Alignment Tracking

I sometimes think I must be the only gamer who doesn't have a problem with alignment in Dungeons & Dragons. Though my personal preference these days is the simple three-way system of OD&D, I'm equally fine with Holmes's five-way version and the very well known presentation from AD&D, with its nine alignments. For me, the only "wrong" alignment system in D&D is a non-existent one. I consider alignment in some form to be one of the distinguishing features of the game, like character classes or Vancian magic. Get rid of alignment and it's not really D&D anymore, at least not for me.

That's why I'm equal parts intrigued and repulsed by attempts to improve alignment by better tying it to game mechanics. I fully understand the impulse. Many critics of alignment feel that it's useless, a wargaming atavism with no purpose in the game. Associating alignment with some kind of mechanism is, I think, an effort to answer these criticisms and I can appreciate that. At the same time, I enjoy reading optional and alternative rules as intellectual exercises, even though I rarely make use of them myself.

Last week, one of the players in my Empire of the Petal Throne campaign asked me if I remembered an alignment tracking chart from an AD&D product from the 1980s. His question immediately reminded me of the existence of such a thing, though it took me a couple of minutes racking my brain to answer his question correctly. As it turns out, 1987's Dragonlance Adventures includes such a chart, which I've reproduced above. 

As written, it's an odd thing. For one, it only tracks a character's moral alignment, which is to say, the good-neutrality-evil axis. At start of play, a character's alignment is deemed to be at the midpoint of his chosen moral alignment. I'm not wholly sure why the chart has no interest in the so-called ethical alignment axis of law-neutrality-chaos. I presume it might have something to do with the unique cosmology of Krynn, but it's not directly spelled out in the book. 

If, in the opinion of the Dungeon Master, a character's actions deviate from his stated moral alignment, it moves one to three steps closer toward the opposite end of the chart. With enough deviations, the character enters the gray "transition" area, which signals that he is in danger of changing his alignment. While in the transition area, there are various game mechanical penalties levied against the character, such as lowered combat statistics and a chance of spell failure. Certain classes, like clerics, suffer further penalties.

Dragonlance Adventures is actually a fascinating AD&D book, one of several setting-specific rulebooks that appeared just prior to the publication of Second Edition. My impression is that these books, each in their own way, was a test run for various ideas and concepts that were being considered for inclusion in 2e. For example, Dragonlance Adventures introduced "spheres" of clerical spells, with each god's clerics having access to only some of them, in an effort to distinguish them from one another. This idea would become a big part of 2e's priest class, one the edition's biggest divergences from its predecessor. 

It's worth noting that First Edition already included something akin to this. Page 24 of the Dungeon Masters Guide includes a section of "graphing alignment," in which Gygax states that "It is of importance to keep track of player character behavior with respect to their professed alignment." Likewise, there are penalties for deviating from one's alignment, though they're not as clear cut as those described in Dragonlance Adventures. Still, I feel confident that alignment tracking is likely an idea considered for Second Edition and given a trial in this book. That it never appeared in 2e suggests it probably wasn't well received or that it had failed to serve its intended purposely, namely to make alignment more mechanically significant in AD&D.