On Alignment

So if you are playing a roleplaying game, what role are you playing? You need to create a character, and as a writer, this shouldn't be terribly difficult. You are used to making up people through any number of possible ways. You can get a feel for personality and desires and motivations of this character. In terms of motivations, one of the major questions is that of alignment.

Alignment is a rule of thumb for how your character will treat the situations they find themselves in. Traditionally, a character's alignment is determined by two axes: Good vs. Evil, and Lawful vs. Chaotic. Each axis has the two ends, and a Neutral level in between. Three spots on each axis makes for nine possible alignments. I will go into each one in depth subsequently, but I want to explain the concepts in general.

Good and Evil, as I've mentioned before, is kind of ridiculous. Nobody really considers themselves evil. The beauty of so many stories is seeing how the most despicable-seeming characters honestly thought what they were doing was justified. People we call evil often do the same kinds of things that people we call good do. The only difference is whose side they're on.

But consider a different definition of good and evil. People we generally call good do things that help people. Good individuals are selfless and are interested in the greater good. Evil people tend to be self-interested; they do things for the benefit of themselves, often at the cost of other people's well-being.

Lawful and chaotic also often get confused, mostly due to a misunderstanding of chaos. The simplest way to say this is that chaos is the opposite of law. Laws are created by leaders and enforced by some sort of police. Chaos is the lack of laws at all, or the lack of any police to enforce the law.

Characters who are lawful generally will submit to the law of the land, wherever they may be. Lawful characters believe in the order and function of the laws, as they are the backbone of society. Chaotic characters, then, have no respect or interest in the law. They don't necessarily want to go out of their way to break the law, but they don't care if their actions are or aren't legal. Chaotic characters are not without scruples, either; they have their personal set of ethics and rules, which they keep close and are as unlikely to break as a lawful character is to break the law.

Of course, alignments should not be considered strict. Goodness and lawfulness are spectra; there are limitless varieties that we can all be. Part of the understanding that they are spectra are the Neutral categories. These show that you can be somewhere in between the extremes. Although real life is more complicated, this is a good starting point.

We should also note that characters should not be bound by their alignments. Characters are people, and people can change. Revelations, personal growth, and sometimes just gradual change over a long period of time. As such, a character's alignment can be changed, but this is a reflection of the character's change. As adventures go on and characters have more experiences, they will change in many ways. Their outlook on the world may be one of them.

Tomorrow, I will start discussing each of the alignments in more depth. You will see that some combinations are for more common than others, but all nine are distinctly different from each other. The most amazing thing to me, though, is that, despite how obvious the characterization of any alignment may be, each one of them can express themselves in nearly limitless ways. With each alignment, I will give a number of examples to illustrate this.

Stay tuned for more. And in the mean time, ponder where you think your own characters would fall in the alignment grid.