What “Alignment” means to me

Character “alignment” is an strange concept with an interesting history. But I want to skip the history this time and just talk about how I think about it my table. Specifically I want to talk about PC alignment. For NPCs, I don’t tend to think about it very much—except for celestials and fiends.

I didn’t include this in my post about house rules because in 5e alignment barely matters, mechanically—and that post was getting long and this slipped my mind. Spells like Detect Evil and Good and Protection from Evil and Good no longer mention alignment. Instead they mention celestials, fiends, undead, etc—and fey who arguably have their own concepts of good and evil. There are a handful of legendary regional effects, like the Unicorn’s, or optional rules like being in a positive or negative plane, where alignment matters. While 4e said things like “[a paladin] must choose an alignment identical to the alignment of [their] patron deity”, 5e says things like “[Oath of Vengeance] paladins are often neutral or lawful” (emphasis mine). There are a couple of items, like the Sword of Answering or Candle of Invocation. In short: it doesn’t come up very often.

To support roleplaying, 5e offers Personality Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws (4e suggested Mannerisms which are also useful to think about). These have no mechanical implications, they’re just suggestions to help you make a more three-dimensional character. In that sense, alignment can also be a helpful tool for the player to help flesh out a character and think about how the character might react to a given situation.

Real people contain multitudes and inconsistencies. I don’t think it’s interesting to force a player to be beholden to a given alignment or trait or ideal. I might ask “How do you think your Paladin would feel about evading the guard like that?” but saying you were Lawful Good in session 0 doesn’t predetermine the answer.

However, I also don’t think you get to declare an alignment, ignore it, and still claim it. There are, after all, a few places where your alignment matters, mechanically.

(There’s another question about Paladin’s and their Oath tenets, and Clerics and their gods, but neither of those are mechanically alignment.)

So the way I think about alignment is: alignment is a reflection and result of your behavior, not a card-carrying membership. If you said you were Chaotic Good, but you’ve consistently restrained from doing what you thought was right because of social structures or the law, you might find yourself somewhat more Lawful. Or if you’ve consistently made more selfish choices, you might find yourself slipping into Chaotic Neutral or eventually Neutral Evil. Or if you were Neutral but keep consistently helping people for altruistic reasons, you might be Neutral Good, pal.

I don’t want this to be a surprise to players. I don’t want them discover the consequences of their choices only when they encounter a unicorn—especially because, without a wild magic sorcerer, that doesn’t happen a lot.

I’d let players know about the direction and changes to their alignment. Maybe they think it’s fine. It could be a part of their character’s arc, or maybe they are finding that how they enjoy playing the character doesn’t match their original vision. Or maybe it’s a sign that the character is going down a path they didn’t expect.