Alignment in Pathfinder or D&D is a heated topic. Some curse its existence, and hope to see it banished with each new edition of their preferred game. Others will swear by it and claim that the game can't be played without it. It's hard to find folks that don't have a strong opinion about alignment. I used to be an alignment apologist. I would find intricate ways to justify its usefulness in the game, finding all kinds of convoluted arguments to use a system of nine categories to describe the variety of human moral and ethical belief. Until recently, I never stopped to ask if the d20 alignment system did the job it was intended to do.
The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game defines alignment as "A creature’s general moral and personal attitudes...Alignment is a tool for developing your character’s identity—it is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies". 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons says alignment "broadly describes (a creature's) moral and personal attitudes. Alignment is a combination o f two factors: one identifies morality (good, evil, or neutral), and the other describes attitudes toward society and order (lawful, chaotic, or neutral)." 2nd Edition Pathfinder does nothing to change the alignment system from 1st Edition. In fact, alignment as a system of codifying character morality and beliefs hasn't changed at all since 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, published in 1979.
As a mean sof defining very broad elements of a character's personality and social views, I guess alignment works. At least it gives a player six choices that can be combined into 9 different alignments. You get good versus evil, law versus chaos, and "I don't give a shit" (neutral along both axes). That's all very fine and well, but does describing your character as "Chaotic Neutral" really aid you in deciding what your character's personality is? The interpretations of each of the nine alignments varies wildly in the gaming community, and has even changed over the course of successive iterations of the game. The 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook describes a Chaotic Neutral alignment as follows "lunatics and madmen tend toward chaotic neutral behavior."
The other issue with alignment is that it forces you to play in a setting where Good and Evil are real and tangible forces in the world. And those forces are defined by a Judeo-Christian code of morality. Generosity is good, greed is bad. Anger is bad, serenity is good. Good guys protect the innocent and helpless, bad guys rob and steal and pillage. If that's the kind of game you want to play, then alignment probably works for you.
Lately, in the games that I've run, I've been drawn towards portraying a world where morality is relative. The world of mortals represents the merging of all cosmic forces and ideals, but isn't truly a reflection of any of them. It is a world where conflicting ideologies clash, change, transform, survive, die and are reborn. It is the battlefield upon which the ideals of the cosmos wage war for survival. Furthermore, it is a world where Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Jesus and all the prophets, apostles and saints never existed. Indeed, the entire concept of monotheism doesn't exist, because gods are real. There is conclusive proof that multiple gods exist and take an active part in the lives of mortals. In such a world, the concepts of Good and Evil are relative to the observer. There is no Bible or Qoran or Talmud, which all tend to align on the topic of what is Good versus what is Evil. Rather, there are multiple holy texts, one or more for each god, that define what is desirable behavior in the world and what is against the philosophy of the relevant god.
Think of two faithful people in such a campaign world. One worships the god of hearth and home, community and family. The other worships the god of war, battle and conflict. The disciple of the god of home and hearth believes in stability, cooperation, and individual sacrifice for the betterment of the greater community. This ideals are considered "Good" to this believer. Anything opposed to these ideals would be labeled as "Evil." Meanwhile, the war god worshiper believes that victory in battle is the ultimate judge of right and wrong. He believes that conflict tears down old ideas and makes way for new ones. They believe that change is constant, and that the world is always in flux. Does he consider himself "Evil" just because his beliefs directly oppose those of the god of Community? Of course not! From his perspective, the tenets of the Community god are "Evil", because they directly oppose his own beliefs. In this kind of world, every mortal is the hero of their own story.
In order to create a system that codifies the moral and ethical beliefs of the mortal world, we must first discard "good" and "evil" as useful terms. "Good" is simply what you believe, and if others believe the same things, then they are "Good" too. Anyone that believes something opposed to your beliefs is "Evil", and therefore should be opposed. Instead, we need to look closely at the Abrahamic faith's definitions of what constitutes good and what is evil, and find suitable replacement words that are not fraught with our real-world's moral context. I offer my apologies to any Buddhist or Hindu readers out there; I was raised a Christian, so my religious knowledge mostly extends to Christianity, it's precursors and it's cousins.
For Catholics, there are seven seven "deadly sins", which provides us with a good jumping-off point. These deadly sins are pride, anger, greed, gluttony, lust, envy, and sloth. The general theme of these seems to be selfishness, or "self-full-ness" (yeah, I just made that word up). Maybe we can summarize these "sins" as the belief that it is more important to better yourself than others. Or maybe that your welfare comes before that of others. Something like that might work. But to strip out real-world connotations of words like "selfish" or "self-centered", we need to find replacement ideas that aren't so laden with moral judgment.
The opposed ideals to the seven deadly sins would therefore be the opposite of the sin, i.e. humility, serenity, generosity, temperance, love, contentment and diligence. If the sins describe selfishness, then their polar opposites would describe the opposite: Selflessness. But we still have a problem, because "selfish" and "selfless" have moral connotations of their own in our world. Selfless is good, selfish is bad, and therefore "Evil". Instead, we need to find words that don't bog us down in real-world religious moral codes. How about this: "Selfless" implies taking care of others before taking care of yourself. This notion can also be described as "sacrifice" because one gives of themselves to help others. The contrary ideal, therefore, would be a word that describes someone who is more interested in giving to themselves. "Self-fulfilling" is a bit clunky, so what about calling this ideal "fulfillment"? Thus, to a person who holds sacrifice as a core belief, fulfillment would be evil. Conversely, a believer in fulfillment would consider sacrifice to be evil.
After settling on satisfactory replacements for good and evil, I turned to the other primary alignment axis: Law versus Chaos. Connotation once again reared its ugly head when I looked at Chaos. In today's modern, organized and structured society, the term 'chaos' has taken on a negative meaning. So once again, I need to find another word that means the same thing, but isn't viewed so differently. 'Change' occurred to me, but I didn't think it reflected the best antonym of 'law', so I decided on 'flux' as the replacement for Chaos. As for "Law", I never really considered it to be the best representation of the concepts it was meant to portray, so I made a decision to rename it 'order'. Boom! Law and Chaos are done.
So far, I've replaced Good, Evil, Law and Chaos with four ideals named Sacrifice, Fulfillment, Order and Flux. Great! Now what?
Since the gods of a campaign world are the primary means by which morality is dictated to mortals, I thought that maybe I would have a look at the cleric domains that exists in PFRPG. Hopefully, I could find opposing domains that would line up in neat pairs and my work would be complete. Sadly, it didn't turn out that way. Some worked out nicely: Air and Earth turned out to be great opposites, as did Fire and Water. Life and Death were no-brainers, and it turned out that Community paired well with Travel. The rest of them required some work; some domains just needed to be renamed so that they would better reflect their opposition to another domain. Some domains didn't seem to have a counterpart, so I created them.
I don't want to turn this post into a lengthy discourse on morality. My aim was to describe the thought process that led me to the system I am now going to detail. I call it Duality. The concept for Duality is based strongly on the Removing Alignment section of Pathfinder Unchained (pp. 100-101).
The core principle of Duality is that for every attitude, idea and belief that a creature holds, there is a competing, opposite attitude, idea or belief. These beliefs are referred to as ideals. An ideal is a character's personal commitment to a moral, ethical or social philosophy, a belief that determines what that character believes about themselves and influences how they interact with the world around them. They are the principles that inform the character what is "good" behavior and what is "evil". Ideals are the line drawn in the sand over which the character shall not cross. It is the hill they will die upon to defend and uphold. In essence, they are a code of personal conduct the character commits to, and holds dear to their heart.
One key point to remember about ideals is that while they still attempt to categorize morality, ethics and social beliefs, the list below is only a sample. A player is free to create and define their own ideal, so long as it also defines the ideal's opposition as well. Second, like alignment, ideals are a framework that players can use to help flesh out their character's personality. But ideals are more granular and less vague than alignment. They provide a broader, more specific selection of choices, each of which is designed to require less interpretation and more inspiration for character development. Lastly, ideals should never be used as a requirement for a race or class; unlike alignment, ideals are strictly role playing tools (but we'll talk about the rules implications of that later).
So, without any further rambling, here is the Duality system:
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