There Are Only Good People Here: Musings on Alignment and Sin in D&D, Fiction, and Life

I know this isn’t a new thought, but as I have aged, I have begun to have a hard time with the D&D alignment system. I’ve been trying to think of alternatives. One idea was a graph where you had evil/good and law/chaos axes and you plotted out a graph to determine current and median alignments. I like this idea and the idea that PCs start unaligned – this idea was implemented wonderfully in Planescape: Torment, and I was initially thinking about something like that. But that’s a lot of work. In some ways I’m tempted to ignore alignment altogether but it’s so heavily built into the framework of D&D that it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

One of the problems that comes up is the use of magic in “detecting” alignments. Of course, you could simply do away with such spells. But this brings me to another thought. What about the pervasive use of detect evil used by communities to keep evil people out? Detect evil is a fairly low level spell in most systems. I tend to like low-magic settings, but even in those, it isn’t impossible that a place might set up some system where they use Detect Evil to determine who is allowed in, who is not, who is exiled, etc. The question then becomes “what constitutes evil?” Are beings inherently evil? Are they born that way? If so, would “evil” babies be left in the wilderness to die ala the Spartans casting children into the chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus?

Or is it acts that make one evil? And if so, how does the practice of leaving babies to die of exposure impact the alignment of the person that does so? Would such an action make the perpetrators evil? If so, would they be expelled to die in the wilderness as well? What about actions that are unintentional? You intended to rob someone to get just enough food to eat, but as you approached with your dagger, you were so keyed up and scared you weren’t looking where you were putting your feet. You trip over a root and plunge your dagger into someone’s heart. Congrats, you are now a murderer! I have been binge watching true crime shows, and it turns out most murders are totally idiotic. Many of them are exactly this kind of thing, where someone has so much anxiety about what they are about to do that they wind up screwing up and shooting the person they are about to mug, often running away afterwards without actually achieving their aim of taking their victim’s money! Having done such a thing, are you now evil?

How would such a society function, knowing that everyone was good? Would unlimited credit be extended because all knew that the person being extended the credit would do anything they could to pay it back? What if that person wound up stealing (perhaps from someone “evil”) to pay back their debts?

I’ve come to the conclusion that true evil in real life is pretty rare. I think one of the reasons I have always kind of liked Vonnegut's work is because none of his characters are evil. There are no “bad guys.” Even Dwane Hoover in Breakfast of Champions is simply ill, not evil. The human need for archetypes and narrative often makes us think in terms of enemies who are evil. You have but to look around you to see how that has been exploited to drive people apart (I’m in the US and it is especially apparent here right now, but it happens everywhere) so it's interesting to me to read fiction where this need for a "bad guy" is ignored. This leaves us at the mercy of the universe, which is an uncomfortable place to be, and I think it's this which drives that need in the first place.

I think what I may do the next time I run a campaign is use the idea that alignment is acquired, but instead of setting up an axis and gradually plotting alignment to create a spectrum, I’ll do it this way – true good or evil is RARE. I really like this quote (very slightly altered by yours truly from the original, but faithful to the meaning I think) from Arthur Machen’s The White People as a way to explain what I mean:

“...the essence of sin is in… the taking of Heaven by storm… an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints, and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint. The saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.”

PCs start unaligned. Most creatures, in fact, have no alignment. It is possible, though rare, to acquire an evil alignment through “repeating the Fall.” This way of doing things feels right to me – something like a lich has “attempted to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner.” In giving himself immortality, something that belongs to the divine and which he never had a right to, he has attempted to take Heaven by force. THIS is the kind of act that could give a creature an alignment. Similarly, you can acquire a good alignment by endeavoring to recover a gift which you have lost. The gift here is not some tawdry physical thing, but rather the kind of innocence in which you are willing to sacrifice yourself for something greater. That is the gift that people lose. Thus, though I don’t think martyrdom is the only way to achieve sainthood, such a thing IS generally reserved for the martyr. I realize that this is a very Christian way to look at evil and sin, but it would be easy enough to modify for a polytheistic society - the main point is that sin is an attempt to take divinity by force.

You could make an argument that the aforementioned hypothetical in which someone goes to rob another person and winds up killing them, or even the very act of robbery, the assertion of one will over another, is taking of something by force, and if you believe that human beings have a spark of the divine, that this in some way repeats "the Fall." However, I’m reminded of another quote, this one from Terry Pratchett’s character Granny Weatherwax, on the nature of sin. From Carpe Jugulum. I love Pratchett because for all the silly humor, there’s a lot of really profound things he says through his characters.

“...Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

The character she is talking to begins to answer that he is sure there are worse things, and Granny answers,

“But they starts with thinking about people as things.”

This definition of sin has a lot to recommend it – I think it is one of the best I have ever heard. Certainly I think the confusion of people and things leads to a lot of unhappiness! But in the same passage, Granny (much like Kurt Vonnegut) indicates that there are no bad guys, as such. The priest she is talking to tells her that the issue of sin (and therefore evil) is not as black and white as she makes it out to be, and that there are shades of grey, to which she responds:

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby.”

Most of us live somewhere in this state of “grubbiness,” I think, or as Machen puts it, “Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it.” And I think most beings inhabiting a D&D world would live in that state as well. This brings me back to the rarity of the true sinner or saint. “Grubbiness” can be cleaned up. Perhaps through forgiveness, perhaps through acts of atonement, but there are sins with a small s that can be washed away. What Machen is talking about is Sin with a capital S – the truly unforgiveable, which is incredibly rare, something so foul and monstrous that it transforms the being who commits it in the same way that a man is transformed into a saint through the embodiment of pure and good that is as far beyond the mundane as its evil counterpart. An affront to a god rather than a human being.

I rather think that most players who “acquire” an alignment of either the good or evil variety in this world would probably have to be retired... IF they still lived!