"A" is for Alignment

“I am chaotic neutral” the players say while stabbing the orphan and throwing Molotov’s at innocent goblins .

Even when I was gamemastering D&D 5e alignment, and its role was a thing that rubbed me the wrong way almost every time it came up in a session. It feels like a (roleplaying) prescription that most players do not really gel with overall. I mean there is a reason most of them end up choosing some flavour of “chaotic neutral”, the alignment equivalent to writing “I can do what I want” on a piece of paper.

Even in my chosen edition of D&D, which happens to be AD&D 2e with a heaping spoon of house rules (which we will explore in more detail in later articles), the nine point alignment chart, while more integrated into the games systems, felt off. It could be the fact that most players treat is as a guide for their characters personality.  Or that in the early stages of a dungeon-crawly game, alignment does not matter that much. Not getting stabbed by goblins, paralyzed and eaten by ghouls or falling into a pit trap filled with poison covered punji sticks (most likely dug by the goblins), seems to be the highest priority.

I want the alignment system in my game, to directly interface with both the implied arc of old-school dungeons and dragons (which would in my opinion be characterized as a progression from dungeon crawl to wilderness exploration to the domain-game) and with the factions of the settings major conflict: Law (represented by civilisation) vs Chaos (represented by the wilderness). I also want some sort of descriptive moral component (I have chosen good/evil). To enable my players to choose appropriate alignments for their characters, I provided the following document: 

Next planned article: "B" is for botanical remedies and poisons (aka Herbalism)