When I was
7, my buckos & I would play Dungeons & Dragons during lunch, seated on
the cold concrete of the schoolyard, wearing out erasers on queer looking forms
and tossing the funny polyhedral dice as fast as our imaginations could swing
cruelly spiked morning stars into the heads of pretty elves.
For those of you who aren't familiar with role-playing games, one assumes the identity of a character which you verbally play, while another narrates the setting in which the characters move about & directs the results. Most RPGs are traditionally based in some Tolkienesque fantasy world. Mechanics of chance & combat are determined by attributes held by the characters represented by numerical values which are then brought to bear against the values of your adversaries & the dice sort out who is left standing, but strategy & creativity also play a large part.
In these mansions of imagination, a man named Gary Gygax created the construct known as Alignment to describe a character's moral & ethical compass, which determines how the character should behave and act so the narrator can then duly reward the player for being true to form in the gaming world. Usually most characters are good or neutral with chaotic & lawful striations, but you sometimes find players select evil. These selections are just you filling in a box on a character sheet for an alter ego.
But what if this box was really about you?
For those of you who aren't familiar with role-playing games, one assumes the identity of a character which you verbally play, while another narrates the setting in which the characters move about & directs the results. Most RPGs are traditionally based in some Tolkienesque fantasy world. Mechanics of chance & combat are determined by attributes held by the characters represented by numerical values which are then brought to bear against the values of your adversaries & the dice sort out who is left standing, but strategy & creativity also play a large part.
In these mansions of imagination, a man named Gary Gygax created the construct known as Alignment to describe a character's moral & ethical compass, which determines how the character should behave and act so the narrator can then duly reward the player for being true to form in the gaming world. Usually most characters are good or neutral with chaotic & lawful striations, but you sometimes find players select evil. These selections are just you filling in a box on a character sheet for an alter ego.
But what if this box was really about you?
A few months ago I found an official online quiz that reverse engineers your Alignment selection:
It's a multiple choice 36-question test. Maybe that's a simplistic system, filing all of human decisionmaking into 9 categories, but I found it interesting & thought provoking to actually answer these queries as best applied to myself. After all, for centuries we've been taking game-like devices & applying them as divinatory tools to real life, like the I Ching or Tarot or Runes or Ouija or Magic 8-Ball or Tasseography or the Enneagram or The Cube or the DSM-IV, and using them to relay personal insights from within & without ourselves.
Some of the questions will twist your noodle & hurt your brain, others will seem not to apply, but if you substitute say the word "king" for "president" or "governor" on the assassination question then they can easily relate. The "magic spell that makes copper coins look like gold" can be translated as "retail accepted fake credit card", and so on and so forth.
My results? To confess, my "character"'s alignment is Neutral Evil. This is the closest to "True Evil", where both law & ethics are non-factors, tools to be used indiscriminately for personal ends, and what matters most is one's own gain & self-preservation. At first I was a bit disturbed by that result (who honestly views themselves as evil?), so I've gotten many of my co-workers to take the test for perspective, and a few have cashed out as Chaotic Evil, where schadenfreude & harmful mischief for evil's sake hold the reigns of persona, which one might consider worse, given the purposelessness of such actions. Most seem to be Neutral. This Alignment can either be viewed as striking a balance or a lack of convictions, depending. But even some of the Neutral Good, the "True Good", folks answered many questions in a not-so-courageous way.
So maybe I'm the baddest of the bad, but bear in mind that I will testify on your behalf despite death threats from the powerful & corrupt judge, and if the orcs come to Arizona, you bet your hit points I'll go to Gate's Pass & defend Tucson against the orcish hordes, unlike all of those spineless Neutral/Lawful/Chaotic do-Gooders. (My derringer & 500 hollow-points are ready, you pigfaced baconheads! Bring it, I'll crush it!) This difference implies that perhaps it takes the latitudes evil allows to accomplish things for the greater good. Besides, Alignment's really like the car -- it may pull a certain direction, but you're still at the wheel and can compensate for that tendency (i.e. you don't have to gleefully run over the rabbit, unless your party likes eating freshly treadmarked coney). Take it, see what it reveals about yourself, and let us know where you land on the Alignment field. You may be surprised.
