that. You can fall from grace in DCC. You can meet a tragic end. You can deal with evil, play with magic that humankind was never meant to touch, and learn that crime and forbidden knowledge do not pay. Any character can meet a fate that could be either deserved or undeserved, and your choices matter. The rules don't go out of their way to protect you, just like life doesn't.
In 5E? The kissing bandit would never be judged, never meet justice, and could progress all the way to level 20 without dying once. She is one of those horribly stereotypical bards. She has a bastion where the "long arm of the law" is not allowed to touch her. She is so overpowered that she can never die or feel consequences. If one place becomes trouble, she can plane-walk to another and start a new reign of terror elsewhere. She has no alignment, so not even the rules can judge her actions, which include murder, taking others against their will, and all types of larceny.
So now, the player characters are the monsters? The above sounds like a murder-hobo simulator where there are zero consequences to actions. Again, I am free to impose consequences on them, but like games that require "extra work," it places the onus and weight of that on the referee, opening me up to being accused of "not being fair." Sorry. A game that places those judgments on players for their actions is far easier to run and manage in a social context. Don't you dare put that call on me as a DM. It is a nightmare, and I have seen it happen.
Remove the game's moral judgments of a player's actions, and it is no longer D&D.
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