D&D Alignment System and System Misalignment: Early Roots of D&D Morality

Some interesting discussion about alignment in D&D has ensued since Wizards of the Coast announced that, in the future, no humanoid “race” in D&D will be automatically “evil,” but that humanoid races, like Orcs, can have, in theory, any alignment.

(John Arendt of Dreams in the Lich House has a discussion about it here; the bit about alignment is not found on the statement to which he provides a helpful link. He also has a follow-up discussion that kept me thinking about this. Thank you, John! Update: one more from him.)

D&D is one of the few role-playing games to require characters and monsters to have an alignment reflecting their inherent morality. Why is D&D different?

The early development of alignment within D&D has been discussed in the past (e.g. here), usually aiming to find what is "original." Here I look at the earlier roots in games immediately antecedent to D&D. I also discuss some of the ramifications of alignment for role-playing games, especially D&D.

You can find a useful general discussion of the background to D&D alignment in Jon Peterson’s book Playing at the World (2012), which likewise sketches literary and game sources of alignment in D&D (pp. 179-187). Here, I am looking at several specific sources.

An early RPG villain

Dave Arneson played wargames with his friends in Minnesota in the late ’60s. David Wesely was one of them, who ran a role-playing wargame called Braunstein from 1967 onward. When Wesely was called to military service in 1970, Arneson started his own “medieval Braunstein,” calling it Blackmoor. Arneson was twenty-three years old when he put the new game together around Christmas of 1970. This would evolve to include the first role-playing dungeon adventure, the prototype of D&D.

A player they knew at the time, Gregg Scott, preferred Napoleonic games and mocked the new medieval game. Arneson used his name as the basis for “the Egg of Coot,” the evil villain mastermind for his medieval-style Blackmoor campaign. This mysterious “Bad Guy” would wage war against the player characters for years, forcing players to ally together against evil.

Thus, the first dungeon role-playing game featured a struggle of Good Guys against Bad Guys. That struggle was not located in the dungeon, but in the setting around it.

The “Good vs Evil” Tolkien infusion in 1970

Leonard Patt was a college junior at Northeastern University who played wargames around 1970. As Jon Peterson has shown, he wrote two pages of rules for using miniatures to reenact battles from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and won a “Best of Show” award for his miniatures take on the Battle of the Pelennor Fields at a Miniature Figure Collectors of America convention in Boston of 1970.

When Gary Gygax and Steve Perren published their Chainmail rules for medieval miniatures wargames, in 1971, one of them borrowed from and adapted Patt’s rules and added it as a “fantasy supplement,” as an addendum.

As Peterson further shows, among the uncredited features that filtered into Chainmail from Patt’s Tolkien miniatures rules, and from Chainmail into D&D, were heroes with power verging on that of “supermen” (ancestor of the “superhero” or eighth-level fighter) and the specific parameters of fireball spells. (If you ever thought that Magic-Users in D&D seem sometimes like unarmored artillery troops, that is because they evolved from that role on the miniatures battlefield.)

There were also “Anti-Heroes.”

The prototype of the fantasy battles rules for reenacting Tolkien’s wars implied Good versus Evil.

Chainmail, in 1971, made good and evil types explicit, as follows:

Note that good and evil, law and chaos, are here used synonymously. (Law and Chaos remind one of the fiction of Moorcock and Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, where they have distinct moral connotations, but here they are simplified as Good and Evil.)

In Chainmail, it is called "line-up," not alignment.

As the reader can see, Chainmail’s lists of good, neutral, and evil creatures are populated almost entirely by creatures known from Tolkien, reinforcing that Tolkien battle reenactment was the original basis for this distinction. Only a few have been imported from other sources of myth and legend: Gnomes, Kobolds, Basilisks, Rocs, Elementals, “Chimerea,” sprites, and pixies.

Basically, the Chainmail rules make provisions for battles between the forces of good versus the forces of evil, and that is based almost directly on Tolkien.

Back to Pre-D&D Blackmoor: alignment appears

After Arneson fell out with Gygax and left TSR in 1976, he went on to publish his First Fantasy Campaign in 1977 with Judges Guild. It is, in effect, a partial record of the first fantasy role-playing game before D&D was published. This little book is an unimpressive hodge-podge of materials describing Arneson’s pre-D&D Blackmoor game, going back to 1973 and further. It preserves fascinating information about the first fantasy role-playing game before D&D.

Alignment is treated here explicitly, by that name. One might think that Arneson could have projected alignment back into Blackmoor in hindsight, from D&D, given the late time of publication of FFC, but Arneson reproduces charts he used in the pre-D&D Blackmoor campaign that include terms for Evil and Good forces, indicating that it was there in the mechanics he designed ad hoc at the time.

Arneson wrote in FFC,

Blackmoor grew from a single Castle to include, first, several adjacent Castles (with the forces of Evil lying just off the edge of the world [i.e. map]) to an entire Northern Province(s) of the Castle and Crusade Society’s Great Kingdom. As it expanded, each area (Castle’s first [sic] and then Provincial Counties) was given a pre-set Army. Later the players were to organize their own forces based on experience and goodies acquired enroute to their Greatness.

(Note that the end-game of setting up one’s character as a lord of a castle antedates D&D, too, but was carried over to become one of the main goals in early D&D.)

As it turns out, each of these regions he mentioned here had an alignment in the coming fantasy war. Arneson continued, describing Blackmoor as he ran it in 1973,

The entire 3^rd Year of the Blackmoor Campaign was to be a part of a Great War between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Each area [of the campaign world] had a certain budget available…, as well as an Alignment rating for each of the four seasons of the coming year. The course of the conflict might change some of the Alignments but barring anything major, I laid them out for the entire year.

Note the word Alignments. It meant nothing more profound than the alignment of forces with either of two sides in a war between Good Guys and Bad Guys. It was a term from wargames and proto-role-playing games like Diplomacy.

Arneson provided a chart of the regions of the campaign world corresponding to this explanation. Each region was allocated to Good, Neutral, or Evil. No region was mixed between two alignments. During each of four seasons of the year, each region played a role for its good, evil, or neutral side as “attacker,” “diversionary,” or “dissenter,” providing or not providing resources to its side accordingly. This was part of Arneson’s campaign plan for the fantasy role-playing wargame as it would unfold.

He also took into consideration changes of personal alignment, when players or other forces might switch sides. About this he writes,

So far as alignment changes went, there were only Bad Guys, Good Guys and those in-between. Good Guys took prisoners, paid their taxes, and would undertake missions for the King, etc. Bad Guys turned all their loot over to their leader, never took anyone prisoner (unless it was part of a Geas). They also stabbed each other in the back at the first opportunity. Everyone else was in the middle. This severely limited the use of Lawful and Chaotic artifacts but kept the players honest. On mixed expeditions, everyone was obligated to try and kill the Neutrals due to the latter’s lack of “Purity.”

Alignment was present, but pretty simple, in Blackmoor. Certain powerful magical objects were good or evil, usable only by characters of the same alignment. Good and evil, synonymous with Law and Chaos, were the two sides to which you could align in the war. The sides were polarized. Hence the name alignment.

Original D&D alignment

The D&D rules published by Gygax and Arneson in 1974 have the following to say about alignment. It is basically the Chainmail "line-up," now called alignment. You can see that it reproduces the chart from Chainmail, with the addition of undead, “Evil High Priests,” Minotaurs, Centaurs, Unicorns, and other creatures straight out of ancient and medieval mythology. There is also the rule that individual characters must pick sides, as in Blackmoor.

 

Alignment, then, was still about picking sides in a war between good and evil, in which some powers were bystanders who might join either side. The prototype of this battle between good and evil here is still that of Chainmail, which is that of The Lord of the Rings.

In the ongoing drama of Arneson’s campaign, the heroes were confronted in war by forces of evil. This is an aspect of the birth of role-playing games that can easily be overlooked: players collaborate on the same team against antagonistic forces represented by the Referee. Alignment expressed the collaborative aspect of the game, with the understanding that most players would fight for Good against the baddies represented by the Referee. This distribution of the two sides between players and Referee, respectively, was a major innovation.

What’s weird is that the battle between good and evil, in which player characters had to choose sides, seems to have had little place in the dungeon, which became the focus of D&D at the outset. Sure, PCs would fight evil monsters in the dungeon, but this was a exploratory hunt for treasure, not a war against Sauron.

The discrepancy between the roguish self-serving morality of the dungeon-based treasure-hunt and the stark war between Good and Evil is what makes D&D alignment awkward. This misalignment of play goals was present from the beginning. Game alignment originated in a war between two sides. What does that have to do with the treasure hunt?

“Gygaxian” Metaphysical Alignments

In February of 1976, Gygax plotted out a more complex model of alignment in which Good & Evil and Law & Chaos formed two perpendicular axes of morality.

In Strategic Review 6 (Feb 1976), he wrote an article on "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and their Relationships to Good and Evil." The system provided for five alignments.

The first Basic Set, edited by Holmes and published in 1977, includes that alignment chart on p. 8, shown below.

People have interpreted alignment in the Holmes edition as a five-point (or six-point) alignment system: lawful and chaotic good, lawful and chaotic evil, and neutral.

The fivefold system of alignment is that which appears in the AD&D Monster Manual (1977). Developing the idea that came by the sequence [Tolkien wargames > Chainmail > OD&D], each monster belonged to an alignment. As Gygax made alignment more complex, monsters found ever-smaller and more specific moral niches for their belonging.

The next year (1978), Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook appeared with the long-lasting ninefold set of alignments based on these two axes, with the combination like “Lawful Neutral” and “Neutral Good,” each spelled out. Each of the nine got a paragraph attempting to explain it.

Two appendices in the PH also produced a version of the chart from Holmes’ edition as well as a chart showing an array planes of existence, one for each alignment. It is here that Alignment becomes a fundamental feature of the multiverse, as John Arendt points out.

In Dragon 52 (August 1981, p. 16), when the second edition of the Basic Set was produced, Holmes commented in hindsight on his authoring the first D&D Basic Set four years earlier. He did not like how alignment turned out in his edition. His statement confirms that Gygax was the source of the complex variety of alignments in D&D.

Character alignment: This is the most difficult of the D&D concepts to get across. The new rules [by Moldvay] spend more space on alignments and do a much better job of explaining them, using practical examples. Alignment is Law, Chaos and Neutral. Good and Evil are not discussed as separate alignments at all, which I think makes better sense. The first Basic Set had one of those diagrams which said that blink dogs were lawful good and brass dragons were chaotic good. I never felt that this was particularly helpful. I am sure Gary Gygax has an idea in his mind of what chaotic good (or other “obscure” alignments, etc.) may be, but it certainly isn’t clear to me. Without meaning to be irreverent, I am also sure that Buddha knew what he meant by nirvana, but that doesn’t clarify it in my mind either. I think the new rules [by Moldvay] simplify the issue appropriately.

Holmes here makes it clear that the alignment rules in the book he edited were not his idea. He implies that he thought they didn’t make sense. He also mentions that he disagreed with Gygax about a number of other rules, but deferred to him because D&D was now recognized as Gygax’s production.

(It turns out that the ever-thorough Zenopus Archives went over this before.)

In 1979, Gygax would explain the rationale for his complex alignments in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (p. 23) with the idea that Chaos stands for individualism and Law for collective good.

This might have established the ninefold alignment system without further debate if it were not for the next edition of the Basic D&D set, the one just mentioned, edited by Moldvay (1981). Apparently to make the game simpler for the new target audience of younger players in high school and middle school, the threefold system of Law, Neutrality, and Chaos reappeared. This also removed the connotation of “evil” in D&D, which was then under attack by concerned parents who heard false rumors associating the game with witchcraft and devil-worship. In B/X D&D, the effect was that once again there were simply Good Guys and Bad Guys. Moldvay's clear explanation of alignment is illustrated with examples of character behavior.

The ninefold alignment system would nevertheless predominate in later editions of (A)D&D, but years later, when players created a D&D-focused revival of old-style rules, now called the OSR, the threefold alignment system would return and find new popularity because of its simplicity and its “original” character.

Meanwhile, “official” D&D now has the ninefold alignment baked in.

Summary

D&D alignment first arose from two main sources: the collaborative nature of team play, on the one hand, which aligned allied players to one side in a struggle, and the literary fiction that the first games were emulating, on the other. It always meant, in the roots of D&D, alignment towards one of two factions in a greater war between good and evil. Neutrality was the only alternative.

When players allied together and fought common foes, this created de facto alignments of Good Guys (players) versus Bad Guys (NPCs), as found in Blackmoor.

This fit perfectly with the other source, the literary inspiration for Chainmail (and Leonard Patt’s rules from which it borrowed) and the original D&D: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which features a battle between good and evil.

The terms Law and Chaos and Good and Evil were equivalents at first.

The original idea became much murkier with moral speculation inserted by Gygax (against Holmes’ preference) that took the categories of Law and Chaos seriously as distinct from Good and Evil, standing for the individual versus the collective. This created more nuanced differences between factions in the D&D game and a rationale for a multiverse that would be populated with all kinds of creatures. Gygax developed alignment to a five-part system in early 1976 and then further into the existing ninefold alignment by 1978. Despite the simpler alternative revived in B/X and BECMI D&D, the system of '78 remains canonical in D&D today.

What does alignment mean for a game world?

Among table-top role-playing games, D&D alignment remains an oddity.

One aspect of this oddity is that an artificial schema of polarized morality is part of the game system and, as John Arendt points out, even the game universe. (Here's the link again.) Alignment, the inherent morality of this fantasy existence, interacts somewhat with the mechanics magic spells and magic items and plays a part in relationships between creatures and characters.

How seriously one takes this is a matter of interpretation. For the re-creators of first-edition AD&D under the name of OSRIC, Matthew Finch and Stewart Marshall, discussion of alignment provided an opportunity to include remarks that D&D’s settings are, in effect, worlds free from culturally determined morality and cultural relativism. See OSRIC (2006-2008, p. 26):

The moral dictates of alignment are not tied to culture in any way; they are objective reality. If a barbarian comes from a society that kills the weak, he or she is evil if he or she accedes to the practice, even though it is considered necessary or beneficial in that culture. Such a culture is evil.

The effect of saying that evil is not culturally bound is to say that some cultures are objectively evil by the customs that constitute them. If some cultures are evil, then presumably heroes need to rectify them or fight them. The idea that some human cultures are inherently evil by their contents is a ramification of alignment as a game mechanic tied to the fantasy world. This interpretation of D&D morality deliberately drops D&D into the "culture wars" of the time.

This illustrates again how D&D fantasy is a projection of our real concerns, but that our huge fantasies are constrained by our tiny realities and our limited minds.

Most other games reject alignment by not including it. Only a few attempted to refine it. I think of the Palladium role-playing games by Kevin Siembieda. In his Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game (1983, developed beginning from 1979), and other games he published, he created two Good, two Selfish, and three Evil alignments, each entailing several moral positions not tied to fabric of the cosmos. (These are Principled, Scrupulous, Unprincipled, Anarchist, Miscreant, Aberrant, Diabolic; each is explained). In my experience as GM, players have found it easier to grasp these alignments than the abstract qualities of "Chaotic Good," "Lawful Neutral," and the like.

The world of Warhammer Fantasy (of which I played the first edition for a couple of years, ages ago) is torn between real cosmic forces of Law and Chaos, and much of the game is based on fighting against or succumbing to the warping, mutating forces of Chaos. In this game, the default position for humans and their allies is Neutral, but alignment is five-part and reflects tendencies toward either pole of the cosmic struggle:

Law - Good - Neutrality - Evil - Chaos

The meaning of these positions for character action is very clearly explained in the game rules. It is easy to navigate in play, as it represents the bulk of ordinary humanity in the middle and alignment with inhumane, alien cosmic forces at the extremes.

Nevertheless, among role-playing games generally, alignment mostly remains identified with D&D, with its mechanical combinations of terms from two axes. It is a relic system from the beginning of the hobby, with the origins that I just sketched. Most other games rely on players to describe their characters’ motivations independently of a polarizing schema, or to use built-in characteristics that motivate characters such as personality traits, disadvantages, belonging to specific cults or religions, and the like.

Misalignment of the game system

Alignment is a hold-over from a formative time when the nature of role-playing wargames and even the nature of playing them were objects of fresh exploration. This is demonstrated by how awkwardly alignment sits with experience points. Many players still today like the early D&D rule that grants experience points for treasure grabbed and monsters killed. But then one asks, how does that fit with heroic Lawful and Good alignments? Why are Lawful characters encouraged by the game itself to plunder and kill? This question has been raised since the '70s. Meanwhile, the first D&D Basic Set (1977) says,

If the Dungeon Master feels that a character has begun to behave in a manner inconsistent with his declared alignment he may rule that he or she has changed alignment and penalize the character with a loss of experience points.

The inconsistency here is that players are rewarded with power-ups for killing monsters and looting, but they are punished by losing power if they don’t play according to a pre-agreed alignment for their character. (This assumes the DM enforces the rule of XP penalty for diverging from alignment. I doubt more than a few DMs ever did.) The obvious solution, for a player who wants to become powerful--the surface goal of the game--is not to play good characters, who could actually be penalized for doing the things that give them power-ups.

This dilemma has bothered players from the beginning of D&D, and it still does today, but, fortunately for D&D, players are good at ignoring dysfunctional annoyances in a composite system when they are having enough fun.

The passage above shows that, in 1977, Gygax and Holmes thought you needed to play your character rightly, according to a character concept, to receive rewards, and that role-playing a character was regarded as essential to good playing. But the rules indicated that rewards were distributed for reasons disconnected from the moral fabric of the fantasy universe, which was undergirded by the alignment system. It is a mismatch.

Gygax was serious that playing your alignment rightly was important and constituted good play. He warned players in the AD&D Players Handbook (1978) that the DM will note your character’s actions on an alignment chart (?!) and the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979, p. 9) includes instructions in the first paragraph on how to play, stating that the DM should keep a secret alignment graph to track player actions. (Does anybody do this?)

Moldvay’s Basic D&D (1981) slightly revised the idea of punishing playing your character contrary to alignment to say only that a player who does not play the character according to alignment may “give the character a punishment or penalty,” without mentioning experience points or any other specific penalty.

It seems that most of the “Old School Renaissance” gamers overlook the competition of these two features in the emphasis on gold pieces to deliver power-ups to attain a certain style of play. But, as I do not tire of remarking, that was not a universal “old-school” style. People emphasized different features, and changed these rules to make them work, right from the start.

It might be hard to root alignment out of the game after each and every of the hundreds of monsters of D&D has an alignment assigned to it and in which spells give results pertaining to alignment. Now that Wizards of the Coast has decided that non-human humanoids lack inherent alignment, it remains to be seen what the next steps will be in the evolution of alignment rules. Will D&D ever align with almost all the other games in dropping this debated feature and turning to other means of characterizing player characters, freeing fantasy cultures from claims to an objective morality? This may be one area in which "old-school" players, who want a simpler system, and the newest players, who are more likely to make an effort to sympathize with cultural difference, are on the same side.