@RedDeerGuy1 D&D alignments are one of several game concepts that get repeated because they’ve become a trope unto themselves, but were of dubious value to begin with. D&D’s world is quite surreal and based on an original desire to play miniatures war games and have a simple system to say what types of creatures were on what side or could fight on the same side or not.
As D&D evolved to later editions and got some better writers and editors, it kept the gamey tradition of alignments, and added more codified details. The game has an enormous number of races and monsters and it lets them more easily give them some behavior by having categories, and it remains a whole thing unto itself in D&D (there are even alignment languages – do you speak Lawful Evil or Chaotic Evil?)
It’s bit like a very slightly more sophisticated version of medieval Christian morality, where there’s a universal binary good versus evil.
Compared to what I see as the actual reality of the sorts of things D&D alignments refer to, real people are much more subtle and individual and complex and contradictory, and who they are and how they behave comes from their conditioning into patterns over the course of their lives, and has many layers.
The D&D alignment system seems to me an extremely poor model of what people’s moralities and behavior are actually like. In particularly, almost no one is actually just “evil” in the sense of the D&D definition. It’s like the morality of cartoon villains, and even less sophisticated than many super hero comic book villains. Even the worst behaved actual evil people have something else going on other than “I’m just Evil, and I have a code of honor about doing evil that conforms to a list very much like all other Evil people”.
Similarly, “good” people are rarely just like “I’m on team Good”. Different people (or if you prefer, at least different groups and traditions or notions about morality) have their own ideas of what good is, and their own ways and reasons they align with those definitions of good or not.
And, many moral codes get twisted into patterns of shaming. Some very nasty behavior takes the form of people who think they are good and that they should shame other people into improving, when they’re actually perpetuating terrible patterns of toxic shaming that lead to those people shaming themselves and others. Here is a classic great book on that.
I think that the Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS) offers a vastly better treatment of modeling people and their moralities. In GURPS, there are no alignments, and many characters may have no moral traits codified at all. A player wishing to detail a character’s morality, however, can do so in terms of traits in various categories. For example, there is Truthfulness, which is different from Honesty, which is different from various types of Pacifism, or Senses of Duty, or Codes of Honor, which should all be described for each character, and if you really want to detail it you can apply formal limitations and so on. There are also some anti-social traits you could officially apply, but they aren’t points on a moral compass (though a few might contradict the morally positive ones) such as Bully, Bloodlust, Compulsive Lying, Megalomania, Sadism, Kleptomania, Callous, Cowardice, Odious Personal Habits, Cold-Blooded, Delusions, Jealousy, Lechery, Paranoia, etc.
