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building on the culture thing in a tribal world you could have different settlements have different laws and rules and have the alignment actually be the source for character moments. where a lawful player is upset about the laws being "wrong" and having development in accepting other viewpoints or a chaotic character arrives in a lawless area where there's no structure to break and losing their purpose

As an autistic person, the alignment chart is useful to me because I'm so exhausted with the greyness of real life morality. Sometimes i just want to know that I'm making the right decision

Also: Ask 5 DnD players, what "lawful" and "chaotic" mean and you will get 7 different answers.

This kind of discussion on stated moral alignments, how morality is affected by culture, etc., this is what I'd love to see like a couple of senators talking about. Seriously. If that means Brennan & Matthew were senators? all the better.

I think that when applied to normal characters in a tabletop game, alignment tends to be more constricting than informing. The thing I've noticed in my... oh god, 20 years of playing... I have most often seen people use alignment to define what they are *not allowed to do*, when I would rather my players think about what is important to their characters. What is important to them, what makes them angry, who do they love? Do they have any beliefs they would die for?

Wow. Most interesting conversation about alignment I've EVER heard. Thanks for making me aware of this show. Proud 174th subscriber.

My bard in Tomb of Annihilation was "officially" Lawful Evil. He cared for his group and kept them alive, but the motivation for it was ultimately selfish along the lines of "I cannot achieve my goal alone. A happy and healthy adventuring group is key to achieving my goals". That said, he would not risk his own personal safety for anyone in the group and most definitely would always persuade the group not to risk theirs for anyone who didn't help achieve his goals. Of course, being the bard, all his arguments were super reasonable! ;-)

I've been using the Magic the Gathering colour pie for morality and personality for a few years now and find it far more descriptive.

3:14 This aged like milk

Ironically the "lawfully good" paladin is closer to what I describe as chaotic evil

Paladins, Clerics, Talismans of Good, and Evil, Protection from Good and evil, Detect Good and Evil, Hallow/Unhallow, Answords, Planes, Afters, etc can be an answer. But it is setting dependent. They are right. If your cosmology has Different planes, then what? A good example: Positive/Negative or Give/Take axis, Day/Night or Forelight/Afterdark realms (basically life weave before here, and shadowfell type deal.) This doesn't apply. Now you have, Negative Light, Positive Night, Etc.

I don't get all these people that think that Paladins in AD&D or AD&D2E were all a bunch of fascist hall monitors with swords. Not so. Those old-school paladins' most important stat was Charisma. They were living symbols of their religions' tenets and precepts. They were lead-by-example types, not the SS, not the Thought Police. Sure, they had great abilities, Turn Undead, Healing, etc., but they were limited to serving gods of Lawful or Neutral Good alignment because of all the cool stuff they were allowed to do. If they were allowed to be any alignment they would have run rampant and broken the game. They were defined more by their limitations than by their powers. I wonder where the misconception came from?

I tend to use Evil and Good in a subjective form. Lets say that you are fighting to protect your village. This is Your Good. So if you have a demon with you, bound and willing to strive towards that Good, then a Detect Good or Evil will ping the demon as Good. But it will ping the enemy soldiers as Evil. On the other hand, if you flip it, and the commander of the invading force cast the same spell, then the defenders would ping as Evil. That way you get more direct use out of the spell i feel. But mainly i just ignore alignments. I feel that you need a specific Alignment-friendly setting for it to work as objective terms, and in general i do not like such settings. From Sweden with Love - Kami P.S And no, Matt, i do not agree with universal good or evil. You can muddy up any and every situation with enough hypothesising. And you risk ignoring real complexity if you refuse or fear mudding it up. Lets say that a Dahmer-like character does very Dahmer-like things in a fantasy setting, but he/she does so to satisfy a deamon inhabiting his/her soul, and if not satisfied, the demon will break out and do much worse things. So we have the same actions as was clearly Evil in our world, but through that fantasytwist, its not as clear anymore.

I think of alignment in two areas, it's a cosmic alignment, there's a war in the cosmos going on, and if you pick a side you have to live up to its ideals, which alignments are, they are ideals on a moral and social level

4:35 Meyers-Briggs is absolute hokum crafted by an uneducated housewife and her daughter. She made it all up. It's Horoscopes with more steps. Great example Brennan lmao

Great convo, but myers-brigg topic always irks me, it's non repeatable, events that happen the morning you take the test can influence your results, it's not scientific, it's pure pseudoscience and needs to go

It sounded like matt spent 2 minutes describing what "neutral" is. Across the board, most humanoids would fall into the neutral category.

Funny thing is detect good and evil doesn't go off of alignment it goes off of creature types like Celestial (Good) and fiend (evil)

The main thing I don't like about alignment is all the tests I did for it define me as true neutral even though I'm an anarchist so should be some form of chaotic even if my schizophrenia or willingness to use violence as a tool stops me being good.

The evil vs good thing is also subjected buy few for instance to country going to war let’s say over Territory who is the evil one there both doing the same thing both sides think the other is evil but in reality none of them are evil I have a hard time with alignments in dnd cause a good person can do a bad thing or a bad person can do a good thing example I know of police officers that was called to a shots fired call in the night he showed up on scene found a man standing in front of a beat up old truck a Standard cab with 4 kids and a woman in it with a dead doe deer in front of it instead of arrest the man for poaching a deer at night and out of season and being the wrong sex he helped him load it up and sent him on his way that would be more of a chaotic good thing to do even thou his hole job was to be lawful so I don’t really understand the hole alignment thing

Alignment is weird, you can be Evil and go along with the Heroes to defeat the villain, purely because it gets you closer to goblins or orcs so you can slowly kill them and watch the light leave their eyes, satiating your endless bloodlust

I've always liked at it as good is selfless, evil is selfish, lawful is strict and orderly, chaotic is wild and untamed

Matt's positing universal moralities is contradicted by reality and philosophically naive.

Relative morality is ruining fantasy

I mean, it's pretty simple - if you hurt other people, you're evil. If you promote thriving for yourself and those you care about, you're good. It's not all that complex or difficult.

The Jeffery Dahmer comment unfortunately aged poorly.

describe your character in 2 words

Pls make more

Quotes that did not age well, "there's nobody going, 'oh Jeffery Dahmer is just misunderstood'"

I have come to see lawful good as being a person whose sees a collective understanding of society as far more beneficial than acting on your own without regard for others. I see the good as want to help others and trying the get the current structure of the society to do that. In the end you can fully know that the world has problems and your society isn't perfect, but you still know there are some good things about it.

Personally I prefer not to write anything in my alignment section or my bonds flaws and traits. This may be because of my DMing style(which is very improvisational) but when I'm playing I prefer to make up my character as things progress in the game rather than bringing the baggage of "My sister was tricked into marrying a fey and I have sworn to break up the forced marriage" into a setting where our entire game is gonna take place in the underdark. I even make up my characters backstory as we go and have that develop based on what he says or how he acts. My current character in a friends game kept misunderstanding metaphors and didnt know much about the world so I ended up seeding dialogue of him being a farm kid who left the farm to go make something of himself. Then as the game progressed he started to learn more about the world(even at one point convincing a dragon to start a cattle farming business so that he wouldnt need to kill anyone), Then we had a 2 year time skip and during that time he studied a bunch of different languages and learnt from books so now he is able to explain things about different regions of the world or different monsters he studied etc. Its a very fun character to play and he started as a literal blank slate

It does irritate me when people start talking about perspective when it comes to alignment. Yes a character can think they're doing right but they're actually of evil alignment. But that doesn't mean that they're lawful good until the local hero walks along and kindly points out they're lawful evil. Alignment is objective. In d&d there are cosmic forces at work tied to alignment. It defines your afterlife, ability to use certain magic items, relationships with certain extraplanar beings and whether you will be the hero or villains of a narrative. It's important as a descriptive tool to both the DM and the other players so that they know what kind of character they are dealing with and can make relatively accurate assumptions about their characterisation. Alignment has nothing to do with culture. Just because it's a taboo to eat beef for instance doesn't mean people will decide a neutral good cleric who eats beef is an evil guy. Alignment simply tells you whether someone cares about the good of others or is purely motivated by personal gain and whether they achieve their goals through a code/ law structure or whether they believe that such things are a hindrance

As a DM and a player I love Alignment system especially within the realm of how the Planes of Existence and Deities. It gives us as players a strong sense of foundation.

One thing that is important about lawful alignments is understanding that not all orders are created equal in a particular person's eyes. Your character may not agree with the order of an evil society. Despite being ordered, they may not agree that it is the "proper" order. They may want to dismantle that society, so that they can re-order it properly. Like how in real life, Christians and Muslims both believe in an ordered cosmology, but those two orders often come into conflict on an ideological level.

i love you, Matt Mercer!

I think characters have to do a lot of fucked up things to become evil, if a demon is evil, a character has to be close to a demon in their behaviour. same with good. if we have unicorns, then characters aren't going to register on that scale really.

My Lawful Good Knight character Operates under Chivalry/Bushido. Which means, really, he can stab as many babies as he wants. Because it fits within his codex, and if he's willingly doing it, then obviously they are bad. The issue comes in, when Gods get involved. Which is why he's a fighter, not a paladin.

It's how omniscient(int and not wis) beings judge people, not how people actually are.

Its what I use to make sure my new guy doesn't turn his life loving nice guy into the a blood soaked psychopathy. Its a little annoy that the heros of the story all are just terrible people with no self control that even the players begin to hate because they cant do anything fun because they are on the run for war crimes. The players get impulses that their character does not get and should maybe not be allowed to randomly go through.

I like to interpret the Good/Evil scale as Selfless/Selfish. That's why I play my Chaotic Evil Barbarian as a total sellout merc who wouldn't lift a finger when asked to help but isn't eating babies or burning down temples just for the fun of it.

6:37 Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA! - Peter Venkman

Interesting that they mention bonds and ideals because as DM that's more what I look for at player characters to see how I can challenge them what will make them more interested in the story.

Usually I do good and evil is: at this moment. Is this person's goal willfully self serving to the deteriment of others. That's a pretty simple way of going about it. You can be selfish but like that's not evil. but if you intentionally do harm to others for your own gain knowingly. you are evil. a hag who harvest misery for her own gain is evil. a hag who harvest crimial's soul to punish them is a ghost rider.

I’m starting to think Matt’s never met a _hybristophiliac_ before..

Mercer is a fing hack and as far as we can tell, hasn't ever run a REAL campaign, just scripted drama for simpy millennials

I really dont like Brendan’s example mainly because it would be more likely someone with that cowardice would more likely just be viewed as weak or at worst some kind of cunning. To cast that in the view of good or evil is just a bad comprehension of the idea. I do like the idea of the modified detection for good or evil, just a horrible execution.

I just make up nonsense alignments and refuse to elaborate when asked.

Subjective vs Objective good-v-evil will always be a touchy subject. I personally find the alignment system to be great. Where I stand is I completely allow evil characters in the party. Hey, the Rogue is everyone's friend, nice, funny, and a joy to be around. But he also steals for self gain whenever he possibly can, and is the first to slit an enemy's throat without question. He's evil.

Stop blaming the alignment system for your lack of imagination...

"there's no one going like, Jeffrey Dahmer is just misunderstood!" Yeah let me introduce you into 2022.