I have invested (wasted?) a great deal of my life in role playing games, though I have spent the vast majority of that time playing WITH the games rather than actually playing them. I have recently had occasion to re-examine the old D&D concept of alignment, and have come to some conclusions that I find interesting.

First, a bit of introduction: The original 1974 release of Dungeons & Dragons included “Alignment” as a character attribute; a character could be Lawful, or Neutral, or Chaotic (categories that were drawn from the writings of Michael Moorcock). This was apparently added to the game to encourage players to think of their characters as something other just a collection of game statistics, and was at least slightly successful. A few years later, when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons came out, this idea had been expanded to a two-axis system, with Law and Chaos on one axis, and Good and Evil on the other.

The idea that has been fascinating me lately is that this system implies that the two axes are truly independent of each other, and I find myself wondering just what the concept of “Good” means if it is utterly divorced from “Law”, and vice versa. It seems to me that goodness, when utterly divorced from law, becomes kindness, and that law, when utterly divorced from the concept of goodness, becomes loyalty. I am intrigued by this. It is only a small epiphany, but, like a new pair of glasses, it is a lens that lets me see things in a slightly different way than I saw them before.