The overall playerbase consistently has a small slant towards chaos and evil, if you add up all the characters. I could write quite a bit about why this is true, but that's whatthe numbers are.

Some hypotheses follow. You may or may not care.

Part of the good/evil axis imbalance is the class disparity. There is only one class that tilts the good/evil axis towards good (paladins), and empowered classes are inherently somewhat rare. Anti-paladins, necromancers, and berserkers all lean the opposite direction, and last I checked all outnumber paladins individually. This used to be somewhat mitigated by conjurers being a de facto good-aligned class, but with a lot of the recent playability improvements to evil conjurers, I'm not sure that's valid any more. But overall, if you are the type of player who hops from class to class, you'll find yourself being forced evil three times as often as you find yourself being forced good.

As an example along the law/chaos axis, Thera is often as much as 40% Chaotic, because a very simple (and incomplete/flawed) interpretation of the ethos system is "Chaotic means I can ignore laws if it is to my benefit. Orderly means I cannot. Therefore, I should pick the ethos that gives me more options." If no Tribunal is around, the Chaotic person can more easily justify selfish behavior (killing, stealing, etc.) that puts their priorities over the community's. Also, many Chaotic characters won't play their ethos when doing something rash and unpredictable ("I'm sick of waiting for you! I'm attacking them all now!") isn't the most sensible thing to do, so they don't suffer the downsides. Some counterincentives exist-- for example, Tribunals will be more likely to trust the word of an Orderly person. But overall, a Chaotic ethos is probably a small powergame-y edge. I could make a similar argument for evils, especially the much-despised Team Evil demographic. ("Oh. You're evil too? Please, take my extra sword.")

We've considered some incentives (along the lines of Request) to reverse this trend, and it's probably something we'll continue to work on in the future.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com