Getting one's Alignment aligned.

One of the many things that lived at the bottom of my massive filter I had created for better reading and use of the newsgroup rec.games.frp.dnd was to throw the word "alignment" in as a "delete this header" type condition.

Why? Because people seemed hell bent on doing two things with alignment: Arguing about it's validity as a game mechanic, and trying in some bizarre manner to smash the real world into an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons alignment template.

I never could figure the desire to participate in either "discussion" out, and all it seemed to do was generate mind-numbing, electron-burning, bandwidth-wasting flame wars that usually ended in someone invoking Godwin's Law (that is, one poster comparing another to a Nazi), typically built around arguments like "A Paladin would have to, by his nature,  serve a Chaotic Evil lord or king." or some other such nonsense.

So, in to the bit-bucket most of the nonsense went.

Unfortunately, in the real world, I still run in to people who bring up that old chestnut, including my 14-year-running gaming group. It's really quite simple, though, folks:

Alignment is a mechanic in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (now just Dungeons & Dragons). It is Part Of The Game. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Don Kaye et. al. included it for a reason. The reason was that the fantasy that they read that strongly influenced Dungeons & Dragons (in all it's versions) had Alignment in them as part and parcel of the milieus they were set in.  Three Hearts and Three Lions was at it's core - as described by the main character - about a war between Law and Chaos. The great bulk of Michael Moorcock's works, including the Elric sagas, are Alignment conflicts as well.

"But," you say, "there's no real world example for that kind of behavior! Nobody is that inflexible that you can say they're 'Lawful Good' or 'Chaotic Neutral' or what have you."

Folks...I don't know how many times nor in how many ways to say it: It's a *fantasy game*. You, as a person, no matter how hard you try, cannot cast Disintegrate on your neighbor's noisy bass-powered car. You can't walk in the Astral Plane, commune with a Shedu, fight Beholders, or anything else like that. So should we throw out those items from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, too, along with Wands, Portable Holes, Levels, Experience Points and all that jazz?

As to Alignments and their application to the real world, I say: garbage. Utter garbage. Hey, in the real world, knights on horseback don't have to move in an "L" shape all the time, and in the same fashion, nobody is "Lawful Good" nor "Chaotic Evil". If anything, my twelve plus years of using the internet have shown me that lots of people are Chaotic Stupid with a touch of Neutral Apathetic thrown in for good measure.

Simply put, while the "real world" certainly is not one of moral absolutes (however there are occasional exceptions), Advanced Dungeons and Dragons' worlds are. That's what the alignment system is for. It's for defining character - both player and non-player - archetypes within a given template of behavior. If you choose to ignore this, that's fine: you're abandoning a major game mechanic and at that point you might as well excise virtually everything else, as well. Even the vaunted 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons kept alignment and all of the restrictions on character types and penalties for breaking alignment, albeit in a different format than 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Ultimately, I don't see anyone complaining about or refusing to use the mechanic of required exsanguinations in Vampire: The Masquerade, the presence of giant armored battle machines in Battletech, nor the use of transporters in *Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game*. They're functions of the rulesets, game mechanics, and various tropes that help define the game within it's own paradigm.

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