In a thread a bit ago, there was some talking about how negative and positive energy aren't inherently tied to alignments and this made me start thinking about exactly what the 2 energies actual do support and oppose.
Negative energy seems to support stagnation, as many of the creatures who "live" on it are obsessive and immortal(ghosts, ghouls, revenants, etc). It wants to kill life and stagnate a world continuously exposed to it, make something that never changes. It kind of wants to convert all life into this specific immortal non-changing ordered creatures, assimilating things slowly.
meanwhile, positive energy support life, which constantly goes through a process that makes it change to favor it's environment and thus favors and support creatures who can change. All the sentient creatures using this energy seem to vary widely in their beliefs and can even change their beliefs over time. Creatures powered by positive energy are generally not immortal and on average most creatures have life spans less than 5 years. This makes me believe that positive energy inherently favors an adapting and changing ecosystem.
Because of these, I came to the conclusion that if I HAD to hook up an alignment to the 2 energies, positive would be chaotic good, and negative would be lawful evil.
NOTE: this isn't what i believe the alignments of the energies are in the rules, just what I think they relate to the most after careful consideration.
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Because of these, I came to the conclusion that if I HAD to hook up an alignment to the 2 energies, positive would be chaotic good, and negative would be lawful evil.
That fits pretty well with the game mechanics.
Undead are pretty static. They don't age, they don't change or grow, they don't *have* to eat or drink to sustain their undead existence (although some choose to).
Living creatures, on the other hand, burn over time like wood in a fire, constantly aging, degrading, starving, thirsting, etc. Unlike an undead, they are very much not static, and have to constantly devour other living creatures to sustain their own lives, which seems very much not-lawful (or even particularly good), as if entropy affects them much more than undead.
IMO, this is something of a thematic mis-match, and I'd prefer if undead were even *less* able to survive without constantly killing other living things to devour them and sustain themselves than living humans and animals, and if negative energy was straight up inferior at sustaining existence and spawning new 'life' than positive energy, but that's the game we've got.
Given that positive energy seems to indiscriminately nourish *all* living creatures, including cancer, plagues, parasites, serial killers and demons, I'm not sure it's necessarily appropriate to label it as 'good,' in any event.
In one of my cleric rewrites, I changed Channel Energy so that it harmed creatures who were at least two aligament steps away from that of your deity. Similarly, you could heal those who were within one step. There were also some options to change how the ability worked. For example, if you had the Good domain, good creatures were always healed. If you had the death domain, living creatures were always harmed.
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the planes of positive and negative energy are not tied to any alignment. I play it as such, I also did a cleric rewrite and that clerics choose a plane to associate themselves with and they can cast that as normal, but they can also channel the other one at twice the cost of normal.
I also changed Paladins Lay on hands to be holy energy instead of positive energy so that it heals like it does already and can deal damage to undead and evil outsiders.
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It would be interesting, if not something done in this system, if the plane of positive energy was a plane of law, a plane of self-organizing systems, and energies that repair and maintain creatures, and the negative energy plane was a place of entropy, that erodes and decays all things into their constituent elements, breaking them down into raw chaos.
That would probably work better in a more old school D&D paradigm, where law and chaos are more important 'alignments' than the good and evil alignments added later.
@ Bandw2,
Interesting idea!
I suppose the counterargument is that living things can be defined as self-organising systems and therefore inherently lawful. Although I must admit I like your idea better.
From the above, you could make the case that BOTH types of energy tend towards Evil, but that forces of Good managed to figure out how to hijack Positive Energy for their purposes while most forces of Evil didn't figure this out, and instead stuck with Negative Energy.
This fits in with the canon we have in which Good Clerics channel Positive Energy and Evil Clerics channel Negative Energy, and it seems to be really hard to get Channel Positive Energy on an Evil character (Evil Oracle/Shaman of Life can do it, but I can't think of any others apart from types of Channel Positive Energy that are restricted to use with Turn Undead), and impossible to get Channel Negative Energy on a Good character (except for types restricted to use with Command Undead).