Alignment-tendency distillation (ours, not the SRD's)
The content tree — the contract for the
data/ tree.
The SRD gives each race an alignment prose tendency. We distill it to
a (moral, ethic) bias pair on the engine’s axes — moral +1
good / −1 evil, ethic +1 lawful / −1 chaotic, each in −1..+1, where the
nine alignment names derive at ±1/3 thresholds. The bias is a
generation-time mean shift, not a cap.
Magnitude scale:
| Bias | Reading of the prose |
|---|---|
| 0.0 | no tendency stated |
| ±0.2 | hedged pull (“not strongly inclined toward…”) |
| ±0.3 | clear lean (“more often X than not”, “tend toward X”, “many end up there”) |
| ±0.4 | strong lean (“most often X”, “share the X bent”, “inherit a tendency toward X”) |
| ±0.5 | emphatic majority (“most are X”, “lean strongly toward X”) — pushes the mean past the ±1/3 label threshold |
Per race (SRD prose quoted in each races/*.srd.ron above the value):
| Race | moral | ethic | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dwarf | +0.3 | +0.5 | “most dwarves are lawful”; “tend toward good as well” |
| Elf | +0.3 | −0.5 | “lean strongly toward… chaos”; “more often good than not” |
| Halfling | +0.5 | +0.5 | “most halflings are lawful good” |
| Human | 0.0 | 0.0 | “no particular alignment” |
| Dragonborn | +0.4 | 0.0 | “most dragonborn are good”, but explicitly polarized (“tend to extremes”) — the bimodal spread can’t live in a scalar mean |
| Gnome | +0.4 | 0.0 | “most often good”; law/chaos split by profession |
| Half-elf | 0.0 | −0.4 | “share the chaotic bent”; no moral tendency stated |
| Half-orc | −0.2 | −0.4 | “tendency toward chaos”; “not strongly inclined toward good”; the “usually evil” clause is conditioned on orc upbringing |
| Tiefling | −0.3 | −0.4 | “many of them end up [evil]” though not innately; “inclines many… toward a chaotic alignment” |