Originally Posted by LoneSky

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.


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.)