On Fiends and Sympathy, a Literary Discussion

I agree with Azure in that fiends are Evil, and attempting to rationalize it is futile. They might have had a reason to be evil in life (abused as a child, fallen in the with the wrong crowd, lost a loved one, needed money, whatever), but it was still a choice that they made, and thus they ended up on the Lower Planes. Once they did, their petitioner had no recollection of the reasons for their choices, only the evil that resulted from them. The good in their souls slowly dissipated, and they became evil incarnate, fueled by more Evil. It's very unlikely that player characters would discover the person whose petitioner eventually scrambled to the top of the fiendish hierarchy to become their archenemy - that takes thousands of years and is rarely recorded. There's some rumors about Orcus' past, but that's all they are. However, despite the irredeemable nature of fiends whose Evil cannot be sympathized with or related to by even the vilest mortal, you can still make particular fiends interesting. I would argue that Shemeshka, to use your example, is interesting not because she is in any way less Evil or more rationalized in it than other Arcanaloths. Rather, she is interesting because of the very idiosyncratic details of her character, fully Evil as it is. A'kin, on the other hand, is interesting because he doesn't act traditionally Evil but nice, yet does not seem to be a raised fiend, creating a unique mystery. Using those two as examples, you could extrapolate to make any fiend completely and irrevocably Evil while still being an interesting nemesis through other means - character quirks, mystery, associations with others, goals, etc.

I would play up the pride angle. There are many stories of people wanted rule over everything to create peace, but a fiend doesn't act this way. If a fiend wants to control everything, it is to feel important (or, like Azure said, survival.) If you portrayed a highly sucessful fiend as a being who has struggled and succeed, he might be liked.

Or just don't try to make them sympathetic. Everyone loves Heath Ledger's Joker.

This is my basic gripe with the alignment sytem; we don't really have any experience with intelligent creatures motivated by evil.  The worst horrors of human civilization have been perpetrated by people acting out of anger, fear, greed, etc.  So it's difficult to construct a mental model for such behavior. 

You can gloss it over a bit by presuming that all sides involved have good propaganda systems, so that the fiends the PCs meet can claim legitimate reasons for grievance and war.  The devils are unjustly imprisoned in Hell and are exercising the right and duty of prisoners to escape.  Lower-level devils are just following orders.  The demons are taking back the essence of existence which was stolen from the Abyss to create the world.  Lower-level fiends are conscripts doing the grunt work.  ...beats me what the yugoloths are up to, I just play 'em mysterious.  Of course, all of this means that the exemplars in question are claiming to act with good reason!

Well, to me an alignment of a character is like an alignment descriptor of a spell. If you only know a spell is [Evil], you know how it interacts w/ rules regarding such spells, but not why it is [Evil]. It might be because it creates undead, because it summons Evil creatures, b/c it harms/impedes Good creatures etc. Same goes for evil characters - there is a myriad of possible reasons why "s/he's evil" applies to a given person and fiends are no different save for the fact this statement is supposed to apply to almost every one of them. 

There are two kinds of fiends:

- people who became evil in life, died and found themselves in an environment that strongly promotes Evil; they are now fiends who are Evil because every for every time they had to choose, the evil choice was the right choice and those who chose otherwise are dead

- those spawned by a lower plane itself/created by somebody start out with pre-programmed malice, then circumstances conspire that the personality they eventually develop is that of an evil person (see above, but )

"They are all evil" =/= "They are all evil for evil's sake"

And one final thought: Once you get down to it, helping people gives you a farm fuzzy feeling inside, hurting people gives you satisfaction as well (sometimes). It's a matter of which one of this feelings you like better and feel more often. Tis is my definition of good and evil.

I tried to write something for this thread when it was still fresh along these lines, but my examples always wandered everywhere. Last night's game gives a really good one though, so I'll have another stab.

So, my character is an alu-fiend brought up in Oghma's Realm, and except when she loses her temper she's a generally nice and 'good' person - this story is not about her.

She's searching the ruins of a city attacked by Graz'zt's armies for survivors - and comes across a fiend (alu-fiend ... ish) who is using the blood of a wounded paladin friend of hers to paint a fantastic mural on the wall.

We hit the dice when my character tries to disintegrate her. The artist fiend is very much 'WTF are you doing?! That could have killed me!' and takes cover behind a boulder and tries to reason with her. My character calms down enough to be reasonable (having been reminded of her other evil friend who sees nothing wrong with draining humans dry of blood, but is generally a nice person).

And then it gets *difficult* - from painterfiend's point of view - my character is being completely insane and unreasonable. And what's more - her point of view is completely valid. Once I stopped trying to turn her into dust and actually talked to her - well, it takes some warping of perspective to talk to a fiend. But painterfiend is the wronged party in this - she's the sympathetic character despite being evil and actively doing an evil thing. All she wants to do is finish her painting. I felt like a dick for trying to kill her.

So: Fiends are sympathetic if you look at it on their terms and their norms, rather than ours. That can be fairly brainbreaking to do, but once you get past the whole 'okay, yes - that's evil' thing, there's plenty of other ways in which they can be sympathetic.

You can make a fiend as evil as possible and still make it sympathetic; just give it a tragic background/history.

I don't agree with your definition of evil - I'd say evil is causing harm. I see no reason why selfishness is necessarily a bad thing, and defining evil as that misses out on a large spectrum of 'evil'. That there's the possibility of accidental evil acts in D&D/Planescape kind of rules out your definition also, I think.

Eh - it seems like you're defining them into a corner where they're necessarily unsympathetic - I don't think that's the best way to go. It's fine to have some characters that are utterly unsympathetic, but having an infinite number of them is kinda dull. I don't think their evilness needs to be compromised to make them sympathetic.

Also, I'm not sure how your post fits in with the example I gave. Painterfiend is both pure evil (by both our definitions) and sympathetic. She's sympathetic despite being evil - although I'm sure that an evil character would have no trouble sympathising with her. Her sympathetic characteristics are essentially irrelevant to her moral alignment though.

I think evil characters (or characters with evil motivations) can be sympathetic, though to me creatures that aren't choosing to be evil aren't frightening.

A sympathetic character that was done well in at least the 1st and 2nd seasons was Dexter. He is a serial killer who likes killing serial killers. This is just his MO, he isn't a hero or a good person. In fact, in some ways it is more disturbing that he aligns with an avenging angel character. It is similar to sympathising with a baatezu's code of honor or a tanar'ri's love of freedom.

Fiends can have tragic flaws, can love in a twisted way, can exhibit characteristics we admire as others said. A disciplined martial artist can be callous and evil but still be admirable. A hard working lemure who climbs his way to pitfiend status can make us feel empathy.

The key, as I see it, is Evil is a matter of degree. We all want to succeed, to have things, want to be secure in our lives, etc. Fiends might, in a twisted way, be portrayed as enviable. We might wish that a love return to us - a fiend would simply kill suitors or charm them to perform horrible acts...and then be a comforter/healer. We wouldn't do something like this, as it would horrify us...but the fiend is the one that gets the boy/girl.

I think the distinction should be made between evil characters and evil fiends. The question was in regards to fiends specifically. It's easy to imagine evil characters that are sympathetic, because we grant them their humanity and their complexity. The aren't incarnations of anything, they are beings of free will whose actions and motives are complex and unique.

Fiends on the other hand are creatures whose very nature is evil. It is not my impression in canon that fiends simply choose their position as fiends. They are simply that way. Those who violate the standard are unique in character and require unique explanations for their deviation. To suggest that fiends as a whole are sympathetic is to rewrite the Planescape mythology and to rethink what the fiends are about and what the purpose of the bloodwar is. I personally have no objection to that (one might reimagine fiends as being actually former agents of divinity turned stag and slowly corrupted in their fanatic devotion to law and chaos respectively). But the fact is, the fiends as written in canon are beings that embody evil, and consequently are only sympathetic in so far as we find certain evil acts sympathetic. The example of the character Dexter was given. Personally I don't think Dexter is truly meant to be a sympathetic character (after all, he is a violent inhuman sociopath who completely disregards any boundaries beyond his own inclination), but we can identify with the acts of violence he commits because of its target and thus rationalize the evil. Potentially, the rationalization is enough to allow us to sympathize with the evil doer. Still, this does not broadly make fiends as a class sympathetic. rather, it may give us specific reasons for rationalizing parts of their evil because we see it in ourselves, and thus can identify. If an individual fiend embodies a specific evil that we have in ourselves (such as a lust for vengance), then that fiend might become sympathetic to us by coincidence of inclination.

Evil alignment in D&D is defined by harming others unjustly. There are also specific acts that are classified as "evil". This includes animating or controlling undead creatures (simple to understand for the animating part; the undead, ESPECIALLY corporeal undead and other 'animated' dead are a danger to all living things, innocent or not, and upset the natural ecological balance in a wild habitat. You would get the exact same alignment penalty for creating a bio-agent. The rebuking part is more difficult to explain, other than that the power to rebuke undead usually comes from evil dieties and powers.)
Poison-use is also (generally) classified as evil, or at the very least non-good, at least when used against intelligent creatures. This is because poisons don't simply kill the victim, they kill it slowly and painfully. Disease-based spells are similarly evil, for the same reason that creating undead is evil; it endangers innocent lives.

Lawful Evil characters are bullies and tyrants. Unlike other evil alignments they usually have honor codes, but they are evil nonetheless. Lawful evil folks are the types who would commit an evil act, so that a 'good' result may come of it. Archtypes include school bullies, extortionists, corrupt religious leaders, and tyrants/despots. Other archtypes include the 'holier than thou' crusader/knight/etc. who views non-evil races or religions as the embodiment of evil and vows to destroy them all, 'purifying' the world. In general, genocide is an evil act unless the alignment of the race/monster in question is listed as "always ___ evil". Magneto is an example of a lawful evil character. Evil characters who commit genocide against "usually ___ evil" races (such as Magneto) tend to justify the killing of non-evil members of that race (if they believe such a thing exists) as an act of mercy. Lawful evil characters generally respect the law, but they're also all about finding loopholes and fuzzy math/words to exploit.

Neutral evil characters are what I like to call "neutral selfish". They are pure evil, but are defined (usually) by their willingness to do absolutely anything to further their own goals or desires. Archtypes include the narcissist and the sociopath. If you've ever played Chrono Trigger, Magus is a perfect example of a neutral evil character. Neutral evil characters, despite being 'pure evil', generally don't go out of their way to be evil. They may or may not harm others just for the fun of it depending on their personality (e.g. Ogremoch), though there is usually a purpose or method to their evil (most neutral evil characters only kill for fun if provoked or if having a bad day) The majority are happy to just leave people alone unless bothered-- or if harming innocents somehow advances their plans (such as a necromancer who needs innocent villagers for spell components)

Chaotic evil characters are evil and chaotic, the worst kind of evil: evil without rhyme or reason. Archtypes include thrill-killers, lust-killers, and serial killers; spree-killers. They don't live by society's rules, and they kill just for the thrill of it. Their evilness is bestial in nature; in the case of intelligent creatures, this means submitting completely to their primal urges. Many horror-movie monsters are chaotic evil (the general rule with non-intelligent creatures is that if they aren't killing sentient creatures for food or to defend territory-- that is, if they kill just to kill, then they're chaotic evil.)

Conclusion: Evil isn't simply 'harming others', it is 'harming others unjustly or excessively'. Unfortunately when it comes to lawful evil, we get into a REALLY fuzzy subjective area. Is it lawful evil to punish a thief by chopping off his hand? What about execution, when there was no witnesses to the crime or DNA evidence (thus no 100% guarantee that you're not about to execute an innocent man).

As for being sympathetic, it is quite easy to make a lawful evil character, even a devil, appear sympathetic to the audience. Again, tragedy does wonders. After all, if someone were to kill Fierna, could we really blame Belial for subjecting her killer to a slow, painful, heinous death?

Lawful evil mortals are even easier to sympathize with. Most of them, after all, have noble goals; the problem is that they use evil methods to further those goals.

""Would you say that the negative energy plane deserves to have the evil alignment trait? It is the source of undead, which are evil as you describe.""

No. Negative energy in and of itself is not evil (you will note a complete lack of the 'evil' descriptor for spells like "Chill Touch", for example.). What determines whether or not it is evil is how it is used. For instance, using Chill Touch in battle to defend oneself or another is not evil, and may actually be a good act. Using "create undead" is an evil act because it recklessly endangers other people and harms the environment.

""Is promoting industry and community development evil because it upsets the natural ecological balance?""
If done recklessly when there are other options, yes.

I've played fiends many times, not just as NPCs but as PCs as well. The first thing i have to say is that they are very very hard to get right. You can't play a CE character and run around slaughtering people unless you plan on going solo or having the good people of the world roast your hide. The same is true for LE fiends. For the most part Yugoloths stay NPCs cause i can never get into them so i'll stick with explaining these and hope it carries over.

Fiends are Evil. Got it. They are dirty, nasty, conniving little monsters. They live forever unless killed. They are infinitely patient and terribly smart...except the few stupid breeds. Now being that smart they are going to have some serious thoughts going on. Plans from centuries ago, masters that they had in the past, their orders, and personal desires are all going to be motives for everything they do. Just because they are evil does not mean that they do not learn, adapt and grow.

Dragging a fiend into a good or neutral aligned party is rough but it is fairly common in most of my lower planar campaigns since there is a need for a native guide in many cases. Prudence and risk management are the things that most of mine use to keep their nature in check. Sure, they are always nudging their companions toward the darker ways out, tempting, but they do not come right out and hit people with it.

Fiends as villains are pretty easy in my opinion. They are much like my PCs only they can get away with more. Generally they are more powerful, confident and driven than whatever PC fiends crop up. They want power at any cost and do not care who is in their way. More LE might dodge around with laws and CE may just slaughter a whole village rather than try to reason with them.

In one of the games i am in right now the chief villain has a family. His mate is his former slave and his children are all fighting over his throne. He has a whole mess of family problems to go with the killing of the PCs. Little things like that can make characters easier to identify with and more memorable to PCs and players alike. It also provides a nice bit of "networking" for your PCs should they decide to team up with whatever usurping spawn comes out on top.

In another game similar i play a Kelvezu (demon) that was formerly in the service of Grazzt. He fought his way from nothing, rose to become a blood war general and was in the end sold to a nobody. In time he killed his new master and became a free demon in his own right...blah...blah...blah... as a retired character he guards a portal to Sigil from the Prime world of Krynn (Dragonlance) and sells armor imported from the planes. He's still very evil, but he bides his time, blends in and has a deep backstory to go along with his long life. No matter how horrible he is people still find that they are cheering for him to come out on top.

Even fiends can be "humanized" without losing their flavor or darkness. The point is to focus on some of the desires, motivation and personal drive as opposed to simply "He uses Metor Swarm on the village" actions. Fiends live forever and want to continue to do so. Only the foolish are going to start razing whole prime worlds when there is a Blood War to fight and in a century a little corruption now could spawn a whole army then.

Just sayin...

You're right about my classification of the chaotic evil, Aik.

The main difference between neutral evil and chaotic evil is that well-- neutral characters will do something lawful one day and something chaotic another day.
Chaotic evil characters are defined by being more care-free and unorganized. Being unorganized is a major feature of the alignment; chaotic evil characters have trouble working with others because they don't like playing by anyone's rules, and don't like taking orders. Sure, they'll do so if they have to in order to survive, but they'll do so begrudgingly, and will likely complain (at least that's how the Tanar'ri do it).
Chaotic evil dieties and leaders are truly the worst to deal with however, since they tend to be defined by a degree of randomness. A chaotic evil diety (Lolth, Ghaunadaur) may 'reward' a devoted worshipper positively or negatively for a job-well-done depending on their whims. Ghaunadaur might turn a devoted worshipper into a non-intelligent ooze 'just because he feels like it' at the time. Neutral evil dieties aren't this reckless and usually follow more of a formula. Chaotic evil dragons are well known for 'rewarding' people and other creatures for a job-well-done by eating them. They tend not to like working with sentient creatures unless they can charm them, because they're paranoid loners. Chaotic evil characters tend to be impulsive (this can often be said of many free-spirited evil characters as well) and passionate (read: emotional).
Whereas neutral evil characters usually have no problem working with others so long as there's something in it for them, though they may have trouble resisting the temptation to backstab, sacrifice, eat, or experiment on the people they work with depending on their personality. Neutral evil is usually less emotional and more methodical. Chaotic evil characters often have problems with planning ahead.

Bottom line: Lawful and neutral evil are usually a more cold, calculating evil than chaotic evil, which is often defined by extreme emotion and recklessness. Chaotic evil characters can also be free spirits as well, you are correct.
Lawful evil characters are at least somewhat honorable and are big on following the law, on fidelity, and on keeping one's oath. Neutral evil characters follow the law and keep oaths only so long as it benefits them. Chaotic evil characters tend to abhor the ideas of laws and oaths.

This is the reason why in my game, I house-ruled mindless undead as being slightly CN instead, and set Negative as associated with Chaos and Positive as associated with Law. (I also changed the alignment requirements for positive/negative energy channeling similarly, but that was just because it's the logical conclusion from the former.)

The upcoming movie Legion may provide an example of a sympathetic fiend:

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/legion/trailer

My understanding is that God decides to end the world for its wicked ways and a devil is sent to protect the unborn anti-christ as humanity's last hope for survival in the face of divine wrath.

When a fiend is protecting you against the forces of good, he suddenly becomes rather likeable. Sure, long-term you would've been better off being destroyed than slaving away in the Hell on Earth kingdom that will come, but humans are always too short-sighted to see the big picture.

But I don't accept that there is an ultimate good and evil, and even if there is, no one can really agree on what it is. Therefore, when we apply a cosmology of good and evil in Planescape, we eliminate that amgibuity and that drama by saying "X is good and Y is evil, regardless of your opinion". Hence we get people who eat paper being evil, regardless of the fact that in reality, such conditions are caused by iron deficiencies.

But of course what a given individual wants done and not done is cultural and individual specific. How do you apply the Golden Rule for a masochist? Is it good for them to cause pain because they enjoy it? Ultimately, the Golden Rule is inherently relativistic, because it considers only the point of view of the individuals sense of right and wrong. So actually the Golden Rule can't be applied universally, and runs up against the alignment system, which says rules are speficic as to what constitutes good and evil.

The compassion one is also problematic, because it assumes that emotion is the primary vehicle for goodness. What of one who adheres to a set of moral considerations for purely rational reasons? Kantian philosophy is a moral philosophy that argues entirely against emotional considerations for moral action, since emotions are often misleading, even when a feeling is positive.

I explicitly said law and chaos are less problematic. I simply illustrated that even this dynamic has problems in that it requires behavior that is consistent to a higher abstract concept of Law and Chaos as opposed to seeing Law and Chaos as means to an end, which is really the way almost every human being actually uses these things. Most people will readily obey laws so long as they consider them to function well, but will oppose the same legal order if they see it as not serving a larger purpose. In other words, people's "lawfulness" or "chaoticness" is almost entirely situational. Very few people really advocate Law merely as an abstract principle rather than a tool that serves a given purpose.

I entirely disagree. There is no need whatsoever for the alignment system in Planescape. The conflicts can be rendered entirely as disagreements of philosophical outlook, with each side convinced their idea is right. There is no need to project a moral judgment and say Baatezu are evil and Celestials are good. It can simply be said that what separates them are their means, their goals and their outlook on life. We don't have to use an alignment system that says anything. Their beliefs, their relationships and their conflicts are still there with or without an alignment system. Human history provides us with plenty of examples without the need for alignment to bolster the narrative.

What I am saying is that the Judgment of each is absolute and contradictory. Two different people can consider themselves good and the other evil. Normally, this is just a difference of opinion. In D&D, one is right and the other wrong. I think that diminishes the conflict because it paints one side as merely petulant and the other as cosmologically correct. I say the conflict itself is a large part of the drama, and what fuels the conflict is the fact that both sides can legitimately believe that they are right and good and that the other side is vile and evil. In fact that is a pretty well established feature of human psychology. I don't like whitewashing that with simplistic moral mechanics.

While D&D as a whole, not just Planescape, has an explicitly objective moral spectrum, that doesn't mean it is as simplistic as 'X action is good while Y action is bad.' Intent and emotional state and circumstances all matter and can change the alignment of any given action in all sorts of ways.

What objectified alignments really mean in D&D is that something, whether the gods or the cosmic sorting process of the multiverse itself is able to add up the summation of your moral actions and choices during life when you die and make a determination that 'You go here.'

This doesn't eliminate ambiguity, no one can tell a mortal exactly what to do in life to end up in a specific place. Certainly listening to fiends won't get you there. A mortal who follows every instruction supplied by a sucubbus is more likely a madman headed for pandemonium or a weak-willed law-abider destined for Acheron than a sociopath on his way to the abyss. Blind obedience to an Archon's will won't get you to Mt. Celestia either, but more likely Mechanus instead, as the truly just must constantly question whether they are doing right.

This is all further complicated by the existence of the 'Neutral' side of the Good and Evil axis (a mix of law and chaos is much easier to understand). It is very, very important recognize that much of what we associate with 'evil' in modern western society qualifies as neutral in D&D. Serial murder because you're a paranoid schizophrenic: not evil at all: chaotic neutral. Mass genocide of a primitive ethnic group because you believe to your toenails they are inferior: lawful neutral. Standing on the side of a street twiddling your thumbs while a helpless beggar is beaten to death in front of you by brigands: true neutral.

Faces of Evil went into a good deal of depth to make this point: in D&D evil takes effort. You have to do horrible stuff because you can, not because you're getting a return, but simply because you like it. Low-ranking Baatezu don't scramble and scrape to gather damned souls as fast as possible and torture them just because their masters tell them to and they are terrified of failure (even though they are) but because they want to, it pleases them to do so. Every soul in Baator is there because it belongs there. It might be suffering horrible torture or spend millennia as a lemure, but deep down it believes everything if worth it for the chance to rise up and someday take the top spot of Asmodeus.

I didn't say they were intended to be meaningless. The intention behind the AD&D alignment system is to evoke the epic war of Good versus Evil in Tolkien's novels, and the more modernist, morally ambiguous Blood-Red Game between Law and Chaos in Michael Moorcock's fantasy novels. It's not supposed to be "universal," just to evoke specific fantasy tropes. Just like Gygax didn't put elves and hobbits in the game because they were appropriate for every conceivable setting; instead, he put them in there because fantasy gamers expected elves and hobbits.

The words aren't intended to be meaningless. Your complaints are meaningless, regardless of your intent. Baator is Baator whether you call the baatezu philosophy "evil" or not; the difference is purely semantic. Unless you're assuming that everyone in the multiverse speaks the same language, your fixation on the particular words used is absurd. The word for the philosophy of the Gray Waste is, in Planar Common, "evil." The yugoloths might call it something that translates better as "purity." Alignment is objective, but language is not.

Sure. Detect Evil identifies beings and intent aligned with the Lower Planes. If you assume the spell names found in the Player's Handbook are actually what the characters call the spells in-world (which is a whole other debate), then they were named by people who speak a language that characterizes this philosophy as evil.

I don't disagree. But the arrangement exists, regardless of the reasons, and it does imply that each element of the axis is equally "valid" as far as the multiverse is concerned.

No, those definitions are meaningless. If you can't wrap your head around the idea that alignments are concrete philosophies, not subjective value judgments, than you'll never understand them well enough to give a valid critique. Perhaps it would be more useful to name them "bleen" and "grue" so that you can let go of your preconceived notions.

If it helps you to think of them that way, sure, but they actually have pretty specific meanings - just not the meanings you want them to have. You seem to want evil to mean "anything I think is wrong" and good to mean "anything I think is right," and you therefore see the fact that D&D doesn't use the words that way as a "semantic trick" allowing the designers to avoid the "real" meaning of the words. Whether or not your definitions are actually the only "correct" ones is irrelevant to this discussion, so I won't belabor the issue.

The conceit of Planescape is that five primal philosophies formed the basis of an outer planar ring.

Bleen: a philosophy based on altruism and compassion, attempting - but not always succeeding - to strive for the benefit of all.

Grue: a philosophy based on hatred, the willful infliction of suffering, and the pursuit of power at the expense of others.

Rellow: a philosophy based on the idea that existence is, or should be, fundamentally ordered and capable of being systemically cataloged. Society and the security of the group is more important than individual happiness or freedom.

Yed: a philosophy based on the idea that existence is, or should be, fundamentally disordered, constantly changing, and systemic knowledge is ultimately futile. Individual freedom and choice is paramount, even at the expense of the stability and security of society as a whole.

Balance: a philosophy based on the idea that the four forces of Bleen, Grue, Rellow, and Yed must remain in a rough state of equilibrium for the cosmos to continue smoothly. Too much Bleen would create weakness and dangerous complacency; too much Grue would result in destruction. Too much Rellow and there is no progress; too much Yed and things become stagnant and sterile. There needs to be a moderate level of suffering and personal ambition. Too much of an extreme along any axis could result in the ultimate end of all things.

These five philosophies warred in the time before time, and ultimately blended to form 17 variations. Many other philosophies exist; some of these can be mapped onto the alignment grid in obvious ways, but many can't. That's okay; the Outer Planes are filled with realms that are placed arbitrarily, or for reasons having to do with themes other than the 9 alignments (for example, the Sign of One isn't based in the Beastlands because it's a neutral good with chaotic tendencies faction; none of the factions fit precisely into the alignment scheme, and this is deliberate). As the planes became more sophisticated, other philosophies and faiths came into being that had to find accommodations between one another and the five great forces, and this involves many marriages of convenience. The result is a Great Ring that is much more complex and interesting than thirteen gradations of five basic world views.

You don't have to believe that any of these philosophies are "true" in real life to accept the conceit the cosmology is based on. The five primal philosophies don't have to be obviously applicable to every religion and dogma that you can conceive of to be important in a fantasy game.

It's a fantasy game. I don't believe there are demons in real life bent on inflicting suffering because suffering and hatred are the things that they're made of. I don't believe there are unicorns and elves in real life either. But I can accept fantasy tropes as being interesting and valid in their own right within the context of the game.

Because it's a fantasy game, we don't say "bleen" and "grue." Instead, we use words like Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos because these are words with a long history in the literature of the fantastic, with strong emotional reactions associated with them. We use the words because they suggest meanings to us, meanings beyond "good is right and evil is wrong." We use words like heaven, Valhalla, purgatory, demon, archon, and hell for the same reasons - not because the way we use them are always mythologically accurate, or applicable to all cultures and all times, or because we're being true to any real-world preconceptions we may have, but because they're emotionally interesting.

And, honestly, getting hung up on those words is purely a semantic fixation. We have to call these ideas something, and words like Good and Evil are the most appropriate for the genre; in our fictional multiverse there are countless languages and perspectives, and our fictional yugoloths and giants (and countless others, on both the individual and cultural level) may observe these objective cosmic forces and come to other conclusions and give them other names. Some may name their "enlightened self-interest" Evil with a fierce pride, while others may refer to their world-view as simple hedonism or "maat." The spells that detect the essence that created the baernaloths may be commonly known as Detect Evil in the church of Pelor, but might be called "sense the sheen of the dark fathers" among the cultists of Nerull. The force is objective; the language used is not.

I don't think that's accurate, Archduke. Nothing says a character is expected to adhere rigorously to one alignment stereotype at all times. In fact, there are various mechanisms presented in different D&D supplements that assuume characters will diverge from their base alignment from time to time and allow the DM to track how far they can go. and for how long, before their alignment changes.

Every character should be more complex than what an alignment can summarize. An alignment is sinply a rough estimate of how a character relates at any one time to the underlying multiversal struggle. Experienced roleplayers should provide more sophisticated motivations as well.

No, that's not correct. The inspiration for the D&D alignment system, most especially Poul Anderson's novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, is very much centered in a multiversal struggle (the war between the forces of Law and Chaos form the book's central conflict). That was the original point of the idea, with the original three-point alignment scale taken directly from that book.

It's been done in different ways in different games. In d20 Modern, alignment represents any sort of affiliation, not necessarily a moral or ethical one. In Palladium's games, it does indeed represent a rough summary of a character's moral stance, with no cosmic connection implied. In Chaosium's Elric! game, based more closely on Michael Moorcock's novels than D&D was, a character's affiliation with Law, Chaos, or Balance is represented by a percentage score, and the various percentiles don't have to add up to 100 (they're calculated independently, and can total far more than that). But the Elric! RPG draws from some of the same major sources that D&D does, and thus alignment serves a similar purpose.

Yes, it very much was. Check out Gary Gygax's introduction to the original Deities & Demigods: "Deities & Demigods is an indispensable part of the whole of AD&D... It is integral to Dungeon Mastering a true AD&D campaign. Experienced players will immediately concur with this evaluation, for they already know how important alignment is, how necessary a deity is to the cleric, and how the interaction of the various alignments depends upon the entities that lead them." Some of that is ad copy, but it's clear that as of 1980, Gygax drew a direct line between the alignments of PCs and the way those forces worked on the greater cosmic scale.

That's why they're called alignments, and not "philosophies" or "personality templates." They represent the cosmic forces that characters are aligned with.

The alignment system and what is now known as the Great Wheel cosmology evolved simultaneously, one dependent on the other. The nine-point AD&D alignment matrix doesn't make any sense outside of it. The original article describing the nine-point alignment matrix, in the February 1976 issue of The Strategic Review magazine (the predecessor to Dragon), showed a map of the Outer Planes first (at the time including Heaven, Paradise, Elysium, Nirvana, Neutrality, Limbo, Hell, Hades, and the Abyss), listing the major planar beings (at the time Demons, Devils, Godlings, and Saints), before describing the qualities associated with the alignments themselves.

So, yes, you've got it exactly backwards.

This is a common question. The answer is that in most settings, it serves no purpose except perhaps as a crutch for those who haven't developed their characters very extensively. That's why other RPGs developed by Gary Gygax didn't include alignment.

In D&D, though, it represents how the characters are aligned with the cosmic forces that dominate the Outer Planes of existence. This is what it's meant from the beginning. It determines what a character's afterlife is, how they interact with various gods and planar beings, and - in 3rd edition - it determines various ability penalties as the character moves from plane to plane. Not every character has to choose sides in the great struggle - that's one of the reasons there's a neutral alignment, or "unaligned" in 4th edition. But for those who want to, alignment offers an mechanical way to do so.

Not particularly. Again, I think you've got it backwards. Alignment's never been meant to be more than a rough summary of a character's beliefs and actions. A good player defines the personality first, and the closest alignment is assigned afterwards, subject to revision as the character evolves over the course of the campaign.

You misunderstand me. I'm not trying to "prove" that alignment is a necessary part of any game or Planescape in particular. I'm sure you're capable of doing just fine without it. I'm correcting some genuine errors you've made about the original purpose of alignment and the history of the D&D game. It began as a setting-specific mechanic meant to tie PCs closer to the grander themes of the milieu, not a crutch or something meant to limit a character's personality or growth. Choosing an alignment is much like choosing a faction; it helps define how the character relates to the campaign setting, but you can run a game without alignments much as you can run a game without factions.

Actually, thinking of the alignments as factions explains a lot about the curiosities of the alignment system as it was originally presented. Originally, each alignment had its own language associated with it, that only characters of that alignment knew. This doesn't make any sense of alignments are simply personality types, but it makes at least some sense if alignments are planar factions with their own associated religions and nations. In Three Hearts and Three Lions, all the various races were aligned with either Law, Chaos, or neither, and it was important to know who was aligned with what because there was a war going on. In Quag Keep by Andre Norton, the very first D&D novel (written in 1978 with Gygax's close cooperation), Law and Chaos are also presented as concrete factions struggling for dominance over the world of Greyhawk, with characters openly identifying with one or the other (or neither), much like rival political parties or faiths. From that perspective, Gygax could claim that Deities & Demigods was essential to AD&D in the same way that The Factol's Manifesto is pretty essential to Planescape: because it shows who the leaders and other prominent high-ups are in the vast planar factions to which the PCs belong.

Well, I don't think it's spelled out anywhere, which is why many designers treated the concept of alignment differently than Gygax did, though Good and Evil as a celestial conflict is very evident, for example, in the Dragonlance campaign, where being good or evil very much does mean you're choosing sides in a cosmic conflict (though of course Evil turns on itself), and there's some evidence that Balance is the "proper" state of the cosmos, with neither Good nor Evil entirely in the "right." Dragonlance didn't really use the Law-Chaos axis, though.

I think 2nd edition designers in particular often forgot what alignment meant, which is why we see it used in less appropriate contexts like Dark Sun (though not in other TSR roleplaying games, so apparently all the TSR designers saw it as a D&D convention only, not something essential to all RPGs).

But I think my summary is where the concept of alignment came from, originating (I suppose) as opposing sides in Gygax's early wargames and drawing directly from the handful of fantasy novels that inspired the basis of D&D's genre conventions.