On Good and Evil, Order and Chaos

The axis of moral conflict I envision is Law vs. Chaos. I don't see Chaos as a cool way to say "evil." There is evil stuff in the world I envision - mortal, divine, and demonic alike. Chaos isn't that. Chaos is freedom, or anarchy. Chaos is a loose coalition of individual hunters and subsistence farmers who band together when threatened - or who go hack up their neighbors in the other end of the valley if they encroach on what they consider their hunting grounds. Everyone thinks the guy who split the head of a kid from the other village with an ax is a bad person, but at least he isn't trying to be king.

The lawful side of that is easier to explain because our modern culture is so organized and mostly law-abiding.  Most of us think we are good. We think a banker that forecloses on the house of an old person with a revere mortgage over a minor billing error is evil, but we don't lynch him. When we see a video by some workers dumping chemicals illegally we may be appalled but we don't stage a crusade to find the dump site and put a stop to it. We routinely tolerate evil in the name of order. This is not exceptional, it has been the way orderly civilizations have worked throughout history. Hell, most medieval nations were Lawful Evil by the definitions of social alignments in D&D, though we routinely whitewash the way we think about them.

I don't think the alignment system is an effective way to describe characters. Real people are more complex than simple alignments. Good characters are more complex than a simple alignment too. I made this in reaction to people trying to pigeon-hole characters in Game of Throne into D&D alignments:


However, the alignment system is mechanically useful on a number of levels. I don't envision a system where individual characters have alignments. I do envision social factions which have alignments though, and individuals can through their actions develop positive or negative reputation with different factions. I don't envision factions ever fighting over their alignments as such. If they have goals that are in conflict, they might fight. But if their goals happen to align, Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil factions would certainly work together, at least temporarily.