Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)
way of categorizing the ethical and moral perspective of characters in the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game
In the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, alignment is a categorization of the ethical and moral perspective of player characters, non-player characters, and creatures.
Most versions of the game feature a system in which players make two choices for characters. One is the character's views on "law" versus "chaos", the other on "good" versus "evil". The two axes, along with "neutral" in the middle, allow for nine alignments in combination. Later editions of D&D have shifted away from tying alignment to specific game mechanics; instead, alignment is used as a roleplaying guide and does not need to be rigidly adhered to by the player. According to Ian Livingstone, alignment is "often criticized as being arbitrary and unreal, but... it works if played well and provides a useful structural framework on which not only characters but governments and worlds can be moulded."
History
D&D co-creator Gary Gygax credited the inspiration for the alignment system to the fantasy stories of Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson.
The original version of D&D (1974) allowed players to choose among three alignments when creating a character: lawful, implying honor and respect for society's rules; chaotic, implying rebelliousness and individualism; and neutral, seeking a balance between the extremes.
In 1976, Gary Gygax published an article title "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons and Dragons and Their Relationships to Good and Evil" in The Strategic Review Volume 2, issue 1, that introduced a second axis of good, implying altruism and respect for life, versus evil, implying selfishness and no respect for life. The 1977 release of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set incorporated this model.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2722365. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1976 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.