Café de Nuit

I legitimately think the number one problem with the D&D alignment system is that 90%+ of people don't bother to look past the alignment names, and I'd include a lot of people who work on D&D in that statistic. The terms of alignment are game terms, and as such they don't mean simply their plain text meaning. 'Lawful good' holds the same place in D&D rules as 'THAC0' or 'Weapon proficiency' or 'Class'. But because people have a more solid understanding of what the terms 'lawful' and 'evil' mean in normal speak, they more easily apply those by default to alignment than they might to the phrase 'armor class' or 'armor rating'. In other words, people think they know what 'chaotic evil' means in D&D because they know what those words mean outside of the context of D&D, and that does a disservice to the D&D alignment system.

Maybe in the very earliest versions of D&D, the alignments were much more strict in what the designers meant them to mean, but in the era of AD&D and the 3x3 alignment grid, the devs put effort into trying to dispel that notion. Good, evil, lawful, chaotic, and neutral are game terms in those alignments and are not definitive. Honestly, its very easy to re-cast the terms of the alignment system. I believe one of the 2nd Edition sources notes that 'good vs. evil' can be rewritten as 'selflessness vs. selfishness' without losing anything. 'Law vs. Chaos', while inspired by Moorcock's stories, could also be characterized as 'collectivism vs. individualism'. Importantly, lawful does not mean 'law abiding' and 'chaotic' does not mean 'totally random'. Yes, those are often associated with those alignments, but they are not the sum total of those alignments. Much like 'all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares', lawful does not always mean law-abiding.

I honestly think Dragonlance is a perfect example of how the people behind D&D themselves can be so terribly wrong about alignment. In the later portions of the meta story for Dragonlance, chaos was conflated with evil and law with good...but honestly, if you look across the entire storyline and products, the evil in the DL setting is almost always much more lawful and the forces of good chaotic, especially in the original adventures, where a huge part of the story is that all the organized and lawful groups on Krynn are complete and utter failures at doing anything. But they just conflated chaos with evil because...Moorcockian morality? I assume that's why.

Another issue is that I think too many people view alignment as a controlling constraint, when its actually a reactive trait. A character does not do an action because he's lawful good, he's lawful good because he does the action. The correct response as a DM to a paladin breaking his oath is not to stop the player from doing the action, its to change the character's alignment; the lose of their status as a paladin is the result of their own actions, not the result of the alignment. I sometimes think that alignment would work better as a behind-the-screen trait the DM tracks instead of something on the character sheets the players have, and if your players have problems with alignments in general, I would probably recommend this.

I think True Neutral is most heavily misunderstood because the source books never do a good job really explaining it, and in large part because 'True Neutral' is also more than one thing. I do think a lot of people make this fairly natural mistake of assuming that all TN characters are the same, but they really aren't and the fact that gets glossed over just makes explaining the entire alignment like untying the Gordian knot.

Ultimately, alignment is a tool to help a player or DM decide the kind of actions a character would take. Lawful good and chaotic good don't have to be in conflict...but sometimes they can be. The same holds true across the alignment spectrum. You might think that LG and CE (or CG and LE) would always be opposed, but there are certainly situations where they could have common interests. Alignments are a tool for players and DMs and, IMO, are a very important one that help shape a quick response to a moral question (this is especially true for a DM where not every single intelligent being you have in a campaign is going to be fully fleshed out).