Alignment System Too Simplistic, Says Evil Wizard
"There should be more nuance...you know, to confuse people.”
Local conjurer of dark magic, Avis Ganderolm, spoke out against the current alignment system earlier today during a debate event at Rendhaven Wizard Academy. The alignment system, which is widely used to categorize extra-dimensional beings, has also been adopted to label native humanoids and their actions. With regards to the latter aspect, Ganderolm criticized the system for being too simplistic. “There should be more nuance,” Ganderolm explains while answering a question about whether he is chaotic evil or neutral evil, “you know, to confuse people.” Ganderolm continued, “Even within the good/evil dynamic, we should have shades of grey. For example, if I desecrate the remains of 1,000 bodies by reanimating them to fight an army of 999 reanimated bodies I earlier created, doesn’t that make me less evil than someone who just created the 999 zombies?”
During an interview later with The Dungeon Tribune, Ganderholm was asked to elaborate. “There is real evil out there! For example, people are having empathy! The forces of Good are conspiring to make people care about each other. But if you go against the forces of good, say by summoning demons to kill everyone just to make sure you get all the Good conspirators, they call you evil! There should at least be a third option where you are evil, but you’re only evil to oppose good, because they are the true evil.”
Professor of Alignment studies, Jeld Cogni, is the first to admit that the simple 9 alignment system commonly used is far from perfect, but he still sees it as useful. “Of course the world and its inhabitants are too complex for the current alignment system, but that is by design. Models have to be simplistic, if we could understand the complexity of every ethical decision, we wouldn’t need to simplify it.” Cogni later states that in this scenario, it is the simplicity of the system that we need most. “We need to be able to look at the actions of individuals, and say ‘This is wrong!’ Of course, I’m not going to do that because I don’t really follow politics.”