Love and Honour or Money and Power?

One of the problems with the D&D alignment system is that there's pretty clearly a right answer: Neutral Good. "Bablyon 5" has shown pretty definitively the problems when either Law or Chaos wins, while "E.T." correctly instructs "be Good". Plus, since the NG philosophy basically boils down to "be excellent to each other", as espoused in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure", it's kind of hard to argue with that.

Unfortunately, NG is also the least interesting of the alignments. You might argue for the goody-two-shoes of LG, but this is actually incorrect - the tendency of LG characters to try to impose their morality on others inevitably causes conflict, and in a storytelling sense conflict is interesting. NG is just blandly nice.

I'm currently reading through "The Man in the Iron Mask", and percolating a whole bunch of "lessons from literature". I'm not ready to post most of those at this time, and indeed may not get some of them polished sufficiently ever to post. But one that does occur is a potential alternate alignment system, one that's perhaps a bit more interesting by virtue of not having a clear 'right' answer.

Three things about the system before I start:

1. It only applies to human and human-like characters. While these alignments might apply clearly to some monsters, many will have less recognisable motivations, and it doesn't really make sense to try to shoehorn them into this system.
2. Under this system you can be 'neutral' on one of the axes, but not both. Pick a side, damnit!
3. These alignments are priorities rather than absolutes - you're unlikely to find a character who is absolutely driven by one side and never by the other. That's actually true of the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes as well, but even moreso here.

So, anyway, this system has two somewhat orthogonal axes, much like the existing system: Love vs Money, and Honour vs Power.

The first axis, Love vs Money, is really about whether the character is more interested in people or in things. Would your character rather have four true friends but be penniless, or would you rather be a lonely millionnaire? (In extreme cases, a money-focused individual may even come to regard people as 'things' to be bought and sold. Such a person can hardly be said to be driven by 'love', of course!)

The second axis, Honour vs Power, is about the character's integrity versus temporal power - would you shoot an unarmed man in the back? What if nobody would ever know? What if it was the only way to defeat him? (At it's simplest level, an honour-focused character is all about his personal code of ethics, keeping to the vows he has sworn, and keeping his word. But it gets much more interesting if the setting also includes an implicit social order, as is the norm in the pseudo-Medieval world used in most D&D campaigns - the character has probably never explicitly made a personal oath to serve his king, but it matters not; because he is the king that oath is implicit and cannot be avoided.)

Obviously, this isn't a system I would use for every game, or even for most - in general, I still think alignment is best dropped. And I certainly wouldn't put any mechanical emphasis on these alignments, except insofar as they might interact with Inspiration or similar. But for the right type of game, such as a Musketeers-type game, I suspect they could well be interesting, especially if the party has significant alignment differences. (In particular, watching the honour-focused d'Argtanian and the power-focused Aramis pull apart in the novels is really quite interesting, and tragic.)