One of the most common points of confusion I have run across in my years working with D&D has been how to parse alignments. Each edition has given some means of describing each alignment, but these descriptions rarely seem to help much and almost never give a solid sense of how each alignment relates to one another. This is especially a problem when people read their own moral understandings into the terms "good" and "evil," rather than seeing how they are being used within the context of the game. So, some years ago, I drew up a chart to explain them, based on an understanding that each axis in the alignment is a spectrum answering one core aspect of the character's morality.

The two axes at play are the character's source of morality or moral basis (lawful/chaotic), and the priority their morality emphasizes (good/evil).
Moral Basis

• To be Lawful is to rely upon concrete external sources of moral judgment; this may be a legal code, a religion, a cultural norm, or anything else. As long as it is seen as absolute and an external source that the character looks to for guidance, it will trend toward the lawful. Lawful occupies negative numbers on this chart.
• To be Chaotic is to rely upon contextual internal sources of moral judgment; this may be one's own conscience, gut feelings, or even a very mercenary morality that accepts whatever pays best. As long as it can bend to varying circumstances, and the character interprets their options without appeal to external moral sources, it will trend toward the chaotic. Chaotic occupies positive numbers on this chart.

Moral Priority

• To be Good is to emphasize the good of society in one's moral decisions. This may be the good of a given country, a social class, or the world at large; as long as the focus of the character's decision is to seek the best for others. A character may belong to the group that is benefiting from their actions (like being a citizen of the country they serve), but being good means that this is incidental, and that they will choose to benefit the larger body even if that means they personally lose out on that benefit. As long as the priority is fundamentally altruistic, it will trend toward the good. Goodness occupies positive numbers on this chart.
• To be Evil is to emphasize the good of oneself in one's moral decisions. This does not mean no one else can benefit, only that helping others is incidental. A character may make a choice that benefits themselves and everyone else in their home city, but the driving force behind that decision will have been the benefit they saw for themselves. This character will sacrifice others, or at least allow others to suffer loss, if it causes them gain. As long as the priority is fundamentally selfish, it will trend toward the good. Evil occupies negative numbers on this chart.

Finding Your Place
Very few characters hit 100% of any given descriptor above. A character that is 100% lawful, for instance, will never make any moral judgments of their own, but will always blindly do whatever their moral authority commands; such a character has no agency of their own, and therefore will probably be stifling or intolerable to play as anything but a cameo role. So how do you make sense of your character's alignment?

First, think about where your character lies on each of the above-listed spectra, and rank them from a scale of -10 to 10. So a character whose morality will incline them to lean on legal standards to benefit themselves will have negative numbers on both axes. If you feel that they are very legal, but only slightly selfish, you may give them a -7 on Law/Chaos and a -2 on Good/Evil.

Next, plot that location on the chart and check which alignment the result is in. Our example, (-7, -2), is located in Lawful Neutral territory. So their alignment is lawful neutral; they will have a strong reliance on an external authority to determine the right path, and while they can go either way in terms of altruism vs. selfish motivations, you have determined they will slightly favor selfish ones.

What this does is gives you a more well-informed idea of how your character makes decisions that is based on the principles your character holds to, rather than on specific examples. You can then use that idea to shape your character's moral actions throughout the campaign, even when confronted with unforeseen moral questions. This also means that, if you want your character's alignment to change, you and your DM have a concrete understanding of what decisions to make to change that. Maybe you want them to be more chaotic; you and/or your DM can confront them with more story opportunities that cause them to see flaws in their external moral authority, or to start taking initiative in interpreting situations.

I hope you find it useful!

One problem my old table ran into in Dungeons & Dragons 3/3.5 was that crits were just kind of...boring. I mean, sure, it was exciting to get a critical hit, and upsetting to get a critical miss, but the game mechanics for them just felt like they didn't live up to the weight they really deserved. So we had two house rules to address this. The first was practiced by every one of us when we DMed, and it was that anyone who rolled a critical hit got to tell the story of that hit however they wanted, with all the epic flair and physics-defying footwork they desired; but if they rolled a critical miss, the DM got to tell the story of it.

The other was a series of crit tables. A couple of us had our own versions of this, but essentially, it was a percentage chart we'd roll to get varied mechanical results from both critical hits and critical misses. Rather than a simple x2 or x3 modifier, there was a chance you would cut the target's arm off or cause them to bleed for a number of rounds.

How this worked in practice is that, when a crit was confirmed, the DM would roll a percentage, compare it to the chart, and tell the player the mechanical effect of their attack. Then the player (or DM, for a failure) would tell the story with the knowledge that it had to include that mechanical effect. The result was a creative approach to attacks, as players were always trying to be prepared to tell a great story, as well as a more varied and exciting critical result system.

Here is the chart I use when running 3.5 campaigns. Feel free to use it, or treat it as a source from which you will develop your own charts for use in various games. Note that it maintains the crit multiplier function; 'base' represents the weapon's critical multiplier, whereas the multiplier bonuses are actual additions to the critical multiplier. So a weapon with a x2 critical multiplier is treated as having a x4 critical multiplier on critical hit percentages from 51-75.

These are compendiums of Power Effects and Power Modifiers for use in Mutants & Masterminds 3e games played on Foundry VTT. To install it, extract the file using 7zip and drop the internal folder into C:\Users\[yourname]\AppData\Local\FoundryVTT\Data\worlds\[yourgame]\packs. You may need to have hidden folders visible to see parts of this path.

Known Issues: There are two issues I have learned about so far that may need addressed if you have trouble importing.

1. Check for duplicate folder in file path: Because of the way I compressed them, each folder below will extract with another folder inside of it with the same name. Please make sure the inner folder is the one in \Packs. That is, when you open the folder titled "power-effects," it should have a handful of weird files in it. If, instead, it has another folder called "power-effects," you need to move that version of the folder into \packs.
2. Generate the Compendium: Adding the folder to the pack for a game may not cause it to appear in the game itself. To correct this, simply create a Compendium in the game using the same name as the one you want to add (so "Power Effects" to import the "power-effects" folder). Set the Document Type to "Item." Doing so will tell Foundry to look for that compendium, and it will auto-populate from the imported file. This may require you to exit and reload the game world, but in my experience, that has rarely been the case.
   

Please comment here if you have any concerns, questions, or problems with the compendiums or installation.

This is a compendium of Advantages for use in Mutants & Masterminds 3e games played on Foundry VTT. To install it, extract the file using 7zip and drop the internal folder into C:\Users\[yourname]\AppData\Local\FoundryVTT\Data\worlds\[yourgame]\packs. You may need to have hidden folders visible to see parts of this path.

Known Issues: There are two issues I have learned about so far that may need addressed if you have trouble importing.

1. Check for duplicate folder in file path: Because of the way I compressed them, the folder below will extract with another folder inside of it with the same name. Please make sure the inner folder is the one in \Packs. That is, when you open the folder titled "advantages," it should have a handful of weird files in it. If, instead, it has another folder called "advantages," you need to move that version of the folder into \packs.
2. Generate the Compendium: Adding the folder to the pack for a game may not cause it to appear in the game itself. To correct this, simply create a Compendium in the game using the same name as the one you want to add (so "Advantages" to import the "advantages" folder). Set the Document Type to "Item." Doing so will tell Foundry to look for that compendium, and it will auto-populate from the imported file. This may require you to exit and reload the game world, but in my experience, that has rarely been the case.
   

Please comment here if you have any concerns, questions, or problems with the compendium or installation.