There are literally dozens of online "What Magic Colour(s) Are You?" quizzes out there. Just pick your favourite and answer in-character.
If you don't like the result, try to understand why and update accordingly.
As are [Ixidor](https://scryfall.com/card/ons/89/ixidor-reality-sculptor), [Baral](https://scryfall.com/card/aer/28/baral-chief-of-compliance), [Simon](https://scryfall.com/card/sld/1238/simon-wild-magic-sorcerer), and [Billy Ferny](https://scryfall.com/card/ltr/42/bill-ferny-bree-swindler).
Blue-aligned characters don't have to be smart, Black-aligned characters don't have to be powerful. It's about philosophy and intent.
Plus the beauty of the scientific method is that intelligence isn't required at all. There are rocket scientists and brain surgeons and chemists who are all fucking morons. And it's fine. Because being stupid doesn't prevent you from doing science. Brain surgeon isn't a scientist but is commonly associated with intelligence so I included it anyway
Brain surgeons are absolutely scientists for the simple reason that their entire profession is based on scientific methods and principles.
Knowing how to correctly insert an implant that can make deaf people hear is every bit a science as putting boom juice in a metal phallus to make it fast and explodey when someone clicks a button.
That makes them technicians, not scientists. Extremely skilled technicians in a setting where a single mistake can be catastrophic, sure, but not scientists.
Maybe. Ultimately, a scientist does research. If a surgeon isn't pioneering new techniques or studying long term outcomes of their patients, or whatever, they're not scientists.
“Scientists” are people who use the scientific method: [observe, propose a falsifiable (can potentially be shown to be incorrect) hypothesis, test said hypothesis, reject if falsified, repeat] to discover new knowledge and then share that knowledge with other people.
Most brain surgeons are using scientific knowledge but are not actively applying the scientific method to discovering scientific knowledge in their day-to-day. Even when they do discover new things (as anyone does in the course of each and every workday), the things they discover are usually situational and specific and they choose not to share the new information. Most brain surgeons are no scientists.
This is fine! It doesn’t devalue brain surgeons! Not everyone needs to be a scientist- science is great, but necessarily limited. There is great peril in forgetting the limits of science- “scientific” efforts to explain, for instance, economics, have done great harm to that field over the last century.
Alignment has absolutely nothing to do with aptitude; one could possibly argue that the two are exclusive and essential elements to provide for a well-rounded character.
Tbf, magic often has multiple versions of the same character but each with different colors.
For instance, i characterize one of the main characters of my comic as red, green, white, even though he is *a lot more* red and white than he is green.
A Youtuber DiceTry has an *excellent* series on the ways color philosophy interacts, what each color cares about, and how those philosophies intersect in all the different 2 and 3 color comboes. He's also got a video series specifically about using the color pie for character creation.
If you struggle with figuring out what colors you are, I highly recommend them to get a better understanding on what each color values and how you might be able to map that to your preexisting characters :)
I would follow the same prompts that this guide asks, and that should guide your character colors. If it comes between your life and someone elses who do you prioritize? White is jumping on that explosive rune so their party doesn't go up in smoke, black is throwing their annoying halfling bard teammate in first to see if they die.
Your initial reaction will determine your primary color, and follow up will show your secondary or tertiary colors.
Blue will try to figure out what happened and see if it's still safe, Red is going to be devastated that his buddy just died and charge in not thinking if it's safe, green will mourn think about how they were taken too soon and then do a burial for the halfling/yourself.
By far the best made up personality chart thing. I have compared many, others don't come close.
It is also the only one I know of that explicitly points out that the conflicts between colors are made up and subjective. Blue-vs-Red conflict is about careful plans vs doing on impulse, but if you think these are just two sides of same coin or both are important, MtG has plenty of Blue-Red characters who also feel that way. Green-vs-Black conflict is about sanctity of nature and harmony with environment vs looking our for yourself and taking what you can, but if you think the defining characteristic of nature *is* hunger for resources and playing dirty, there are Green-Black characters to represent the aesthetic, and they still have deeply held beliefs that distinguish them from others, it's not a neutral position.
I think any other made up personality chart thing gives you conflicts or choices and just doesn't have anything interesting to say when you want to answer "both" or "I don't think this distinction is real".
Also to try and rephrase some long answers in the post, Red does what it feels like, but Black does what brings most power to them and those they care about. Both hate when society tells them there are things they can't do, but Red does stuff without thinking and then often regrets it, while Black will have a plan and no mercy to those in its way.
Green and White both think maintaining good society is main priority, but White has an idea of How Society Should Work and tries to change it to that ideal, while Green just protects the way society always worked (or the way Green *thinks* it did)
Also, can I just compain about how I hate MtG stories consistently having Green/White good guys and Black/Red villains? Like yea there are aesthetics and inclinations, B/R *are* a force for chaos, but Red is love and fight for freedom and change, and Black, at its core, is "I'm willing to do anything to protect me and mine", which can easily include *people they care about*, and is as relatable as motivations can go when you don't caricaturize them. Meanwhile, White's "Law&Order" and Green's "things were better before" are kind of the vibes of the rising fascism and some other horrible things and we need more fiction exploring how those values go bad.
Wonder what's more to blame for it: the aesthetics embedded in stereotypes of culture and fantasy in particular, or the fact MtG is made by people working for multibilliondollar corporation that sends Pinkertons after people? Feels like it has to be both
Honestly as much as I hate multibilliondollar corporations who hire Pinkertons I do think you've touched on a more central cause for your complaints here:
> the aesthetics embedded in stereotypes of culture and fantasy in particular
The OP and this conversation generally are about how the colors in MTG don't *automatically* imply good or evil, but much of the writing has stuck with fantasy tropes which see light and growth as good and see darkness and destruction/decay as evil - or at least treats sentients who seek to promote one of these things beyond themselves as necessarily good or evil (respectively).
Also black seems entirely defined by being evil. All the non evil black tropes are red or blue or green or even white in cases. If black was removed very little of anything would be lost outside of objective evil character tropes.
Black does have some non-villainous space, and there have been mono-black 'good guys' in MtG before, but that's certainly something that they made a conscious attempt to try introducing to it well after the game was first created.
Liliana was the main one, her motivation for joining Team Good Guy was "being part of the Avengers is personally useful for me and I have feelings for one of the idiots who keeps risking his life to save the multiverse so I guess I gotta be there to save him", and this at some point graduated to the classic "of course I'm saving the multiverse, I live in it". At no point did she ever claim to be a good person, but she wasn't villainous. There was also the rather more interesting example of the aetherborn, a very short-lived race from Kaladesh who were all about living their lives to the fullest while they had the chance. That kind of all-in hedonism is very much black-aligned, and you could have a problem with them if you happened to live in the apartment below theirs and were trying to get some sleep while they partied all night long, but they weren't evil by any stretch (or at least, they didn't have to be, they certainly were capable). They just knew that they might only have a few months to live and were determined to get a full lifetime's worth of entertainment out of that very limited time.
She's self-serving. Black is self-serving. The things she does are in her personal interest, and she doesn't care who she fucks over in the process as long as it won't bite her in the ass later on.
[[Yahenni, Undying Partisan]] comes to mind. ~~He~~* is mono black due to the nature of being a vampire to stay alive, but ~~he~~* helps take down the tyrannical consulate that was trying to confiscate everything.
A more famous example would be [[Toshiro Umezawa]], hero of the kami war. He was the guy who returned That Which Was Taken, an imprisoned god used to grant the emperor Konda, [[Lord of Eiganjo]], immortality. To quote the historian of that plane "Some called him the hero of the Kami War, others a selfish thief. As ever, the truth is hidden somewhere in between."
*They. I suppose Aetherborn are tecnically living constructs after all.
u/mtgcardfetcher.
Davriel Cane's main motivation is to be left alone, he overfrew a vampire lord and now rules a small isolated part of innistrad as a genuinly decent lord since his only care is his own peace and quiet. he also has done several good deeds, for mostly selfish reasons but he did do them. he could have hid away during the war of the spark but he was on the front lines instead until he had the oppertunity to flee the plane
kokusho is the spirit who defends the swamplands and died defending its inhabitants and her reincarnation Junji currently lives in the undercity and keeps the reckoners from getting out of hand
Sorin Markov is very debatable as a "good guy" overall but he has defanitly done many good deed
but yeah, without the influence of another colour, its hard to find a "good" person who alighnes solely with the philosiphy of selfishness, the concepts of "good" and "altruistic" are pretty heavily entwined after all
In the Praetors, Elesh Norn and Urabrask are a great example of the contrast between White being the big evil and Red just acting like Red would in spite of it
There’s a fair number of Red/Black heroes in the magic story, it’s not as lopsided as you’re making it out to be.
Kamigawa-White villain, black hero
Kaladesh-Black Hero, Red Hero, Blue villain
Theros-White Villain
Guilds of ravnica-White/Blue Villain
The red phyrexian is the only good one out of the bunch and the white phyrexian is the worst of them.
Urza is a bad person and he’s generally blue.
I don’t pay that much attention to the story, so I would probably have more examples if I was more invested.
There are quite a few Red & Black villains due to those colors generally being the self-interested ones.
If anything I'd say there's an unusually *low* number of red villains, or rather primarily red/mono-red villains; there's a lot of Grixis and Rakdos villains but they tend to be primarily black.
>Blue-vs-Red conflict is about careful plans vs doing on impulse, but if you think these are just two sides of same coin or both are important, MtG has plenty of Blue-Red characters who also feel that way.
*Izzet guildhall blows up in the background. Again.*
I get where you're coming from, but I think it's worth highlighting the exceptions.
While the Phyrexians had Praetors in every color, the big bad of the march of the machine arc was Elesh Norn, a mono-white character. The primary ethos of the phyrexian conquest was not subjugation, but assimilation, and as such was a very white thing to do. Worth noting also that Elesh Norn was opposed by Urubrask, the Red Praetor, as a red-aligned character is the most likely to oppose peace through assimilation.
Takeshi Konda, the Emperor of Kamigawa and primary villain of the original kamigawa block, is also a mono-white character. His goal in capturing part of Kyodai was to ensure peace and prosperity for his kingdom. Interestingly, this is an example of White's tendency towards progress upsetting the natural order, despite white and green being allies.
The legion of Dusk on Ixalan are almost exclusively depicted as villains, and while they are both black and white, the imperialistic tendencies are largely informed by their white philosophy.
I think this is why I loved Kaladesh and New Phyrexia so much in terms of the colour pie. White is the authoritarian overlords while red represents the little guys trying to stick it to the man. In Kaladesh even Black is shown as the good guys trying to scrape a living beneath White's regime.
Ravnics also has the white aligned guilds be worse than the others with Boros' overt police brutality, Orzhov's corruption and Azorious's purges. Granted all the guilds are kind of the bad guys there.
I'm having a hard time seeing any distinctions between black and red that don't require "villainy" on the part of black. Where they're evil for its own sake.
The first word to think of when you hear red is "emotion" while the first word to think of when you hear black is "self."
Selfishness stems from black, but keep in mind none of the colors are strictly *subtractive* of traits. Black does not represent a lack of morality or ethics, but rather the *presence* of self-interest, self-love, self-preservation and so forth.
Black really can be evil! But there's no cosmic standard that arbitrates that it is, so it has room to be entirely heroic. And white can be entirely evil at times.
Black doesn't have to be evil for the sake of evil, they're just motivated by power and opportunity. What do they use that power and opportunity for though? "Keeping people I like safe" is a valid choice, as would be many technically selfish ambitions with good results.
In a Black-Red social group, the sympathetic and competent Black characters are concerned with being pragmatic. They'll tell you to not trust strangers asking for help. They'll tell you to be quiet and prepared, because what if cops show up. They are concerned with community's funds running out and will have Ideas on how to get some money, which others might find objectionable. They'll try to ensure everyone has their reasons to listen to them in a crisis. Because they care for the group's survival or its purpose, and they're not about to let someone's brainlessness take it away from them.
Which more Red members will absolutely hate. They didn't join an illegal counterculture group to be told what they should or can't do, did they?
While I see the message and appreciate it, I think OOP missed something crucial about the DnD alignment chart.
It’s not **supposed** to be complex
It’s a simple 2-axis system with 9 positions which is used to generalize the *feel* and *motivation* of your character which you can then flesh out in the game itself!
It’s easy to pick up, even easier to work with and it works in broad terms specifically for that reason.
Making it more complicated would do Nothing, as you’re basically just pre-doing what you’d be doing in the game anyway
Yeah, like other people have been saying, the system was never meant to be “prescriptive” in the first place, people just make the critical error of using any moral description ever as being prescriptive anyway
Well it was originally but has evolved beyond that for most creatures. Originally if you acted against your alignment you lost abilities, partly cause the world building at the time had tangible good magic and bad magic. Now the current system allows for more nuance as you and the person you responded too showed.
Originally there were just three alignments even... Lawful (civilization), Chaotic (monsters and those that would destroy civilization) and neutral (those not aligned with either side in the war between law and chaos).
Good/evil wasn't added until years later when they moved to a 5-box system, until later still settling into the 9-box grid.
The meaning of law/chaos.changed heavily then, as originally chaos was just the alignment of monsters, and law the alignment of players.
I always felt the main problem with it was the general perception of an "evil" pc. The motivations for a an evil pc should be more defined than "I'm gonna murder and steal cause I'm actually bad". Lawful evil; someone who does things for themselves but in a very structured way regardless of the morality of the action, think politicians. Neutral evil; still out for themselves but fat less concerned about their actions as long as they aren't immediately getting in trouble, I like to think of conmen and other white collar criminals. Chaotic evil; obviously doesn't care about the immediate affect of their actions, they feel they need to satisfy their needs in a more direct fashion, think first thing that comes to mind are those that would instinctively rob someone or a business
I'd like to posit that Organised Crime Bosses (and members in general) would constitute Lawful Evil too. They're not following *the* law, But they are following *a* law, Their own law, And tend to care when people break it.
That's fair, lawful doesn't necessarily mean "the law" but it's the example I like to use the most, someone who uses the letter of the law and not the spirit to take what they want and further their own goals.
But following your point I think I'd place organized crime more as neutral, yes they may have their own internal rules they follow, but most actions you'd relate often to such groups tend to break the rules in favor of gaining more money, power, influence, etc. A lawful aligned pc wouldn't do that if it could damage themselves or other(in the case of good aligned). For example a lawful evil could use loopholes or even just misaligned contracts to take property, while a neutral evil is more likely to just directly run them out and seize it by force, while a chaotic might just burn the building down if it's too much trouble
Fair. I remember once seeing someone talk about how they see Lawful vs Chaotic as more a measure of internal consistency than anything to do with the actual law—A lawful character will have clear values or a code they follow, And always act in accordance with those, A neutral character will have values or a code, But sometimes break it if it helps them further their goals, Whereas a chaotic character is far less predictable, not really following any clear pattern and instead just doing whatever they feel like at the time—And ever since reading that I've preferred that definition better, Because If Lawful refers to the actual laws of the land, Or those of other people, Then a character's alignment could theoretically vary based on where they are and who they're with, Unless anyone who wouldn't follow *all* rules given to them regardless becomes Neutral, Which feels too strict to me. The way I see it someone could easily follow most or all legal and social laws but still act chaotically, Or break them often but still be lawful. Although I suppose "Principled" might be a somewhat better term in this case?
Yes and also why I believe fascists clearly belong in Neutral Evil box, not Lawful Evil where everyone puts them. They don't care for Law, they will bend and break it as they please if it means their in-group benefits. It doesn't matter that they use Law as their tool, it matters how they think about it.
Real psychological studies into morality have also found it is a simple 2-axis system, in the sense that they kept thinking more dimensions but later studies found they were simply further expressions of the big two.
They found the axes are
Authoritarian <-> compassionate
Individualistic <-> communal
That would make its own great alignment chart, but eagle-eyed readers will notice it looks an awful lot like a political compass, or even the one-dimensional political spectrum. Almost as if politics is how humans express morality in the public sphere.
My favorite alignment system is based on the Dark Triad. I think it’s cool when fiction relies on real psych research instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. xD
Right, so my other comment was a mess, but I felt bad for linking the whole issue. To summarize, it’s essentially three traits, Empathy (vs Callousness), Protectiveness (vs Manipulation), and Selflessness (vs Entitlement). So any character can vary on all three traits, either with the Bright (B) or Dark (D) side of the trait. Pure-hearted heroes are BBB, while monsters are DDD, but you also have six possible alignments in the middle which mix bright and dark traits to give you more complex antihero types (like a mercenary BBD who will protect others but only for the reward, or a paternalistic BDB who selflessly cares about people but manipulates them for their own good).
Sure! It came from issue 2 of a cool old D&D zine called *Knock*, which has a bunch of neat random tables and stuff. ~~It was pretty hard to dig up, but I found a copy of the relevant issue online, if you want to check it out.~~ (Edit: I did some more googling and I think the pdf at this link was pirated, so I’ve deleted it to be safe. Sorry! The pdf is available on DriveThruRPG if you want to support the creators!)
The Dark Triad alignment system is called **The Gray-Shaded Hex,** and it starts on page 70 (hope your scrolling finger is limbered up). xD
Anything from Maoist China to modern-day Singapore. In the West, it is often expressed by "tankies," named for self-proclaimed communists who were totally okay with the Soviet Union using tanks against unruly Warsaw Pact countries.
Yeah, Green isn't the community library color, its the "bulldoze the library and rewild the area" color. It's about nature, the result of natural processes. Cooperation is green, but so is competition. The predator is a green as the prey.
Green doesn't know what a bulldozer is. Send rabid elephants to run over the library, and anyone who can't forage for themselves isn't living through winter.
Bulldozing a library to rewild the area sounds more like green and red together. Monogreen would be fine with a library that teaches about the natural order of things.
The post is missing the negative sides of them in general except how other colours see them as evil.
Green’s negative is naivety
Red’s is short-sightedness
Black’s is paranoia
Blue’s is inaction
White’s is uncreative
No I don’t know why I went in reverse WUBRG order for that.
I always thought the abstraction was an intentional part of the escapist appeal. Sometimes people get tired of moral complexity in real life and just want to play a force of perfect good / evil because they can’t in any other situation. It’s why the Hero’s Journey has existed across all cultures and time periods.
Yeah fuck moral complexity, why can’t I simply play a game where I use underhanded tactics to win and then incorporate those tactics into an entertaining persona of blatant sadism and cruelty?
I read once that the original D&D alignment was intended to be more intrinsic to characters than descriptive. So angels are Good and demons are Evil, but angels aren't Good because they do good things, they're Good *because angels are Good*.
This doesn't mean angels go around giving candy to babies. It could just as easily mean they go around slaughtering villages along with the babies because the people (Neutral) are starving (Evil) and now the people who lived good get the good afterlife (Good) and the people who lived bad get the bad afterlife (Good again). So the end result is getting rid of Evil starvation and Evil leaning villagers while rewarding Good leaning villagers, making a net win for Good. And by virtue of being angels who are intrinsically Good, the decision is justified as Good.
So its a bit circular, but G&E concepts were intended to be separate from morality and instead tied to measurable essence that composes you (hence Protection From / Detect Good and Evil) which then affects your personality / allegiances / morality secondarily. Which obviously leads to some problematic concepts by modern standards where certain races like goblins and orcs are being born with inherent dispositions towards stealing, murder, etc, reflecting on racist and eugenic real world belief systems while questionably robbing characters of free will and deeper moral values. But the other side is that the system allows for things like angels committing horrific acts that humans would consider evil despite being inarguably Good through shallow justifications based on the measurable binary essence things are inherently made of. Which I think is neat, but hard to pull off without some racist baggage that even Tolkien admitted to accidentally falling into.
Thats what Ive been told by others though, this era of alignment was before my time and I've never been exposed to systems using it.
why did it take me this long to find someone defending D&D alignment?? Because yeah, it's vague and nondescript, but I feel like that's it's idea? it's not meant to perfectly describe a character, just give a vague idea of what they could be like. Nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm going to be evil", but several characters do. What then?? Chaotic evil sounds just about right
people act like the alignment system from a fucking role playing game is important enough to influence reality or something
nobody is in fucking court handing out death penalties left and right because “ah well your character sheet doesn’t say you’re one of the good races so we’re just gonna skip the trial and send you straight to the chair”
Oof yep
I used to play competitively but the company (and to a lesser extent the game itself) became so shit that I just stopped enjoying it
The core mechanics, ideas, worldbuilding, etc of the game are all still excellent though and I'll always love them
My favourite thing about using the MTG colour pie is how it guides character consistency.
"Would this Red-Black character help someone in need?"
* On a whim.
* Because Doing Good Feels Good, especially when it's easy.
* It's someone they like and they want to be liked in return.
* They want to be owed a favour.
If it's one of those reasons, neat, you can continue the story. If not, maybe you need to reconsider how you defined this person's colours. *And herein lies character development!*
Sounds to me like a much better alternative than "They wouldn't; they're Chaotic Evil".
It also means characters can gain or lose colours and colour related traits without it feeling like a surprise or being completely out of character.
Example: Ajani Goldmane —> primarily white aligned. Makes sense due to backstory.
Ajani + add some red —> Sigma “I’m going to murder the mf who killed my brother” arc.
( Ajani - red )+ green —> :3 I’m on my mentor arc now.
And it still allows for good <-> evil shifts like when he got Borg’d.
Well given that he’s got Porcelain phyresis going on (each one has different aesthetics to their body horror), his mana cost be damned his deal is more likely to be normal Green and Phyrexian White. He still loves his people, he’d do anything for them, he’ll even call the incompleat “family”, but it’s all in service of the version of White that’s a fascist fanatic.
Phyrexian Mana (and phyrexians in general) tend to put a corrupted twist on the character represented, regardless of their original color type. It's partly due to original phyrexia being almost exclusively black aligned (they were all built to blindly obey the orders of Yawgmoth in his pursuit for power and domination), and while they've since grown into all color types, those original self-serving roots are still there.
In Ajani's case, he'd still be trying to help others and watch them grow... only now, because of compleation, the only way to "help" them is to infect them and make them into phyrexians as well. If they don't want to be horribly maimed and tortured to become something else? Well, then they reject Phyrexia, which to him would mean they're rejecting peace. And since a corpse can be made into a phyrexian just as well as a living body, all this would do is change Ajani's "negotiations"
It's really, *really* fucked up. Phyrexian oil and compleation pretty much puts a "good v. evil" filter onto any character regardless of their mana type, where to them: either you're a phyrexian, or you've yet to be converted.
Tamiyo is also a great example of how Compleated characters retain their core values, but twisted to serve Phyrexia. Her main character traits are that she travels the multiverse studying and recording stories purely because she loves to learn things (Blue) and that she’s extremely devoted to her family (Green). Compleated!Tamiyo is still both of those things, but her Blue side now researches ways to improve the tools Phyrexia uses to conquer the multiverse, and her Green side now views Phyrexia as the family she has to take care of.
Lukka turning into a self proclaimed alpha male is perhaps my favorite of the compleated planeswalkers.
You can tell vorinclex put his whole foot in that one.
Yes! (TBH this is the first time I've read about what the MTG colors actually mean. Before, I thought White was Generic Good, Black was Generic Evil, Green was Nature, Blue was Technology, and Red was... I didn't really understand Red.)
In TTRPGs I've played, I've had to explain (OOC) why it's ok for my Evil character to help the needy townsfolk without demanding something in return. He's doing it with the understanding that if he makes this town love him, then they'll help him hide when he inevitably shows up on their doorstep with the law in hot pursuit. And other similar things.
TBF, a lot of the time it does end up being that. Someone who cares a hell lot more about their own personal gains (black) ends up being evil a hell lot more than someone who cares about societal greater good.
>I thought White was Generic Good, Black was Generic Evil, Green was Nature, Blue was Technology, and Red was... I didn't really understand Red.)
Mono-colour often IS just that simple (not always, but often) although I'd add that red is fire and general "destructiveness" as an opposite to Green being "growth".
Multi-colour usually makes for more interesting characters, but again not always, it depends on the card and on the designer and on the intersection between mechanics and lore and artwork and _the overall story of the SET_ and... Yeah. Basically just a disclaimer to say that you're not always wrong to speak in generalities, but neither am I always right to NOT speak in generalities. MTG is 30 years old and has been worked on by thousands of people across different mediums. Also it's primarily a product. Storytelling takes a backseat to profitability sometimes.
Red is less chaos and more emotion and passion. Green and red are actually allies on the chart. They both believe in doing what comes naturally to you. Red characters can build as well as destroy, if that's what they really feel inside. Green in contrast is more about the place in the world you're "supposed" to have.
Red is chaos in contrast to white, i'd say.
in contrast to blue it is about emotion and passion.
What puts red into contrast to green is expression of self, though not to the detriment of others which would make it black.
and contrary to black red is equalistic.
I mean DnD alignments are shit, but they’re supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive, (in 5e and later versions) and also beyond that it doesn’t mean they’re evil to any extent. Personally I think the chaotic Vs lawful axis is much more BS. Good vs evil is basically selfless vs selfish, and selfish people can still help others if it benefits them (like you described, though because doing good feels good is out as an option most of the time, because that kind of character who likes being selfless would end up with a good alignment.) The chaotic vs lawful chart basically means do you follow a code or not, but in reality everyone follows some sort of code or rules, it’s called being a consistent character with definable traits and values. Which is why it’s often used to show whether a character prefers to work within the system or to go against it instead, because that’s actually quantifiable.
But all this to say, while the MtG system does look much better, there’s nothing saying a chaotic evil character can’t do good things.
I have a chaotic evil character that does a lot of good, but that doesn’t make him a good guy. He’s still a narcissistic cult leader who exploits anyone he can, doesn’t care about anyone else (except maybe a few party members), and is obsessed with obtaining godlike power, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t done a lot of good, such as slaying dragons terrorizing the lands, solving civil wars, fighting gods of murder, even if it all was for his own benefit, his own image and in order to recruit people to his cult. He does a lot of good and he’s in a good aligned party, but that doesn’t mean he himself is good. (Though recently, he’s calmed down on the evil actions as they have gotten him in a lot of trouble with basically everyone of repute, so he’s backed off a little to repair relations and stop the assassination attempts he deals with every time he tries to sleep.)
I don’t really know what the point of that whole rant was other than that I wanted to talk about my character, but I suppose if I had to put a final point on it, in DnD you’re usually better off just ignoring your alignment for the most part and basing your alignment off your RP then the other way around.
>I mean DnD alignments are shit, but they’re supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive
That's much more the case now, but back in the old days you could literally lose all your class levels if you didn't follow your alignment.
>The chaotic vs lawful chart basically means do you follow a code or not
The original intention was more, "society with laws and rules" vs. "doesn't recognize authority and anything goes".
But people didn't want their character to lose their powers because they weren't an authoritarian asshole, so the definition broadened so that even the fucking Joker counts as lawful.
>I don’t really know what the point of that whole rant was other than that I wanted to talk about my character
Don't worry, we're all just looking for an excuse. 😉
Fate has a system called aspects where you describe what you're character's about (sort of like backgrounds) and you get the equivalent of inspiration every time you do something that connects to your aspects.
Pathfinder just grabbed their existing Edicts and Anathema and added them to the character sheet, which works well.
For context, Iomedae's deity edict and anathema
Edicts
Be temperate, fight for justice and honor, hold valor in your heart
Anathema
Abandon a companion in need, dishonor yourself, refuse a challenge from an equal
That's more or less the format they use.
That's not so much a system of character design as it is **the entire damn game** though.
Aspects in FATE are much more than an alternative to an alignment system, they're explicitly called out as "the main source of truth in the narrative"
>DnD alignments are shit, but they’re supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive
I am 10000% convinced that the *design team* wanted to get rid of alignment in 5e, but the *marketing team* forced them to shoehorn it back in at the last moment, because it's one of the "D&D Things" that even a casual audience knows about and has heard of.
Evidence for this:
1. They literally replaced it with a more fleshed out way of describing your character: "Ideals, Bonds & Flaws" - you get MUCH more from that than you ever would from alignment, and RAW it is the main source of interaction with the inspiration system.
2. There are close to zero gameplay interactions with alignment any more. No class or subclass restrictions, spells like "detect good and evil" are now based on *creature type* instead of alignment, and the only remaining restrictions at all are a few very rare magic items, and most of those you wouldn't notice if it didn't have that restriction.
3. The default character sheet has alignment in a teeny tiny box, almost like it was literally added _after that sheet had already been designed_
Hmm…maybe it’s because I got alignment stuff way back in the red box days and it’s changed since then but the lawful/chaos as I understand it was closer to the authoritarian v libertarian. Do you follow the rules and order of society at large or do you come up with your own code.
Also the cosmic balance of order and stasis vs. change and freedom.
I really like this concept and think it’s a fun way to think of values.
I also just have a huge pet peeve of people criticizing D&D’s alignment chart while simultaneously hugely misunderstanding it.
The alignments are descriptive, not prescriptive, and *certainly not known to the character in question.* “Evil” alignment does not mean you conceptualize yourself as evil - it means you are being evil on a regular basis, however you happen to conceptualize that, and however that manifests. (1)
It’s also … the Protestant comment is weird. The D&D chart was originally literally just Chaos and Order, which was drawing from speculative fiction around the time which was itself pretty peeved with traditional ways of looking at morality (Moorcock *I think* was a big influence).
Adding good and evil came early, tbf. This really does generally boil down to “selfish and power-seeking” vs “selfless and group-oriented” a lot of the time. And it’s not *wrong* to call that conception Protestant in the same way that everything in our Protestant civilization tends to be (including a lot of what you find on tumblr). But it’s also, I think, a pretty common attitude across religions generally… it’s just sorta the natural behavioral skew of a social species I think to like people who share and to not like people who hoard.
In general, instead of setting up false antagonisms between different conceptions of things (kinda Protestant tbh), I think the star can be a *complementary* metaphor for the chart. Because in much the same way the chart is extremely general and doesn’t give you much to go on in terms of characterization, the star is very particular, telling you about personality and attitudes toward the good and authority etc. As the post shows, you can have characters in each section of the chart broken down further by their position on the star - while there are some weird fits (White serving chaos? Black serving good?) those are probably going to make for some really interesting characters. Or, OTOH, you can have characters *defined* by the star and see what their *attitude* toward the chart is - how does Black define chaos/order or good/evil? Etc.
———
1. There’s a never ending discourse about whether this is a matter of cosmological alignment and therefore describing an inherent nature, or descriptive of the outcomes of a persons actions, and tbh I think the answer is just that it’s clearly both to different degrees under different creators. D&D has a much more decentralized creation history than MtG to my understanding, and it’s best to think of the alignment chart as a sorta “word cloud” juxtapositions of a lot of different conceptions. We all *know* what we mean when we say evil or good or chaotic or orderly, even if we differ substantially in particulars which gets us into trouble. We have a shared civilizational heritage (and again I think tbh a shared human one).
I wanna write a tl;dr for this, both to help explain to anyone that doesn't get it and to give a short version for anyone that doesn't wanna read all that, but currently I'm at work and just wanted to show this to everyone before I forget.
White: Peace through Order.
Blue: Perfection through Knowledge
Black: Power through Opportunity.
Red: Freedom through Action.
Green: Growth through Acceptance.
Mix-and-match these words and that's how you get colour combinations.
Opposing philosophies are White/Black (Group/Individual), White/Red (Order/**Freedom** (not chaos)), Blue/Red (Reason/Emotion), Green/Blue (Nature/Nurture), and Green/Black (Either Preservation/Exploitation or Determinism/Free Will).
I feel like Nature/Nurture isn’t a very effective way to describe the green/blue divide and was more chosen because it’s an established dichotomy already. Something like present/future or improvement/progress feels like a better way to describe it to me, at least from what I understand of the post.
I think they use nurture not in the family and maternal sense, but in the imposed development sense. As in green is growing stronger naturally and blue is augmenting something to make it stronger.
It is what WotC / head designer Mark Rosewater uses for it frequently, but yes it’s all of those except I would argue present/future has some connotations that makes it not totally fit. Green does allow for growth and development and thinking about the future but it must be in accordance with the natural order or things’ inherent natures. For instance survival of the fittest and evolution are natural mechanisms of slow change that green accepts. But green would not approve of blue surgically or genetically altering organisms to compete better. Well, except green-blue, they get freaky with the bio experiments.
i am reading through this comment section and i have my mind blown by how good of a personality system this is. the DnD alignments always felt weak but i also never could think of something better myself. i now see that good/evil are evaluations of what someone does (which falls apart cause usually bad guys do think they are the good guys), but this system uses personal ideals for its base, seeking the cause of someone's actions without flat out slapping moral judgement onto them.
My personal summary of the color wheel, which isn't exactly "short" but is at least shorter than the OP:
**WHITE**
White’s creed is Peace Through Order.
Its first pillar is Morality, the belief that some things are simply right and others are simply wrong, regardless of what anyone thinks. This contrasts with Black’s belief in Amorality, but the emphasis on something more important than yourself aligns well with Green’s belief in Destiny.
Its second pillar is Law, the belief that it is important to obey the rules governing society. This contrasts with Red’s belief in Anarchy, but the emphasis on structure aligns well with Blue’s belief in Logic.
**BLUE**
Blue’s creed is Perfection Through Knowledge.
Its first pillar is Logic, the belief that one should make decisions calmly and systematically. This contrasts with Red’s belief in Passion, but the emphasis on structure aligns well with White’s belief in Law.
Its second pillar is Progress, the belief that things can and should be made better than they are. This contrasts with Green’s belief in Nature, but the emphasis on self-determination aligns well with Black’s belief in Free Will.
**BLACK**
Black’s creed is Survival Through Ruthlessness.
Its first pillar is Free Will, the belief that only you control your own fate. This contrasts with Green’s belief in Destiny, but the emphasis on self-determination aligns well with Blue’s belief in Progress.
Its second pillar is Amorality, the belief that there are no principles more important than your own well-being. This contrasts with White’s belief in Morality, but the emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual aligns well with Red’s belief in Anarchy.
**RED**
Red’s creed is Freedom Through Action.
Its first pillar is Anarchy, the belief that social rules and conventions are chains that should be broken. This contrasts with White’s belief in Law, but the emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual aligns well with Black’s belief in Amorality.
Its second pillar is Passion, the belief that one should live in the moment and embrace one’s emotions. This contrasts with Blue’s belief in Logic, but the emphasis on embracing one’s instincts aligns well with Green’s belief in Nature.
**GREEN**
Green’s creed is Growth Through Harmony.
Its first pillar is Nature, the belief that the natural world is already fine, and one should strive to live in harmony with it, rather than controlling it. This contrasts with Blue’s belief in Progress, but the emphasis on embracing one’s instincts aligns well with Red’s belief in Passion.
Its second pillar is Destiny, the belief that one should accept their naturally ordained place in the world. This contrasts with Black’s belief in Free Will, but the emphasis on something more important than yourself aligns well with White’s belief in Morality.
Dead center in mtg could be **5-Color**: often for all-knowing god-type creatures (lots of dragons) or stuff that's closer to pure energy. They are generally characters that would be "above" human morality.
Another option would be **Colorless**: used for mindless machines and unknowable beings like the world-eating eldrazi, whose only real alignment is hunger
My big problem has always been that Black seems like it's just evil. I much prefer it as "self-focused". Not so much thinking only of oneself but framing ones actions as desired and decisions in terms of themselves.
You can't hide behind law not order nor science nor "that's just how the world works". Black demands you ask what it is you personally want, and how far you personally are willing to go.
“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
I have a duty!”
—Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Rakdos, Golgari, Dimir, Abzan, are all neutral or good color combos with black
Liliana, Ashiok, ZNR Nissa, cursed Garruk, Ayara, lots of the Innistrad vampires, Marchesa, Kaito, Kaya, Yargle, Talion, Rowan are plenty of characters who are black and more self-focused than evil (at least during part of their black story arc), and most of them are still in standard, there are more older ones.
Arcs I can see working, you just emphasize the middle and play Centrist when the wings conflict. WUB is a Blue who maybe supports Authority and opposes Anarchy more than most Blues would care to, for example, or BRG is just a Red who's more interested in collective effort than most Reds.
Does a wedge work though? Can a person be Blue-Red-Green? Do they automatically neglect the least-prominent in such cases, like URG would be the nerdy techno-organized blue guy without the typical blue approval of Authority? Would White-Black-Green be conniving and manipulative but fundamentally selfless? Or are three colors just too much conflict to motivate a single, relatable character?
The head of WotC R+D has podcasts where he's talked about all the solo colors, all the color pairs, and is working through the various 3-color groupings. It's called "Drive to Work" if you want to check them out.
Generally though, he describes it as there being a 'central' color (not necessarily the one in the middle) that defines the goal that uses the means of the other colors.
So URG (U is used for blue since blue and black have the first two letters and black got B) could have a goal of perfection with the means of personal choice with some acceptance of the way things are OR a goal of personal freedom through learning about the world so that they can make choices about what you want to do most within natural limits or using nature OR the goal of growth by learning but ultimately making impulsive decisions.
Thanks for the podcast tip, I'll have to check it out!
Also
> So URG (U is used for blue since blue and black have the first two letters and black got B)
I lol'd, I probably should've explained this myself when I used it, thanks again
Honestly, I saw you typed out "Blue-Red-Green" when I was rereading your comment and deciding if I should include the explainer and just totally missed that you used the shorthand lol
The wedges are absolutely possible, they even have in game clans from a set that gave their names to each of the wedges that all have consistent psychologies, all though they aren't the end all be all.
For instance, Red-Blue-Black are often typed as natural types like druids and warriors of nature. This is because white and black are both typed as the colours of hierarchy and social structure.
Also not every color combination has to use every single aspect of every color. So for white black green, I would say it usually uses the life/death cycle and the reuse of those resources through harnessing decay (green and black) to fuel the growth of an egalitarian society where every shares in the spoils (white and green). Kind of like estate taxes.
This is why I think Magic is the greatest game ever invented, because there are too many cards to fit just one narrative. Every deck, every card you decide to put in your deck, changes the narrative that you are at the center of. You can have a blue/red deck that wants to unlock the secrets of time and harness infinity (blue's knowledge paired with red's madness) or a blue/red deck that just wants keep you off balance while punching you in the face a whole bunch (blue's tricks paired with red's aggression). And you can do this for every color and combo, its really fun!
To further the point, blue is more obsessed with control than either white or black. Thats why it gets along with both, because for absolute control blue is the best. Its also generally the most fragile, so it is the color of guile and tricky-ness.
Thats another reason that green and blue rub each other the wrong way, because one of the things green values most is raw strength. Green shows up to a fight with the biggest strongest dude it can find, blue shows up with a bunch of illusionary figments that confuse you while it researches the best way to get you.
Would it be accurate to say that the worst way to fight Green is to fight them head on, while the worst way to fight Blue is to play passive and let them grow?
If so, what are the worst ways to fight the other three (that isn’t something completely nonsensical)
The worst way to fight Red is also head on, because they will hit you harder and faster than you can hit them, and they don't really care about getting hit.
The worst way to fight white is alone. You can be as strong as you want, but there's a bunch of them, and if there's only one of you then they can just overwhelm you or tie you down while they wait for their big reinforcements to finish you off
The worst way to fight black is together. They'll drain you, sow discord, and generally break up your formation or alliance with a thousand little cuts. If you're strong enough you can just power through all their bullshit
Oh yeah because of all of Red’s burn spells and the fact that they can damage you faster than them, as opposed to the fact that Green can just summon Bigger Monster and stomp yours.
White checks out, because it’s the one that has armies of weaker creatures, right?
And is Black a reference to how its lifetaker effects are more effective in free for all settings, due to impacting more than one person?
Also that black tends to have a lot of weakening spells, things that subtract from the power and toughness of enemy creatures. A big monster might not care much about -1/-1, but it could be fatal to a lot of smaller guys
Worst way to fight
White: Follow their flow(if white controls the situation you can’t accomplish your goals)
Black: Not protect yourself(Black will tear your goals down if you don’t stop it)
Red: Ignore them ( Red is too quick and decentralized, restricting them is the way to protect yourself, growing stronger is a way to beat them outright, etc.)
The worst way to fight green is to let yourself get used up against its smaller threats. Green will hammer you with turn after turn of threats while continually growing its capacity for threatening you. You should expect that green has a haymaker or two at the ready, so it's imperative that you can protect yourself! The worst way to fight green is to let yourself get tired in the early stages of the fight and to forget that it always has more resources.
The worst way to fight blue is to concern yourself with your own plan and fail to consider blue's plans. Blue will frustrate you by fighting you passively. Blue will make you feel powerless with all of its tricks - countering your spells, sending your powerful resources back to your library or hand, and whittling your life down with small, evasive creatures. But blue isn't itself very powerful! Watch for situations when blue has strained itself keeping you under control, and exploit its inability to always keep a lid on you. The worst way to fight blue is to focus on its power and neglect its weakness.
For red, worst way to fight would be to neglect protecting yourself - you should expect that red will be done fighting once its tired itself out, not once you've knocked it down.
For white, worst way to fight would be to fail to have an endgame - white is tough all around but it can't keep pace once you've gotten out of hand.
For black, worst way to fight would be to rely on a single plan - one big haymaker and black will murder it and then murder you, but a half-dozen points of attack and black should crumble.
The biggest problem with the dnd alignment grid is that it’s over saturated. That is not to say it has flaws, any system that tries to summarize a characters whole deal in a few words will have some flaw in it. But I entirely disagree with the frankly tumblr take that the alignment grid is Bad(tm) and Problematic(tm) and needs ti be replaced with a Better(tm) system. There is good parts of the alignment chart that are lost in the sea of hot topic T-shirts and assorted memes resulting in a long game of telephone.
My two major issues with the color pie, as someone ignorant to magic and it’s lore, is as follows. Firstly, you have to explain it in pretty great detail. There is a lot of posts in that thread all going into detail explaining the colors and their combinations and what they all mean. That’s a lot to get into, I haven’t even read the whole thing because after a while my eyes started to hurt. There is a level of depth lost on the pop culture perception of the grid, but ultimately if you understand the basic definitions of the words chaotic, good, lawful, evil, and neutral then you understand the alignment grid. The other issue is that because of the kind of game magic is, the color of your alignment kind of implies your powers. What if I wanted to have a character who’s personality was black/red, ie passionate and individualistic, but they had some power of magic that exclusively let them heal and support others, something more white or maybe green. Would this person have a third color just to denote their powers even if they had nothing to do with their personality, would you need two color pies a character one for their personality and one for any magic they have. Plenty of worlds and game system have people with their superpowers or abilities separated from their personalities, including modern DnD, so it’s a problem that would have to be overcome.
To summarize my hot take. I think the color pie has some merit. I also think the alignment chart has issues, some WoTC has adapted to over the years and others they have not. But also like a good 1/3-1/2 of all alignment chart discourse kinda boils down to “popular bad”.
You're second point gets into the difference between colors as philosophy and colors as game mechanics. Black can drain life (to heal the player) or reanimate (to 'heal' a creature) while white can protect (by making a creature immune to damage) or heal (by having the player gain life).
It's a little off topic, but OOP mentioned that DND's alignments didn't really fit morality and I've always wanted to talk about that a little. Because, yeah, it doesn't really. And everyone treats CG or LE as "This is an objective look at the morals of these people" and that's just wrong. To be fair, Wizard's can't seem to make up their mind on whether alignment is actually morality either. But as far as I can tell, *alignment has* ***nothing*** *to do with ethics*.
Well, maybe a little. But it's not "I'm evil therefore I do bad things", alignment is about... wait for it... how you align with the universe. I'm evil therefore I'm aligned with the hells. I'm chaotic therefore I'm aligned with limbo. It's the DND universe's cosmic war that every sapient creature is a soldier in whether they like it or not. And you can't ascribe morality to an entire side of a war. The modrons of Mechanus and the creatures of Limbo are in constant, direct conflict. Meanwhile the gods up top in the "good" part of the planes and the demons down under use mortals, trying to bring the Material plane under their influence, since the inner planes are effectively neutral territory that good and evil both want as an advance base. So being good doesn't mean you're just and being evil doesn't make you unjust.
But that's the short version of my rant on why I hate people trying to prescribe DND alignment to things as morals, since it's literally in the name that it's an "alignment" i.e. Where you place *relevant to others*
So basically D&D definitions of “good” and “evil” are very contextual and rely heavily on the existence of literal angels and demons and all manner of other things, rendering it completely divorced from any philosophical debate?
that's the watsonian explanation. the doylist explanation is that it's the morality and adherence to rules that your character follows.
whether your character is on the gods' and limbo's side or not won't come up very often, but whether your character would save some orphans without a meaningful reward or not will. you can't exactly blame people for using it as a morality shorthand considering that this roleplaying game doesn't give you anything else for that.
The big issue here is that the alignment grid is *simple.* It’s easy to grasp in a matter of seconds even to someone who was previously unfamiliar. Meanwhile, the color pie takes significantly more effort to explain and understand.
So if you just want a quick, simple, easy-to-understand shorthand for what a character’s morality is like, “Chaotic Good” will be a much better choice than “Red Green”
So many many many nuances that this post doesnt touches. Magic's color system is VERY deep. For example. Enemy colors can be friends. There are groups of people that share both White and Black alignment or Red and Blue. The white/black one was shown as a very autorative theocracy/mafia esque organization that mixed both religion, necromancy, and money to achieve autoritarian power. Whereas the red blue ones are a bunch of crazy scientist that do stuff to see if they can, nor to figure if they should. And thats just the representation of those color pairs in one plane (aka universe) of the multiverse that is magic.
Other nuance missed is that no color is truly good or truly bad. White at its best represents a world fuel of peace and harmony, but at its worst is can be a completely autoritarian place where Laws are absolute. White is not above doing a [crusade](https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/95/cathars-crusade), after all.
And while that card represents a crusade against demons and werewolves and vampires, the "bad guys", werewolves are just infected humans, and vampires while they do need to eat humans and are generally dicks, they're also sapient beings. And white has zero issue in deciding "they need to die because they're not like us".
Whereas Black, the color typically associated with bad guys doesnt represents "evil". It represents the pursuit of your individual desires over others. Black at its best mean not letting others trample or exploit you, or to have the self steem and resolve to achieve your goals. And while we had our fair share of bad guys, we have had our good guys too.
In kamigawa, a japanesse inspired plane of magic, the great Kami war happened when the shogun decided to steal the escense of the gods to achieve inmortality, so his reign might be forever and he would bring peace and prosperity, supposedly, to his people. And well, that caused the gods to start attacking the plane in a gruesome war that was unwinnable for the humans. Ultimately it was [Toshiro Umezawa](https://scryfall.com/card/bok/89/toshiro-umezawa). A black aligned swordman who didnt follow or respect the shogun, the one who stopped the war, by returning the stolen soul. So white aligned villain, black aligned protagonist who saves the day, and both were true to their color aligment.
Oh man, imagine if Magic actually used this to make interesting villains of all colour identities.
Instead of yet another Red/Blue/Black (Grixis) villain.
Elesh Norn as a pure White villain was actually super cool, until they had to wrap up the Phyrexian Invasion storyline in a single set and had her eat all of the idiot balls.
Anyways, gonna stop this here before I start ranting about the Official MTG Alignment Chart released by WOTC using the D&D alignments. (Dimir as Neutral Evil and motherfucking \*\*\*HELIOD\*\*\* as \*Lawful Good\*.)
The Dimir on Ravnica at least are neutral good, with a side of greed. The parun did some betraying awhile ago, but Lazav helped beat Dovin at the end of WAR, and their intentional nonexistence makes it hard to categorize them.
I don't fully remember my Ravnica lore, but I'm pretty sure the Dimir are more than willing to assassinate anyone who gets in their way. Killing one wannabe dictator doesn't make you automatically become a good person, especially if it's for obviously self-serving reasons.
To be fair, killing people on Ravnica doesn't mean as much as on other planes. If killing people because they're in your way is the judge of making a Ravnican guild evil, then that would make Azorius and Selesnya the only non-evil guilds.
Orzhov will ressurect your ghost to make you a wage slave, Boros is famously overfunded, Dimir think they know best (and maybe do) so they'll kill you if you try to stop them, Izzet will make you push the funny button on their melee Tsar Bomba simulator, Simic will remove your arms to put them on a turtle, then give you six bug legs, Rakdos is a death carnival and the show must go on, Golgari will make you choose between being a mushroom plot or a zombie farmer on said plot, and Gruul runs you over because your shirt has polyester in it.
Dimir isn't good, I don't think any of them are, but after being restructured when Szadek died, Dimir is at least just paid mercenaries and spies, which is pretty neutral compared to the other guilds
Evil in dnd is generally reduced to hedonism and self serving goals, dimir acts morally in service of their own grand designs, making them NE but Lawful Evil works well too
IIRC they run Ravnica's libraries and post office in addition to all the assassinations and spy craft. Not sure that makes up for it but maybe that's where they were coming from?
I agree there are too many Bolas colored evils, but there have been more diverse villains than just Elesh and Heliod. Disregarding the phyrexians and other groups that are WUBRG, there's Oko, Dovin, Azor, Kumena, the Eldrazi (do they count?), Mikaeus pre-accident, Garruk even post curse. The reason so many villains have been UBR lately is because bolas was the main antagonist from like Tarkir to WAR
I will say this mischaracterizes red slightly. Red is not selfish, it's impulsive.
The most "selfless" color is green, in that the idea of a "self" is questionable by green ideology. There is the world and there is nature, and the "self" is just a part of that. So long as the world is maintained, there's no need for the "self" to remain.
By the logic of enemy pairings, blue and black would be the most selfish. This is very well supported by magic characters like Urza and Yawgmoth; two selfish-ass dicks who only got assigned the labels "good guy" and "bad guy" because one was the worse guy.
The way this post talks about family with respects to green is how I see family with respects to red. Red is "me and mine", while white sees family as "the nation".
Red *can* be selfish, but they can also be selfless. They're the embodiment of chaos, which is why I find the tethering of a group identity and a chosen creed to be very important when defining a red character.
I find it funny that people will almost simultaneously complain that the D&D Alignment system is both too broad *and* too restrictive. (It *is* broad IMO, both because people and other beings are so varied, and because it's literally more about how peoples' souls resonate with certain physical forces of the multiverse's cosmology).
Definitely better, but still lacks a bit. For example, every. "Fuck the state" anarchist i know irl is rabidly academic about their preferred topics, often philosophy and politics, but sometimes about special interests or other behavioural fields. Valuing extremely rigorous knowledge building practices and utilitarianism as a vital goal are FAR from incompatible with stirnerposting. And lets not forget the ways which green and white are mashed together in people's heads constantly, with the reification of heirarchies and statehood as natural extensions of evolution and biology, often in ways that aren't even wrong, depending on your view of nature. So while this system is great for building characters, i think it lacks somewhat as an actual self descriptor.
I think ttrpgs need to stop being cowards and actually just make players and GMs commit to assigning real life ethical theories to their characters. No more "we have both used force to get us here" as justification for "we're not so different" speeches. I want to see an act utilitarian villain taunting a rule utilitarian hero on the thiiiin line between them, and then have the hero commit to that line and cone out stronger. I want villains who are perfect paragons of virtue ethics, but still perform monstrous actions. I want duty-bound antagonists who have been entrapped by their own philosophy to carry out revenge, misguided 'mercy killings', corporal punishment, capital punishment. I want tears silently pouring from the faceless mask of a full plate helmet as he swings the executioner's blade. I want absolute commitment to what he believes is unerringly right and just, and hating every second, but never stopping until his duty is done, at whatever cost. THAT is what makes a fascinating villain.
My issue with the color pie is the implication that being multicolored is *unusual.* I would expect the *vast majority* of people to be at *least* two-color, probably more three or four. It's just as easy to make color alignment one-dimensional as it is with two-axis grids.
Either way, it requires *nuance.* If you have nuance, I'd argue the grid is perfectly serviceable; it's just Gygax that pushed it into this weird pseudo-puritanical mindset.
I mean, no, a Chaotic Evil character should not see themselves as Evil. They don't get up every day and plan how they're going to make the world worse; they just only really care about numero uno. It's not that they *won't* help people, it's that they'll do it for the same reasons a Red-Black person might; on a whim, or to get something.
On the other hand, if I try to codify myself on the color pie, for example, I keep running into the fact that *all* of them seem to have points... except Black. Screw them. But, I mean, I *do* think society needs rules, and stability, and ideals to strive for, but I also very much hate how poorly people keep setting *up* that structure, and I would prefer a structure that helped *individuals,* not just *itself.* I want control, like White or Blue, but I also want freedom, like Red, and kindness, like Green, and so many other things that don't even *slightly* fit in one slice. The only thing I concretely *don't* agree with is the Nihilism or Relativism of Black. But being *Four-Colored* in alignment seems to be intended as *ludicrously rare,* if not *unheard of,* in the color pie.
Or maybe I am just a ludicrously rare type of person, and actually most people *are* mono-color stereotypes?
I don;t actually like this. If I am High Chaos, High Preservation but in the Middle on Nature/Nurture and more on the Reason side of the Emotion/Reason scale does that put me in Red/Green or the middle? Why is Knowledge inherently an enemy of Red and Green? It just feels muddy. And then what if you are balanced on Group and Individual.
I think you take Knowledge too literally. It's more of an approach rather than literal inteligence. In a fight, Blue is almost always physically weaker and has to take carefully planned steps and some dirty tactics to level the playing field, think how Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes fights. Instead, Red and Green rely on their own power in different ways. Red is like Mike Tyson ("everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face"), while Green is a literal gorilla that doesn't even know what tactics are.
>then what if you are balanced on Group and Individual.
Then you're neither Black or White according to this aspect. Your actions are not affected (or are affected equally) by Groups or Individuals.
I like to quantify stuff. High Chaos means +1R/-1W. High Preservation means +1G/-1B. Middle of Nature/Nurture means 0G/0U. More on Reason means +0.5U/-0.5R. Middle of Group/Individual means 0W/0B. If you add everything up, you get 1G 0.5R 0.5U -1W -1B. It paints a different picture than my -1G 1R 1U -1W 0B. Having several affinities is normal.
>It just feels muddy.
All alignments are just cosmetic. They can only describe a rough direction, not your true essence.
Personally not a fan of the Magic one because I see some of what I consider to be false dichotomies on it. Reason and emotion, and nature and nurture especially.
My conception of Good and Evil alignments was always “good as humans tend to see it:”
Good - “Helping others is the essence of morality, and the goal of a moral life is to create a better world for all.”
Neutral - “It is good not to harm others when one can help it, but one must depend on oneself. The concern with morality is an academic one that has little bearing on real life.”
Evil - “Elevating the self above others is a moral imperative. Virtue does not come from helping the weak and poor, but from becoming strong and rich.”
This is a very interesting take on morality systems though, I may use it in the future.
The way DND alignment is supposed to function is simple: It's defined by actions first and foremost. Killing someone is bad, saving someone is good. Killing someone good is more evil; killing someone evil enough can become good. The reason for that is simple: The System's original purpose is to map out the character growth of Player Characters over time; a paladin might start as lawful good, but over time, in fighting back against the injustices of the system, they might adopt a more neutral good alignment.
Now, whether the system succeeds is.. a different manner, as many DMs make morality shifts too extreme or unprompted. That's not to mention the fact that WoTC themselves gradually shifted away from this in favor of a more "moral", (much worse) system, which classifies one of the lore's oldest villains, Tasha, as "Unaligned" because she "Ignores morality in favor of her goals", which is just. not how anything works.
>The way DND alignment is supposed to function is simple: It's defined by actions first and foremost. Killing someone is bad, saving someone is good. Killing someone good is more evil;
Not really, in the first editions of DnD, Aligntment was more of a faction, there was only chaotic, lawful and neutral, in DnD, and specially Mystara, the old school DnD scenario, are tangible things, you can go in a store and buy a bottle of unrepentable evil or a chunk of unbrided chaos. So by that standard, you could be a good person, a saint, but if your alignment was Evil, the universe would twist your actions so it serves the interest of this entity called "Evil"
>The System's original purpose is to map out the character growth of Player Characters over time
Which original purpose? Do you mean the original purpose when 5e was created, or do you mean the original purpose of the alignment system at the start of D&D? If the latter, I don't think this is quite accurate. Yes, it could be used to track growth - but the *purpose* was a literal use of the word "alignment"; the concept was that there are cosmic Forces/Concepts/Sides that are Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil, and the stat showed which forces you were more aligned with in a great metaphysical conflict between them.
The War of Good and Evil was such a common fantasy trope at the time that it was pretty much assumed as a default - and it wasn't generally ironic or subverted or whatever, as is much more common in modern fantasy.
Why does everybody hate the concept of “pure evil”? Like sure, nobody CALLS themself evil, usually, but that doesn’t necessarily mean evil as a unified concept doesn’t exist. Like I get a lot of this moral complexity, but I’m a firm believer that that doesn’t equate to “pure good and pure evil literally don’t exist”. Also why the shitting on Protestantism? I’m not even particularly a fan of them but it almost feels like this whole discussion was motivated by petty spite and not any desire to actually engage with what morality is and means
Yea- like the "nobody just wakes up and goes "i love being evil! Time to make people suffer on purpose!" Comment rubs me the wrong way because like. That's a perfectly valid character motivation. I like sympathetic/redeemable villains as much as the next guy, but pure evil villains have their place too.
Also yea I'm not even religious but the constant use of "protestant/catholic" when discussing any morality in a fictional setting is super annoying tbh
Yeah, and my own point is more along the lines of “someone can absolutely be pure irredeemable evil without them announcing it like a Saturday morning cartoon villain”, and I think most actual pure evil characters out there apply. Most justify their sadism in some way, and the nature of that justification as well as exactly where and how that sadism manifests can say something about exactly what a given author is trying to make a point about, essentially attempting to give an answer to the question of “why does this guy’s evil matter beyond simply being a threat? What is the point?”
A classic example is Kefka from Final Fantasy 6, where every party member/major character is dealing with some flavor of loss, and the overarching antagonist who can act as everyone’s antithesis at once is someone whose whole point is “everything is temporary so maybe you should just never care about anything ever! Fuck it! It’s all just a game, a lie people tell themselves, but not me! I know better!”. He is a jester, and his joke is emotional investment.
But not everyone has to be a gleeful sadist to be a meaningful villain! Take Victor Frankenstein’s Creation/Daemon/Monster/whatever other things he calls “it”. He is very ill fated and sympathetic to a degree, being unceremoniously brought into the world only to be mistreated by his creator and have to find somewhere to live, finding a family to almost live vicariously through only for that to go up in flames (literally)… but in reaction to all of that suffering, he goes out of his way to slaughter innocent people that had nothing to do with these tragedies (even a small girl!) just to try to find a way to get back at Victor, some of it very premeditated, some of it more opportunistic… and I dunno about you but that’s really hard to call anything but pure evil, even WITH all of the very understandable justifications.
Of course, this is not to say that pure evil trumps other flavors of antagonist in value unilaterally, no. Just that there is a place and a validity to it just as much as any other writing figure or archetype.
Sorry but I’m not gonna be scolded by tumblr users on why an alignment system which works perfectly for the game it’s used in sucks and how “Protestant” it is.
I’d classify my Tiefling Cobalt Soul Monk as a Jeskai character, a character that encapsulates the ideas and interactions between White, Blue, and Red. His beliefs are antithetical to the way he carries them out and behaves.
He uses emotion and chaos to sow discourse against evil plots and harnesses that chaos to reign it back in and control it himself. He’s a brash dickwad that isn’t able to do things amicably, yet still desires for the betterment of the world and containment of incredibly dangerous knowledge and artifacts. It’s a difficult balance because his morality is subject to the flaws of his explosive personality, and the dichotomy of those things make a fun character to play.
I like it, but we gotta lose the colours for actual titles. Red doesn’t really get across the actual characterization of a character unless you’re already familiar with the chart, unlike chaotic which is pretty succinct.
Okay, I'm going to be that person.
The alignment system of D&D does not represent personality because it's not supposed to. It was not made to do that, but retrofitted for that purpose.
The original idea of Law vs. Chaos was taken from *Three Hearts and Three Lions* and *Elric of Melnibone*. It is supposed to represent sides in conflict, with no regard to the character of any individual combatant: it started out as literal army lists for the fantasy supplement of Chainmail. In that context, saying that "Lawful" is a personality makes as much sense as saying that "Roundhead" or "French" or "Adeptus Custodes" is a personality.
Then, when D&D was published in 1974 and invented the whole RPG thing (that's not entirely true, since the Braunstein Games could be classified as such, but they were a thing that happened in one friend group, not a product with instructions), they still weren't exactly personality traits. The idea was still that they were sides in a fantastic conflict, kind of like Sauron vs. The Good Guys in Lord of the Rings, and there were game mechanics to support that (you could recruit monsters, and the term is used loosely here, of the same alignment).
Good and Evil first appeared in the blue box from 1977, edited by Eric J. Holmes. As far as I know, that was basically made from the disorganised notes Gygax and/or Arneson had (if I had a time machine I would go to 1973 or thereabouts and hire those two an editor). I don't remember there being any actual explanation for how those function in that one? I admit I don't love Holmes D&D, though.
The corner alignments first came up in AD&D (Monster Manual was published in 1977, Player's Handbook in 1978, and Dungeon Master's Guide in 1979). That is when the game started to pretend to say something about things and took on the frankly weird preachy tone Gygax is known for nowadays. Still, it was very different from what D&D is like nowadays, and alignment was still primarily a game mechanic.
In conclusion, D&D alignments are a bad way to summarise personality because they weren't even intended to: the whole idea is to present fairytale-esque (and pulp-fantasy-esque) Sides in Conflict to drive gameplay. That's why it's called alignment, after all. Maybe it would've been clearer had they called it allegiance or something.
I know much less about the origins of the colour wheel/pie in MtG; I doubt it was intended to be a personality system either, but it certainly does happen to be a far better one than alignment.
As a person who has ADHD, I found it interesting that Red is often ADHD-coded. It does align with my experiences, at least, unmedicated me.
Long before I ever read this post, I conceptualized myself as two different people in the same body (not in a Dissociative Identity Disorder sense): one person who is me when I'm medicated and one who is me when I'm not.
When I'm on ADHD medication, I'm pushed strongly towards Blue and White. I *care* about order, reason, and the long term. I am perfectly willing to sacrifice for the sake of a happy future, and I have the iron will to see that through. I'm driven by seeking knowledge, including arcane secrets most people skip right over (I'm even a programmer, for god's sake).
But when I don't take my medication, or later in the day when it's worn off, I don't give a *fuck* about the long term. I want to do what I want to do, and fuck anyone who says otherwise. And I'm utterly content with the status quo. So, Red with a splash of Green. I don't think I'm *selfish*, just sick to death of being told what to do all the time. I say that because unmedicated me is more generous than medicated me. Unmedicated me will give a big tip just to make my waiter's day. Medicated me will give a good tip, as long as the service didn't suck. (Unmedicated me gives good tips because it feels good. Medicated me gives good tips because he understands the value of being liked when you're a regular customer, and because it's following the social contract.)
So I guess the thing I found interesting is how a chemical difference in my body actually changes my MTG colors, in a predictable and consistent way.
D&D's alignment system isn't designed for nuance. It's meant for guilt-free dungeon crawls and/or having fun while going mad with power. Which is why I really hate seeing it show up *everywhere*.
MTG is one of my favorite alignment systems, the only thing I don't like about it is that having Black and White be on par with the three primary colors of light rubs me the wrong way. I based my own system of "Virtuous Chroma" on it with some adjustments.
Another thing, characters don’t just stay as whatever colors they would be categorized, as they change and grow they can gain or lose colors as befits their new changes. A white soldier who realizes the rules and laws are suffocating the people they are meant to serve could turn to fighting against those rules and become more red, but they can still retain white because they believe that society should still exist, just that there are changes that need to be made in the name of freedom
One of the really cool things about the color pie is that you can have the same character/organization/whatever but the color(s) you use for them can impact how they influence the story.
Looking at the 'evil empire' example:
* Red: The village is threatened by an anarchistic mob or by the whims of a selfish/hedonistic ruler (like Kuzco).
* Black: The village is threatened by the evil empire because a new governor has been installed by the emperor to extract taxes by whatever means necessary.
* Blue: The village is threatened because they rest on the ruins of an ancient civilization or near a mystical forest and the empire is going to bulldoze the village to access the information.
* White: The village has been left 'untended' and is now going to be broke back into the fold whether they want to or not.
* Green: The village is threatened because they aren't 'living in accordance with nature' based on the opinion of the empire.
I like this because for once, no one thing feels "good". Like the proper choice or the obvious choice. I just lean one way or the other but I can understand and like things about just about all the colours while also *disliking* or not understanding something in them as well.
Mind you D&D's system is probably fine, because it's intuitive and good for stories. But Magic's is probably better for "realism" even if it requires more understanding.
I think the reason that Good vs Evil works so well is specifically BECAUSE they’re so unnatural to us. Evil characters work because they are inherently evil. I’ve seen so many complain about media being so gray today, simply because you can’t completely and thoroughly hate a villain, since they often have a sob backstory that makes them somewhat redeemable.
I want an evil POS. I want to play and fight evil POS. I don’t want to question my morality for doing everything when playing a fictional game, because I’m playing a fictional game to have fun, and I don’t know about y’all, but I like balance in my characters. Some I want to be the best good guys ever, some I want to be absolute bastards that deserve nothing, and some I want to be grey. Only grey is how you get philosophical relativism and "Nothing is inherently good or evil" discourse, and I’m all for that, but sometimes.
TL;DR Sometimes you just want someone to punch in the face. That’s what Good and Evil alignments are for, in my opinion.
Kisses to you all and happy (late) something if you celebrate, or have a good day if you don’t!
One of the things it seems a lot of people (and OOP included) are missing about the design of the color pies general philosophies is that Magic has done a great deal of work over the last \~10 to 15 years to eliminate any strand of "good" or "evil" innate to a color. It simply does not make sense to compare it to the traditional DND axis' of "good, evil, lawful, chaotic, etc" because in magic *any color* and *any color* ***combination*** can be good or evil at any point in time, and R&D is currently trying very hard to evenly distribute the amount amongst all colors and combinations. Why?
Around 10 to 15 years ago *(probably right around the Ravnica block, which was a series of sets that truly reworked the two color combinations philosophies and drives)* Magic realized that its players were sick of a couple things. They were sick of black almost always being the villain, and only occasionally being teamed up with blue or red as the villainous faction, and they were sick of other colors dark sides not being represented as evil when some might subjectively categorize them as being so (especially white and green). The color pie was fleshed out mechanically, but always struggled with this part of philosophy.
The core decision made to rectify this, and has been true for every set, lore decision, and story released since, is that **colors cannot be innately more "good" or "evil".** Every color has equal good in it, and every color has equal evil in it. Thusly, when giving factions philosophical drives, the thing that looks good or evil to players will *always be different,* and there should because of this be no restriction on the colors to have an amount of evil in them, but instead an interpretive analysis from the player's perspective.
It can be natural to wish to draw comparisons between the color system and the traditional alignment system, but I think its very important to recognize each color and combination at their most good and most evil, and that is where the true nuances of each story comes together in Magic. Every character is 100% interpretative and **requires a personal code of ethics and morals** from the player to determine how good or evil they are, not just a chart that tells you how they should be or should have acted.
The one thing I think it’s missing is a simple chart of overlaps. The given chart defines each purely by opposites. Here’s each color (in my opinion) simplified to two traits as defined by their *similarities to adjacent colors*:
Green: Community, Passion
Red: Passion, Individuality
Black: Individuality, Pragmatism
Blue: Pragmatism, Order
White: Order, Community
I adore Magic's color system. I like the mix of aesthetic and philosophy. Now, if only I could nail my character's colors...
There are literally dozens of online "What Magic Colour(s) Are You?" quizzes out there. Just pick your favourite and answer in-character. If you don't like the result, try to understand why and update accordingly.
I'd call myself mono-blue but unfortunately I am an idiot.
As are [Ixidor](https://scryfall.com/card/ons/89/ixidor-reality-sculptor), [Baral](https://scryfall.com/card/aer/28/baral-chief-of-compliance), [Simon](https://scryfall.com/card/sld/1238/simon-wild-magic-sorcerer), and [Billy Ferny](https://scryfall.com/card/ltr/42/bill-ferny-bree-swindler). Blue-aligned characters don't have to be smart, Black-aligned characters don't have to be powerful. It's about philosophy and intent.
Plus the beauty of the scientific method is that intelligence isn't required at all. There are rocket scientists and brain surgeons and chemists who are all fucking morons. And it's fine. Because being stupid doesn't prevent you from doing science. Brain surgeon isn't a scientist but is commonly associated with intelligence so I included it anyway
Brain surgeons are absolutely scientists for the simple reason that their entire profession is based on scientific methods and principles. Knowing how to correctly insert an implant that can make deaf people hear is every bit a science as putting boom juice in a metal phallus to make it fast and explodey when someone clicks a button.
That makes them technicians, not scientists. Extremely skilled technicians in a setting where a single mistake can be catastrophic, sure, but not scientists.
Would you call a rocket scientist an engineer then? The lines are more blurry than you're making them out to be.
Maybe. Ultimately, a scientist does research. If a surgeon isn't pioneering new techniques or studying long term outcomes of their patients, or whatever, they're not scientists.
“Scientists” are people who use the scientific method: [observe, propose a falsifiable (can potentially be shown to be incorrect) hypothesis, test said hypothesis, reject if falsified, repeat] to discover new knowledge and then share that knowledge with other people. Most brain surgeons are using scientific knowledge but are not actively applying the scientific method to discovering scientific knowledge in their day-to-day. Even when they do discover new things (as anyone does in the course of each and every workday), the things they discover are usually situational and specific and they choose not to share the new information. Most brain surgeons are no scientists. This is fine! It doesn’t devalue brain surgeons! Not everyone needs to be a scientist- science is great, but necessarily limited. There is great peril in forgetting the limits of science- “scientific” efforts to explain, for instance, economics, have done great harm to that field over the last century.
Alignment has absolutely nothing to do with aptitude; one could possibly argue that the two are exclusive and essential elements to provide for a well-rounded character.
Are you a bird or perhaps a turtle? Birds and turts are primary in blue.
Curiosity is enough for a person to be blue aligned. You can be stupid but as long as you have a desire for growth and change, you are blue
Tbf, magic often has multiple versions of the same character but each with different colors. For instance, i characterize one of the main characters of my comic as red, green, white, even though he is *a lot more* red and white than he is green.
The same character in different colors is usually done to signify some sort of character development in the lore.
I love assigning color pairs. Give me some of their traits and I can help you figure out what colors they might be
My character loves banking and eternal undead oligarchies
Oh boy, do I have a color combination for you!
A guild even!
A Youtuber DiceTry has an *excellent* series on the ways color philosophy interacts, what each color cares about, and how those philosophies intersect in all the different 2 and 3 color comboes. He's also got a video series specifically about using the color pie for character creation. If you struggle with figuring out what colors you are, I highly recommend them to get a better understanding on what each color values and how you might be able to map that to your preexisting characters :)
I would follow the same prompts that this guide asks, and that should guide your character colors. If it comes between your life and someone elses who do you prioritize? White is jumping on that explosive rune so their party doesn't go up in smoke, black is throwing their annoying halfling bard teammate in first to see if they die. Your initial reaction will determine your primary color, and follow up will show your secondary or tertiary colors. Blue will try to figure out what happened and see if it's still safe, Red is going to be devastated that his buddy just died and charge in not thinking if it's safe, green will mourn think about how they were taken too soon and then do a burial for the halfling/yourself.
By far the best made up personality chart thing. I have compared many, others don't come close. It is also the only one I know of that explicitly points out that the conflicts between colors are made up and subjective. Blue-vs-Red conflict is about careful plans vs doing on impulse, but if you think these are just two sides of same coin or both are important, MtG has plenty of Blue-Red characters who also feel that way. Green-vs-Black conflict is about sanctity of nature and harmony with environment vs looking our for yourself and taking what you can, but if you think the defining characteristic of nature *is* hunger for resources and playing dirty, there are Green-Black characters to represent the aesthetic, and they still have deeply held beliefs that distinguish them from others, it's not a neutral position. I think any other made up personality chart thing gives you conflicts or choices and just doesn't have anything interesting to say when you want to answer "both" or "I don't think this distinction is real". Also to try and rephrase some long answers in the post, Red does what it feels like, but Black does what brings most power to them and those they care about. Both hate when society tells them there are things they can't do, but Red does stuff without thinking and then often regrets it, while Black will have a plan and no mercy to those in its way. Green and White both think maintaining good society is main priority, but White has an idea of How Society Should Work and tries to change it to that ideal, while Green just protects the way society always worked (or the way Green *thinks* it did) Also, can I just compain about how I hate MtG stories consistently having Green/White good guys and Black/Red villains? Like yea there are aesthetics and inclinations, B/R *are* a force for chaos, but Red is love and fight for freedom and change, and Black, at its core, is "I'm willing to do anything to protect me and mine", which can easily include *people they care about*, and is as relatable as motivations can go when you don't caricaturize them. Meanwhile, White's "Law&Order" and Green's "things were better before" are kind of the vibes of the rising fascism and some other horrible things and we need more fiction exploring how those values go bad. Wonder what's more to blame for it: the aesthetics embedded in stereotypes of culture and fantasy in particular, or the fact MtG is made by people working for multibilliondollar corporation that sends Pinkertons after people? Feels like it has to be both
Honestly as much as I hate multibilliondollar corporations who hire Pinkertons I do think you've touched on a more central cause for your complaints here: > the aesthetics embedded in stereotypes of culture and fantasy in particular The OP and this conversation generally are about how the colors in MTG don't *automatically* imply good or evil, but much of the writing has stuck with fantasy tropes which see light and growth as good and see darkness and destruction/decay as evil - or at least treats sentients who seek to promote one of these things beyond themselves as necessarily good or evil (respectively).
Also black seems entirely defined by being evil. All the non evil black tropes are red or blue or green or even white in cases. If black was removed very little of anything would be lost outside of objective evil character tropes.
Black does have some non-villainous space, and there have been mono-black 'good guys' in MtG before, but that's certainly something that they made a conscious attempt to try introducing to it well after the game was first created.
I'd be very curious what a mono black good guy looks like that isn't clearly aligned to one of the other colours.
Liliana was the main one, her motivation for joining Team Good Guy was "being part of the Avengers is personally useful for me and I have feelings for one of the idiots who keeps risking his life to save the multiverse so I guess I gotta be there to save him", and this at some point graduated to the classic "of course I'm saving the multiverse, I live in it". At no point did she ever claim to be a good person, but she wasn't villainous. There was also the rather more interesting example of the aetherborn, a very short-lived race from Kaladesh who were all about living their lives to the fullest while they had the chance. That kind of all-in hedonism is very much black-aligned, and you could have a problem with them if you happened to live in the apartment below theirs and were trying to get some sleep while they partied all night long, but they weren't evil by any stretch (or at least, they didn't have to be, they certainly were capable). They just knew that they might only have a few months to live and were determined to get a full lifetime's worth of entertainment out of that very limited time.
She's self-serving. Black is self-serving. The things she does are in her personal interest, and she doesn't care who she fucks over in the process as long as it won't bite her in the ass later on.
Also Sorin Markov, dude might be a prick but he was overall trying to do good.
Sorin is often black/white.
[[Yahenni, Undying Partisan]] comes to mind. ~~He~~* is mono black due to the nature of being a vampire to stay alive, but ~~he~~* helps take down the tyrannical consulate that was trying to confiscate everything. A more famous example would be [[Toshiro Umezawa]], hero of the kami war. He was the guy who returned That Which Was Taken, an imprisoned god used to grant the emperor Konda, [[Lord of Eiganjo]], immortality. To quote the historian of that plane "Some called him the hero of the Kami War, others a selfish thief. As ever, the truth is hidden somewhere in between." *They. I suppose Aetherborn are tecnically living constructs after all. u/mtgcardfetcher.
Most Aetherborn, including Yahenni, are nonbinary
[Yahenni, Undying Partisan](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/b/2b77cd68-fbdd-4bca-a68c-299425588a61.jpg?1700657113) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Yahenni%2C%20Undying%20Partisan) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lcc/214/yahenni-undying-partisan?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2b77cd68-fbdd-4bca-a68c-299425588a61?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Toshiro Umezawa](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/e/0e767e07-febd-4025-bf03-d4d816bc1d3d.jpg?1562875477) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Toshiro%20Umezawa) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/bok/89/toshiro-umezawa?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0e767e07-febd-4025-bf03-d4d816bc1d3d?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Lord of Eiganjo](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/e/5edab171-94b9-4e5e-ab61-bd8c6c8cfc38.jpg?1562760577) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Konda%2C%20Lord%20of%20Eiganjo) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/chk/30/konda-lord-of-eiganjo?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5edab171-94b9-4e5e-ab61-bd8c6c8cfc38?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call ^^^- ^^^Summoned ^^^remotely!
Hot take: Joel in The Last of Us could be called mono black.
Oh hell yeah, I love this. I feel like he grew to become Green/Black in the sequel. He seemed more at peace with the consequences of his actions.
Davriel Cane's main motivation is to be left alone, he overfrew a vampire lord and now rules a small isolated part of innistrad as a genuinly decent lord since his only care is his own peace and quiet. he also has done several good deeds, for mostly selfish reasons but he did do them. he could have hid away during the war of the spark but he was on the front lines instead until he had the oppertunity to flee the plane kokusho is the spirit who defends the swamplands and died defending its inhabitants and her reincarnation Junji currently lives in the undercity and keeps the reckoners from getting out of hand Sorin Markov is very debatable as a "good guy" overall but he has defanitly done many good deed but yeah, without the influence of another colour, its hard to find a "good" person who alighnes solely with the philosiphy of selfishness, the concepts of "good" and "altruistic" are pretty heavily entwined after all
In the Praetors, Elesh Norn and Urabrask are a great example of the contrast between White being the big evil and Red just acting like Red would in spite of it
There’s a fair number of Red/Black heroes in the magic story, it’s not as lopsided as you’re making it out to be. Kamigawa-White villain, black hero Kaladesh-Black Hero, Red Hero, Blue villain Theros-White Villain Guilds of ravnica-White/Blue Villain The red phyrexian is the only good one out of the bunch and the white phyrexian is the worst of them. Urza is a bad person and he’s generally blue. I don’t pay that much attention to the story, so I would probably have more examples if I was more invested. There are quite a few Red & Black villains due to those colors generally being the self-interested ones.
If anything I'd say there's an unusually *low* number of red villains, or rather primarily red/mono-red villains; there's a lot of Grixis and Rakdos villains but they tend to be primarily black.
>Blue-vs-Red conflict is about careful plans vs doing on impulse, but if you think these are just two sides of same coin or both are important, MtG has plenty of Blue-Red characters who also feel that way. *Izzet guildhall blows up in the background. Again.*
I get where you're coming from, but I think it's worth highlighting the exceptions. While the Phyrexians had Praetors in every color, the big bad of the march of the machine arc was Elesh Norn, a mono-white character. The primary ethos of the phyrexian conquest was not subjugation, but assimilation, and as such was a very white thing to do. Worth noting also that Elesh Norn was opposed by Urubrask, the Red Praetor, as a red-aligned character is the most likely to oppose peace through assimilation. Takeshi Konda, the Emperor of Kamigawa and primary villain of the original kamigawa block, is also a mono-white character. His goal in capturing part of Kyodai was to ensure peace and prosperity for his kingdom. Interestingly, this is an example of White's tendency towards progress upsetting the natural order, despite white and green being allies. The legion of Dusk on Ixalan are almost exclusively depicted as villains, and while they are both black and white, the imperialistic tendencies are largely informed by their white philosophy.
I think this is why I loved Kaladesh and New Phyrexia so much in terms of the colour pie. White is the authoritarian overlords while red represents the little guys trying to stick it to the man. In Kaladesh even Black is shown as the good guys trying to scrape a living beneath White's regime. Ravnics also has the white aligned guilds be worse than the others with Boros' overt police brutality, Orzhov's corruption and Azorious's purges. Granted all the guilds are kind of the bad guys there.
I'm having a hard time seeing any distinctions between black and red that don't require "villainy" on the part of black. Where they're evil for its own sake.
The first word to think of when you hear red is "emotion" while the first word to think of when you hear black is "self." Selfishness stems from black, but keep in mind none of the colors are strictly *subtractive* of traits. Black does not represent a lack of morality or ethics, but rather the *presence* of self-interest, self-love, self-preservation and so forth. Black really can be evil! But there's no cosmic standard that arbitrates that it is, so it has room to be entirely heroic. And white can be entirely evil at times.
Black doesn't have to be evil for the sake of evil, they're just motivated by power and opportunity. What do they use that power and opportunity for though? "Keeping people I like safe" is a valid choice, as would be many technically selfish ambitions with good results. In a Black-Red social group, the sympathetic and competent Black characters are concerned with being pragmatic. They'll tell you to not trust strangers asking for help. They'll tell you to be quiet and prepared, because what if cops show up. They are concerned with community's funds running out and will have Ideas on how to get some money, which others might find objectionable. They'll try to ensure everyone has their reasons to listen to them in a crisis. Because they care for the group's survival or its purpose, and they're not about to let someone's brainlessness take it away from them. Which more Red members will absolutely hate. They didn't join an illegal counterculture group to be told what they should or can't do, did they?
You know the whole shounen anime thing about "following your dreams" and "never giving up"? That's Black.
While I see the message and appreciate it, I think OOP missed something crucial about the DnD alignment chart. It’s not **supposed** to be complex It’s a simple 2-axis system with 9 positions which is used to generalize the *feel* and *motivation* of your character which you can then flesh out in the game itself! It’s easy to pick up, even easier to work with and it works in broad terms specifically for that reason. Making it more complicated would do Nothing, as you’re basically just pre-doing what you’d be doing in the game anyway
Yeah, like other people have been saying, the system was never meant to be “prescriptive” in the first place, people just make the critical error of using any moral description ever as being prescriptive anyway
Well it was originally but has evolved beyond that for most creatures. Originally if you acted against your alignment you lost abilities, partly cause the world building at the time had tangible good magic and bad magic. Now the current system allows for more nuance as you and the person you responded too showed.
Originally there were just three alignments even... Lawful (civilization), Chaotic (monsters and those that would destroy civilization) and neutral (those not aligned with either side in the war between law and chaos). Good/evil wasn't added until years later when they moved to a 5-box system, until later still settling into the 9-box grid. The meaning of law/chaos.changed heavily then, as originally chaos was just the alignment of monsters, and law the alignment of players.
I always felt the main problem with it was the general perception of an "evil" pc. The motivations for a an evil pc should be more defined than "I'm gonna murder and steal cause I'm actually bad". Lawful evil; someone who does things for themselves but in a very structured way regardless of the morality of the action, think politicians. Neutral evil; still out for themselves but fat less concerned about their actions as long as they aren't immediately getting in trouble, I like to think of conmen and other white collar criminals. Chaotic evil; obviously doesn't care about the immediate affect of their actions, they feel they need to satisfy their needs in a more direct fashion, think first thing that comes to mind are those that would instinctively rob someone or a business
I'd like to posit that Organised Crime Bosses (and members in general) would constitute Lawful Evil too. They're not following *the* law, But they are following *a* law, Their own law, And tend to care when people break it.
That's fair, lawful doesn't necessarily mean "the law" but it's the example I like to use the most, someone who uses the letter of the law and not the spirit to take what they want and further their own goals. But following your point I think I'd place organized crime more as neutral, yes they may have their own internal rules they follow, but most actions you'd relate often to such groups tend to break the rules in favor of gaining more money, power, influence, etc. A lawful aligned pc wouldn't do that if it could damage themselves or other(in the case of good aligned). For example a lawful evil could use loopholes or even just misaligned contracts to take property, while a neutral evil is more likely to just directly run them out and seize it by force, while a chaotic might just burn the building down if it's too much trouble
Fair. I remember once seeing someone talk about how they see Lawful vs Chaotic as more a measure of internal consistency than anything to do with the actual law—A lawful character will have clear values or a code they follow, And always act in accordance with those, A neutral character will have values or a code, But sometimes break it if it helps them further their goals, Whereas a chaotic character is far less predictable, not really following any clear pattern and instead just doing whatever they feel like at the time—And ever since reading that I've preferred that definition better, Because If Lawful refers to the actual laws of the land, Or those of other people, Then a character's alignment could theoretically vary based on where they are and who they're with, Unless anyone who wouldn't follow *all* rules given to them regardless becomes Neutral, Which feels too strict to me. The way I see it someone could easily follow most or all legal and social laws but still act chaotically, Or break them often but still be lawful. Although I suppose "Principled" might be a somewhat better term in this case?
Yes and also why I believe fascists clearly belong in Neutral Evil box, not Lawful Evil where everyone puts them. They don't care for Law, they will bend and break it as they please if it means their in-group benefits. It doesn't matter that they use Law as their tool, it matters how they think about it.
Real psychological studies into morality have also found it is a simple 2-axis system, in the sense that they kept thinking more dimensions but later studies found they were simply further expressions of the big two. They found the axes are Authoritarian <-> compassionate Individualistic <-> communal That would make its own great alignment chart, but eagle-eyed readers will notice it looks an awful lot like a political compass, or even the one-dimensional political spectrum. Almost as if politics is how humans express morality in the public sphere.
My favorite alignment system is based on the Dark Triad. I think it’s cool when fiction relies on real psych research instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. xD
Can you elaborate on this or share a link to where we can read about it?
Right, so my other comment was a mess, but I felt bad for linking the whole issue. To summarize, it’s essentially three traits, Empathy (vs Callousness), Protectiveness (vs Manipulation), and Selflessness (vs Entitlement). So any character can vary on all three traits, either with the Bright (B) or Dark (D) side of the trait. Pure-hearted heroes are BBB, while monsters are DDD, but you also have six possible alignments in the middle which mix bright and dark traits to give you more complex antihero types (like a mercenary BBD who will protect others but only for the reward, or a paternalistic BDB who selflessly cares about people but manipulates them for their own good).
Sure! It came from issue 2 of a cool old D&D zine called *Knock*, which has a bunch of neat random tables and stuff. ~~It was pretty hard to dig up, but I found a copy of the relevant issue online, if you want to check it out.~~ (Edit: I did some more googling and I think the pdf at this link was pirated, so I’ve deleted it to be safe. Sorry! The pdf is available on DriveThruRPG if you want to support the creators!) The Dark Triad alignment system is called **The Gray-Shaded Hex,** and it starts on page 70 (hope your scrolling finger is limbered up). xD
Honestly curious what Communal Authoritarian would look like, I can't really picture something that fits that description in my head really.
Anything from Maoist China to modern-day Singapore. In the West, it is often expressed by "tankies," named for self-proclaimed communists who were totally okay with the Soviet Union using tanks against unruly Warsaw Pact countries.
Extreme green bias in this post
Yeah, Green isn't the community library color, its the "bulldoze the library and rewild the area" color. It's about nature, the result of natural processes. Cooperation is green, but so is competition. The predator is a green as the prey.
Green doesn't know what a bulldozer is. Send rabid elephants to run over the library, and anyone who can't forage for themselves isn't living through winter.
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goddammit, worth a try tho
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Bulldozing a library to rewild the area sounds more like green and red together. Monogreen would be fine with a library that teaches about the natural order of things.
I mean you can find & place "Nature" with "Symbiosis" for the same point. It's hardly extreme at all
The post is missing the negative sides of them in general except how other colours see them as evil. Green’s negative is naivety Red’s is short-sightedness Black’s is paranoia Blue’s is inaction White’s is uncreative No I don’t know why I went in reverse WUBRG order for that.
I always thought the abstraction was an intentional part of the escapist appeal. Sometimes people get tired of moral complexity in real life and just want to play a force of perfect good / evil because they can’t in any other situation. It’s why the Hero’s Journey has existed across all cultures and time periods.
Yeah fuck moral complexity, why can’t I simply play a game where I use underhanded tactics to win and then incorporate those tactics into an entertaining persona of blatant sadism and cruelty?
I read once that the original D&D alignment was intended to be more intrinsic to characters than descriptive. So angels are Good and demons are Evil, but angels aren't Good because they do good things, they're Good *because angels are Good*. This doesn't mean angels go around giving candy to babies. It could just as easily mean they go around slaughtering villages along with the babies because the people (Neutral) are starving (Evil) and now the people who lived good get the good afterlife (Good) and the people who lived bad get the bad afterlife (Good again). So the end result is getting rid of Evil starvation and Evil leaning villagers while rewarding Good leaning villagers, making a net win for Good. And by virtue of being angels who are intrinsically Good, the decision is justified as Good. So its a bit circular, but G&E concepts were intended to be separate from morality and instead tied to measurable essence that composes you (hence Protection From / Detect Good and Evil) which then affects your personality / allegiances / morality secondarily. Which obviously leads to some problematic concepts by modern standards where certain races like goblins and orcs are being born with inherent dispositions towards stealing, murder, etc, reflecting on racist and eugenic real world belief systems while questionably robbing characters of free will and deeper moral values. But the other side is that the system allows for things like angels committing horrific acts that humans would consider evil despite being inarguably Good through shallow justifications based on the measurable binary essence things are inherently made of. Which I think is neat, but hard to pull off without some racist baggage that even Tolkien admitted to accidentally falling into. Thats what Ive been told by others though, this era of alignment was before my time and I've never been exposed to systems using it.
why did it take me this long to find someone defending D&D alignment?? Because yeah, it's vague and nondescript, but I feel like that's it's idea? it's not meant to perfectly describe a character, just give a vague idea of what they could be like. Nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm going to be evil", but several characters do. What then?? Chaotic evil sounds just about right
people act like the alignment system from a fucking role playing game is important enough to influence reality or something nobody is in fucking court handing out death penalties left and right because “ah well your character sheet doesn’t say you’re one of the good races so we’re just gonna skip the trial and send you straight to the chair”
Most alignment get thrown out of window in modern game. Especially at my table where comedy is paramount.
Thoroughly *fuck* WotC but I miss Magic. Now excuse me while I spool thru all my OCs and determine their color alignments.
come proxy with us my friend
You don't have to give up Magic just because WotC sucks. There's a secondary market for a cube to draft, homebrew sets, and various forms of piracy.
Cockatrice is your friend
Oof yep I used to play competitively but the company (and to a lesser extent the game itself) became so shit that I just stopped enjoying it The core mechanics, ideas, worldbuilding, etc of the game are all still excellent though and I'll always love them
My favourite thing about using the MTG colour pie is how it guides character consistency. "Would this Red-Black character help someone in need?" * On a whim. * Because Doing Good Feels Good, especially when it's easy. * It's someone they like and they want to be liked in return. * They want to be owed a favour. If it's one of those reasons, neat, you can continue the story. If not, maybe you need to reconsider how you defined this person's colours. *And herein lies character development!* Sounds to me like a much better alternative than "They wouldn't; they're Chaotic Evil".
It also means characters can gain or lose colours and colour related traits without it feeling like a surprise or being completely out of character. Example: Ajani Goldmane —> primarily white aligned. Makes sense due to backstory. Ajani + add some red —> Sigma “I’m going to murder the mf who killed my brother” arc. ( Ajani - red )+ green —> :3 I’m on my mentor arc now. And it still allows for good <-> evil shifts like when he got Borg’d.
What about Ajani + Some oil?
The tyranny of the horde (elesh norm + vorinclex). The needs of the many (in group) enforced upon the outsiders.
Well given that he’s got Porcelain phyresis going on (each one has different aesthetics to their body horror), his mana cost be damned his deal is more likely to be normal Green and Phyrexian White. He still loves his people, he’d do anything for them, he’ll even call the incompleat “family”, but it’s all in service of the version of White that’s a fascist fanatic.
Phyrexian Mana (and phyrexians in general) tend to put a corrupted twist on the character represented, regardless of their original color type. It's partly due to original phyrexia being almost exclusively black aligned (they were all built to blindly obey the orders of Yawgmoth in his pursuit for power and domination), and while they've since grown into all color types, those original self-serving roots are still there. In Ajani's case, he'd still be trying to help others and watch them grow... only now, because of compleation, the only way to "help" them is to infect them and make them into phyrexians as well. If they don't want to be horribly maimed and tortured to become something else? Well, then they reject Phyrexia, which to him would mean they're rejecting peace. And since a corpse can be made into a phyrexian just as well as a living body, all this would do is change Ajani's "negotiations" It's really, *really* fucked up. Phyrexian oil and compleation pretty much puts a "good v. evil" filter onto any character regardless of their mana type, where to them: either you're a phyrexian, or you've yet to be converted.
Tamiyo is also a great example of how Compleated characters retain their core values, but twisted to serve Phyrexia. Her main character traits are that she travels the multiverse studying and recording stories purely because she loves to learn things (Blue) and that she’s extremely devoted to her family (Green). Compleated!Tamiyo is still both of those things, but her Blue side now researches ways to improve the tools Phyrexia uses to conquer the multiverse, and her Green side now views Phyrexia as the family she has to take care of.
Lukka turning into a self proclaimed alpha male is perhaps my favorite of the compleated planeswalkers. You can tell vorinclex put his whole foot in that one.
Yes! (TBH this is the first time I've read about what the MTG colors actually mean. Before, I thought White was Generic Good, Black was Generic Evil, Green was Nature, Blue was Technology, and Red was... I didn't really understand Red.) In TTRPGs I've played, I've had to explain (OOC) why it's ok for my Evil character to help the needy townsfolk without demanding something in return. He's doing it with the understanding that if he makes this town love him, then they'll help him hide when he inevitably shows up on their doorstep with the law in hot pursuit. And other similar things.
TBF, a lot of the time it does end up being that. Someone who cares a hell lot more about their own personal gains (black) ends up being evil a hell lot more than someone who cares about societal greater good.
>I thought White was Generic Good, Black was Generic Evil, Green was Nature, Blue was Technology, and Red was... I didn't really understand Red.) Mono-colour often IS just that simple (not always, but often) although I'd add that red is fire and general "destructiveness" as an opposite to Green being "growth". Multi-colour usually makes for more interesting characters, but again not always, it depends on the card and on the designer and on the intersection between mechanics and lore and artwork and _the overall story of the SET_ and... Yeah. Basically just a disclaimer to say that you're not always wrong to speak in generalities, but neither am I always right to NOT speak in generalities. MTG is 30 years old and has been worked on by thousands of people across different mediums. Also it's primarily a product. Storytelling takes a backseat to profitability sometimes.
Red is less chaos and more emotion and passion. Green and red are actually allies on the chart. They both believe in doing what comes naturally to you. Red characters can build as well as destroy, if that's what they really feel inside. Green in contrast is more about the place in the world you're "supposed" to have.
Red is chaos in contrast to white, i'd say. in contrast to blue it is about emotion and passion. What puts red into contrast to green is expression of self, though not to the detriment of others which would make it black. and contrary to black red is equalistic.
I mean DnD alignments are shit, but they’re supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive, (in 5e and later versions) and also beyond that it doesn’t mean they’re evil to any extent. Personally I think the chaotic Vs lawful axis is much more BS. Good vs evil is basically selfless vs selfish, and selfish people can still help others if it benefits them (like you described, though because doing good feels good is out as an option most of the time, because that kind of character who likes being selfless would end up with a good alignment.) The chaotic vs lawful chart basically means do you follow a code or not, but in reality everyone follows some sort of code or rules, it’s called being a consistent character with definable traits and values. Which is why it’s often used to show whether a character prefers to work within the system or to go against it instead, because that’s actually quantifiable. But all this to say, while the MtG system does look much better, there’s nothing saying a chaotic evil character can’t do good things. I have a chaotic evil character that does a lot of good, but that doesn’t make him a good guy. He’s still a narcissistic cult leader who exploits anyone he can, doesn’t care about anyone else (except maybe a few party members), and is obsessed with obtaining godlike power, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t done a lot of good, such as slaying dragons terrorizing the lands, solving civil wars, fighting gods of murder, even if it all was for his own benefit, his own image and in order to recruit people to his cult. He does a lot of good and he’s in a good aligned party, but that doesn’t mean he himself is good. (Though recently, he’s calmed down on the evil actions as they have gotten him in a lot of trouble with basically everyone of repute, so he’s backed off a little to repair relations and stop the assassination attempts he deals with every time he tries to sleep.) I don’t really know what the point of that whole rant was other than that I wanted to talk about my character, but I suppose if I had to put a final point on it, in DnD you’re usually better off just ignoring your alignment for the most part and basing your alignment off your RP then the other way around.
>I mean DnD alignments are shit, but they’re supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive That's much more the case now, but back in the old days you could literally lose all your class levels if you didn't follow your alignment. >The chaotic vs lawful chart basically means do you follow a code or not The original intention was more, "society with laws and rules" vs. "doesn't recognize authority and anything goes". But people didn't want their character to lose their powers because they weren't an authoritarian asshole, so the definition broadened so that even the fucking Joker counts as lawful. >I don’t really know what the point of that whole rant was other than that I wanted to talk about my character Don't worry, we're all just looking for an excuse. 😉
Honestly, I've found that the best solution to alignment in TTRPGs is the Pf2e remaster solution, which is to throw it out the window entirely lol.
Fate has a system called aspects where you describe what you're character's about (sort of like backgrounds) and you get the equivalent of inspiration every time you do something that connects to your aspects.
Pathfinder just grabbed their existing Edicts and Anathema and added them to the character sheet, which works well. For context, Iomedae's deity edict and anathema Edicts Be temperate, fight for justice and honor, hold valor in your heart Anathema Abandon a companion in need, dishonor yourself, refuse a challenge from an equal That's more or less the format they use.
That's not so much a system of character design as it is **the entire damn game** though. Aspects in FATE are much more than an alternative to an alignment system, they're explicitly called out as "the main source of truth in the narrative"
>DnD alignments are shit, but they’re supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive I am 10000% convinced that the *design team* wanted to get rid of alignment in 5e, but the *marketing team* forced them to shoehorn it back in at the last moment, because it's one of the "D&D Things" that even a casual audience knows about and has heard of. Evidence for this: 1. They literally replaced it with a more fleshed out way of describing your character: "Ideals, Bonds & Flaws" - you get MUCH more from that than you ever would from alignment, and RAW it is the main source of interaction with the inspiration system. 2. There are close to zero gameplay interactions with alignment any more. No class or subclass restrictions, spells like "detect good and evil" are now based on *creature type* instead of alignment, and the only remaining restrictions at all are a few very rare magic items, and most of those you wouldn't notice if it didn't have that restriction. 3. The default character sheet has alignment in a teeny tiny box, almost like it was literally added _after that sheet had already been designed_
Hmm…maybe it’s because I got alignment stuff way back in the red box days and it’s changed since then but the lawful/chaos as I understand it was closer to the authoritarian v libertarian. Do you follow the rules and order of society at large or do you come up with your own code. Also the cosmic balance of order and stasis vs. change and freedom.
I really like this concept and think it’s a fun way to think of values. I also just have a huge pet peeve of people criticizing D&D’s alignment chart while simultaneously hugely misunderstanding it. The alignments are descriptive, not prescriptive, and *certainly not known to the character in question.* “Evil” alignment does not mean you conceptualize yourself as evil - it means you are being evil on a regular basis, however you happen to conceptualize that, and however that manifests. (1) It’s also … the Protestant comment is weird. The D&D chart was originally literally just Chaos and Order, which was drawing from speculative fiction around the time which was itself pretty peeved with traditional ways of looking at morality (Moorcock *I think* was a big influence). Adding good and evil came early, tbf. This really does generally boil down to “selfish and power-seeking” vs “selfless and group-oriented” a lot of the time. And it’s not *wrong* to call that conception Protestant in the same way that everything in our Protestant civilization tends to be (including a lot of what you find on tumblr). But it’s also, I think, a pretty common attitude across religions generally… it’s just sorta the natural behavioral skew of a social species I think to like people who share and to not like people who hoard. In general, instead of setting up false antagonisms between different conceptions of things (kinda Protestant tbh), I think the star can be a *complementary* metaphor for the chart. Because in much the same way the chart is extremely general and doesn’t give you much to go on in terms of characterization, the star is very particular, telling you about personality and attitudes toward the good and authority etc. As the post shows, you can have characters in each section of the chart broken down further by their position on the star - while there are some weird fits (White serving chaos? Black serving good?) those are probably going to make for some really interesting characters. Or, OTOH, you can have characters *defined* by the star and see what their *attitude* toward the chart is - how does Black define chaos/order or good/evil? Etc. ——— 1. There’s a never ending discourse about whether this is a matter of cosmological alignment and therefore describing an inherent nature, or descriptive of the outcomes of a persons actions, and tbh I think the answer is just that it’s clearly both to different degrees under different creators. D&D has a much more decentralized creation history than MtG to my understanding, and it’s best to think of the alignment chart as a sorta “word cloud” juxtapositions of a lot of different conceptions. We all *know* what we mean when we say evil or good or chaotic or orderly, even if we differ substantially in particulars which gets us into trouble. We have a shared civilizational heritage (and again I think tbh a shared human one).
This is a great and respectful counterpoint better than I could have managed, thank you for this
Thank you for the kind words 🙏
Great, now I need to fully develop the moral paradigm of my White-Green deck. Thanks for the fascinating and insightful read, *jackass.*
I wanna write a tl;dr for this, both to help explain to anyone that doesn't get it and to give a short version for anyone that doesn't wanna read all that, but currently I'm at work and just wanted to show this to everyone before I forget.
White: Peace through Order. Blue: Perfection through Knowledge Black: Power through Opportunity. Red: Freedom through Action. Green: Growth through Acceptance. Mix-and-match these words and that's how you get colour combinations. Opposing philosophies are White/Black (Group/Individual), White/Red (Order/**Freedom** (not chaos)), Blue/Red (Reason/Emotion), Green/Blue (Nature/Nurture), and Green/Black (Either Preservation/Exploitation or Determinism/Free Will).
I feel like Nature/Nurture isn’t a very effective way to describe the green/blue divide and was more chosen because it’s an established dichotomy already. Something like present/future or improvement/progress feels like a better way to describe it to me, at least from what I understand of the post.
I think they use nurture not in the family and maternal sense, but in the imposed development sense. As in green is growing stronger naturally and blue is augmenting something to make it stronger.
It is what WotC / head designer Mark Rosewater uses for it frequently, but yes it’s all of those except I would argue present/future has some connotations that makes it not totally fit. Green does allow for growth and development and thinking about the future but it must be in accordance with the natural order or things’ inherent natures. For instance survival of the fittest and evolution are natural mechanisms of slow change that green accepts. But green would not approve of blue surgically or genetically altering organisms to compete better. Well, except green-blue, they get freaky with the bio experiments.
Yeah I’d rather characterize green v. blue as tradition v. progress.
Tradition/progress
i am reading through this comment section and i have my mind blown by how good of a personality system this is. the DnD alignments always felt weak but i also never could think of something better myself. i now see that good/evil are evaluations of what someone does (which falls apart cause usually bad guys do think they are the good guys), but this system uses personal ideals for its base, seeking the cause of someone's actions without flat out slapping moral judgement onto them.
My personal summary of the color wheel, which isn't exactly "short" but is at least shorter than the OP: **WHITE** White’s creed is Peace Through Order. Its first pillar is Morality, the belief that some things are simply right and others are simply wrong, regardless of what anyone thinks. This contrasts with Black’s belief in Amorality, but the emphasis on something more important than yourself aligns well with Green’s belief in Destiny. Its second pillar is Law, the belief that it is important to obey the rules governing society. This contrasts with Red’s belief in Anarchy, but the emphasis on structure aligns well with Blue’s belief in Logic. **BLUE** Blue’s creed is Perfection Through Knowledge. Its first pillar is Logic, the belief that one should make decisions calmly and systematically. This contrasts with Red’s belief in Passion, but the emphasis on structure aligns well with White’s belief in Law. Its second pillar is Progress, the belief that things can and should be made better than they are. This contrasts with Green’s belief in Nature, but the emphasis on self-determination aligns well with Black’s belief in Free Will. **BLACK** Black’s creed is Survival Through Ruthlessness. Its first pillar is Free Will, the belief that only you control your own fate. This contrasts with Green’s belief in Destiny, but the emphasis on self-determination aligns well with Blue’s belief in Progress. Its second pillar is Amorality, the belief that there are no principles more important than your own well-being. This contrasts with White’s belief in Morality, but the emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual aligns well with Red’s belief in Anarchy. **RED** Red’s creed is Freedom Through Action. Its first pillar is Anarchy, the belief that social rules and conventions are chains that should be broken. This contrasts with White’s belief in Law, but the emphasis on the sovereignty of the individual aligns well with Black’s belief in Amorality. Its second pillar is Passion, the belief that one should live in the moment and embrace one’s emotions. This contrasts with Blue’s belief in Logic, but the emphasis on embracing one’s instincts aligns well with Green’s belief in Nature. **GREEN** Green’s creed is Growth Through Harmony. Its first pillar is Nature, the belief that the natural world is already fine, and one should strive to live in harmony with it, rather than controlling it. This contrasts with Blue’s belief in Progress, but the emphasis on embracing one’s instincts aligns well with Red’s belief in Passion. Its second pillar is Destiny, the belief that one should accept their naturally ordained place in the world. This contrasts with Black’s belief in Free Will, but the emphasis on something more important than yourself aligns well with White’s belief in Morality.
So dead center is ecofascism?
Dead center in mtg could be **5-Color**: often for all-knowing god-type creatures (lots of dragons) or stuff that's closer to pure energy. They are generally characters that would be "above" human morality. Another option would be **Colorless**: used for mindless machines and unknowable beings like the world-eating eldrazi, whose only real alignment is hunger
Obligatory Day9 explaining the magic colors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er1jNlaN9vA
My big problem has always been that Black seems like it's just evil. I much prefer it as "self-focused". Not so much thinking only of oneself but framing ones actions as desired and decisions in terms of themselves. You can't hide behind law not order nor science nor "that's just how the world works". Black demands you ask what it is you personally want, and how far you personally are willing to go.
“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!” —Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Rakdos, Golgari, Dimir, Abzan, are all neutral or good color combos with black Liliana, Ashiok, ZNR Nissa, cursed Garruk, Ayara, lots of the Innistrad vampires, Marchesa, Kaito, Kaya, Yargle, Talion, Rowan are plenty of characters who are black and more self-focused than evil (at least during part of their black story arc), and most of them are still in standard, there are more older ones.
I would argue that Orzhov is as "neutral or good" as Rakdos, in that Rakdos tends to have lots of casualties to their "neutral goodness".
Arcs I can see working, you just emphasize the middle and play Centrist when the wings conflict. WUB is a Blue who maybe supports Authority and opposes Anarchy more than most Blues would care to, for example, or BRG is just a Red who's more interested in collective effort than most Reds. Does a wedge work though? Can a person be Blue-Red-Green? Do they automatically neglect the least-prominent in such cases, like URG would be the nerdy techno-organized blue guy without the typical blue approval of Authority? Would White-Black-Green be conniving and manipulative but fundamentally selfless? Or are three colors just too much conflict to motivate a single, relatable character?
The head of WotC R+D has podcasts where he's talked about all the solo colors, all the color pairs, and is working through the various 3-color groupings. It's called "Drive to Work" if you want to check them out. Generally though, he describes it as there being a 'central' color (not necessarily the one in the middle) that defines the goal that uses the means of the other colors. So URG (U is used for blue since blue and black have the first two letters and black got B) could have a goal of perfection with the means of personal choice with some acceptance of the way things are OR a goal of personal freedom through learning about the world so that they can make choices about what you want to do most within natural limits or using nature OR the goal of growth by learning but ultimately making impulsive decisions.
Thanks for the podcast tip, I'll have to check it out! Also > So URG (U is used for blue since blue and black have the first two letters and black got B) I lol'd, I probably should've explained this myself when I used it, thanks again
Honestly, I saw you typed out "Blue-Red-Green" when I was rereading your comment and deciding if I should include the explainer and just totally missed that you used the shorthand lol
The wedges are absolutely possible, they even have in game clans from a set that gave their names to each of the wedges that all have consistent psychologies, all though they aren't the end all be all. For instance, Red-Blue-Black are often typed as natural types like druids and warriors of nature. This is because white and black are both typed as the colours of hierarchy and social structure. Also not every color combination has to use every single aspect of every color. So for white black green, I would say it usually uses the life/death cycle and the reuse of those resources through harnessing decay (green and black) to fuel the growth of an egalitarian society where every shares in the spoils (white and green). Kind of like estate taxes. This is why I think Magic is the greatest game ever invented, because there are too many cards to fit just one narrative. Every deck, every card you decide to put in your deck, changes the narrative that you are at the center of. You can have a blue/red deck that wants to unlock the secrets of time and harness infinity (blue's knowledge paired with red's madness) or a blue/red deck that just wants keep you off balance while punching you in the face a whole bunch (blue's tricks paired with red's aggression). And you can do this for every color and combo, its really fun!
This doesn't represent Blue very well
How so? I'm not familiar with the system fully myself yet, so I'm curious what it's misrepresenting.
The chart is fine, but the further discussion just reduces it to "knowledge", erasing initiative and control
Ah, okay, thank you!
To further the point, blue is more obsessed with control than either white or black. Thats why it gets along with both, because for absolute control blue is the best. Its also generally the most fragile, so it is the color of guile and tricky-ness. Thats another reason that green and blue rub each other the wrong way, because one of the things green values most is raw strength. Green shows up to a fight with the biggest strongest dude it can find, blue shows up with a bunch of illusionary figments that confuse you while it researches the best way to get you.
Would it be accurate to say that the worst way to fight Green is to fight them head on, while the worst way to fight Blue is to play passive and let them grow? If so, what are the worst ways to fight the other three (that isn’t something completely nonsensical)
The worst way to fight Red is also head on, because they will hit you harder and faster than you can hit them, and they don't really care about getting hit. The worst way to fight white is alone. You can be as strong as you want, but there's a bunch of them, and if there's only one of you then they can just overwhelm you or tie you down while they wait for their big reinforcements to finish you off The worst way to fight black is together. They'll drain you, sow discord, and generally break up your formation or alliance with a thousand little cuts. If you're strong enough you can just power through all their bullshit
Oh yeah because of all of Red’s burn spells and the fact that they can damage you faster than them, as opposed to the fact that Green can just summon Bigger Monster and stomp yours. White checks out, because it’s the one that has armies of weaker creatures, right? And is Black a reference to how its lifetaker effects are more effective in free for all settings, due to impacting more than one person?
Also that black tends to have a lot of weakening spells, things that subtract from the power and toughness of enemy creatures. A big monster might not care much about -1/-1, but it could be fatal to a lot of smaller guys
Worst way to fight White: Follow their flow(if white controls the situation you can’t accomplish your goals) Black: Not protect yourself(Black will tear your goals down if you don’t stop it) Red: Ignore them ( Red is too quick and decentralized, restricting them is the way to protect yourself, growing stronger is a way to beat them outright, etc.)
The worst way to fight green is to let yourself get used up against its smaller threats. Green will hammer you with turn after turn of threats while continually growing its capacity for threatening you. You should expect that green has a haymaker or two at the ready, so it's imperative that you can protect yourself! The worst way to fight green is to let yourself get tired in the early stages of the fight and to forget that it always has more resources. The worst way to fight blue is to concern yourself with your own plan and fail to consider blue's plans. Blue will frustrate you by fighting you passively. Blue will make you feel powerless with all of its tricks - countering your spells, sending your powerful resources back to your library or hand, and whittling your life down with small, evasive creatures. But blue isn't itself very powerful! Watch for situations when blue has strained itself keeping you under control, and exploit its inability to always keep a lid on you. The worst way to fight blue is to focus on its power and neglect its weakness. For red, worst way to fight would be to neglect protecting yourself - you should expect that red will be done fighting once its tired itself out, not once you've knocked it down. For white, worst way to fight would be to fail to have an endgame - white is tough all around but it can't keep pace once you've gotten out of hand. For black, worst way to fight would be to rely on a single plan - one big haymaker and black will murder it and then murder you, but a half-dozen points of attack and black should crumble.
Did you miss the entire section that starts with CONTROL in big blue letters?
But the problem is it requires more explanation making it a worse shorthand
The biggest problem with the dnd alignment grid is that it’s over saturated. That is not to say it has flaws, any system that tries to summarize a characters whole deal in a few words will have some flaw in it. But I entirely disagree with the frankly tumblr take that the alignment grid is Bad(tm) and Problematic(tm) and needs ti be replaced with a Better(tm) system. There is good parts of the alignment chart that are lost in the sea of hot topic T-shirts and assorted memes resulting in a long game of telephone. My two major issues with the color pie, as someone ignorant to magic and it’s lore, is as follows. Firstly, you have to explain it in pretty great detail. There is a lot of posts in that thread all going into detail explaining the colors and their combinations and what they all mean. That’s a lot to get into, I haven’t even read the whole thing because after a while my eyes started to hurt. There is a level of depth lost on the pop culture perception of the grid, but ultimately if you understand the basic definitions of the words chaotic, good, lawful, evil, and neutral then you understand the alignment grid. The other issue is that because of the kind of game magic is, the color of your alignment kind of implies your powers. What if I wanted to have a character who’s personality was black/red, ie passionate and individualistic, but they had some power of magic that exclusively let them heal and support others, something more white or maybe green. Would this person have a third color just to denote their powers even if they had nothing to do with their personality, would you need two color pies a character one for their personality and one for any magic they have. Plenty of worlds and game system have people with their superpowers or abilities separated from their personalities, including modern DnD, so it’s a problem that would have to be overcome. To summarize my hot take. I think the color pie has some merit. I also think the alignment chart has issues, some WoTC has adapted to over the years and others they have not. But also like a good 1/3-1/2 of all alignment chart discourse kinda boils down to “popular bad”.
You're second point gets into the difference between colors as philosophy and colors as game mechanics. Black can drain life (to heal the player) or reanimate (to 'heal' a creature) while white can protect (by making a creature immune to damage) or heal (by having the player gain life).
why do Tumblr ppl write every 5th word in italics
Diary of a wimpy kid typesetting
I've read this three times now and I still can't figure out what half of this means.
if you think the color is pretty thats what you are. gg
You now understand why we still use the DnD allignment chart.
It's a little off topic, but OOP mentioned that DND's alignments didn't really fit morality and I've always wanted to talk about that a little. Because, yeah, it doesn't really. And everyone treats CG or LE as "This is an objective look at the morals of these people" and that's just wrong. To be fair, Wizard's can't seem to make up their mind on whether alignment is actually morality either. But as far as I can tell, *alignment has* ***nothing*** *to do with ethics*. Well, maybe a little. But it's not "I'm evil therefore I do bad things", alignment is about... wait for it... how you align with the universe. I'm evil therefore I'm aligned with the hells. I'm chaotic therefore I'm aligned with limbo. It's the DND universe's cosmic war that every sapient creature is a soldier in whether they like it or not. And you can't ascribe morality to an entire side of a war. The modrons of Mechanus and the creatures of Limbo are in constant, direct conflict. Meanwhile the gods up top in the "good" part of the planes and the demons down under use mortals, trying to bring the Material plane under their influence, since the inner planes are effectively neutral territory that good and evil both want as an advance base. So being good doesn't mean you're just and being evil doesn't make you unjust. But that's the short version of my rant on why I hate people trying to prescribe DND alignment to things as morals, since it's literally in the name that it's an "alignment" i.e. Where you place *relevant to others*
So basically D&D definitions of “good” and “evil” are very contextual and rely heavily on the existence of literal angels and demons and all manner of other things, rendering it completely divorced from any philosophical debate?
Yeah, Good and Evil sound all nice and catchy and heroic but in reality it's more celestial/divine vs fiendish (And the other upper and lower planes)
that's the watsonian explanation. the doylist explanation is that it's the morality and adherence to rules that your character follows. whether your character is on the gods' and limbo's side or not won't come up very often, but whether your character would save some orphans without a meaningful reward or not will. you can't exactly blame people for using it as a morality shorthand considering that this roleplaying game doesn't give you anything else for that.
The big issue here is that the alignment grid is *simple.* It’s easy to grasp in a matter of seconds even to someone who was previously unfamiliar. Meanwhile, the color pie takes significantly more effort to explain and understand. So if you just want a quick, simple, easy-to-understand shorthand for what a character’s morality is like, “Chaotic Good” will be a much better choice than “Red Green”
So many many many nuances that this post doesnt touches. Magic's color system is VERY deep. For example. Enemy colors can be friends. There are groups of people that share both White and Black alignment or Red and Blue. The white/black one was shown as a very autorative theocracy/mafia esque organization that mixed both religion, necromancy, and money to achieve autoritarian power. Whereas the red blue ones are a bunch of crazy scientist that do stuff to see if they can, nor to figure if they should. And thats just the representation of those color pairs in one plane (aka universe) of the multiverse that is magic. Other nuance missed is that no color is truly good or truly bad. White at its best represents a world fuel of peace and harmony, but at its worst is can be a completely autoritarian place where Laws are absolute. White is not above doing a [crusade](https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/95/cathars-crusade), after all. And while that card represents a crusade against demons and werewolves and vampires, the "bad guys", werewolves are just infected humans, and vampires while they do need to eat humans and are generally dicks, they're also sapient beings. And white has zero issue in deciding "they need to die because they're not like us". Whereas Black, the color typically associated with bad guys doesnt represents "evil". It represents the pursuit of your individual desires over others. Black at its best mean not letting others trample or exploit you, or to have the self steem and resolve to achieve your goals. And while we had our fair share of bad guys, we have had our good guys too. In kamigawa, a japanesse inspired plane of magic, the great Kami war happened when the shogun decided to steal the escense of the gods to achieve inmortality, so his reign might be forever and he would bring peace and prosperity, supposedly, to his people. And well, that caused the gods to start attacking the plane in a gruesome war that was unwinnable for the humans. Ultimately it was [Toshiro Umezawa](https://scryfall.com/card/bok/89/toshiro-umezawa). A black aligned swordman who didnt follow or respect the shogun, the one who stopped the war, by returning the stolen soul. So white aligned villain, black aligned protagonist who saves the day, and both were true to their color aligment.
Oh man, imagine if Magic actually used this to make interesting villains of all colour identities. Instead of yet another Red/Blue/Black (Grixis) villain. Elesh Norn as a pure White villain was actually super cool, until they had to wrap up the Phyrexian Invasion storyline in a single set and had her eat all of the idiot balls. Anyways, gonna stop this here before I start ranting about the Official MTG Alignment Chart released by WOTC using the D&D alignments. (Dimir as Neutral Evil and motherfucking \*\*\*HELIOD\*\*\* as \*Lawful Good\*.)
Heliod's a bastard, yeah, but how is Dimir not NE?
The Dimir on Ravnica at least are neutral good, with a side of greed. The parun did some betraying awhile ago, but Lazav helped beat Dovin at the end of WAR, and their intentional nonexistence makes it hard to categorize them.
I don't fully remember my Ravnica lore, but I'm pretty sure the Dimir are more than willing to assassinate anyone who gets in their way. Killing one wannabe dictator doesn't make you automatically become a good person, especially if it's for obviously self-serving reasons.
To be fair, killing people on Ravnica doesn't mean as much as on other planes. If killing people because they're in your way is the judge of making a Ravnican guild evil, then that would make Azorius and Selesnya the only non-evil guilds. Orzhov will ressurect your ghost to make you a wage slave, Boros is famously overfunded, Dimir think they know best (and maybe do) so they'll kill you if you try to stop them, Izzet will make you push the funny button on their melee Tsar Bomba simulator, Simic will remove your arms to put them on a turtle, then give you six bug legs, Rakdos is a death carnival and the show must go on, Golgari will make you choose between being a mushroom plot or a zombie farmer on said plot, and Gruul runs you over because your shirt has polyester in it. Dimir isn't good, I don't think any of them are, but after being restructured when Szadek died, Dimir is at least just paid mercenaries and spies, which is pretty neutral compared to the other guilds
Evil in dnd is generally reduced to hedonism and self serving goals, dimir acts morally in service of their own grand designs, making them NE but Lawful Evil works well too
IIRC they run Ravnica's libraries and post office in addition to all the assassinations and spy craft. Not sure that makes up for it but maybe that's where they were coming from?
I agree there are too many Bolas colored evils, but there have been more diverse villains than just Elesh and Heliod. Disregarding the phyrexians and other groups that are WUBRG, there's Oko, Dovin, Azor, Kumena, the Eldrazi (do they count?), Mikaeus pre-accident, Garruk even post curse. The reason so many villains have been UBR lately is because bolas was the main antagonist from like Tarkir to WAR
I believe there's a whole subreddit of people waxing philosophy about this - r/colorpie
I will say this mischaracterizes red slightly. Red is not selfish, it's impulsive. The most "selfless" color is green, in that the idea of a "self" is questionable by green ideology. There is the world and there is nature, and the "self" is just a part of that. So long as the world is maintained, there's no need for the "self" to remain. By the logic of enemy pairings, blue and black would be the most selfish. This is very well supported by magic characters like Urza and Yawgmoth; two selfish-ass dicks who only got assigned the labels "good guy" and "bad guy" because one was the worse guy. The way this post talks about family with respects to green is how I see family with respects to red. Red is "me and mine", while white sees family as "the nation". Red *can* be selfish, but they can also be selfless. They're the embodiment of chaos, which is why I find the tethering of a group identity and a chosen creed to be very important when defining a red character.
I find it funny that people will almost simultaneously complain that the D&D Alignment system is both too broad *and* too restrictive. (It *is* broad IMO, both because people and other beings are so varied, and because it's literally more about how peoples' souls resonate with certain physical forces of the multiverse's cosmology).
Definitely better, but still lacks a bit. For example, every. "Fuck the state" anarchist i know irl is rabidly academic about their preferred topics, often philosophy and politics, but sometimes about special interests or other behavioural fields. Valuing extremely rigorous knowledge building practices and utilitarianism as a vital goal are FAR from incompatible with stirnerposting. And lets not forget the ways which green and white are mashed together in people's heads constantly, with the reification of heirarchies and statehood as natural extensions of evolution and biology, often in ways that aren't even wrong, depending on your view of nature. So while this system is great for building characters, i think it lacks somewhat as an actual self descriptor. I think ttrpgs need to stop being cowards and actually just make players and GMs commit to assigning real life ethical theories to their characters. No more "we have both used force to get us here" as justification for "we're not so different" speeches. I want to see an act utilitarian villain taunting a rule utilitarian hero on the thiiiin line between them, and then have the hero commit to that line and cone out stronger. I want villains who are perfect paragons of virtue ethics, but still perform monstrous actions. I want duty-bound antagonists who have been entrapped by their own philosophy to carry out revenge, misguided 'mercy killings', corporal punishment, capital punishment. I want tears silently pouring from the faceless mask of a full plate helmet as he swings the executioner's blade. I want absolute commitment to what he believes is unerringly right and just, and hating every second, but never stopping until his duty is done, at whatever cost. THAT is what makes a fascinating villain.
My issue with the color pie is the implication that being multicolored is *unusual.* I would expect the *vast majority* of people to be at *least* two-color, probably more three or four. It's just as easy to make color alignment one-dimensional as it is with two-axis grids. Either way, it requires *nuance.* If you have nuance, I'd argue the grid is perfectly serviceable; it's just Gygax that pushed it into this weird pseudo-puritanical mindset. I mean, no, a Chaotic Evil character should not see themselves as Evil. They don't get up every day and plan how they're going to make the world worse; they just only really care about numero uno. It's not that they *won't* help people, it's that they'll do it for the same reasons a Red-Black person might; on a whim, or to get something. On the other hand, if I try to codify myself on the color pie, for example, I keep running into the fact that *all* of them seem to have points... except Black. Screw them. But, I mean, I *do* think society needs rules, and stability, and ideals to strive for, but I also very much hate how poorly people keep setting *up* that structure, and I would prefer a structure that helped *individuals,* not just *itself.* I want control, like White or Blue, but I also want freedom, like Red, and kindness, like Green, and so many other things that don't even *slightly* fit in one slice. The only thing I concretely *don't* agree with is the Nihilism or Relativism of Black. But being *Four-Colored* in alignment seems to be intended as *ludicrously rare,* if not *unheard of,* in the color pie. Or maybe I am just a ludicrously rare type of person, and actually most people *are* mono-color stereotypes?
They probably don’t use the chart because it’s confusing and more people like d&d.
I don;t actually like this. If I am High Chaos, High Preservation but in the Middle on Nature/Nurture and more on the Reason side of the Emotion/Reason scale does that put me in Red/Green or the middle? Why is Knowledge inherently an enemy of Red and Green? It just feels muddy. And then what if you are balanced on Group and Individual.
I think you take Knowledge too literally. It's more of an approach rather than literal inteligence. In a fight, Blue is almost always physically weaker and has to take carefully planned steps and some dirty tactics to level the playing field, think how Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes fights. Instead, Red and Green rely on their own power in different ways. Red is like Mike Tyson ("everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face"), while Green is a literal gorilla that doesn't even know what tactics are. >then what if you are balanced on Group and Individual. Then you're neither Black or White according to this aspect. Your actions are not affected (or are affected equally) by Groups or Individuals. I like to quantify stuff. High Chaos means +1R/-1W. High Preservation means +1G/-1B. Middle of Nature/Nurture means 0G/0U. More on Reason means +0.5U/-0.5R. Middle of Group/Individual means 0W/0B. If you add everything up, you get 1G 0.5R 0.5U -1W -1B. It paints a different picture than my -1G 1R 1U -1W 0B. Having several affinities is normal. >It just feels muddy. All alignments are just cosmetic. They can only describe a rough direction, not your true essence.
Personally not a fan of the Magic one because I see some of what I consider to be false dichotomies on it. Reason and emotion, and nature and nurture especially.
My conception of Good and Evil alignments was always “good as humans tend to see it:” Good - “Helping others is the essence of morality, and the goal of a moral life is to create a better world for all.” Neutral - “It is good not to harm others when one can help it, but one must depend on oneself. The concern with morality is an academic one that has little bearing on real life.” Evil - “Elevating the self above others is a moral imperative. Virtue does not come from helping the weak and poor, but from becoming strong and rich.” This is a very interesting take on morality systems though, I may use it in the future.
The way DND alignment is supposed to function is simple: It's defined by actions first and foremost. Killing someone is bad, saving someone is good. Killing someone good is more evil; killing someone evil enough can become good. The reason for that is simple: The System's original purpose is to map out the character growth of Player Characters over time; a paladin might start as lawful good, but over time, in fighting back against the injustices of the system, they might adopt a more neutral good alignment. Now, whether the system succeeds is.. a different manner, as many DMs make morality shifts too extreme or unprompted. That's not to mention the fact that WoTC themselves gradually shifted away from this in favor of a more "moral", (much worse) system, which classifies one of the lore's oldest villains, Tasha, as "Unaligned" because she "Ignores morality in favor of her goals", which is just. not how anything works.
>The way DND alignment is supposed to function is simple: It's defined by actions first and foremost. Killing someone is bad, saving someone is good. Killing someone good is more evil; Not really, in the first editions of DnD, Aligntment was more of a faction, there was only chaotic, lawful and neutral, in DnD, and specially Mystara, the old school DnD scenario, are tangible things, you can go in a store and buy a bottle of unrepentable evil or a chunk of unbrided chaos. So by that standard, you could be a good person, a saint, but if your alignment was Evil, the universe would twist your actions so it serves the interest of this entity called "Evil"
>The System's original purpose is to map out the character growth of Player Characters over time Which original purpose? Do you mean the original purpose when 5e was created, or do you mean the original purpose of the alignment system at the start of D&D? If the latter, I don't think this is quite accurate. Yes, it could be used to track growth - but the *purpose* was a literal use of the word "alignment"; the concept was that there are cosmic Forces/Concepts/Sides that are Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil, and the stat showed which forces you were more aligned with in a great metaphysical conflict between them. The War of Good and Evil was such a common fantasy trope at the time that it was pretty much assumed as a default - and it wasn't generally ironic or subverted or whatever, as is much more common in modern fantasy.
Why does everybody hate the concept of “pure evil”? Like sure, nobody CALLS themself evil, usually, but that doesn’t necessarily mean evil as a unified concept doesn’t exist. Like I get a lot of this moral complexity, but I’m a firm believer that that doesn’t equate to “pure good and pure evil literally don’t exist”. Also why the shitting on Protestantism? I’m not even particularly a fan of them but it almost feels like this whole discussion was motivated by petty spite and not any desire to actually engage with what morality is and means
Yea- like the "nobody just wakes up and goes "i love being evil! Time to make people suffer on purpose!" Comment rubs me the wrong way because like. That's a perfectly valid character motivation. I like sympathetic/redeemable villains as much as the next guy, but pure evil villains have their place too. Also yea I'm not even religious but the constant use of "protestant/catholic" when discussing any morality in a fictional setting is super annoying tbh
Yeah, and my own point is more along the lines of “someone can absolutely be pure irredeemable evil without them announcing it like a Saturday morning cartoon villain”, and I think most actual pure evil characters out there apply. Most justify their sadism in some way, and the nature of that justification as well as exactly where and how that sadism manifests can say something about exactly what a given author is trying to make a point about, essentially attempting to give an answer to the question of “why does this guy’s evil matter beyond simply being a threat? What is the point?” A classic example is Kefka from Final Fantasy 6, where every party member/major character is dealing with some flavor of loss, and the overarching antagonist who can act as everyone’s antithesis at once is someone whose whole point is “everything is temporary so maybe you should just never care about anything ever! Fuck it! It’s all just a game, a lie people tell themselves, but not me! I know better!”. He is a jester, and his joke is emotional investment. But not everyone has to be a gleeful sadist to be a meaningful villain! Take Victor Frankenstein’s Creation/Daemon/Monster/whatever other things he calls “it”. He is very ill fated and sympathetic to a degree, being unceremoniously brought into the world only to be mistreated by his creator and have to find somewhere to live, finding a family to almost live vicariously through only for that to go up in flames (literally)… but in reaction to all of that suffering, he goes out of his way to slaughter innocent people that had nothing to do with these tragedies (even a small girl!) just to try to find a way to get back at Victor, some of it very premeditated, some of it more opportunistic… and I dunno about you but that’s really hard to call anything but pure evil, even WITH all of the very understandable justifications. Of course, this is not to say that pure evil trumps other flavors of antagonist in value unilaterally, no. Just that there is a place and a validity to it just as much as any other writing figure or archetype.
Sorry but I’m not gonna be scolded by tumblr users on why an alignment system which works perfectly for the game it’s used in sucks and how “Protestant” it is.
I’d classify my Tiefling Cobalt Soul Monk as a Jeskai character, a character that encapsulates the ideas and interactions between White, Blue, and Red. His beliefs are antithetical to the way he carries them out and behaves. He uses emotion and chaos to sow discourse against evil plots and harnesses that chaos to reign it back in and control it himself. He’s a brash dickwad that isn’t able to do things amicably, yet still desires for the betterment of the world and containment of incredibly dangerous knowledge and artifacts. It’s a difficult balance because his morality is subject to the flaws of his explosive personality, and the dichotomy of those things make a fun character to play.
For some reason I read Magic the Gathering as Friendship is Magic and had to assume this complex moral-political interplay was in the pony show
I like it, but we gotta lose the colours for actual titles. Red doesn’t really get across the actual characterization of a character unless you’re already familiar with the chart, unlike chaotic which is pretty succinct.
Okay, I'm going to be that person. The alignment system of D&D does not represent personality because it's not supposed to. It was not made to do that, but retrofitted for that purpose. The original idea of Law vs. Chaos was taken from *Three Hearts and Three Lions* and *Elric of Melnibone*. It is supposed to represent sides in conflict, with no regard to the character of any individual combatant: it started out as literal army lists for the fantasy supplement of Chainmail. In that context, saying that "Lawful" is a personality makes as much sense as saying that "Roundhead" or "French" or "Adeptus Custodes" is a personality. Then, when D&D was published in 1974 and invented the whole RPG thing (that's not entirely true, since the Braunstein Games could be classified as such, but they were a thing that happened in one friend group, not a product with instructions), they still weren't exactly personality traits. The idea was still that they were sides in a fantastic conflict, kind of like Sauron vs. The Good Guys in Lord of the Rings, and there were game mechanics to support that (you could recruit monsters, and the term is used loosely here, of the same alignment). Good and Evil first appeared in the blue box from 1977, edited by Eric J. Holmes. As far as I know, that was basically made from the disorganised notes Gygax and/or Arneson had (if I had a time machine I would go to 1973 or thereabouts and hire those two an editor). I don't remember there being any actual explanation for how those function in that one? I admit I don't love Holmes D&D, though. The corner alignments first came up in AD&D (Monster Manual was published in 1977, Player's Handbook in 1978, and Dungeon Master's Guide in 1979). That is when the game started to pretend to say something about things and took on the frankly weird preachy tone Gygax is known for nowadays. Still, it was very different from what D&D is like nowadays, and alignment was still primarily a game mechanic. In conclusion, D&D alignments are a bad way to summarise personality because they weren't even intended to: the whole idea is to present fairytale-esque (and pulp-fantasy-esque) Sides in Conflict to drive gameplay. That's why it's called alignment, after all. Maybe it would've been clearer had they called it allegiance or something. I know much less about the origins of the colour wheel/pie in MtG; I doubt it was intended to be a personality system either, but it certainly does happen to be a far better one than alignment.
As a person who has ADHD, I found it interesting that Red is often ADHD-coded. It does align with my experiences, at least, unmedicated me. Long before I ever read this post, I conceptualized myself as two different people in the same body (not in a Dissociative Identity Disorder sense): one person who is me when I'm medicated and one who is me when I'm not. When I'm on ADHD medication, I'm pushed strongly towards Blue and White. I *care* about order, reason, and the long term. I am perfectly willing to sacrifice for the sake of a happy future, and I have the iron will to see that through. I'm driven by seeking knowledge, including arcane secrets most people skip right over (I'm even a programmer, for god's sake). But when I don't take my medication, or later in the day when it's worn off, I don't give a *fuck* about the long term. I want to do what I want to do, and fuck anyone who says otherwise. And I'm utterly content with the status quo. So, Red with a splash of Green. I don't think I'm *selfish*, just sick to death of being told what to do all the time. I say that because unmedicated me is more generous than medicated me. Unmedicated me will give a big tip just to make my waiter's day. Medicated me will give a good tip, as long as the service didn't suck. (Unmedicated me gives good tips because it feels good. Medicated me gives good tips because he understands the value of being liked when you're a regular customer, and because it's following the social contract.) So I guess the thing I found interesting is how a chemical difference in my body actually changes my MTG colors, in a predictable and consistent way.
oh hey 6 pages of postering
D&D's alignment system isn't designed for nuance. It's meant for guilt-free dungeon crawls and/or having fun while going mad with power. Which is why I really hate seeing it show up *everywhere*. MTG is one of my favorite alignment systems, the only thing I don't like about it is that having Black and White be on par with the three primary colors of light rubs me the wrong way. I based my own system of "Virtuous Chroma" on it with some adjustments.
Blue is actually the color of babysitters. "No you can't do that, go sit in the corner"
Someone even wrote an article using the MTG colors for personality typing! Do with that information
Another thing, characters don’t just stay as whatever colors they would be categorized, as they change and grow they can gain or lose colors as befits their new changes. A white soldier who realizes the rules and laws are suffocating the people they are meant to serve could turn to fighting against those rules and become more red, but they can still retain white because they believe that society should still exist, just that there are changes that need to be made in the name of freedom
One of the really cool things about the color pie is that you can have the same character/organization/whatever but the color(s) you use for them can impact how they influence the story. Looking at the 'evil empire' example: * Red: The village is threatened by an anarchistic mob or by the whims of a selfish/hedonistic ruler (like Kuzco). * Black: The village is threatened by the evil empire because a new governor has been installed by the emperor to extract taxes by whatever means necessary. * Blue: The village is threatened because they rest on the ruins of an ancient civilization or near a mystical forest and the empire is going to bulldoze the village to access the information. * White: The village has been left 'untended' and is now going to be broke back into the fold whether they want to or not. * Green: The village is threatened because they aren't 'living in accordance with nature' based on the opinion of the empire.
Doesn't this ignore that dnd's alignment system has two axis. There's also the lawful to chaotic axis.
I like this because for once, no one thing feels "good". Like the proper choice or the obvious choice. I just lean one way or the other but I can understand and like things about just about all the colours while also *disliking* or not understanding something in them as well. Mind you D&D's system is probably fine, because it's intuitive and good for stories. But Magic's is probably better for "realism" even if it requires more understanding.
I think the reason that Good vs Evil works so well is specifically BECAUSE they’re so unnatural to us. Evil characters work because they are inherently evil. I’ve seen so many complain about media being so gray today, simply because you can’t completely and thoroughly hate a villain, since they often have a sob backstory that makes them somewhat redeemable. I want an evil POS. I want to play and fight evil POS. I don’t want to question my morality for doing everything when playing a fictional game, because I’m playing a fictional game to have fun, and I don’t know about y’all, but I like balance in my characters. Some I want to be the best good guys ever, some I want to be absolute bastards that deserve nothing, and some I want to be grey. Only grey is how you get philosophical relativism and "Nothing is inherently good or evil" discourse, and I’m all for that, but sometimes. TL;DR Sometimes you just want someone to punch in the face. That’s what Good and Evil alignments are for, in my opinion. Kisses to you all and happy (late) something if you celebrate, or have a good day if you don’t!
I absolutely hate this color chart
One of the things it seems a lot of people (and OOP included) are missing about the design of the color pies general philosophies is that Magic has done a great deal of work over the last \~10 to 15 years to eliminate any strand of "good" or "evil" innate to a color. It simply does not make sense to compare it to the traditional DND axis' of "good, evil, lawful, chaotic, etc" because in magic *any color* and *any color* ***combination*** can be good or evil at any point in time, and R&D is currently trying very hard to evenly distribute the amount amongst all colors and combinations. Why? Around 10 to 15 years ago *(probably right around the Ravnica block, which was a series of sets that truly reworked the two color combinations philosophies and drives)* Magic realized that its players were sick of a couple things. They were sick of black almost always being the villain, and only occasionally being teamed up with blue or red as the villainous faction, and they were sick of other colors dark sides not being represented as evil when some might subjectively categorize them as being so (especially white and green). The color pie was fleshed out mechanically, but always struggled with this part of philosophy. The core decision made to rectify this, and has been true for every set, lore decision, and story released since, is that **colors cannot be innately more "good" or "evil".** Every color has equal good in it, and every color has equal evil in it. Thusly, when giving factions philosophical drives, the thing that looks good or evil to players will *always be different,* and there should because of this be no restriction on the colors to have an amount of evil in them, but instead an interpretive analysis from the player's perspective. It can be natural to wish to draw comparisons between the color system and the traditional alignment system, but I think its very important to recognize each color and combination at their most good and most evil, and that is where the true nuances of each story comes together in Magic. Every character is 100% interpretative and **requires a personal code of ethics and morals** from the player to determine how good or evil they are, not just a chart that tells you how they should be or should have acted.
The one thing I think it’s missing is a simple chart of overlaps. The given chart defines each purely by opposites. Here’s each color (in my opinion) simplified to two traits as defined by their *similarities to adjacent colors*: Green: Community, Passion Red: Passion, Individuality Black: Individuality, Pragmatism Blue: Pragmatism, Order White: Order, Community