I have been getting to play a decent amount of D&D during the pandemic and I've become more comfortable and familiar with the fifth edition of the rules. I now have five rules sets in my memory so sometimes I get them mixed up and make bad calls or confuse rules but its a game so that is fine. I'm the kind of DM that focuses on fun instead of strict rules adherence and those players tend not to roll so well with me anyway, we get into petty argument over little rules and I should be better.
One aspect of roleplaying games that has always been a strange point for me when it comes to how I view the game and how everyone plays it is alignments and actions as they can be interpreted by alignment. I have reached a point where in the law to chaos / good to evil x/y axis that I view one representing nature and the other representing actions, respectively.
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Some good old 1st edition table work for you here |
So in my games a character is inherently lawful or chaotic (or neutral of course espousing neither dominantly but this is more reserved for monsters or NPCs). So a lawful character would be orderly, prefer structure, value intrinsic social structures, and civilization in its orderly aspects. On the converse the inherently chaotic character would prefer more organic and disorganized structure, a social organization based off other ideas besides social ranks, and would take actions more on the context of the moment rather than a subscribed moral structure.
On the other axis the good and evil, which I define as actions, or "acts". So an inherently lawful character can perform an evil act and a good act but it doesn't not change his nature. Neutral acts are possible, and in all truth the most numerous. Eating a sandwich is neither good nor evil under normal circumstances although in the correct context it could be seen as either.
This means within a role playing environment the game master, and how they define the gods of the game, define what is "good" and "evil" but law and chaos are inherent within nature. It is easy to draw the X axis within many dynamics; civilization vs. wilds, law vs. anarchy, social hierarchy vs. rule of the strong, and so forth. Good and evil though must be defined by the predominant gods and demons. This will almost always fall into the classic acts; murder is evil vs. self defense being good, paying for something is good vs. stealing something is evil. Those are very basic ideas of course but more complex ones are easily found. I feel the best way to exemplify what I am trying to describe is to use an in game event that actually happened. If you will permit...

While scouting out the cave where monsters may be, raiding monsters, they capture a kobold sentry. Binding it they question it, use some intimidation, and successfully gotten their information one of the player stated they would kill the kobold. I pointed out that would be an evil act. They whole heartedly disagreed saying that the kobold was an evil being and therefore killing it was not evil but good. I tried to explain that the nature of the victim is not a factor in the nature of the act; if you murder an evil kobold or a good farmer you are still murdering.
This devolved quickly as the player would not concede even though we were discussing only a fantasy setting with good and evil defined by the game master. In the end the player did not want to return and I had to think about that a lot. I had no interest in pushing away players but at the same time I felt it is the game master's responsibility to establish the game world's nature. With most frpgs you will get a pantheon that gives you a lot of guidance, and we can go straight to that for this event.
In the 5th edition of the game the primary game world is Faerun, and we have a nice full pantheon for reference. We can go straight to a particular diety npc: Bhaal the "god of murder". Classified as neutral evil in alignment we can easily draw the correlation that murder = evil action. The next step down the rabbit hole of defining moral actions is "What is murder?" which gets more difficult. Again you have to take responsibility as a DM to define this in a way players can digest and either exploit or conform to according to their play style. Saving a lot of text I will sum up my view within a frpg context: Killing any defenseless creature that is intelligent is a murderous act. This makes it simple, gives feasible loopholes, and lets the DM (me in this case) work within a game world that is not burdensome.
To revisit the bound kobold there were solutions to the evil act to make it neutral or good. The could have unbound it and armed with for a duel to the death. Admittedly that would be a weird response but it would have been more neutral and less evil for sure. Perhaps even good. They could have freed the kobold and sent it packing. Clearly a merciful act and therefore good. They could have left it there, bound up, until they had cleared the cave and rescued the villagers. An ambiguous act that would be more neutral and undetermined until after the rescue effected. Ultimately the definitive desire of the player to kill a bound intelligent being was evil without question within the context of the game world.
From my view, as the Dungeon Master. Which ultimately is what must be considered in a game.
Obviously there is a lot of room for discussion as morals and ethics usually generate such but I feel that ultimately this is a game and a game needs rules that can be used for structure. I would like to hear your opinions though if you are an frpg enthusiast and hobbyist, or just have an opinion.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, and may your dice always roll to your favor.