Rethinking Alignment: the Great Chain of Being

One of the most ignored parts of D&D's core rules is the idea of alignment. I get it, I ignore it too! For those who aren't familiar with it, D&D gives every creature--PC, NPC, monster, beast--an alignment on two axes. One axis is good-neutral-evil, and the other is lawful-neutral-chaotic. So, for example, a red dragon is classified as a Chaotic Evil creature.

The Problem with Alignment

While alignment grids make for very popular memes, reducing the complexities of morality to a simple good-vs-evil, lawful-vs-chaotic grid can lead to really flat characters. Some of the most interesting moments in my games have involved moral questions: is it ethical to accept assistance from pirates to overthrow a tyrant if that means being indebted to the pirates? Is it ethical to kill people who are being trained by a cult to wipe out your church, or can you only target those who have already acted against you? Reducing the pirates to "oh, they're chaotic evil so we shouldn't deal with them" flattens that moral choice.

Good vs Evil

Alignment also has a problem in that no one truly views themselves as evil. Sure, some fantasy derives from the Lord of the Rings school of an unquestionably good force fighting against an unquestionably evil one. I don't think Sauron has much in the way of moral nuance. That type of game has a place, and a lot of people enjoy the moral absolutism that comes with a good-vs-evil, save-the-world style of narrative. However, if we're looking at history (per the theme of this blog), then good-vs-evil doesn't work; it just is not how people view themselves.

That isn't to say that all villains need to be sympathetic. I also think that there is a virtue in having villains who act villainous and aren't motivated by some past trauma that makes the party think that they are redeemable. Some people in history are power-hungry dictators acting in their own self-interest, willing to throw others under the bus for their own advancement. But those people are unlikely to describe themselves as "evil," even if other people would.

As a result, parties almost always fall on the good-to-neutral end of the spectrum, unless you're playing an "evil campaign" or have a classic problem player who insists on playing a chaotic evil rogue who steals loot from the rest of the party and angers all the other players.

Chaotic vs Lawful

As for the other axis on the grid? I think that there's a much richer spectrum there as well.

Specifically, what happens with unjust or minor laws? I generally think of myself as a law-abiding person, but I speed on the highway because everyone does, and I jaywalk. But I also would not commit murder even against someone who I really dislike. I will walk through the subway emergency exit to get a free train ride, but I wouldn't shoplift. Does that make me lawful? Chaotic and lawless? Neutral?

The answer is probably neutral, like pretty much every nuanced individual. I'm pretty sure that I can count the number of "lawful" or "chaotic" characters that I've played and felt like I've played in line with their alignment on a single hand, and those characters tend to be mere stereotypes like some holier-than-thou paladin.

D&D's Removal of Alignment's Impacts

Because of those things, as D&D moves from being a wargame to being more and more focused on storytelling (a trend you can see over the years in a lot of ways, from the types of adventures that are popular to the lethality of the mechanics themselves), they've removed a lot of the limitations that used to be tied to alignment.

It used to be that paladins could only be played as "lawful good" characters, and if they did something that made the DM question their lawfulness or their goodness, they'd have their class features suspended. In 5e, where alignment is even mentioned (in some backgrounds), it is non-binding. You can play a lawful good character with the criminal background. That's not to say that sort of character couldn't exist--we can imagine a reformed criminal who is now dedicated to the law--but the descriptions of the background and the alignment seem to stand in pretty stark contrast with one another. You can be a cleric of a chaotic evil god and act in an entirely lawful good fashion, and you will suffer zero mechanical impacts using the rules as written. Your evil god of violence and destruction will remove none of your spells from you if you decide to spend all your time not destroying, and instead building homes for puppies in the game. And that should feel weird!

Basically, alignment is a vestigial remnant of a rule. It exists in the Player's Handbook as a thing to connect to your character, all of the gods have an alignment listed, and some spells reference it. But other spells don't. The spell Protection from Evil and Good--which seems to me like it should be connected to the alignment of monsters–instead protects you from aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead. It doesn't have anything to do with alignment!

Let's Get Rid of It

So, alignment is a vestigial part of the rules that no longer reflects the sort of story-rich, nuanced stories that many, many tables prefer to tell while playing.

The easy solution is just to get rid of it. That's what my table does. If alignment is not going to impact the rules of the game, and it's going to flatten your character and/or the narrative into something less nuanced and interesting, let's just not use it.

The things that feel like they should be tied to alignment--things like a god revoking your powers because you broke the central commandments of that deity, so why would they continue letting you use their powers to cast spells--can be placed on the shoulders of the DM as a narrative consequence. It may provoke a player saying "that's unfair, it's not in the rules," but if we want gods with concrete tenets, then we need to add those rules.

But what about looking at history? Surely the Church-dominated medieval world from which a lot of fantasy draws would have a fairly concrete sense of good vs evil. Is moral relativism in our games period-appropriate? Or should we have a label that says, at the very least, "angels are good and demons are evil"?

I mean, once again, the simple answer is to just get rid of it. It's what I'm going to keep doing in my games. But, I do still think looking at notions of good and evil--and how utterly alien the medieval conception of "goodness" is to a modern audience--is still interesting, even if you're going to say screw it and ignore alignment as a mechanical label in your TTRPGs.

The Great Chain of Being

Medieval Europe did have many of the same "good" elements of their morality that modernity includes. The Seven Deadly Sins are more well-known today than the Seven Heavenly Virtues, but those virtues inform what we think of as being "good." Things like charity, patience, kindness, and humility are all still praised in modern society, and they absolutely would have been seen as good in the Middle Ages.

Yet another core aspect of Medieval European morality has fallen by the wayside, and that is the so-called Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain of Being was the belief that there was a divinely arranged ordering of everything in the world. God sat on the top, followed by angels, humanity, beasts, plants, and minerals. All of these had their own internal ranking systems as well--diamonds were the best minerals, while mushrooms and other fungi were the worst of the plants.

A key part of living virtuously in medieval society was acting within one's proper place according to the divinely ordained Chain. So a king who had been appointed by God to act as ruler was strictly higher than a common peasant; for the king to work with his hands in the fields, playing at being a farmer, would be sinful, while a peasant rising in rebellion was similarly disruptive to the divinely-appointed role that the peasant had been assigned.

What Determines Those Rankings

In general, the ranking system in the Great Chain of Being is focused on abilities and sentience. God is omniscient and omnipotent in medieval Catholic doctrine, and so is at the top. The Angels do not have the constraints of physicality--they do not need water or food and are not burdened with instincts like lust or greed.

Humans sit in the middle. They have the ability for complex thought and communication with the divine, but they are also stuck with the physical instincts of natural life.

Animals have instincts but not the ability for complex communication with higher powers. This distances them from those higher powers, making them inferior in the Great Chain. Plants can grow and reproduce, but do not have the ability or instinct to move and react that animals have. Minerals, lacking even those aspects, are at the bottom of the chain.

Implications for D&D

Beyond the worldbuilding opportunities and moral conflicts that dealing with the Great Chain of Being presents us, I think that integrating this idea can provide a framework for replacing parts of alignment in the places where it does still linger.

D&D Creature Types

Right now, D&D uses a hodgepodge classification system to sort its creatures into 14 semi-overlapping categories. These are: aberration, beast, celestial, construct, dragon, elemental, fey, fiend, giant, humanoid, monstrosity, ooze, plant, or undead. But common questions involve the edge cases.

Why is Dragon its own thing? Is a dragon-like creature--like a dragonborn--a Dragon or a Humanoid? What about a drake, which looks basically like a dragon? Is that a beast? Why isn't a dragon a beast?

What is the line between an aberration and a monstrosity? Why is an owlbear a monstrosity and not a beast? Owlbears are usually described as a pretty naturally occurring creation within the world of D&D--it just isn't real in ours. So is that the line between monstrosity and beast?

Instead, we could use something more connected to the Great Chain of Being's classification system. Is a creature celestial (including fiends, devils, demons, and elementals)--something that is unbound by physical constraints but is sentient? It can be humanoid, something that possesses both sentience and physical form. It can be bestial, including aberrations and monstrosities, which have a physical form and instinctual actions but which are not fully sentient. Lastly, a creature could be plantoid, which possesses a physical form and the ability to react to stimulus, but which do not independently act. Many undead could fit the classification of plantoid, though that depends on how you conceptualize the ability for independent action that an undead has. Other than the undead, Plantoids should be few and far between, as that would not be a very interesting conflict, and mineral creatures that could not take actions would likely be entirely boring and therefore not worth including.

When looking at the spells that seem to reference alignment, like Protection from Evil and Good, this new grouping feels far more relevant. Instead of listing out an assortment of creature types that do not necessarily relate to evil and good, the spell could simply become Protection from Celestials or Protection from Plantoids.

If you need more granular creature types, those can still exist for abilities like Turn Undead. But having a higher-order method of classifying creatures and having specific levels of sentience and sorts of abilities connected to those classifications feels useful as a component of replacing alignment.

Conformity to the Chain

Instead of lawful vs chaotic as our axis of alignment, we can instead have an axis of conformity or rejection of one's role in the Great Chain of Being. This has many of the same implications as chaos or lawfulness without some of the sticking points.

You probably cannot be a lawful criminal except with a niche character concept, but you could certainly play a criminal who conforms to their role in society. They can see criminals as an underclass within the way that society is ordered, but choose to engage with being a part of that underclass. You could play an aloof noble who conforms to their superiority in the Great Chain, or you could play a nonconformist noble who seeks to reform the system for the sake of equality.

This doesn't replace the good-vs-evil axis, but I think it does provide a more elegant version of lawful-vs-chaotic that avoids some of the paradoxical implications of D&D's existing system.

Conclusion

The Great Chain of Being model is certainly not required as a replacement for anything. The simplest way of dealing with alignment's issues is to simply not use the alignment grid and to describe the moral code of your character in more depth. That is honestly what I will continue doing.

But the Great Chain of Being is a fascinating and often overlooked part of medieval morality that would translate well into a fantasy world, whether that is through any mechanical aspects or just through narrative and worldbuilding. When considering alignment, conformity to one's social role in the Great Chain would be far more important in the medieval mindset than the traditional chaos-vs-obedience aspect expressed by D&D. So for those trying to make a more period-appropriate game, fitting into one's social expectations is something more than just regulated by society; it is one that ought to be promulgated by divine teachings.