D&D's 2025 Monster Manual Changes Alignment In Two Simple But Significant Ways

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Alignment has been a subject of much controversy in modern , and the 2025 is making a couple of potentially smart tweaks. As a way to categorize the moral inclinations of an individual or species, alignment can be a helpful tool for players and dungeon masters to determine how characters and creatures behave. At the same time, broad applications of alignment present a simplified worldview, and recent books have made changes like placing the qualifier "" in front of creature alignments.

In a press briefing, game director Jeremy Crawford confirmed that the "" qualifier is being dropped in the 2025 . The book will instead opt to explain the complexities of alignment early on and then leave the understanding of its flexibility to the DM's discretion. The other big change is an increased emphasis on Neutral characters to return to the old-school idea of Neutral as a "" category, encouraging DMs to push anyone marked as Neutral in any direction.

Leaving " in the past doesn't indicate an overall shift in philosophy or have a huge effect on the, but it does show that the new books aren't dead set on keeping changes if they don't prove to be worthwhile. Although the inclusion was theoretically a nice way to signal to DMs that species don't have to be monolithic in nature, it also became a repetitive appendage.

Dungeons & Dragons 2024’s Monster Manual is coming soon, so players should do what they can to pre-order or get early access to the rulebook.

Applying Neutral more liberally is likewise a relatively minor change, but it might be a better way to encourage a flexible approach to characterization. It remains to be seen just how often the alignment will show up throughout the 2025 , but it should be significantly more frequent than in the 2014 books, particularly when it comes to human characters.

I'm not one for sticking strictly to alignment, but I still think the shift in the 2025 's approach makes a lot of sense.I've never needed a "" qualifier to guide my willingness