Alignment and Realism

As the reader may recall from our last episode:

Alignment in tabletop miniature roleplaying games is a stat that defines the character’s loyalty to a given moral code. The moral codes in a Dungeons and Dragons, and games like it, are meant to be rough and ready, and something a thirteen-year-old boy (the target audience) can grasp and play without difficulty or distraction. Gary Gygax took inspiration from Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and from the Eternal Champion cycle by Michael Moorcock, and decided on a three-by-three matrix of good-neutral-evil by lawful-neutral-chaotic. Other games, especially storytelling games like VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE or PENDRAGON, meant for an older target audience (fourteen-year-old boys) made the internal moral conflict of the character central to the drama of the game: there the alignment is between honor and dishonor, being a monster or being a man.

The law-versus-chaos spectrum is something Moorcock invented for the admirable purpose of cranking out fairly repetitive action-adventure sword-n-sorcery paperbacks where the angst of our beloved antihero protagonist, the eternally brooding Eternal Champion, never lacks for grist for his woe. It is formula writing, but it is good a good formula, and I personally do not mock it but salute it.

The formula is this: the multiverse is a cosmic war between equally inhuman and unpleasant divinities representing total tyranny and total anarchy. Since victory for either side would be disastrous for mankind, our beloved antihero can always easily be placed in a situation where he must betray one side or the other, betray one ideal or the other, and he can always place the back of his wrist against his forehead and bemoan the fact that he is caught up in an eternal conflict (hence his name) with no meaning and no resolution. Striking this pose is sweet as fresh peaches to the target audience (fourteen-year-old boys) to whom bemoaning the cruelty of life is a newfound pleasure, and they eat it up with cream.

But, upon reflection, lawfulness and anarchy have no innate moral meaning whatever.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.