RE: alignment
The wrinkle with alignment has
always been the lawful aspect to it. People always get so hung up over good-vs-evil, but that's the
easy part. It's objective and well-defined. You might dislike the objective definition, but that does not change its meaning. This is Word Of God from Gygax himself that the moral axis must be judged from a frame of reference. There absolutely cannot be any subjective interpretation as to what this frame of reference is, because certain aspects of (A)D&D rely upon it having a specific definition. Therefore, following this logic, we do not have room to interpret what is good and what is evil. If we ask ourselves, "What is Good?" then we need only look at AD&D's PHB: the Ranger class
must be some form of Good, and an Assassin must be some form of Evil.
If we say that a Ranger does things that are Good, we then ask ourselves: well, what does a Ranger actually do? The PHB is surprisingly light on the ranger, giving only a few sentences. But Gygax spoke on this also:
The Ranger class was originally devised by Joe Fischer, then a regular in my D&D game group. I published his initial treatment of the class in The Strategic Review, thereafter revised it and included it in the core game rules. Of course it is apparent that Joe based the class on JRRT’s work and Aragorn.
Aragorn is the prototypical ranger and therefore we can surmise that Aragorn's actions are generally a definition of
Good.
We did not need our own interpretation, and there is no room for our own interpretation. Again, morality is well-defined in AD&D.
Lawfulness not so, because by definition it must be subjective not in its definition but in its interpretation.
If a lawful good person refuses to follow the local law because it is evil, are they still lawful? Are you lawful if you
only follow and enforce laws you agree with? Would a person living in a land with no laws be considered lawful by default? Are you lawful if you have your own code of laws you live by?
With a lack of a proper answer to any of these, I simply thought of counterexamples as to why they wouldn't be valid.
I cannot accept that Law requires following the ethos of a deity as is somewhat hinted at by the paladin class. Perhaps, that is a valid definition for paladin to some extent, but not overall. An obvious hole here is assuming everyone worships a deity to begin with, when many inhabitants -- non-human creatures(typically ones that pour molten chocolate on their penis) especially so -- are atheistic.
Following a personal moral code, perhaps? But... Would not most people consider Robin Hood to be some interpretation of Chaotic Good? But he follows his own ethos, his own moral code. Nope, not a good fit either.
And so on.
I was never able to find any satisfactory answers to these questions in any of Gygax's(or related) writings. Yes, I went through most of his works including his Q&A posts on forums as he got older(there were hundreds if not thousands.) OD&D Holmes edition is one of the few times it's expanded upon but it left me confused. I suspect these were not Gygax's words and would be quite strange if it were. I have other reasons for disregarding this edition's alignment discussion, not the least being the insistence that all lawful characters must walk up to other people and inform them of their lawfulness... yeah, really.
If, however, you thought you had alignments figured out perfectly, consider this:
Gygax believed if there was some final showdown between the alignment extremes, it would
not be Good and Evil fighting against each other as is nearly always depicted. Chaotic Good and Chaotic Evil would align to prevent the ascendancy of complete lawfulness.
Refer to The Strategic Review Vol. 2, No. 1(Feb 1976) issue for an article on alignment by Gary Gygax as a starting point if you haven't read it already.
