[…] It is actually a really fun exercise: you pick your favorite series, franchise or setting and then you try to fit its characters into the grid representing all the possible D&D alignments. For bonus points, you provide a quote that supports your decision below each picture. It quite astonishing how well this works until you try it with batman. […]

The dnd alignment system is meant to be the sum of a characters normal actions. This means that even though someone might be neutral good most of the time in one instance maybe emotions will take over and cause the character to act out of alignment.
When it comes to batman i would say that this is due to many different writers.

With Dexter you have to ask why he acts how he does.

To help understand the system you should think of it as a balance between lawful and moral restriction. The moral axis can be though of as (Good-Urge to help others, and kills only if the death helps others) (Nuetral-No Morals) (Evil-Urge to harm others (completely nonspecific))
The law axis can be thought of like this (Lawful)-almost always follows the law (Nuetral- follows the law if it meets his or her moral code) (Chaotic- Does not recognize the law, and would only follow it if absolutely necessary)

Therefore a completely neutral character is hard to fit, the character would have no moral urge, and have mostly inhuman ideas. For example animals are nuetral in DnD.
Druids can be neutral in DnD as well and this is due to the fact that some have feral like nature.

Firstly, having your own code of morals isn’t lawful in DND. Being lawful literally means following the laws of your state, for instance if a devil helped an angel he would be committing an unlawful good act, but a human paladin doing the same act would be doing a neutral good act because he isn’t breaking or following the law, just doing something good. A chaotic character only follows his own moral code. This is why chaotic neutral can be thought of as the most random, the character has no moral or lawful restrictions and can act in a way that benefits his survival most.

Some would argue that chaotic evil has the most freedom, but this cant be true because a chaotic evil alignment would mean that most of the time the character would profit more from harming others than profiting materially.

Anyway so when it comes to dexter.

Dexter (NORMALLY) kills serial killers who escape justice to satisfy his hunger for killing. though the killing might end up helping people this is not his purpose it just happens to turn out that way. Think of it as a poacher killing a bloodthirsty cheetah about to kill you. He didnt kill the cheetah to save you, he killed it to make a profit and not to satisfy a need to harm others which is an unlawful neutral act.

This means Dexter is killing because he wants to harm others which is an evil. Whereas he only follows the laws that dont conflict with his moral code which is neutral.

I would deduce Dexter as NORMALLY neutral evil. This does not however mean that Dexter’s alignment cant change throughout the series after learning (people change).

An alignment chart doesn’t need to be a straitjacket to limit characters actions, when they start becoming too restrictive it’s time for an alignment shift, as often nobody is always lawful good or neutral good, and playing in a alternate dimension is better than following the rules of DnD most of the time

Also the example might work better for a game like WH40k

Now you could have fully 3d immersed experience… no more NEED for “imagination”

@ Travis McCrea:

Ah, ok. Makes sense now. None of the groups I have ever been in actually used miniatures or dungeon map type things.

The GM would usually just describe the scene, and if we were in a dungeon one of us would be tasked with drawing a map as we went. Or the GM would draw it in real time based on his notes. We used imagination for everything else. :)

Instead of painted characters, they could be on little tokens (or paper for cheap) people can go onto blender and customize their charaters (more than just paintjobs, but actual physical features) or use stock. the table would also just be flat and the environment can be generated by the device OR it would just look like the flat table but there would be additional tokens which would generate walls or dungeons and such.

When battling you could actually watch your charaters attack each other on screen (watch the YuGiOh augmented reality for the idea for this) you could call various attacks by sliding the attack token onto the board and hit points or other factors could actually be tracked on the phone/computer.

@ Liudvikas:

You do! I actually blog about my teaching experiences from time to time.

Some of my projects tie into that too – like my Google App Engine experiment which I used to host student websites.

@ Luke Maciak:
You teach classes?
Why do we never hear of them?

@ Liudvikas:

My 8pm class on Wednesdays apparently. There are memes, video game jokes and movie references all over my slides and only one girl from the back row seems to be getting them. :)

@ Adrian:

Agreed. In most cases the whole system requires some contextualization – as in stating what your character believes to be “good” and what kind of law does he abide by, ignore or break with impunity.

@ astine:

Very good points. Perhaps this vagueness and lack of concrete definition for alignments is an unintentional strength of the system. By keeping things vague it allows everyone to define their own sets of values for good and lawful alignments. In a D&D setting though, you can make it rather clear cut by simply inventing a few deities representing law and morality and then say lawful good individual would follow their proscriptions and then extrapolate other alignments from that.

@ Travis McCrea:

Can you elaborate? How exactly would that work?