@ MrPete:

Uh, oh… I’m not sure actually. Lanisters would probably be low on empathy and justice and high on ambition (except for Tyrion who would have high everything – he is empathetic, ambitious and have good sense of right and wrong) for example. Well, maybe. I haven’t said this system is perfect. :)

@ Chris Wellons:

Yeah, I think the lawful axis is pretty clear cut. The Good/Evil axis is where things get murky and inconsistent – especially when we try to use it to label anti-heroes and vigilantes who do questionable things for good reasons.

And yeah, I also think Batman belongs in Lawful Good/Neutral side of the chart because of his no-killing rule and the fact he hands criminals over to the police so that they can be arrested and stand a fair trial.

@ joek:

Yeah, I definitely am to harsh on it. I love it to pieces because it allows such discussions to take place. I think culturally it is a slam dunk in terms of giving us nerds a vocabulary to take apart character motivations. So this was mostly just an exercise in doing something different.

Speaking of Jean Valjean, every time Russel Crowe started singing in that movie I couldn’t help but think about that South Park episode.

@ switchnode:

Wow, good points. I guess the intent was to get away from vague concepts such as good/evil and try to re-interpret them into more concrete terms (as in empathy and sense of right and wrong). But your points still stand. So I think as a whole the exercise was worthwhile helping us to re-examine the dual axis system. :)

Anyways, excellent critique and suggestions and dully noted.

Also, you are right: Hogwarts Houses do kinda work like an alignment system (especially with the way students are “sorted” into them based on personality). Perhaps that’s actually could be an interesting solution: pick a number of houses/guilds/groups which all represent specific character archetypes and personality types and sort characters into them, allowing for internal variance within them.

@ Michael Miller:

Yeah, perhaps making it a numerical scale was not the hottest idea. I’d rate Superman’s ambition low because of the way he uses his powers. In my mind the ambition was more about selflessness and or belief in own infallibility. So a Superman with high rating in that stat would seek power so that he could protect people by “fixing” the society and installing new law and order as a supreme ruler of Earth. Instead he seeks to help one person at a time, stays out of the politics and is careful not to intimidate or threaten those he protects. Not sure if that makes sense with the way I worded it though, but that was kinda the intent. Perhaps a word other than “ambition” would have worked better.

@ Sheriff Fatman:

Yeah, I think you are right. Though in Warhammer Chaos has a very specific meaning – namely “the shit that oozes out of the North Pole and ruins everyone’s day – and everything associated with that stuff”. So it does make sense that it would be on the bottom rung in the alignment chart, and opposed by Lawful alignment which is that of Witchhunters and religious fanatics. It creates a nice lop-sided dichotomy.

I do like your example of Constantine’s angels and Nolan’s Joker as representations of Law and Chaos. It makes perfect sense.

First time I’ve heard of the D&D 4th edition alignment system. It seems more than a bit reminiscent of the Warhammer scheme: Law – Good – Neutral – Evil – Chaos.

Of course, WH’s Law isn’t really the same as Lawful Good, nor is Chaos the same as Chaotic Evil, though Law is “better” than evil, and Chaos definitely causes pain and suffering: it’s just that good and evil simply aren’t the point as far as those two are concerned.

The angels in Hellblazer are WH-lawful (I don’t know why people think Angels are beatific: they scare the crap out of me — John Constantine): the Divine Plan comes first; humanity rates a very poor second.

Heath Ledger’s Joker is Chaos personified (Some men just want to watch the world burn — Alfred Pennyworth): possibly no more so than when he accepts Harvey Dent’s bet and puts Dent’s gun to his forehead himself.@ Sheriff Fatman:

It’s an interesting idea… The Empathy and Justice categories kinda fit the D&D Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes, but stated in a slightly different way. Having said that, I think the phrasing is a definite improvement. However, I am unclear what the middle pip represents? Batman has two pips in empathy and Dexter has one – but Dexter is a psychopath and Batman is … troubled. Three pips would be a paragon of empathy. So is two pips ‘normal’? Would this follow a bell curve where most people would be two pips on empathy and the 3 and 1 would be the 5% outliers? I think a good way to think about it ‘how many people do they care for’? Even Dexter cares about his sister and his friends, so he gets one pip, Batman cares about everyone except for criminals, so he gets two. Looking at it like that, Superman cares about everyone and everything, so he gets three? Or would Superman get one, since he’s an alien and doesn’t really understand us at all (as in the more traditional meaning of empathy), and the protectiveness comes from a three pip justice rating?

Thinking of Superman, what’s his ambition rating? He is definitely not afraid of literally being a god among men, and the costume doesn’t exactly scream modesty… Maybe Superman and Kent could get different ambitions ratings – 3 and 1 respectively. What about the Joker? Is he a zero pips in all three?

I agree about time btw… I still think of any film or game that has come out since 2000 as ‘new’ or ‘recent’. Understanding that almost 15 years has past since 2000 is weird.

*shakes head* I don’t think it works.

The “ambition” slider feels tacked on; it’s so one-dimensional as to be almost useless. ‘Ambition’ doesn’t only refer to desire for personal fame, or glory, or even power; it’s possible to have incredible drive towards entirely orthogonal goals—discovery, self-improvement, activism. Take V: he believes that he can change a nation, and does so—but the same ideology that drives him also leads him to subsume his personal identity completely (“ideas are bulletproof”). Is he ambitious or not?

All characters have goals, even if they’re only simple ones. There are too many possible directions there to be reduced to a single slider with any kind of usefulness or meaning. Far better to let a character’s goals drive or be driven by the campaign! For the narrativists, it’s the narrative; for the snarky dungeon-crawlers… kill monsters, get gold, clear dungeon. Do either of them need more?

What you’re left with are the “justice” and “empathy” sliders. (And, incidentally, I think you’ve made another mistake in, if not the intent, the description of “empathy”: alignments are supposed to be about motivation; you’ve made this one about ability. An unwillingness to give a shit about other people’s problems is not necessarily caused by an inability to understand them. I have always argued that the very best villains are the ones who can see the other side of the story, who are adept at anticipating, interpreting, and manipulating the heroes’ thinking, who do understand how they are hurting people—and just don’t care. To assert that antagonism is always inflexible or blinkered is a little dismissive of villainy, and by extension, of heroism.)

So you have your “justice” and “empathy”, which you present as an improvement on D&D’s “Lawful/Chaotic” and “Good/Evil”… when both of them reduce to, or are best interpreted as, Code/No Code (which the comments above have covered) and Other(s)/Self. You’ve kept the granularity of the sliders—each one gives you three choices—but you’ve made them one-sided instead of symmetrical. Okay, the D&D system can be simplistic and rigid, but its lure is that an Evil person is generally fairly obviously distinguishable from a Neutral person is generally fairly obviously distinguishable from a Good person. There is a qualitative difference—negative/zero/positive—that makes it quick and easy to assign. Whereas the quantitative difference between two pips of empathy and three pips of empathy is… uh… what is it, really?

What is the mechanical purpose of this? Surely it can’t ever actually be used for anything; there’s clearly no room for ‘protection-from’ mechanics here. Okay, maybe you can have an NPC react differently to a two-justice character and a three-justice character, but is that really better than just keeping in mind the players’ reputation? What else is there—”roll to feel sympathy”? Definitely not an improvement on the “limiting player choice” front. You seem to be saying that snarky dungeon-crawlers need a thing to tell them what their characters are like, regardless of whether that thing ever comes up in-game. But do they really? As long as you’re playing a campaign that doesn’t care about your personality or motivation, is there any reason to play your character in any particular way aside from “fun”? And if you have enough of a narrativist streak to like personality templates, what does this system do that picking, say, a Hogwarts House doesn’t?

(Actually now that I think of it I would totally play a dungeon crawl where everyone had a Hogwarts House. That would be hilarious.)

So… tl;dr, a lossy cipher for the standard two-axis, and a largely pointless one at that. I like your thoughts about RPGs, but this one strikes me as mostly cruft.

Two footnotes:
1. The GoT alignment chart is from the estimable MightyGodKing.
2. You might be interested in the discussion of D&D alignment here, particularly the pages “Intelligence” (re: limiting player choice) and “‘Real’ Alignments” (re: good villains, evil heroes, and the many variations on ‘ambition’.)

Chris Wellons wrote:

I think the lawful-chaotic axis is a lot more objective than good-evil. Lawful doesn’t really mean following the law of the land but rather following some (mostly) consistent, developed moral code. A local monopoly on violence is just one way to derive law, and an alignment system shouldn’t have that method hard-coded. A lawful character is more predictable, often resulting in dependable honestly and loyalty even when evil: if their moral code dictates it as such, they can be trusted never to lie or betray. If a lawful evil villain is killing you, it shouldn’t be very surprising and you probably know exactly why s/he’s doing it. The good/evil component is a measure of their moral code more than of the person.
A chaotic character is whimsical and inconsistent, and therefore cannot be relied upon for any particular behavior. The good/evil component is an indicator of their tendencies.
A neutral character is somewhere in between. They have some sort of moral code, but it’s not consistent or they don’t always follow it. They’re compromising, but without being totally unpredictable. The vast majority of people fall under this category. It’s probably the most economical position on the lawful-chaotic axis.
Now, I only know Batman from the Nolan trilogy and the Arkham games, but under this definition Batman is clearly lawful. He adheres to a strict moral code, regardless of conflict with the current law of the land. That conflict doesn’t make him chaotic. As for Batman’s good/evil, that’s definitely open for debate.

I agree with this interpretation of the lawful/chaotic spectrum. In fact, I think it’s pretty similar to your ‘justice’ meter. Lawful characters will do ‘the right thing’ according to their own moral standards, consistently, whereas chaotic characters are more likely to ignore their own moral system for fun or profit, or not have a coherent or well developed system. Dexter, for example, is lawful: he follows Harry’s Code. Likewise, Javert from Les Mis is lawful: he follows the law of the land, regardless of personal consequences (and eventually kills himself when he feels that he no longer can follow the law objectively). This despite the fact that Dexter is portrayed mostly doing good, while Javert is portrayed mostly doing evil. In fact, I would go further and say that both Javert and Dexter are lawful neutral: both follow their moral code no matter what the circumstances are, and don’t allow empathy (good) or personal ambition (evil) to get in the way of that.

By contrast, Jean Valjean, also from Les Mis, is probably Neutral Good: he has a personal moral code, but is willing to bend it in order to help others — stealing bread for his nephew, breaking out of custody to go to rescue Cosette, and so on. When he has the opportunity to kill Javert, or to leave him to die, however, he rescues him, showing that his overall morals — not killing, for instance, for personal gain — are still intact.

Basically, then, I think you are a little harsh on the D&D alignment system: sure, people don’t understand what the divisions mean, but I think that there is in fact a coherent set of definitions to the alignments — and that they basically match up pretty well to those you have suggested in your new alignment system…

I like the system, it’s simple and expressive. I would allow an option for zero pips, though, to accommodate psychopaths and nihilists.

The most interesting alignment system I know of is the Tides from Torment: Tides of Numenera. This writeup explains. It’s used a little differently too: Tides are an actual metaphysical force in the Ninth World, and it gauges your PC’s actions and not their motivations.

I will be talking to someone about a video game that came out “a few months back” only to have them remind me it is actually a six year old title.

This actually just happened the other day in a conversation between my wife and me. In December 2012 I bought Fallout: New Vegas in a Steam sale. Last week I finally started playing it, and a discussion of the age of the game came up. To me it only felt like it came out a couple years ago, but looking it up we found out it’s nearly 4 years old now.

Different people have different ideas of what is evil, or what is considered chaotic.

I think the lawful-chaotic axis is a lot more objective than good-evil. Lawful doesn’t really mean following the law of the land but rather following some (mostly) consistent, developed moral code. A local monopoly on violence is just one way to derive law, and an alignment system shouldn’t have that method hard-coded. A lawful character is more predictable, often resulting in dependable honestly and loyalty even when evil: if their moral code dictates it as such, they can be trusted never to lie or betray. If a lawful evil villain is killing you, it shouldn’t be very surprising and you probably know exactly why s/he’s doing it. The good/evil component is a measure of their moral code more than of the person.

A chaotic character is whimsical and inconsistent, and therefore cannot be relied upon for any particular behavior. The good/evil component is an indicator of their tendencies.

A neutral character is somewhere in between. They have some sort of moral code, but it’s not consistent or they don’t always follow it. They’re compromising, but without being totally unpredictable. The vast majority of people fall under this category. It’s probably the most economical position on the lawful-chaotic axis.

Now, I only know Batman from the Nolan trilogy and the Arkham games, but under this definition Batman is clearly lawful. He adheres to a strict moral code, regardless of conflict with the current law of the land. That conflict doesn’t make him chaotic. As for Batman’s good/evil, that’s definitely open for debate.

I like that trial of adding more variety and glancing over it there’s no character coming to mind that would be hard to get into there.

go out of their way to find legal loopholes to help someone who fell hard on their luck.

That one immediatly reminded me of Mr.Incredible working at the insurance company :)

Just out of curiosity, how would you translate the pictured GoT-characters into this system?