How can Alignment and Alignment languages actually work

My 10^th level paladin, Ambrosia Cornucopia, dismounts his white steed, full of a robust will to do good in the world. He grabs his gleaming double bladed executioner’s axe from the saddle and enters the town of Babblybabblebrook with a righteous glory. He then flips on his detect evil switch and goes to work. Ten headless corpses later, Ambrosia Cornucopia mounts his steed and makes his way to the next town.

Talk about a menace.

The paladin from the eyes of a villager.

 

I think we’ve all had to deal with this at some point in our gaming past. For my part, it produced a lot of hilarity at the table until I did away with alignment, detecting good and evil, and even most mind reading magic. In a way I miss that. I also miss the ‘zoo’ dungeon, not a lot, but sometimes. I suppose everything has its place.

Having done away with alignment, I replaced it with…. adjectives. Basically, I gave NPCs and monsters three adjectives and a goal (more or less) that defined who they were. I replaced alignment with a ‘tenor of their being.’ This turned out to be better than alignment since it gave me more meat or gristle to work with at the table.

Now here was the interesting part of that. It took a few years until the idea dawned on me that the characters could read mannerisms, inflections of speech, language, and physical cues to, more or less, indicate the nature of the person with whom they were interacting – if they made a successful check. The paladin was better than others at noting characteristics of a ‘bad’ person, a thief would be more accurate in recognizing a thief - “it takes a thief to catch a thief”. That, in a nut shell, was alignment language. It is not a spoken language.

The ‘detection’ was not always accurate nor was it complete, but that was not important. What was important was allowing me to keep situations fluid and open to interpretation so the players were always a little off-balance.  

 

Now, why are orcs evil? They are not evil per se' but it i is certainly within anyone's self-interest to kill them all lock stock and barrel on site. I set it u such that a deity has decided to destroy the world. The act of destroying the world is manifested through the orcs. Orcs have but one job, they must destroy everything. Humans and others, realizing they are on the chopping block for destruction, fight back to eradicate the menace to their existence. or die.