Alignment is... weird.
In D&D, one of the most successful elements of pop-culture osmosis - maybe its most successful - is the idea of alignment. While fiction has had "good guys" and "bad guys" since time immemorial, D&D's distribution of characters along not just the axis of good and evil, but also of law and chaos, has really stuck in the collective discourse. We see memes online of characters from various works of fiction (or even types of food) sorted into the 9-square alignment chart.
And in D&D, one of the first ways you define your character's personality is picking their alignment. There used to even be requirements for certain classes in earlier editions - a Paladin had to be Lawful Good, and I think Druids had to be True Neutral.
D&D's mutliversal cosmology is built on the alignment system. The sixteen Outer Planes (well, really 17, though the Outlands tend not to get as much of a focus outside of Planescape specifically) are defined by their alignments, with one for each X,Y coordinate in the three notches along each spectrum and then in-between planes that sit between them, like Arcadia as the Lawful Neutral/Lawful Good plane.
The Blood War - a key plot element in, among other things, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, is a war waged between the Devils of the Nine Hells and the Demons of the Abyss - creatures who, without alignment, would probably just both be called "demons," as they are in just about every other fantasy game.
But I've noticed that in Candlekeep Mysteries and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, alignment seems to be set aside for the most part. The stat blocks for creatures in both are not given alignments, which looks weird to me as someone who's spent the last several years poring over monster stat blocks.
Still, I get it: reading through the Monster Manual when I first got it, I remember some of the alignments surprising me. How could a Gibbering Mouther be neutral, and not evil? Why were Kuo-Toa evil?
Even tougher to wrap my head around was the way that law and chaos are handled. Consider this:
Demon lords are, by definition, chaotic. But chaotic does not mean that they never have any kind of organization. A demon lord will have a demonic horde at their command. How, though, does that differ from an archdevil commanding a squadron of diabolic soldiers? Both are evil (again, by definition,) but one is lawful while the other is chaotic.
Ok, so maybe you decide that the archdevil derives their authority by their rank - they've been imbued with their station by Asmodeus, and the other devils respect that authority and serve this archdevil in accordance with the rights and privileges of that rank. Meanwhile, a demon lord has only gotten their authority through brutality and threat, and the demons who serve it are doing so either by being bullied or because they think that the demon lord is the right conqueror to back, if they want to get in on all their violent conquest.
I can get behind that. But then we get Beholders.
Beholders are listed as lawful evil. But all the lore we've gotten about Beholders is that they freaking hate everything that isn't directly serving them - especially other Beholders. A Beholder is totally self-centered, and acquires minions through coercion, and generally seems to act on their own selfish impulses.
I'm sure that there are arguments to be made here, but the point is that there's ambiguity.
Now, I think that there's a much clearer reason for this change, which comes from an admirable place:
Historically, D&D has had humanoid races that have evil alignments. Drow, orcs, goblins, etc., are listed as evil, because they were designed to play an antagonistic role in games where the general assumption was that players would be good guys.
Orcs in Lord of the Rings (which really codified the modern fantasy orc) were written to be the massive horde of evil minions that we could feel unambiguous about our heroes cutting down dozens at a time. Tolkien, to his credit, understood the problem with this (though from a more Catholic than humanist perspective.) Tolkien decided that Orcs could not be their own people, because only God could create life - which was kind of his Catholic way of saying that any people had to be at least capable of good, as God would never create something that was pure evil. Thus, Orcs in Middle-Earth are actually corrupted elves.
But a few things have happened since then. First off, orcs have gotten more nuanced in fantasy fiction simply out of a desire to make them more interesting. But there's also been a greater awakening to the realities of racial prejudice (something that still has a long way to go) and certainly many people have started to look at these tropes of an entire people being written off as evil as, you know, a problem.
I think someone at WotC realized that we don't really lose much, mechanically, when alignment is removed from a stat block. Very little in the game actually refers to alignment (and in a modular, tag-referencing-based game like D&D, that's important.) Indeed, spells like Detect Evil and Good don't work the way they used to in older editions. You can't just figure out if someone's evil using that spell, which is great because what a dull way to solve a mystery. Instead, you detect certain creature types, some of which give you a strong sense of their moral alignment.
One eyebrow-raising line in Eberron: Rising from the Last War, was when it pointed out that creatures that were normally evil-aligned might not be in Eberron - you could encounter a benevolent beholder, friendly gnolls, and there's even a whole peaceful nation of orcish druids. The odd thing is that by justifying that - saying that the different cosmology of the orbiting planes around Eberron meant that the influence of gods like Gruumsh, Maglubiyet, and the demon lord Yeenoghu allowed these people to have free will to be good, implied that on other settings, an orc for example could not help but be evil.
That clearly doesn't really fit with modern sensibilities and really just what I think would be modern conceptions of these creatures.
Really, I think the model for the modern sense of humanoid alignment is Warcraft. In Warcraft III, the Orcs of the Horde were fleshed out to explain that their culture had been misled and manipulated by the demonic Burning Legion, and that, as a people, they are struggling to rebuild what they had before this influence. As tired as the Horde/Alliance conflict in the game has gotten, it still allows the Orcs to be more than just the bloodthirsty warmongers they were, but also recognizes that role that they played in the past, and even gets into thornier issues like the responsibilities of a new generation to take responsibility for the acts of their forebears. I don't mean to say it's perfect, but I also don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that the modern fantasy gamer's conception of Orcs has been shaped significantly by Warcraft.
But does that mean getting rid of alignment entirely?
It's an option, but I do think that alignment starts to play a more important role when we get to the otherworldly elements of D&D.
Without alignment, there's no real distinction between devils and demons, which pulls the rug out from under the entire Blood War, which is an objectively cool and story-driving part of the lore. Outside of the obvious good/evil dichotomy, we might not have gotten really interesting places like Mechanus or Ysgard.
Granted, in most cases, devils carry an implication of alignment, as do demons and yugoloths. And you might not need alignment to simply know the lore that Rakshasas are not devils, but nevertheless make their home in the Nine Hells.
However, Rakshasas are also vulnerable to piercing damage from magic weapons wielded by good-aligned creatures. Yes, this is a super-niche case, but it does nevertheless mean that you need to know if a character is good in order to see if this vulnerability is triggered - meaning that there's at least one true, mechanical need to know a character's alignment.
I think I'd approach this with two strategies.
The first is that anyone controlling a character should pick an alignment that makes sense for the character. If you're running a demon, you should always pick chaotic evil unless they are explicitly a weird or unusual one (like the Fey Balor who's chaotic good in Exandria and can be an Archfey warlock patron). Creatures that aren't planar outsiders or otherwise embodiments of some alignment should vary entirely based on the specifics of that character's personality and behavior.
As for player character, I think having an alignment is a good idea, but it should always be an abstraction of the character's actual personality, and it should react to the way you're behaving. My Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter was conceived of as Lawful Neutral (especially because I wanted him to be sort of a timeline-enforcer who wanted to make sure that the proper timeline was preserved, no matter how good or bad it was.) But over the now two-plus years I've been playing him, it's become pretty clear to me that he acts morally whenever possible (our party is weird - we're like the anti-murder-hobos, and our DM sometimes gets frustrated with how often we try to resolve things peacefully with the monsters). So, with a check-in with the DM, I changed his alignment to Lawful Good. Easy peasy, and Burnie the Barber will... style his scales for free, I guess? (We're still stuck in the Nine Hells and were hanging around Mahadi's Wandering Emporium.)
Anyway, we'll see if they do anything regarding alignment in future books. I think the general attitude is to let it kind of drift into the background, though I'll be very curious to see if it plays a more important role in any 5th Edition Planescape book.
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