In my experience, many people don't use alignment, or they don't use it effectively. It's more than just an adjective for a character. It's a good tool for a game master to use to detail their setting, the people and places in it, and to establish the player character's places therein. Let me elaborate and be more specific, it's a good tool to describe your character's allegiance to higher powers in the setting - be it national or religious. Let's take a look at the classics.
One axis is all you need: Lawful, neutral, and chaotic. Lawful means you are a member of a society with laws, and you have an allegiance to some authority! Chaotic means you are a an outsider to that, such as an anarchist, or a monster from the wilderness. Law and Chaos are not dispositions or personality traits, they are opposing FORCES and in no minor way. They actively oppose and come into conflict with each other. Law wants bring order to chaos, and chaos wants to bring disorder to the lawful world. They hate and fear each other.
This serious division in a setting means the setting has conflict! You'll notice I didn't say any one side was good or evil? You don't need that axis! Lawful people can be good or evil. Chaotic people can be good or evil. Law vs Chaos describes a low or dark fantasy setting where good and evil are unattainable for now. What's at stake is whether we establish a society with order and safety, or we establish a setting where might makes right. These old games that emphasized law vs chaos often treated lawful characters as good and heroic, and chaotic characters as evil for a reason: the authors were on the side of law. To them, it was implied that law was good, and chaos was bad.
Where do neutral folks fit in? Neutral IS not some safe middle ground. Neutral explicitly meant you didn't have allegiance to law and its factions, or to chaos and its factions. Your character was not a soldier in the kings' army, nor were they a marauder in the wilderness. It means that wherever you went, you might fit in, or you might not. Both lawful and chaotic people see you as someone without convictions or loyalty. Your values were unknown. You are untrustworthy. Maybe you could get along with us, or maybe you might as well be with the other team. The point is neutral means unaligned and aligned people have good reason to be skeptic of unaligned people.
This law and chaos alignment thing was important because of the setting where law and chaos are the major source of conflict. Some settings use this law v chaos alignment for the cosmology of the setting. Law gets you into the good afterlife and chaos gets you into the bad afterlife. Also, some spells or magic items could affect you differently. I think it's a shame no one really uses alignment or understands alignment. Players treat chaotic alignment like an excuse to play a character who's naughty, and parties of mixed alignment characters almost never come into conflict over grander things like who should rule the world.
Before we look at my excellent alignment system that is excellently excellent, let's detour briefly to Star Wars. Within the Star Wars setting, there is the force. The force is Star Wars' cosmology and magic system. There are people who can use the force, and people who can't. Of these people who can use the force, called force users or force sensitives or force adepts, there are two major factions: the Jedi who champion a "light side" of the force, whatever the heck that is, and the Sith who pursue a "dark side" of the force, whatever the heck that is. Jedi and Sith are not personality traits, they are factions. A force user can belong to one or the other, or neither. Force users who belong to neither the Jedi nor the Sith are usually completely untrained because there is no faction in the Star Wars setting that teaches the neutral path of the force. This is because George Lucas likes mythology and he wanted to tell a story about good and evil, and this is now intrinsic in the philosophy of Star Wars. A good story about a powerful, neutral force user would be welcomed, and a good story about a Jedi who uses the dark side for a good cause would also be welcome, but Star Wars without these factions is missing the Star Wars philosophy. I argue that the good and evil dichotomy found in Star Wars is part of what makes Star Wars. I hope this detour into Star Wars helps to recontextualize the law vs chaos alignment system. All hail the force or whatever they say!
Ok, so here's my alignment system. *Plays a humble fanfare on a kazoo* it's Heroic, Neutral, Villainous. Yeah, that's it. Without defining, it's more of a characteristic than an alignment. A motive perhaps. Instruction. A way to set expectations. I think this is perfect for a modern RPG because all that stuff I just spent 1,000 or more words talking about, almost no one who plays RPGs even knows or cares about it! Young players might not be able to understand.
Heroic means that in spite of your flaws and weaknesses, you're still trying to be a darn hero at the end of the day! Cowabunga! Villainous means whatever redeeming traits you have, you're still a baby-eating monster! Hail Hydra! Neutral means you've taken the safe middle ground, maybe because you're a coward. Or, it means you don't commit to a cause because it could mean you flip-flop to serve your own interests. Maybe you're principally neutral. Go Sweden! The GM can decide that neutral is for NPCs.
At least we don't have players misunderstanding the original intent of what was actually a really simple, useful system for describing a setting and the characters in it, and using it as permission to play a naughty character who sometimes causes conflicts at the table. The Heroic, Neutral, Villainous alignment system allows you, the GM, to set easy expectations for your players. Just tell them you're running a game for heroic characters. Bam. No need to bring in shades of grey. The only weakness I see here is if you have players who want to argue that someone like the Punisher is a heroic character, or that Winston Churchill was actually a villain. Just tell them heroic means traditional hero and they're no allowed to overthink it.
Han Solo was heroic and anyone who says he was neutral is wrong. Neutral is for NPCs.
