Alignment Survey - Results
Data Analysis of Player Alignment Preference
Preface and Sample Size
What started out as a brief thought I had regarding player alignment preference ended up as a survey. I anticipated I'd get about 80-90 responses in a week, and ended up with 1,001 in less than 24 hours. Turns out, Survey Monkey will only show the first 100 responses to a free account, so I had to fork out $24 to get the rest of the results (up to 1,000). I wish I could have left it open longer, but anything after 1,000 costs me $0.15 per person so I had to cut it off there. I apologize to anyone who didn't get to answer the survey in time; it's not that I don't value your input, I just didn't want a huge credit card bill. :) I'd like to take the time to thank everyone who answered the survey. I personally posted this survey to r/DnD, r/Pathfinder_RPG, and r/RPG, as well as Facebook. I'm not sure if anyone sent it out to anyone else, but if you did, thanks!
(Sidenote – I was told that Google Docs will let you conduct large surveys/polls for free. I'll keep this in mind in the future, I didn't want to start over on Google Docs and risk ignoring the data of those who had already responded)
Expectations of Data/Perceived Sampler Bias
My belief going into this was that I expected Chaotic Neutral to be the most popular alignment, followed perhaps by True Neutral and Neutral Good. I expected that all three Evil alignments would most likely be the bottom 3 results, since most DMs shy away from allowing evil PCs, for various reasons.
Results in comments
Question 4 and closing remarks
(Author's note - If you see broken/misdirected links, typos/mistakes(excluding [sic] in Question 3), or other errors, please let me know and I'll correct them.)
Posted May 17, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC · edited
Question 1: Which of these alignments have you played as in the past? (Multiple selections allowed)
Q1
As expected, all three Evil alignments are in the bottom 3. Interestingly, Chaotic Evil is the least played, while Chaotic Good is the most played. It seems like even when someone is a “bad guy”, they still prefer to keep a bit of planning about them. Rules don't matter when you're helping others, but they're important when you're out for yourself. Seems like this would be ripe for a joke about politics and society as a whole :)
Question 2: Which alignment is your PREFERRED alignment to play as? (Pick one)
Q2
Here's the biggest question, and the results show that most people tend toward the upper right three blocks of the alignment spectrum, CG, NG, and CN. There's a pretty steep dropoff after that, with Lawful Good being the least popular non-evil alignment. A lot of responses in question 3 seem to indicate a heavy bias against Lawful Good, with many people feel the morality is too extreme and it ties their hands. These same reasons are given in favor of the choices of CG, NG, and CN. Most CG/NG players want to be “Good guys” without being “Lawful Stupid”, and CN is the go-to alignment of people who want what they feel is the alignment that gives them the most freedom. Many others go to True Neutral for the same reason. Of the 210 people who have ever played Chaotic Evil, only 17 of them have actually picked it as their favorite. It seems like once you go CE, you decide it's a bad idea.
Of course, these results are skewed by the fact that many players never play Evil characters. So I filtered the results to ONLY display people who have played at least one Evil alignment.
The first thing that surprised me is that 483/1001 respondents say they've played an Evil character at least once. I expected this number to be around 30-35%, not 48%.
So once you go Evil, do you go back?
Q2A
CG/NG/CN remain the most popular choices among players who have tried an Evil character, with Lawful Evil being the most popular Evil alignment. Semi-unsurprisingly, among players who have tried Evil characters, they don't seem to want to be Lawful Good.
So let's do this in reverse. Let's take a look at the people who decided they DID want to be Evil. Filtering Q2 by only players who have preference of LE/NE/CE:
Q2B
106/1001, or 10% of respondents said they prefer Evil
Q1B
Of those who prefer Evil, it seems as though they've tried a good bit of everything. 7/106 respondents said they've played every alignment at least once (in question 4) and 17/106 said they're not interested in trying any other alignments.
With all this talk of Evil characters, what about Good ones?
Q2C
559/1001 respondents indicated a preference towards Good characters. Of those people:
It seems there's still a stigma against Lawful Good. Of the people who picked either CG or NG as their favorite alignment, 60.33% (295/489) of them have said they've given LG a try, and 15.34% (75/489) say they haven't, but they'd be interested in it.
Have they given other alignments a chance? Is Good all they know?
Q1C
For about half, they've tried at least one Neutral alignment. Less than 1 in 4 have tried an Evil.
I know I haven't introduced Question 4 formally yet, but I found these results to be interesting:
Q4C
(Are there any alignments which would interest you, that you have not previously played as?)
A very large amount of people indicate an interest in wanting to play an Evil character. In fact, when I filter out the results of people who chose “Every Alignment” or “Not interested in other alignments”, 54.48% express interest in LE, 27.13% NE, 26.01% CE.
You hear that, DMs? Your Paladins secretly want to take over the world.
And finally, what would drive a man to be Neutral?
Q2D
336/1001 people indicated their terrible, dark propensities for the vice of Neutrality.
Among the Neutralites, about half of them go for “the freedom alignment” of CN, with the rest falling into TN and LN respectively.
Q1D
Most (more than half of) players who prefer middle alignments have tried Good alignments, with the same skew towards the upper right of the alignment matrix, as seen before.
Of those who picked Chaotic Neutral as their go-to alignment, it seems that 68.29% (112/164) of them have tried Chaotic Good as well.
Data inconsistency sidenote: Of the 164 people who said Chaotic Neutral was their preferred alignment , only 159/164 (96.95%) of them have said they've played CN in the past. Scratching my head at that one, but those CN types will do what they want.
More fun data inconsistency: So that it doesn't seem like the CN people are the only crazy ones:
97.14% of people who selected LG as their preferred alignment have indicated that they've played LG before.
Likewise for 98.70% of LN people, 98% of LE people, 94.98% of NG people, 94.74% of TN people, 87.18% of NE people, 99.20% of CG people, and 100% of CE people.
So thank you to the 17 CE murder hobos who were the only group to actually play the group they prefer to play. :) CG was pretty close.