Cooking with Alighnment

This was my entry for Thought Eater. My prompt was "Alignment: Used Poorly And Well."

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Alignment sucks when it's used as an excuse to be a douche.

To use some of the clichés:

• "Of course I'd steal from the party! It's right there on my character sheet: what part of chaotic-evil thief do you not understand?"

• "I burned down the tavern because I'm chaotic neutral. I'M CRAAAAAZY."

• "Well you resisted arrest from the evil overlord's goons. Since he's the lawful authority around here, your paladin just totally lost all his class features."

• "And in the back of the cave are baby orcs! Do you let them grow into murderous monsters or do you kill INNOCENT LITTLE BABIES. What I'm saying is you're evil now."

Those last two examples point out that on the GM's side, alignment is used poorly when it limits how players can interact with the game. No one wants a straightjacket. This implies the inverse: alignment is useful when it adds shit the players can fuck around with*.  A few examples.

• Lots of games have chaotic sorcerers summoning eldritch monstrosities. Only Carcosa comes with 34 pages of horrifying people-sacrificing rituals. Wanna summon the Leprous Dweller Below? Get yer ass to hex 2205, find a leper, tear him apart and eat his flesh. Wanna stop that bastard? Well you know his plan, what are you waiting for? Carcosa gives you blueprints for evil.

• The Planes take the nine fold alignment and convert it into geography. Lawful neutral? You can go there. There are armies to fight and everything! Have a problem with Zeus? Find him and give him a wedgie. A TPK means you get to bust out of hell.

• Here games with others gives you a Jedi/Sith class. In a nut shell: each force power has a light side and a dark side version. You can choose which version you use, but you get a light/dark side point. Level up with more dark side points and boom! You're Sith now. Level up with more light side points and you have been redeemed! It's mechanical support for one of Star Wars' great moral arcs.

• And lastly this bit of genius from Monsters! Monsters! "BLACK HOBBITS: This does not refer to their skin tone, but rather to their political affiliations." Law and chaos go from personal philosophy to political parties. The best game I've ever played had me going door to door in the caves of Chaos as a black hobbit, asking each monster in turn "Have YOU decided who you're going to vote for Evil Overlord in 2016?"**

And like anything else, sometimes alignment makes for good roleplaying. Absent any fun mechanics or interesting scenario, this is the wooden spoon award for including alignment in your game: it might make someone's character more interesting, it might be cause for roleplaying.

Another essential quality of alignment is how LOUD it is. If you put an alignment slot on the character sheets but then never mention it again, it's entirely up to your players to fuck around with it. If the standard currency of your campaign is souls and various alignments have different exchange rates, alignment is going to come up all the time. If Satan himself rises from the ground and insists you JOIN HIM OR DIE, then the players literally cannot avoid alignment. All of these have their place, as long as you observe rule number one: don't be a dick.

So there you have it: alignment is a sometimes food. Spice it up but don't force feed it to people.

*To be less colloquial: using alignment well adds ways to interact with the game.

*After a wave of disappointing answers, I decided I would run for Evil Overlord 2016. The problem I kept having to solve was this: how do I make all these monsters obey me while killing as few as possible. Assassination, intimidation, charm spells, bargaining, stockholm syndrome and sexy orc girls were all tried with varying levels of success.