Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Alignment?

Well luckily for you, that was exactly Swen’s answer. When asked about alignments he said WotC had asked him to diminish their presence, but that they would be included inconspicuously via the large array of dialogue options.

It might be a crude test, but this question is transparently asking about the law/chaos axis. A respected, traditional authority disagrees with you. Do you:

A.) Bow to authority? (Lawful)
B.) Seek compromise with authority? (Neutral)
C.) Reject authority? (Chaotic)
D.) Murder authority because you disagree? (Chaotic Evil)

Pretty straightforward.

That's essentially how I had to think about the whole test. Strip it down to make it as relevant as possible and then apply it. Still gooped that I'm Chaotic Evil though, lol.

Try again asking yourself "what would Robin Hood do". You don't just want to take down the authorities, you want to take their gold and give it to the poor.

I've always thought of Robin Hood as Chaotic Good.
Wouldn't Chaotic Evil be closer to The Joker, or Loki?

Yeah, the joker would be chaotic evil as would Marvel Loki. (old myth Loki being Chaotic Neutral)

My mistake, I though you were trying to get a different result.

You're not entirely wrong. I was hoping for a different result because I don't really think that I'm similar to either of those examples of Chaotic Evil, but that's what the WOTC test has consistently brought back as a result.
Honestly, I wasn't hoping for any specific alignment in particular, I just wasn't expecting that.

It's nothing but straightforward though in my humble opinion. I wish it was. I will approach this as someone who wants to do what is right, what is good, and that is very much relative in itself, because until we can see the full results of our actions, we can't know if our choice was good. So I "try" to be good, can't do more - but let's just consider it that for this test I aim to be "good" (as in as good as possible)
Family elders can be right but also can be just as wrong, and thus the conclusions depend on that vital part that isn't specified.

1. if they are right: your reactions can be rated as you listed above

2. if they are wrong however;
Accept the criticism and change your ways
> you are a sheep if you do this, stand up and do what is right instead
Seek a compromise with the elders
> this more likely, but again depends on what is this about, can allow a compromise or must defy them, because doing what is right it's above everything else
Besmirch the reputation of the elders as you ignore their scorn
> never do this obviously, even if they wrong, but help them instead correct that wrong, if possible
Silence the elders any way you can
> same as previous

Same for the rest, must be made clear if the that law is good, that king is right and so on -- because obeying a bad law doesn't make you lawful, there are just bad words for that, and you can't be good if you are part of that greater evil that is corrupt authority, bad laws and rotten elderly traditions; the source of everything wrong in a society that just follows blindly.

Context is definitely an important aspect for all this stuff. Take the old story of Jack and Beanstalk, for example. Jack is the hero of the story, but is his behavior ever "good" at any point?

For the question under discussion, I’m pretty sure that the quiz writers are trying to address the law/chaos axis while divorcing it from the good/evil axis (with the exception of the last answer, “do a murder,” which is chaotic evil). Your mileage may vary on how successful they were. It is, after all, an internet multiple-choice personality quiz. Subtle philosophical discussion isn’t a strength of the medium.

In the broadest, crudest possible sense, “obeying laws and authority” is lawful; “helping other people” is good. But here we arrive at one of the key flaws of the DnD two-axis alignment system: When the law obligates evil acts, what’s a lawful good character to do? Different editions have posed different answers; different players have interpreted those answers in different ways. It’s part of why alignment threads all over the internet have gone up in flame wars.


(Funnily enough, the earliest version of DnD only had a one-axis, three-point system of alignment: you could serve Law, Chaos, or Neutrality, with no Good or Evil to be seen. This is obviously cribbed off of Michael Moorcock, whose books involved a cosmic balance between Law and Chaos, and who tried, though not always successfully, to divorce those concepts from the easier binary of good versus evil.

And then the audience for DnD decided they liked the easy binary of good and evil, so ADnD put that in as the second axis, where it quickly eclipsed the law/chaos axis in cosmic importance. Funny how things work out, isn’t it.)

This is very true. It is also possible that these concepts are much older than Moorcock ... Maat vs. Isfet.
Check out Robert Plant's symbol on Led Zeppelin's fourth album.

Normally I'd agree with this take about the integrity of online quizzes in general, but as this was the official WOTC alignment quiz, I guess I was expecting a bit more depth or nuance. It's hard to argue the results when they quite literally made the rules, even if the quiz wasn't written particularly well.

There is another aspect to alignment that nobody here seems to be talking much about - it's historically always been an important part of the Forgotten Realms/D&D lore.

Alignment isn't just a label you slap on your character during character creation - it's a concept that exists within the D&D universe. Even while most of its inhabitants are unaware of it, it literally determines their afterlife, among other things.

I'm all for more moral complexity and all, and I get why Larian/WotC want alignment to play a lesser role. I just hope they won't ditch it altogether - to me, that would be shoving a large part of D&D down the drain.

Law against chaos is primordial, and was a major part of many ancient religions, especially Egyptian. That being said, for D&D, just like with the early days of Warhammer / WH40k, they were just straight lifting from Moorcock. Moorcock didn’t invent law against chaos anymore than Tolkien invented elves and dwarves, but they are the popular fantasy inspirations behind what is in D&D.

Absolutely. Moorcock took his inspiration from Zoroastrianism, which goes back to at least several centuries BCE, but there are similar concepts dating back even earlier.




I doubt they’ll dump the themes; it seems to me like they’re just backgrounding the specific labels. Heck, we’re starting in the middle of a Blood War battlefield, which is—coincidentally—probably the most prominent Law versus Chaos conflicts in the lore.

(Although in the Forgotten Realms, specifically, your afterlife is determined solely by your patron god and how well you served them. While some lore suggests that souls who didn’t worship a god are personally judged by the current god of the dead, most lore either strongly implies or outright states that they all end up as part of the Wall of the Faithless, there to slowly dissolve into nonexistence. It’s kind of messed up when you think about it.)

Yeah, the alignment system is very apparent in the FR cosmology and the orientation of the planes and the beings which dwell on them, that isn’t going away. But I mostly never saw a purpose in selecting alignments for player characters. It seems overly rigid to me, so excluding them from character creation is more than fine by me.

Ah, I thought people just automatically go to whichever plane their personality and self-conduct was most akin to (e.g. CN people end up in Limbo, while LE ones go straight to the Nine Hells). Perhaps I got that mixed up with Planescape Torment

At any rate, I hope the themes remain. And tbh I also hope we see more characters who very clearly fit one alignment when it makes sense (e.g. Lae'zel - everything we've seen of her up to this point screamed 'lawful evil', as a githyanki should). I find those to be quite underappreciated these days, Pathfinder Kingmaker was full of such characters, and I really enjoyed most of them. I haven't played the older Larian games, only DOS and DOS2, but from what I've seen they're quite reluctant to write genuinely 'good' characters, as if such people didn't exist.

I've actually enjoyed all of Larian's games because they've never been afraid to work within those moral shades of grey. There's usually not the stereotypical shining beacon or hero figure, and I'm happy that they've got two decades under their belt of crafting stories around the idea that situations very rarely break down to basic concepts of good and bad.

I dunno about all that, just that I now have bits of Hawkwind's Chronicle of the Black Sword stuck in my head.

For me it was Tanelorn by Blind Guardian. Hair metal in my head, all afternoon.

Sure Zoroastrianism had it's impact ('tho I'd argue that had bigger impact on Tolkein -- "keeper of the sacred flame" and all that) but I'd also throw out Chaos, the first god, as an influence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)

If you listen to any interviews with Moorcock he'll list influences all day -- his modesty is one of his better traits.