Just The Caffeine Talking

Some Notes on Alignment

Get your tires rotated every six months.

Oh, wait: I mean Dungeons & Dragons alignments.

We all know the famous three-by-three grid, right? You've got Lawful Good in the upper left, with Lawful Neutral below it and Lawful Evil at the bottom. The middle column has Neutral Good at the top, True Neutral in the Paul Lynde square, and Neutral Evil below. On the right we have Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, and (boo, hiss!) Chaotic Evil.

Social media has used this as the structure for hundreds of memes, slotting in superheroes, Lord of the Rings characters, breakfast foods, how you deploy your toilet paper roll, and far too many others.

And since the first publication of the D&D Basic Set in 1977, roleplayers have been arguing about what those axes actually mean. Part of the problem is that American society has gone through immense changes during that same period. When (practicing Jehovah's Witness) Gary Gygax put the alignment grid in the game, the definitions were pretty simple. Good and Evil were God vs. Satan, Law and Chaos were following the rules of society vs. rebelling against them. Simple enough?

Well, no. An increasingly secularized society meant that game designers and gamemasters had to slot Good vs. Evil into a non-religious, essentially subjective framework. Meanwhile the rebellious "counterculture" attitudes of many gamers meant that Law and Chaos also became subjective. Trouble is, as various authors have said over the years, "everyone is the hero of his own story." Which means if Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are matters of personal judgement, everyone is Good and probably everyone is Lawful as well.

And just to complicate things, in the D&D world, the alignments are also cosmic factions — rival pantheons in the Outer Planes struggling for influence in the material world. So in addition to personal ethics, alignment can simply be what team you support. A bad person who worships a Good deity could be Evil (personal ethics) or Good (allegiance).

Here's my attempt to define the terms in non-religious but objective terms. I doubt this is the last word on the subject, but it is what I intend to use for my own games in the future. This is not an attempt to actually define Good and Evil, just to put them in usuable terms for use in games.

In general, Good — across all cultures — implies altruism. Helping others, treating them fairly, keeping the peace in your social group. There are plenty of complicated edge cases, hypotheticals involving non-human psychology and biology, but the core is pretty robust. Good means being, well, good to others.

Evil, the converse, is fundamentally selfish. The Evil individual (and again, we're talking about roleplaying game characters here) puts his personal interest and desires above the welfare of others. An evil individual takes things if he wants them, harms people if they don't do what he wants, and very much does not do unto others as he would have them do unto him.

Good and Evil are actually the simple ones, even though moral philosophers have been wrestling with how to define them for at least three thousand years. The troublesome D&D alignments are Law and Chaos. Does being Lawful mean you follow the law even when it's unjust? Does Chaos require you to oppose any authority, even if it's beneficial? If you follow a personal code of honor is that Lawful or Chaotic?

I've thought about this for a while and I think I've found a useful way to distinguish between Law and Chaos: time horizon. Law implies long-term thinking, Chaos is all about immediate gratification. Law plans, Chaos acts. Stalin, working through the machinery of the Soviet state, was Lawful Evil. Some asshole who gets pissed off because somebody said something to him at a party and shoots up the room is Chaotic Evil.

So let's go through the nine alignments, looking at how people in each box might behave, and how a society built on that principle might work.

Lawful Good: Long time preference, high altruism. A Lawful Good individual is pro-social, defers gratification, and sacrifices personal benefit for society. That's a pretty good fit for the most Lawful Good character class, the Paladin. A Lawful Good society expects everyone to work together, make sacrifices for the group, and help one another — a common Utopian ideal, but presumably without any coercion to make it happen.

Neutral Good: Moderate time preference, high altruism. Basically a more impulsive version of Good than Lawful Good. Neutral Good individuals would try to strike a balance between helping people immediately and helping in the long term. A Neutral Good society is less tolerant of short-term problems even though that might consume resources which could be more efficiently employed for long-term goals.

Chaotic Good: Short time preference, high altruism. Essentially nice people with Twitter. Chaotic Good individuals are always concerned about the Current Thing. Alleviating present harms is more important than any hypothetical long-term benefits. A Chaotic Good society would be inefficient but well-intentioned: groups and individuals trying to solve a variety of ills, often working at cross-purposes. Nice, but . . . chaotic.

Lawful Neutral: Long time preference, moderate altruism. Willing to tolerate harm or injustice in pursuit of a long-term benefit. A Lawful Neutral character would be rational, pragmatic, but a bit heartless. A Lawful Neutral society would probably be pretty harsh. The Legalist societies of ancient China are a good real-world example of a Lawful Neutral system.

True Neutral: This one is surprisingly tricky, and has sparked no end of discussion among gamers. Moderate altruism, medium time preference. There's two ways to look at this — either the Buddhist ideal of detachment from the world, or just a fairly incoherent muddle of conflicting drives. The latter is certainly common enough among people in the real world. The Druid character class is supposed to be True Neutral, but to be honest, that never struck me as particularly sensible. Historical Druids in ancient Celtic societies were pretty solidly Lawful Good, or maybe Lawful Neutral since ancient societies could be awfully harsh at times. The nature-worshipping Lorax/hippie Druid of D&D seems a lot more Chaotic Good. A True Neutral society isn't hard to imagine: a culture which tries to balance personal selfishness, altruism, freedom, and order. Sounds like most modern Western nation-states to me.

Chaotic Neutral: Low time preference, moderate altruism. A Chaotic Neutral person can balance personal desires against helping others, but has poor impulse control. This is the classic "issues with authority figures" personality — not actually desiring harm to people, but very unwilling to accept direction from anyone else. A Chaotic Neutral society, ironically, might be more stable than a Chaotic Good one, since while there would be more people trying to take advantage of others for their own benefit, there would be less charging about trying to solve the crisis of the week.

Lawful Evil: Low altruism, high time preference. A Lawful Evil character can control his impulses and make sacrifices for long-term goals, but those goals are entirely selfish. This is the classic Evil Overlord type character, and thus the most challenging kind of villain. He's not going to screw up with some outburst of temper or momentary whim. He's also willing to work within organizations and social rules to get what he wants. A Lawful Evil society would be highly rational and organized, but would favor the interests of the powerful at the expense of everyone else. A cynic might identify all societies as Lawful Evil, but the best historical examples I can think of would be oligarchies like Republican Rome, Carthage, and possibly Russia pre-2022. They're run by bastards, but the bastards aren't stupid.

Neutral Evil: Low altruism, moderate time preference. Sometimes in roleplaying games this is defined as "pure Evil" as it manages to include both long-term and short-term villainy. A Neutral Evil character doesn't have the patience for the Lawful Evil's cunning plots, but that actually makes him more dangerous to be around — the chance of irrational harm is scarier than a careful plotter, even though it may be a bit self-destructive. Neutral Evil societies would be similar to Lawful Evil ones, just less organized. Think of various kleptocratic oligarchies around the world, or Renaissance city-states whose rulers might go to war out of personal pique.

Chaotic Evil: Low altruism, short time preference. Selfish, impulsive, and sociopathic. The Chaotic Evil individual is likely to burn out pretty fast, as he's likely to piss off someone more powerful, possibly a whole lot of someones. If there were people devoted to Chaos as a philosophy they might wind up here, but that seems kind of self-refuting. A Chaotic Evil society . . . isn't. Basically it turns into a war of all against all. If one person or faction can take over, then they've established a Neutral Evil regime, even if the boss is personally Chaotic.

Any questions? Let the nerd-wrestling commence!

Art and Storytelling

Should the visual arts tell stories? Or strive for simple abstract beauty?

The answer of course is "yes" to both. Just as music has room for both fugues and ballads.

Here's a good essay by Aidan Harte — sculptor and animator — touching on the neglect of story in contemporary art, and how he's trying to correct that.

The Subsurface Agency Wants YOU!

Geoff Manaugh is an interesting writer — his book A Burglar's Guide to the City is something everyone should read — and he has a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG. The most recent post (as of this writing) is about some ambitious projects to do large-scale surveys of the subsurface environment using ground-penetrating radar, sonar, and other techniques. Read it here.

This set off my writer/game designer's "spider sense" like a fire alarm. This is a roleplaying campaign or a series of technothrillers just ready to be written! From here on I will discuss it in terms of a game campaign, but most of the same ideas and concepts could be turned into fiction or film.

The obvious campaign frame is to have your heroes as scientists and specialists working for the International Subsurface Exploration Agency. They go to exotic places around the world and find out what's underground. There are several "lenses" one can apply to this, ranging from least to most fantastic.

Action Thriller: While archaeologists are looking for sites of historical interest, so they can go through them in painstaking detail, there are a lot of other people who hear "buried" and immediately think ". . . treasure." Put your ISEA researchers in some lawless region, then send in a gang of looters and you've got a modern-day Raiders of the Lost Ark. The looters can be crooks, corrupt officials, mercenaries, or whoever. There's also the danger of people who just don't like anyone poking around under the ground in their neighborhood. They could be religious fanatics, drug growers or terrorists who don't want their operations exposed, governments who don't want their operations exposed, or people who have buried something they don't want dug up (toxic waste, bodies, etc.).

Caper Story: Or maybe the "heroes" are the bad guys — freelancers who are looking for loot and have to evade or distract those pesky ISEA eggheads (and the cops) long enough to disable the giant boulder traps and get the gold. They also have to cope with all the perils and adversaries the legit archaeologists have to worry about (see above).

Paranormal/Science Fiction: Maybe there's something really weird buried in an out-of-the-way corner of the world. Ancient alien space probes, remnants of lost civilizations with strange powers unknown to moder science, dinosaurs in suspended animation, caves holding weird cultures . . .  This is the "Saturday Afternoon Monster Theater" campaign. The ISEA might be part of a larger secret investigation into weird stuff — and when there's one clandestine conspiracy there's likely to be others, all trying to be first to dig up the latest uncanny find.

Horror: The heroes' investigations keep turning up buried things which are scary and dangerous and really shouldn't be dug up at all. Vampires, Elder Gods, ghouls, grumpy mummies, and cultists who want to keep the world from finding out until the stars are right. Both this campaign and the Paranormal one above might cast the ISEA as archaeological "men in black" who not only have to deal with the weirdness, but also keep it under wraps. Either way, it's a great frame for a modern-day dungeon crawl with monsters, traps, villains, and treasure. Just don't disturb the context!

New Paradigm Required

Forgive the interruption in service. Regular blogging has resumed.

I've noticed something about the way cities are portrayed in most comic books — and in the superhero movies based on those comics. What I noticed is how old-fashioned the cities are.

Whether you're looking at Batman's decaying Gotham City, Superman's bright and thriving Metropolis, or even the Marvel Universe's New York, all of them seem frozen in time, stuck forever in about 1970.

The City consists of a bunch of big skyscrapers — weird neo-Gothic towers in Gotham, International Style glass boxes in Metropolis, and a mix in Manhattan. Not far from the giant towers are smoky brick factories, surrounded by crime-ridden ethnic neighborhoods. Along the waterfront are warehouses, wharves, and rusty old ships. Beyond the city limits lies the countryside, a quick drive to and from the city center by Batmobile.

I was born in the mid-1960s, and this doesn't match any city I've lived in or visited in half a century.

Sure, cities have skyscrapers. Typically they're clustered in the very heart of town, while the bulk of the city consists of mid-rise buildings (five to ten stories in New York or Tokyo, three to four most other places). A handful of big cities may have a couple of distinct high-rise sections separated by lower buildings — like New York's Midtown cluster and Wall Street. But even the biggest megacities like New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, or London have enormous expanses of ordinary single-family dwellings, possibly in the form of row-houses. Spider-Man or Batman won't do very well perching on those rooftops or trying to get around by rope-swinging.

Those old brick factories are gone, either demolished completely or converted to shopping malls, condos, or office space. Modern factories are out at the edge of town, in bland windowless buildings near the Interstate. Again, the only way a non-flying superhero is going to get to a modern factory is a pretty long drive.

The whole raison d'etre for "street-level" heroes has changed, too. The high-rise parts of cities are terrible places to hang out on a rooftop looking for crimes to interrupt. Most downtowns are pretty dead at night. Now: in the current climate, it might be fun to see Batman or whoever trying to stop looters or organized shoplifting gangs in someplace like San Francisco or Portland, but somehow comics writers are reluctant to turn their heroes into glorified security guards.

Hence the focus on superheroes battling villains with superpowers who advertise their status with their own colorful costumes. Even Batman's vaunted "greatest detective" skills are mostly devoted to figuring out fairly obvious clues left by costumed lunatics, while the poor Gotham City PD has to try to work out who committed a daylight gang shooting in front of witnesses who deny they saw anything.

I think it's time for superheroes to adapt to the new urban environment. Superman, with flight and super-speed, can range across the world in search of perils to thwart, and the same goes for Marvel's heavy hitters like Iron Man.

But the "street-level" heroes like Batman, Spider-Man, the Punisher, and Green Arrow (stop snickering) are still wedded to an old paradigm, in which crime is conveniently concentrated in dense urban settings. Stealth, surprise, and an aura of mystery just don't translate well to suburban sprawl, let alone "exurbs" like most of Connecticut.

The first problem is distance. Having a Batmobile can be a positive disadvantage in big-city traffic, while poor Spider-Man must resort to riding atop trains or buses to reach outlying areas. A modern hero needs the ability to get around instantly, either with rapid flight or actual teleportation.

The second is stealth. Hiding in the shadowy alleys of downtown Chicago at night is all very well, but that doesn't translate to the suburban streets of Schaumburg. Crime-busting superheroes need a way to lurk unseen, or at least un-noticed, even in the daytime. Being a master of disguise is one solution, as is straight-up invisibility. Possibly using inconspicuous drones would give the hero a form of stealth, allowing secret observation of potential villains.

And finally, there's the issue of finding crime. Listening to police scanners or cruising around on patrol won't cut it — that just leads the superhero to the aftermath of most crimes, and by the time the yellow tape and chalk outlines have gone up there isn't much for a vigilante to do. You can just wait around for Lex Luthor or whoever to attack the Daily Planet building in a giant robot, but that's not really going to prevent much wrongdoing.

Obviously the vigilante heroes should be undercover agents — mingling in the underworld as criminals themselves, maybe even pulling off some relatively minor or at least bloodless crimes in order to build a reputation.

Now there's some potential for real suspense! All the dangers of undercover police work, except that the cops are also after you and there's no backup at all. The constant dilemma of how much crime to tolerate in order to bring down the gang leaders. Watching youngsters get drawn in and corrupted. This makes a secret identity and a masked crimefighter identity mandatory: if the other crooks ever realize that a trusted minor lawbreaker is actually the Masked Avenger, he's doomed. That seems like a way forward for superheroes.

If anybody likes to draw crime comics, get in touch.