Alignment has been a subject of much controversy in modern Dungeons & Dragons, and the 2025 Monster Manual 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 "typically" in front of creature alignments.

In a D&d press briefing, game director Jeremy Crawford confirmed that the "typically" qualifier is being dropped in the 2025 Monster Manual. 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 "whatever" category,...