#dnd 3e

The entire alignment system is sick from the top to the bottom and racist too.

Content Warning: I’m going to talk smack about not just Dungeons & Dragons‘ morality system in 3rd edition, but also, in the process, talk some smack about Christians, and more specifically the Jehovah’s Witnesses. If you’re not here for that, you should find yourself a door.

Few elements of Dungeons & Dragons that lay bare its deeply incoherent roots have endured quite so long as the alignment system. Whenever discussing the alignment system, and by extension, the conception of morality presented in this game, it’s always worth remembering that the framework was devised by, and speaks to the values of, a deeply racist and misogynistic man who in addition to those larger, more structurally common biases, was also a Jehovah’s Witness and heavily informed by the way that that specific sect of American Christianity works.

I’ll spare you a detailed rundown of what I mean by American Christianity (for now, because this is about Dungeons & Dragons), but instead in the broadest strokes indicate that the alignment system that Gygax conceived of was something cosmically tracked and enforced. It was a truly objective morality system; your intention or your attitude did not matter, because there was an absolute right and an absolute wrong to each action, and characters could choose to comply with that right or not, by degrees.

This is why I say racist: It’s a hard fact in the first editions of D&D under Gygax’s most direct control that killing orc children who hadn’t done anything was a moral good; those creatures were evil creatures, and regardless of consequences killing them was good. Gygax quoted the ‘lice make nits’ line from the colonialism of the Americas to reinforce this position, but he was also quite clear that it was the act itself that had its moral valence, not the results or the intention.

This quite frankly deeply evil and immoral ethical framework was the horse to which Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition had to nonetheless hitch its wagon, and the resultant discord show a host of cracks in the way it’s supposed to work. Politicians who starve millions are in no ways doing anything wrong because they’re doing their jobs and there’s nothing evil in signing a piece of paper, but the people who enforce that law and keep orphans away from the food are also not doing anything wrong because they’re just upholding order. The core rulebook of 3rd edition had to try and address this framework without making it too obvious that elements of it were being thrown out the window, especially as the purpose of alignment shifted subtly in the more programmatic, more, let’s say, intentionally designed world of 3rd edition.

See, in 3rd edition, the purpose of alignment was first and foremost to let you target things. Oh sure, it was flavour, it helped to inform some monster behaviours or styles, but mostly, you were never going to scan the alignment of things you fought (not worth the effort) which meant that what alignment did was let you make reasonable guesstimates for smart-targeting of spells and effects. If you threw a spell that protected you from evil creatures into the mix it meant that you had some control over the kinds of threats you’d deal with and then prioritise them. In the purest sense, this was a reference point for magical spells.

Secondarily to that, it informed the moral valence of what you were doing and it was with the rulebooks The Book of Vile Darkness and its prettier but equally vacuous cousin The Book of Exalted Deeds that 3rd edition attempted to really roll up its sleeves and discuss morality in a way that could square the circle of previous editions’ heinous moral landscape and 3rd edition’s attempt to improve it by just rearranging some of the words.

The problem, such as it was, is that alignment was fundamentally invisible. You could have no control over what you did and how it affected you morally, because it was a matter of checking a list of subjects and determining what you did not what you thought or tried to do. If you killed a child and it turns out that child was a shapeshifted demon in disguise, the rules would say that you were in no way morally impacted by your desire to do it. If on the othe hand, you refused to kill the child that was a demon in disguise, because that’s a pretty messed up thing to want to do, then you’d failed to do a good act.

Now, the way the Book of Exalted Deeds tried to grapple with this was by presenting virtues that stood apart from the listed examples of explicitly evil acts. Doing mercy was shown as part of the tension with punishing evil and that’s a pretty good rules patch for the absolutist nature of things. It at least lets the player present something that’s within their control (why they did something) rather than one of those invisible wires around them.

One of the examples the book presented in 3rd edition was that if you climbed a cliff face, and in the process a rock fell and started an avalanche, then that avalanche killed people, then you were morally liable. In fact, a Paladin who did that kind of thing would lose access to their powers, while trying to redeem themselves for the sin of… climbing something.

The added problem with all of this is that no element of opposition or ambition cannot be framed with different moral outlooks that change nothing about how it expresses. A ruthless pursuit of justice and a sadistic love of control over criminals would both be expressed roughly similarly in a Javert-style inspector. A characte’rs own alignment, what they determine their alignment to be is something that can always be rationalised in terms of a framework of moral choices, and those intentions are going to be what informs the actual result of the test. If you’re doing everything right for an asshole reason, the world does not see you as doing evil acts, but your alignment can still be evil because there’s nothing in the world forcing you to change from your mindset of being a total prick.

The 4th edition system did try and push back against this with some interesting ideas of its own, but based on watching people talking about 5th edition games? Boy howdy they did not learn from that and instead decided to RETVRN to the worst version of the system so far.

Anybody working on dnd campaigns in any of the main-line properties like the Forgotten Realms, I so heavily encourage you to look at the old stuff from 3rd Edition and the revision.

Listen, there's some absolutely amazing stuff in there. Even if you weren't even alive when they came out, read some of the books. The picture above is of a Red Vampiric Dragon... A RED VAMPIRIC DRAGON. If I don't end up using a vampire dragon as a villain at some point I'm gonna haunt someone.

If you want that particular stat block, whether it be for inspiration or converting to 5e or any other game system, check it out in the Draconomicon (it's on the internet archive). That same book also has the Styx Dragon, and I'm gonna need to put a picture of that one in here, too.

It's literally a dragon who's immune to the River Styx, which is deadly pretty much anywhere you find it. They're apex predators for full-on demons, and they can make their victims lose all their intelligence. Added on to that: y'know Achilles and the whole myth that he was nearly unkillable because his mother dipped him in the River Styx as a baby? Same principle. These guys swim in invincibility juice their entire lives and then eat their weight in campaign-ending bosses. Styx Dragons, like with all dragons, are much weaker when they're young, but I don't think either of us is thinking of using a young one rn.

There's one more thing that I can't not mention: the Ur-Priest. Not many good pictures of them, so use your imagination, but they're essentially god parasites. They take divine spells that clerics usually get and use them (usually) for evil. They're in the books "Complete Divine" and "The Book of Vile Darkness" as prestige classes, and I'm completely smitten with them as potential antagonists. They'd be perfectly good for an evil campaign or an anti-hero one, but I love the idea of having a villain or minion who can perfectly pass as a cleric of the nicest, most trustworthy deity you can think of, and nobody ever questions them because they can cast the same exact spells.

That's really why I love all of these: the surprise. Having your players unaware that any of these things could even exist makes it all the cooler for them when they run into the vampire dragon, or the intelligence-draining dragon, or the pretender priest who's pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. And those are just THREE examples I took from only TWO BOOKS out of the over 80 others.

I played them all so you don't have to. In honor of THAC0, low scores are better.