Dealing With Alignment In Dungeons & Dragonlance

[Neurosis]

Crosspost from Big Purple Monster, so my language ain't as Denny as usual.

TW: Dragonlance.

Let's start with something we can all agree with. Alignment in most editions of D&D isn't just "problematic", it's fucked from the jump. Orcs as a race of (fantasy monster) people are "usually Chaotic Evil"? I'm not the kind of guy who gets offended by stuff, but that's straight up fucking racist.

But I'm not here to talk about that, or to all agree about how horrible it is, or to virtue signal at each other until we're blue in the face. Instead I want to talk about the more subtle nuances of what makes someone GOOD and what makes someone EVIL. Let's establish some caveats:

1) I'm talking about 3.X and earlier. I don't know how 5E handles alignment and I pretend 4E doesn't exist.
2) I'm talking about the Good-Evil continuum, not the Chaos-Law continuum.
2) My primary frame of reference here is Dragonlance, but for those of you non-lancers, I'll provide enough context for my questions and concerns to make sense. For those of you who think Dragonlance is FREAKING STOOPID, I understand your hatred, there's plenty about Dragonlance that I too find offensively dumb even as a fan, and please forebear for now to consider my broader questions about alignment.

Now, with overarching question is...in D&D, are alignments (Good, Evil, Neutral--remember, we're talking about that axis) actual benchmarks of moral fiber and character? Or are they teams you join until you join another team?

Dragonlance is a great example of this. If you are a WIZARD (there are no Sorcerers in Dragonlance), if you're a GOOD Wizard, you wear the White Robes, if you're a NEUTRAL Wizard (like Raistlin WAS/IS) you wear the Red Robes, and if you're an EVIL Wizard (like Raistlin WILL BE/IS), you wear the Black Robes ("take the black", a whole other pre-GoT meaning). You are literally wearing your team colors. Straight up.

NOW, A CASE STUDY. Like most case studies, this is an edge case, but it has gotten me thinking about alignment A LOT. There is an unavoidable amount of "let me tell you about my character" built into this, and for that, I apologize, but my main point here is not to tell you about my character (I own a shirt that says "Don't tell me about your damn character") but to raise questions about Alignment.

In my Dragonlance campaign, Felgrane Caladon, a CN Dark Elf Wizard (in Dragonlance, those are not Drow--there are no Drow in Dragonlance) exiled from Silvanost a hundred years before the War of the Lance has spent the first....360ish...as a Red Robed Wizard of High Sorcery. Ironically, over the campaign, organically and without planning, he has kind of been undergoing a "reverse Raistlin", gradually sliding from neutral towards good.

Between the end of Dragons of Ice (which happened off camera) and the start of Dragons of Light, the party is shipwrecked, and Felgrane washes up on the shores of the wilds of Ergoth without his Spellbook (this wasn't something I did because I wanted to screw the character or create a moral crisis, incidentally, it's something I did as DM because it seems to me like a spellbook is very unlikely to survive being shipwrecked and washed up on a beach). Now, this is the kind of crisis for a wizard that immediately pushes him away from Neutrality and towards one pole, or the other. (Anyone want to chime in with what actually happens in the D&D 3.X rules when a wizard loses their spellbook and what if anything their options are besides the player quitting the game in a huff, please do so: I genuinely don't know.)

While in the "protective" custody of the Qualinesti, while they're rescued by Theros and Silvara, before they leave the Qualinesti city, Felgrane (who's not completely helpless, because he's still packing an almost fully charged Staff of Illusion that he recovered from Skullcap) makes the decision to steal a spellbook of one of the Qualinesti hedge wizards before leaving. This, I reason, is perfectly in line with a Chaotic Neutral character, and perfectly practical for a Wizard deprived of his spellbook. Unanimously between player and DM, no alignment shift is considered. The spellbook acquired, however, kind of sucks. It tops off at third level spells, doesn't have a great selection of those, and at this point Felgrane is a 10th Level Wizard. Third level spells are NOT CUTTING IT.

Fast forward a little and the PCs have reached Foghaven Vale with D'Argent's secret help (she's disguised herself as Dargo, Silvara's elfhound). They are now contemplating Climbing of the Stone Dragon. At this point, I decide that Felgrane (control of whom is shared between myself and the player, who has other PCs she controls more consistently and more fully--her main right now is Laurana) has decided: "FUCK THIS. I AM A MASTER OF THE ARCANE. MY OLD SPELLBOOK HAD SPELLS THAT WOULD HAVE FLOWN OR TELEPORTED US UP THIS MOUNTAIN IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE. AND NOW WE'RE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING...CLIMBING...THIS STUPID GIANT MOUNTAIN AND I DON'T EVEN KNOW SPIDER CLIMB ANY MORE? JUST...FUCK THIS. FUCK THIS QUEST. I'M OUT." And in the middle of the night, with his best bro, the LN half-ogre Bbn 4/Fighter 6 Rag, he decides to sneak away. His first plan is to go back to D'Argent's hoard, beneath Huma's tomb, and see if there is a spellbook there worth memorizing: if that doesn't work out, he intends to abandon Laurana and the entire quest until he can find a spell book that will get him back to where he was. This selfish act is, again, I think, basically consistent with CN. It's shitty, and it's selfish, but it's not EVIL.

Before he can get more than a few hundred feet away, Dargo the doggie trots out in front of him and reveals herself as D'Argent the Very Old Silver Dragon. TL;DR too late, she bribes him with the spellbook of Magius, held within her horde, to go back and continue helping the party reach the titular dragonlances. (For those of you who DO follow DL, this means that while Raistlin has the Staff of Magius and the spellbook of Fistandantilus, Felgrane has the spellbook of Magius.

And I'll just leave this here.)

Fast forward again to the heart of the Stone Dragon. The party loses Flint to the Guardian of the Lances, who smashes him into a million tiny dwarven bits: D'Argent tries Resurrection,but Flint's soul is unwilling to return: he's young, he's hale, he's chilling with Reorx in the Dwarven Halls of the afterlife. Sturm loses a Fort save and gets 'stoned' by the Basilisk, which Rag then vivisects with Livecleaver. The (greatly diminished) party spots Flight Marshal Odenkeer two-thirds of the way into poisoning the last supply of Dragonmetal on Krynn. A fight breaks out. D'Argent (now in the form of Silvara, not her dog) starts pouring positive energy into the pool, but it's not enough on its own to undo the poisoning. Odenkeer takes Laurana from full hp to 1 hp in a single round of full attacks, and she is forced to back off. Rag is fighting Odenkeer backwards towards Felgrane, who is in perfect position to flank.

Now, and thank you for bearing with me so far, I finally reach my point. Felgrane spends two full rounds of combat just thinking about what he is going to do next. I ask the player: "Do you want Felgrane to remain Chaotic Neutral, or become Chaotic Good?". "...Good?" she answers doubtfully, uncertain what exactly the question means, and probably pretty freaked out because Flint is dead and Sturm is stoned and the dragonmetal is poisoned and her main PC Laurana is at 1 hp and I just made Felgrane spend two full round actions thinking about what to do.

If she had said "stay neutral", I would have Felgrane five-foot step forward and backstab Odenkeer with his +1 Frost Rapier, Icicle. As a 10th level wizard, Felgrane isn't much of a swordsman, but between flanking bonus and the element of surprise, he would have hit: it would certainly have killed Odenkeer, who Rag had bashed down to just 10 hp: D'Argent would have cast another cure critical wounds into the pool of molten metal and the dragonmetal would have been fine. However, what Felgrane did do instead is cast a fireball into the pool of dragonmetal, purifying it. Not an ordinary fireball: half of the damage was radiant, equivalent in my mind to positive energy. But how could Felgrane do that as a Red Robe? He couldn't.

The party saw, stunned, that Felgrane's robes had turned white. I erased CN on his character sheet. I wrote down CG.

When asked by Laurana why he had done this, Felgrane answered something to the effect of "For over a hundred years I've wandered Ansalon as an outcast. If I hadn't met you and your friends, and her," (D'Argent) "I would have been more than happy to wait out this war with Rag and join whichever side one. But...now, having met you, having met her. I've changed my mind. For once, I don't care about being on the winning side. I care about being on the side that's right."

A moment later, I explained to the player, because she was also the player of Felgrane, and because she asked, that all of this was a lie. That the real reason Felgrane "took the white" and went CG is because D'Argent bribed him with the spellbook of Magius to join her side, and it worked. The truth was almost the inverse of the noble rationale he gain: Felgrane went White Robe because he believed that by siding with Good (as represented by D'Argent and the Heroes of the Lance), he could increase his personal power.

Was I wrong to change his alignment to CG? Should it have stayed CN? Should the sheer cynicism of his decision making process ("I am going to become Good because I have been convinced that Good will win and Good has a really big dragon and gave me a really nice toy") and his willingness to lie about it with a straight face actually have bumped him to CE?

And what color should his robes be? In my campaign, they're White. For now.

But what do you think, sirs?

[Schleiermacher]

I think this discussion is more worthwhile and more interesting on every level if you just don't have a line on your character sheet that says "alignment".

That's how my group has done it for the past few years and it works great for us. Moral issues become more relevant, not less.

[Lurky Lurkpants]

Now, with overarching question is...in D&D, are alignments (Good, Evil, Neutral--remember, we're talking about that axis) actual benchmarks of moral fiber and character? Or are they teams you join until you join another team?

The problem is that picking one of these as what alignment is would not be wrong. D&D just doesn't. Instead it is a weird mish mash of personality, karma, morality, and team.

So you'll have someone ask for advice on "playing Neutral Good" and then declare you have summoned too many demons and (despite acting the same) are now Chaotic Evil. People will write rants on alignment being an objective thing in the universe, but it never gets pinned down and you end up with contradictory information even on where stuff like cannibalism lands. It is easy for it to be your team, it makes it easy to accept committing genocide against the Orcs, but people get disturbed when the same reasoning makes it okay to enslave the Orcs and torture them for your amusement.

So the answer is whatever you want. People generally can't give a "right" answer because the system and setting rarely give a "right" answer. Instead you just end up getting into weird textual analysis of sub-minimum-wage writers writing across decades who never had a clear idea in the first place.

[Neurosis]

I think this discussion is more worthwhile and more interesting on every level if you just don't have a line on your character sheet that says "alignment".

That's how my group has done it for the past few years and it works great for us. Moral issues become more relevant, not less.

This is done automatically with literally every RPG I play that isn't D&D. Which is actually most of the RPGs I play.

With D&D, I try to meet the game, if not on its own terms, at least on some middle ground between what you just said ("don't even bother with alignment") and the game's terms (an alignment system that is weird, stupid, and fucked from the jump).

TANGENT:

Hey, guys, because it often comes up as a point of confusion, Schleiermacher is Schleiermacher, has around 500 posts, joined in 2012, and may or may not actually be German.

Schwarzkopf (me) is definitely American, joined in 2010, has almost a thousand posts, and is named after a minor Shadowrun NPC (a Great Dragon that's a professor of magic somewhere like U Copenhagen).

I have seen more than one post or PM confusing me with Schleiermacher and he probably has seen more than one post or PM confusing him with Schwarzkopf, because we both have German sounding usernames that start with the letters "Sch", so I just thought I'd take the opportunity to set the record straight about which is which.

Actually one of us should get an avatar. That would probably help.

Now, with overarching question is...in D&D, are alignments (Good, Evil, Neutral--remember, we're talking about that axis) actual benchmarks of moral fiber and character? Or are they teams you join until you join another team?

The problem is that picking one of these as what alignment is would not be wrong. D&D just doesn't. Instead it is a weird mish mash of personality, karma, morality, and team.

So you'll have someone ask for advice on "playing Neutral Good" and then declare you have summoned too many demons and (despite acting the same) are now Chaotic Evil. People will write rants on alignment being an objective thing in the universe, but it never gets pinned down and you end up with contradictory information even on where stuff like cannibalism lands. It is easy for it to be your team, it makes it easy to accept committing genocide against the Orcs, but people get disturbed when the same reasoning makes it okay to enslave the Orcs and torture them for your amusement.

So the answer is whatever you want. People generally can't give a "right" answer because the system and setting rarely give a "right" answer. Instead you just end up getting into weird textual analysis of sub-minimum-wage writers writing across decades who never had a clear idea in the first place.

But Frank & K wrote intelligently about this in Tome: "is Evil what you Are, or what you Do?". I think they were specifically referring to necromancy at the time, but the general discussion was fascinating. I was hoping for the same kind of discussion here, only focused on Good.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Having 'good' and 'evil' be things a person can unequivocally be is useful in stories where morality is very simple and heel-face/face-heel turns happen. In D&D, most players don't want to have to think too hard about whether they should feel bad about stabbing someone. Now in Krynn, Good is very much just a team. They pretend it isn't, but the actual moralities involved are completely incoherent and also stupid, so the team aspect is all that's left to work with. Felgrane made a commitment to a particular team and now very appropriately wears that team's colors. Also you can and should talk up his 'redemptive arc' because Team Paladine is all about the spin.

[Mask_De_H]

I know not and care not about Dragonlance, but in this particular case the Good/Neutral/Evil axis is literally the color you rep. It's gang affiliation, and Fireballing the Generic Fantasy Metal was the equivalent of getting the gang sign tatted on your chest. Under the Tome of Fiends Evil discussion, you chose Moral Option 1, which is kind of the default.

So with that, you did the right thing S1.

[Josh_Kablack]

I don't think we've really worked out just how well Good and Evil are Teams works to make all the craziness of D&D alignment actually make sense once you extend the metaphor:


Characters who are neutral on this axis are undrafted, or have been released by their former team without being picked up by another team.


The pantheon are the team owners. Outsiders are the various coaches, coaching assistants, medical staff and scouts and recruiters.

The Law/Choas axis is how binding your contract is. A Lawful character has something like the Franchise Tag and the commitment of the powers that be to see that character well compensated. On the Law/Chaos axis a neutral character has a contract for at least the current season, but may be traded to other teams and may attempt to negotiate a better deal for the future. Choatic characters are unrestricted free agents and may sign with either team.

Paladin Codes are just hype for the fans, who will forgive lapses when their team wins but demand firing for the same lapse after a loss. Killing baby kobolds is an onside kick attempt - highly unpopular when it fails, but lucky genius when it works. All types of "theft" boil down to either fumbles or fumble recoveries - where what matters is who had the loot last and that you're running the right way with the loot. And so it goes....

[Neurosis]

They pretend it isn't, but the actual moralities involved are completely incoherent and also stupid, so the team aspect is all that's left to work with. Felgrane made a commitment to a particular team and now very appropriately wears that team's colors. Also you can and should talk up his 'redemptive arc' because Team Paladine is all about the spin.

This answer is best answer so far...but it also makes capital G Good in Krynn sound pretty small e evil.

[Chamomile]

Krynn's Age of Might is canonically known as an era when Good was too powerful and threatening the natural balance. So we know exactly what Krynn looks like when Good is winning super hard, and what it looks like is a totalitarian police state that employs mind-reading wizards to police the thoughts of its citizens and send those who think evil thoughts to fight to their deaths in gladiator matches (or maybe the gladiator matches are actually outlawed, and instead prisoners are just enslaved to theater troupes that pretend to have gladiator matches, it's inconsistent). The Gods of Good did take some issue with this behavior, which is why they cast Meteor on the densely populated heart of the empire (and when the Lifestream flowed to heal the wounded planet, Raistlin absorbed its power and ascended to godhood).

EDIT: Oh, and it's also inconsistent whether Paladine dropped a mountain on Istar because they were an Orwellian police state or because the Kingpriest petitioned the gods for the power to eradicate Evil forever, and they were punishing him for his hubris. Whatever it was, it was a joint action by all the gods, so Paladine was willing to team up with draco-Sauron to bring about this particular apocalypse.

[angelfromanotherpin]

This answer is best answer so far...but it also makes capital G Good in Krynn sound pretty small e evil.

That's what makes it sound evil? Not "Welp, our highest-ranked mortal follower has gone all paranoid and genocide-y. Should we: a) tell him to knock it off, b) publicly smite him as an object lesson, or c) Send some very vague warning signs that will kill many innocents while feeding his paranoia, and then (if he doesn't knock it off) nuke the world and stop helping people for three centuries? Very definitely C. Also, if anyone asks, it's our victims' fault for having wrong thoughts."

[Chamomile]

Oh, and by the way, your elf wizard there is long-lived enough that I'm confident in saying that he backed the wrong horse.

[Mask_De_H]

They pretend it isn't, but the actual moralities involved are completely incoherent and also stupid, so the team aspect is all that's left to work with. Felgrane made a commitment to a particular team and now very appropriately wears that team's colors. Also you can and should talk up his 'redemptive arc' because Team Paladine is all about the spin.

This answer is best answer so far...but it also makes capital G Good in Krynn sound pretty small e evil.

This is exactly the point Frank and K make about the pitfalls of using the Alignment as Hat method of morality. Check out the Tome of Fiends, Schwartz.

Also Josh's post is great.

[Leress]

[Neurosis]

@Leress: I lol'd.

FWIW, I know almost literally nothing about Dragonlance that happens either before or after the original series of modules. And I don't even know the end of those.

I have read vague hints on wikis here or there and I've just started reading the first book of Dragonlance Legends: Volume 1 -- Time of the Twins. So I know that Raistlin turns evil, at some point some people go back in time, and it seems like maybe Raistilin becomes a god???

I own all of the 3.X Dragonlance stuff (most of which is mechanically speaking terribly incompetent hackwork) but I've only skimmed or outright skipped anything that doesn't specifically concern the War of the Lance, because it's TMI when my campaign is specifically about the War of the Lance.

I definitely don't know anything outside the scope of the original Chronicles Trilogy of novels, and I don't even know the ending of that (though they're telegraphing that Raistlin is going to turn evil from a hundred miles away, I don't know how or when it's supposed to go down) and would like to avoid spoilers.

That probably would have been a good thing to mention up front.

***

Another good thing to have mentioned up front would be how "my Dragonlance campaign" differs from "the canonical story of Dragonlance" and namely, that's that it pays any goddamn attention to the D&D rules and not just WHAT MORMONS WANT TO HAPPEN.

This has altered the story thusly:

I'm running this shizznit for one single lucky special delighted adored patient and kind player (yes honey if you're den-stalking me I am sucking up).

In terms of system and adventure for a single PC, obviously you pretty much couldn't find a worse choice, but we're still having an awesome time in spite of the total unsuitability of both system and adventure.

I didn't start doing this out of sheer perversity, by the way. I started doing this because I completely didn't realize how many freaking PCs Dragonlance insists on marching in every chapter before I started DMing. My enthusiasm greatly overwhelmed my due dilligence and before I knew it my single player was drowning in more PCs than both of us could control combined.

Of course, I have been quite liberal with killing off PCs (when the dice say so, not by fiat!), because that campaign has LITERALLY 48 of them by the end and we've added in some OCs as well, and by no means are all of these characters necessary. So far we've got the following notable deaths:

* Gilthanas slain by a finger of death from Highlord Feal-Thas.
* Tasslehoff Burrfoot eaten by Sleet. If you hate kenders, that probably makes you chuckle. If you like kenders, I can't say anything nice and this is the den so instead of the way that idiom usually finishes, go fuck yourself : P
* Ellistan frozen and exploded by thermodynamics, falling off the slippery bridge to Huma's tomb into the hotsprings and then frost breath-weaponed by Squall.
* Flint Fireforge pulped into Dwarf Heaven by the Guardian of the Lances. D'Argent cast Resurrection but my player and I collectively decided that Flint's spirit was unwilling to return from Reorx's dwarven halls.
* Tika Weylan spit-roasted by Kitiara's lance charge (Caramon was very upset and Tanis is way fucked up over it).
* Sturm Brightblade is currently a statue thanks to failing a Fort Save versus the Celestial Greater basilisk, but the Felgrane just got his 11th effective Wizard Level, learned Stone to Flesh, and can fix him.

I am very excited to see how the emotional and character arcs of "MY DRAGONLANCE" versus "DRAGONLANCE" differ due to all these tragic heroic deaths. I'll probably make a thread about it in the D&D forum.

If anyone wonders how I manage this craziness with one player, my model is Final Fantasy Tactics: my player controls four of the PCs directly, and I control another two PCs as "NPC" guests. In spite of Dragonlance's insane need to have a 32 person party, I put a strict limit of 6 allied characters at a time on the party because once we hit Dragons of Ice I was starting to lose my mind. It helps that my player is a very smart lady and that most of the PCs under her control are fighter types and generally just have to hit stuff.

[Ancient History]

Remind me again why the evil wizards don't wear a red robe just to fuck with people?

[Neurosis]

Krynn's Age of Might is canonically known as an era when Good was too powerful and threatening the natural balance. So we know exactly what Krynn looks like when Good is winning super hard, and what it looks like is a totalitarian police state that employs mind-reading wizards to police the thoughts of its citizens and send those who think evil thoughts to fight to their deaths in gladiator matches (or maybe the gladiator matches are actually outlawed, and instead prisoners are just enslaved to theater troupes that pretend to have gladiator matches, it's inconsistent). The Gods of Good did take some issue with this behavior, which is why they cast Meteor on the densely populated heart of the empire...

Okay, so pretty much, it's inarguable that Paladine is large G Good in D&D but is small e evil in any-reasonable-person's-morality system?

That's what makes it sound evil? Not "Welp, our highest-ranked mortal follower has gone all paranoid and genocide-y. Should we: a) tell him to knock it off, b) publicly smite him as an object lesson, or c) Send some very vague warning signs that will kill many innocents while feeding his paranoia, and then (if he doesn't knock it off) nuke the world and stop helping people for three centuries? Very definitely C. Also, if anyone asks, it's our victims' fault for having wrong thoughts."

This is kind of the bullshit I expect when a world's divinity and mortals and morality are all created and concepted by Mormons.

I mean, Elistan is essentially Joseph Smith, right? Or is it that Goldmoon is sexy lady Native American Joseph Smith and Ellistan is Brigham Young? I forget.

Anyway, Chamomile I'm sure that article is super interesting, but I'm gonna avoid clickin' it because of the aforementioned spoilers (I don't know shit about what happens after the War of the Lance ends).

Remind me again why the evil wizards don't wear a red robe just to fuck with people?

It was very difficult for me not to portray every single Red Robe Wizard (which thus far would be young Raistlin and until recently Felgrane) as being identical in personality to "Red Mage" from 8-Bit Theater

[hyzmarca]

Remind me again why the evil wizards don't wear a red robe just to fuck with people?

Obviously, because wizards radiate a powerful natural magic that alters the coloration of any clothes that they're wearing. Good Bleaches. Evil Darkens. Hollywood Hulk Hogan puts Good on his Stache but Evil on his beard.

[Maxus]

Remind me again why the evil wizards don't wear a red robe just to fuck with people?

Because the god of Neutral Magic will shove a firecracker up someone's ass and light it if they dared.

Or something. Or possibly the god of Black magic wouldn't give you powers.

Because, you know, even arcane magic comes from the gods in Dragonlance. Which makes me wonder what the difference between a cleric and wizard is here.

[Prak]

I wrote an essay on alignment for the last campaign I ran in a world of my creation, but it basically boiled down to "Evil is self-first, good is other-first. Chaos thinks everyone gets to live their lives as they see fit (but deal with the consequences of it), law thinks everyone should live the same way." So I suppose that in my games, doing a Good thing because you were bribed to with power would make you Evil, and doing an Evil thing because you think it benefits the greatest number of people that aren't necessarily you is a Good thing, but I don't really care about that shit.

[Mask_De_H]

Remind me again why the evil wizards don't wear a red robe just to fuck with people?

Obviously, because wizards radiate a powerful natural magic that alters the coloration of any clothes that they're wearing. Good Bleaches. Even Darkens. Hollywood Hulk Hogan puts Good on his Stache but Evil on his beard.

Nah, Hogan is naturally Evil (thus the black beard), but he's considered a good guy enough that Good gives him special dispensation (bleached mustache and hair)

[hyzmarca]

Remind me again why the evil wizards don't wear a red robe just to fuck with people?

Because the god of Neutral Magic will shove a firecracker up someone's ass and light it if they dared.

Or something. Or possibly the god of Black magic wouldn't give you powers.

Because, you know, even arcane magic comes from the gods in Dragonlance. Which makes me wonder what the difference between a cleric and wizard is here.

Technically they come from the moons.

[Wiseman]

In dragonlance, the gods of magic are the source of arcane magic and the Order of High Sorcery is based around them, but they don't really grant spells it in any way (your either born with magic ability or not). Wizards don't pray to the gods of magic to get their spells and don't worship them in any sense. In fact a wizard can actually tell the Order and the gods to fuck off (and several have) and still retain all their powers.

[JonSetanta]

Dragonlance is Weiss and Hickman, and therefore stupid in its entirety.

I saw the animated movie. I've read some books. I hate it all.
(Except for Keifer Sutherland as Raistlin.... that was OK.)

[angelfromanotherpin]

I wrote an essay on alignment for the last campaign I ran in a world of my creation, but it basically boiled down to "Evil is self-first, good is other-first. Chaos thinks everyone gets to live their lives as they see fit (but deal with the consequences of it), law thinks everyone should live the same way." So I suppose that in my games, doing a Good thing because you were bribed to with power would make you Evil, and doing an Evil thing because you think it benefits the greatest number of people that aren't necessarily you is a Good thing, but I don't really care about that shit.

I've done campaign-specific alignment guidelines before. For example, in a crypto-Viking game, the guidelines were:

Lawful: Does their utmost to obey the laws and keep their word.
Neutral: Makes an effort to obey the laws and keep their word.
Chaotic: Makes no effort to obey the laws and keep their word.

Good: Helps family, friends, and community even at much personal cost.
Other Neutral: Helps family, friends, and community at small personal cost.
Evil: Does not help family, friends, or community without being bribed or threatened.

Among other things, that was written to make it morally okay to sail to the lands of the Franks and killage at will. Because in iron age Scandinavia, making sure that war happened in the houses of other people (instead of the people you had responsibilities to) was the right thing to do.

[Wiseman]

Honestly, despite how much stupid shit is in dragonlance (pretty much everything but Raistlin and Istar), I can't bring my self to truly hate it considering it was what got me into TTRPGs in the first place.