Reintroducing Alignment

I wanted to get some vague ideas down on how alignment could be made into a more integral part of 5e, either in general or for a specific setting or campaign. Many of these suggestions are mechanical and come down to the same root point of having alignment be more mechanically present than it is currently, but there are a few lore suggestions here and there as well.

Unfortunately this post is going to be a bit disorganised, though that's nothing new here.

It's also worth mentioning that this isn't a post on why alignment should be implemented, merely how.

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To start off, I'm going to give definitions of alignment. The notion of what is or isn't under which alignment is flexible and open to interpretation, but for this post I'm going to steal and tweak my definitions from a previous post I made on alignment-based factions:

Good: acting for the benefit of others, especially when no personal gain is achieved from it. Altruism, compassion, and empathy are tenants of Good.

Evil: allow or enforce suffering upon others, for one's own benefit or for no benefit whatsoever. Selfishness, manipulation, and abuse are tenants of Evil.

Law: adhere to and enforce a set structure to life and society. This could be a city's laws, a factions rules, a deity's oaths etc.

Chaos: promote free will and metamorphosis, opposing control and restriction, and abiding by one's own sense of how to behave.

Alignment for characters has a dominant trait and a recessive trait, as shown with capitalisation. This is used to indicate which of the two alignments - law-chaos and good-evil - overrides the other in decision making. For example, a Lawful good character will choose Law over Good if pushed, whilst a lawful Good character would choose Good over Law.

Unaligned creatures are such because they lack an understanding of the alignment system and as such are unaffected by its influence. Whilst an animal may act in a chaotic neutral manner, it does so because of its instinctual drives, not due to a sense that the alternative is morally wrong or unfavourable. Creatures with completely different senses of morality and alignment are also classified as Unaligned - in my books, this should arguably include oozes and aberrations, given that their minds are so alien to ours that they may not work on the same notions that we do. They are outside of alignment.

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A game that brings back alignment as a prominent aspect should bring it to the front mechanically as well as in theme and lore. D&D does do this, but 5th edition does so significantly less than past editions. We mainly see alignment present in these aspects:

Spells: spirit guardians has its damage type vary on character alignment. This kind of thing should be expanded upon. Different character alignments or deity alignments should influence damage types, or potentially further influence spell effects. Perhaps casting burning hands whilst Chaotic in alignment makes more things ignite on contact, or bless and bane could be the same spell, with the effect changing based on whether you're Good or Evil?

Monsters: There are some monsters that have alignment-based abilities. Sprites can detect alignment using their Heart Sight; rakshasas are vulnerable to piercing damage from good-aligned creatures; demiliches and unicorns have lair traits/regional effects that affect non-evil and good creatures respectively. Planar creatures especially show these traits, which is to be expected given their stronger connections to alignment.

Items: Items show some of the more prominent alignment mechanics in the game, with items that can only be attuned to if you are of a specific alignment. This makes sense to include, or potentially to expand upon: perhaps an Evil artifact can be attuned to by a Good person, but the abilities they get are different. Alternatively, maybe their abilities are warped? A Good cleric attunes to the Evil item and now all of her healing spells instead deal necrotic damage, or only give temporary hit points?

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As a vague idea, why not have the forces of alignment be more conventional large-scale forces, like deities? We have dichotomous notions of deities in real world religions (e.g. Abrahamic God and Satan), and Forgotten Realms already has the alignments act as planar forces, so why not have gods of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos? These could in turn create the gods of dual alignments, and/or create emissaries to spread their influence - the devils, slaadi, celestials, modrons etc.

With my personal prefernce for Chaos and Law, I'd potentially go for a god/entity of each of these, which in turn have six opposing spawn (for Chaotic and Lawful good, evil, and neutral).

Alternatively, why not go the route of Avatar? Each alignment is an ideology and way of life, none perfect on their own but best seen in their interactions with one another and the balance of the four. In such a setting, Neutral may be seen as the ideal state to be in, with players traveling the land to learn about the different ways of life and their influences on the world. This could also be an interesting way of exploring how different alignments look from outside perspectives, and how they can come across in many different forms.

An important idea in such a setting to get across for me is that the prescriptive nature of character alignment is something special - it is an indication of free will and the ability to make choices. It is this that differentiates them from celestials and fiends, and this that links them to giants, dragons, and other such creatures. Whilst they may lean towards certain alignments, this isn't set in stone.

This is in contrast with extraplanar entities that directly serve the ideals of their alignment. Their alignment is a fixed state, a constant (yes, even the Chaotic entities) mindset that is unwavering. It can be confused, misled, possibly even manipulated, but their actions and personality are inherently shaped by what they are. Unlike players and other such entities, where alignment is prescriptive, these entities have descriptive alignment.

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Alignment Thresholds
Alignment is on a scale for a reason. There are degrees to which an individual shows alignment, and having thresholds is one way that players can quantify how Good or Lawful their character is.

This is akin to Ravnica's Renown rules, where completing certain actions increases your level of influence and benefits within a faction. It could also be compared to the Humanity and Path tables in Vampire, where committing certain acts influences your behaviour and abilities.

The DM would have a table for each alignment. On these tables are actions and modifiers - actions such as harming an innocent, forcing an ally to face the force of justice, starting a rebellion or putting yourself in harm's way to save another. When players commit an action, the DM can alter the number of points they have on the alignment axis. You need a minimum number of points to be classified as an alignment; under this you count as Neutral.

Upon reaching certain point thresholds, different boons become available to you. These range from being more amiable with creatures of the same alignment to actual abilities based on the tenants of your alignment. They should ideally be beneficial to both martial and spellcasting classes, and have some flavour based on your alignment of choice. Perhaps there could be multiple to choose from, depending on how detailed this system was.

EDIT: After some discussion, these boons should ideally be focused on non-combat aspects of the game to prevent players going specific alignments just for certain attacks or combat benefits.

If you drop below your alignment threshold, the boons you had beyond your new score are lost to you.

These boons may also be available to NPCs, giving nice flavourful mechanics to your allies and enemies, and also informing players about what kind of person or creature you're dealing with.

Alignment Factions (Rough Draft)

EDIT 17/02/19: I have spoken to a few people about this system on Discord, and we've come to the agreement that, much like the Ravnica faction system this is based on, the system predominantly benefits casters. If I come back to this in the future- which I doubt I will do unless there is a lot of interest in it- I think what I'd do instead/as well is to make some traits that players gain as they level up/commit alignment-specific deeds, similar to feats.

The following are optional semi-backgrounds, based on old D&D editions applying alignment as much more concrete concepts with mechanical influence. These would work for games where DMs want alignment to be core forces in their world- perhaps to the extent where they are manifested as gods or core elements.

When a player selects their alignment, they capitalise either good, evil, lawful, or chaotic. This trait becomes their founding alignment, which determines which alignment's traits they benefit from.

Each core alignment has a language. This language consists of body language, glints in the eye, and occasionally specific code words and dialects. These can only be spoken by those with the same alignment, and cannot be learned through other means. At the DM's discretion characters may get to learn the language of both their good-evil alignment and law-chaos alignment.

Neutral gets nothing right now because in the metaphysical war of polar ideologies, you don't get points for indecision.