D&D Alignments - How to Use Them!

Alignment describes the setting. There are forces of good and evil, and these two forces are opposed. There are forces of law and chaos, and these two forces are opposed. Your character's Alignment may have been defined by the rules as a stance or an attitude, but is often treated like a personality type by players. Your character's alignment instead describes their alignment to these forces, or to neutrality if they're unaligned.

What is good? What is evil? Are these ideas up for debate? The higher powers in the setting (gods for example) decide. In other words, it's up to the GM to define these concepts for their setting as s/he is the curator of the setting and the one who portrays these NPC higher powers. What if your character has the desire to be good, but lacks the knowledge of right and wrong or the willpower to act on it? That's up to the higher powers of the setting.

If your setting does not contain these cosmic or otherworldly forces, why are you using these alignments?

How to Convert 5e Players: The World Within a World Strategy

I'm going to lead with this: if someone is happy with 5e, they're going to stay with 5e. But, maybe, possibly, you can get them to TRY another game, and maybe they can learn to appreciate another game! I have had an epiphany!

I can't be the only person who has ever had the idea "what if our D&D characters made their own D&D characters and played D&D? How meta!"

The premise: You give the players characters (not the players) a situation in your game where they can play another TTRPG for a reward. A reward is better than avoiding a consequence, but you can layer both. Maybe a traveling magical stranger come along and offers the PCs a chance to play a magical game for fabulous prizes. Maybe they meet a mad wizard who got trapped in a secondary world, that is to say, a world within a world like the Matrix or some Isekai. That secondary world has different rules. To go into that world, the characters will have to play by those rules - like the Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, Shadowdark, or GURPS or whatever. I'm sure you can make up a situation that suits your own game.

Tips:

Use incentives! If their 5e D&D characters can complete the 1e D&D adventure you have prepared for them, their 5e characters can magically keep a magic item their 1e characters earned. Offer them something NICE like a +3 item.

Make sure it's a choice! Don't force it on them. But you could.

Split the party. Its magical wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey BS and it doesn't interfere with normal passage of time. Don't let a pesky thing like democracy stop willing players. Run a side-game for them. Work around the party-poopers so they don't feel spurred.

Make the medicine sweeter! Don't just give them a loser 1e D&D character sheet, give them a really impressed 1e D&D character sheet. Unless they'd be into a character funnel.

Justification: Maybe the players need a palate cleanser; Do this instead of a one-shot. Maybe they've just finished an adventure and you don't have the next adventure prepped yet. This is your excuse for delaying.

Have respect for their time: Structure this like a one-shot! Try to keep it to a one-session thing.

Leave them wanting more: At the end of the PCs brief stint into the secondary world, when everything feels wrapped up, you're going to give them another adventure hook! Like a treasure map to a ruin with a ton of treasure, or their own star ship.

Make it Easy: Hand out pre-generated characters. Don't spend game time making characters. Leave out some of the more complex options.

You're Doing Tieflings Wrong

Tieflings do not have a standard skin tone, and 3e did not assign them standard physical features.

Look up Tieflings online in the D&D 3.5e SRD. "Many tieflings are indistinguishable from humans. Others have small horns, pointed teeth, red eyes, a whiff of brimstone about them, or even cloven feet. No two tieflings are the same." Note the use of the word or in the list of physical features, not and. And definitely note that the description reads "many tieflings are indistinguishable from humans". This is the full physical description and does not address skin color. This passage comes from the monster manual (where tieflings used to be) and the physical book provides an illustration of a woman who looks like an ordinary human.

For reference, even the description of tieflings in 2014 5e PHB, under the subheading "Infernal Bloodline" reads "Their skin tones cover the full range of human coloration, but also include shades of red." The red skin thing is new in 5e (or maybe it was 4e?) and it suits cambian demons, which are creatures with a human parent and an infernal parent like Hellboy.

In 3.5e, Tieflings are categorized with Aasimar under Planetouched in the Monster Manual. Quote: "Planetouched is a general word to describe someone who can trace his or her bloodline back to an outsider, usually a fiend or celestial." To reiterate, if you're a tiefling, you have a fiendish ancestor. That's bad. Here's why. Tiefling alignment is given as "usually evil (any)". The alignment of usually evil is the basis for discrimination against tiefliings. To quote 3e's definition of evil: ""Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master." THIS is this the bases for discrimination against tieflings. Evil alignment in 3e is traditional black-and-white-morality, objectively bad.