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View Full Version : Neutrality- should the alignment system be symmetrical?



hamishspence
2012-03-20, 08:06 AM
Specifically, with respect to the interpretation of characters that "regularly commit evil and good acts in equal magnitude" are Neutral.

Under this interpretation, a character could, for example "make personal sacrifices (risking their life) to help strangers" every day, and murder one innocent child every month, and it would "balance out".

Or some other moderately evil act- like torturing an animal to death for pleasure.

I don't think it's supposed to work this way- and I think that regularly, unrepentantly, doing moderately evil acts outbalances any amount of good acts.

Thoughts?

Yora
2012-03-20, 08:12 AM
Actions don't have alignment.

There are no good acts or evil acts. If you randomly do some things that a good character does, it does not make you good or negate your evil actions. Good and evil are not equal. Good is active, evil is passive. You don't do evil because you want to do evil. You do evil because you don't care how some people are affected by it. Evil people do bad thing because they want to gain something for themselves and that it hurts others doesn't stop them.

Serpentine
2012-03-20, 08:27 AM
I think a character who behaves like that is insane, and probably Chaotic. It would, I think, take an extremely good roleplayer to make that work, and even then the character in question would probably only think they're Neutral.
Although that could conceivably make a pretty neat character - someone who really wants to be, say, a Druid, and thinks that "maintaining the balance" means "running from one end of the see-saw to the other and back again", when they're actually just mental.

valadil
2012-03-20, 08:30 AM
I think a character who behaves like that is insane, and probably Chaotic.

I actually kind of like the idea of an insane character who is alignment savvy in a world where nobody else is.

Serpentine
2012-03-20, 08:42 AM
Heh. Yes, alright: the schitzophrenic variety of True Neutral can work... for a few particular types of character, and shouldn't be considered the standard (much less the only!) True Neutral.

Saph
2012-03-20, 08:43 AM
I don't think it's supposed to work this way- and I think that regularly, unrepentantly, doing moderately evil acts outbalances any amount of good acts.

Under that logic someone who performs massively important good actions of enormous significance which culminate in him selflessly sacrificing himself to save the world, who also did a few moderately evil but trivial actions at the same time, would count as Evil. Doesn't make much sense to me.

There has to be a balance. In your proposed system of measurement, evil actions are effectively way more important than good ones - why?

Sgt. Cookie
2012-03-20, 09:15 AM
Good is active, evil is passive.

I have to disagree with you there, Yora. Evil is most definately active. You do something evil because you want to do it, either for pleasure or malice. Take the Sons of Anarchy, for example: no way in hell are they paragons of humanity, but they are also a far cry from outright evil. Yes, they kill, torture and god knows what else, but not out of simple pleasure they gain from killing and torturing, but rather simply to serve themselves and their own interests.

Evil is razing a village to the ground for fun. Neutral is killing a guy who seriously offended you.

Yora
2012-03-20, 09:39 AM
Not completely sure about the examples you give, but my point is that in almost all cases, an evil person does not care if persuing his goal hurts other people or not. Hurting others is not a requirement for them to do it. They only care for the result. Causing suffering is a side effect, but not the goal.
Even a crazy maniac who does nothing but murdering people doesn't do it because his goal is to see other suffer, but because it feels rewarding for him.

When you decide "I want this!", it is an active descision.
But I think in virtually all cases they don't make the decision "Whatever I do, it must hurt someone".

Good is different. When you do something for yourself, but it also happens to benefit someone else, that's nice, but that's not being good. That's just a fortunate coincidence, but neutral.
To behave in a good way, helping others needs to be the goal, and any personal gain is an optional side effect.
With evil, personal gain is the goal, with causing harm being an optional side effect.

Sgt. Cookie
2012-03-20, 09:49 AM
Not completely sure about the examples you give,

It's probably because you have never seen Sons of Anarcy. If you have seen it, you know what I mean.


But my point is that in almost all cases, an evil person does not care if persuing his goal hurts other people or not. Hurting others is not a requirement for them to do it. They only care for the result. Causing suffering is a side effect, but not the goal.

True, but that can also describe neutral.


Even a crazy maniac who does nothing but murdering people doesn't do it because his goal is to see other suffer, but because it feels rewarding for him.

Yes, but he DOES go out of his way to cause suffering.


When you decide "I want this!", it is an active descision.

But not in and of itself evil.


But I think in virtually all cases they don't make the decision "Whatever I do, it must hurt someone".

I direct you to the Paladin of Slaughter.


Good is different. When you do something for yourself, but it also happens to benefit someone else, that's nice, but that's not being good. That's just a fortunate coincidence, but neutral.
To behave in a good way, helping others needs to be the goal, and any personal gain is an optional side effect.
With evil, personal gain is the goal, with causing harm being an optional side effect.

That's a fair point.

Yora
2012-03-20, 10:02 AM
True, but that can also describe neutral.
Most often, it is. Until you get to the point, where you become aware that others may be hurt by your action. A neutral character may go through with if he thinks the damage is so minor to be acceptable or the damage caused by not doing it is greater than what is caused by doing it.
Evil sees the damage the action will cause, but does not care.

Yes, but he DOES go out of his way to cause suffering.
But the damage is a means to another goal, not the goal itself.

I direct you to the Paladin of Slaughter.
Which I regard as a case of "cartoon evil" that only exists in bad fiction and has no relations to reality. Evil for the sake of evil is the same category as making paladins fall for only being able to save one of two people in danger.

TheDarkSaint
2012-03-20, 10:39 AM
I see neutrality more along the lines of doing what's best for myself and the people I love and everyone else can rot. That's where I see the balance coming in. I will do kind and loving things to people I know/respect/love/admire and I can be cruel and uncaring to those I don't know and don't care about.

Mystify
2012-03-20, 11:15 AM
When you do something for yourself, but it also happens to benefit someone else, that's nice, but that's not being good. That's just a fortunate coincidence, but neutral.
To behave in a good way, helping others needs to be the goal, and any personal gain is an optional side effect.
With evil, personal gain is the goal, with causing harm being an optional side effect.
This sums up my stance nicely. Evil is acting without regard for others. Consider the term "Evil corporation". They are not an evil corporation because they heat the building with furnaces fueled by babies. They are evil because they enact policies that benefit themselves, but are harmful to their customers. A thief is evil because they are acting to get themselves and advantage, without caring how it harms someone else. A murderer is evil because they are acting in their own interest(whatever their motive is, be it revenge, money, pleasure...) without caring that they are killing somebody else.
Because of this apathy towards others, an evil person is generally not concerned with performing a good act.You pretty much never so the line of thought "No, I can't do that, it means those orphans will get a full meal!". Incidental goodness is not something they will avoid on the path towards self-gain. Presented with 2 option with equal gain, they may even choose the option that helps the most people.
Of course, somebody doing evil for evil's sake doesn't follow those rules, but that kind of thinking is generally the result of poor writing.
In contrast, a good character has to avoid incidental evil at all times. Evil is not concerned with not doing good, but good is concerned with not doing evil.
In fact, a major plot point in one of my games was that the good aligned creatures decided that it was better to not have the extremes of evil than to have extremes of good, and so combined the elemental planes of good and evil to counteract each other, resulting in a more neutral cosmology.

RndmNumGen
2012-03-20, 11:31 AM
I see neutrality more along the lines of doing what's best for myself and the people I love and everyone else can rot. That's where I see the balance coming in. I will do kind and loving things to people I know/respect/love/admire and I can be cruel and uncaring to those I don't know and don't care about.

Depending on the scale though, that can describe Evil as well. If someone is willing to enslave 98% of the world's population, torturing and beating them to keep them in line, all for the benefit of the 2% he cares about, is that Neutral? I don't believe it is.

Deepbluediver
2012-03-20, 11:34 AM
I think that when you have a dedicated system of good and evil, you need to take both actions an intent into account, and you essentially break things down into varying degrees.

It get's complicated, and a lot of it depends on what an individuals personal philosophy is, but I like the versions where the "well intentioned-extremist" and the "evil for teh lulz" end up at different points on the malevometer, even if they are in the same general classification.

What I like to do is add the 4e idea of "unalligned" to the existing 3.5 alignment chart, so that "nuetral" can actually be play as some one who favors balance. This is frequently where the idea of intent vs. action, and the results of your decisions, all come together to mesh into some horribly complicated stew.

I tend to play dieties as reasonable type, to the point where they are willing to look at all the mitigating circumstances in a situation, and say "did this follow my guidelines or advance my personal agenda?". Sacrificing people to save yourself is bad (evil), sacrificing 100 people to save a city of 10,000 might be overlooked, especially if you risked your own life to do so, and you don't make a regular habit of it.
Sacrificing 100 people to save yourself, under the theory that you will, in the long run, do more "good" than some random commoners doesn't fly. Thats not what Good (with a capital "G") is.
IMO it really needs to be addressed on a case-by-case basis.


And no, I don't think you can balance good and evil deeds and end up as nuetral. You might have a story where there is a redemption or a fall from grace, but repeated evil acts get you firmly classified as evil in my book.

Mustard
2012-03-20, 11:54 AM
Perhaps good and evil shouldn't be mutually exclusive, then. Let's say you have a character that commits extreme acts of good and evil, to try and balance them. Ignoring motivation, I think the solution is to have that character simultaneously classified as being Good and Evil, then let everything else fall into place. Similarly, a character could conceivably not commit any good nor any evil acts.

In D&D/PF, basically this means that spells that affect good creatures would work on that character, and spells that affect evil creatures would work on that character. Spells seem to be consistently worded simply to ask "is the character <good/evil>", and apply an effect from there, so this adjustment should work on its own. If there happens to be a spell that affects a character based on morality, and both effects cannot reasonably be applied, then I'd say make a judgment call and one "side" wins due to the probable imbalance. If the character is perfectly split between good and evil, coin toss (or maybe even a d3: treat as good, treat as evil, treat as neither).

So, "new alignments" in D&D/PF would be LGE, CGE, and [N]GE. I'm assuming you can't have a Lawful and Chaotic character, but perhaps that could be used for characters that follow a strict personal code (which I think shouldn't matter at all for alignment, but let's roll with it), but don't give one whit about the laws of government and laws of society.

As for the afterlife, well, that's a problem the setting should resolve.

tedthehunter
2012-03-20, 11:59 AM
And no, I don't think you can balance good and evil deeds and end up as nuetral. You might have a story where there is a redemption or a fall from grace, but repeated evil acts get you firmly classified as evil in my book.

I agree with you on this. I personally find the idea of balancing out good and evil acts to be pretty silly. "Oops! I'm tilting towards the good side this month, I'd better catch up on my quota of demon sacrifices." What?

And furthermore, the way I've always had my characters and NPCs roleplay neutrality is less extreme than that. For me, a neutral person has always been someone who is generally good, but has no particular devotion towards good as a cause. For example, someone who is neutral would certainly help a stranded stranger on the road (if it was convenient), but would almost never turn down payment for such a service. A sort of paragon to fairness if you will.

Another example could be, a neutral character might answer a request for help at a tavern, where there was full expectation of payment, but would likely never go and offer to help someone at his own expense.

Deepbluediver
2012-03-20, 12:30 PM
Perhaps good and evil shouldn't be mutually exclusive, then. Let's say you have a character that commits extreme acts of good and evil, to try and balance them. Ignoring motivation, I think the solution is to have that character simultaneously classified as being Good and Evil, then let everything else fall into place. Similarly, a character could conceivably not commit any good nor any evil acts.

Sorry, but I think that's an even worse solution. Good and evil are not seperate states that you can exist in simultaneously.

As was said earlier, I think, the acts that determine your alignment are seperate from the alignment itself. Repeatedly committing evil actions means you end up as evil, even if you sometimes do things that are very good.

Mastikator
2012-03-20, 12:30 PM
In my heart of hearts I think alignment, morals and ethics is a matter of fluff and should not be represented mechanically, as I do not think these are objective descriptions of things. They are entirely valid subjective descriptions of things.

That said, if we must have an alignment system then it's very important to clearly define what is and isn't alignment. Personality, preference, capacity for empathy, willingness for altruism, impulsiveness etc are all very much different things and to fold them into a system of alignment would be to destructively simplify the character since one thing will inevitably imply another thing, even when it shouldn't. Just because someone has very little capacity for empathy doesn't mean that someone isn't willing to self sacrifice for total strangers, but with a system that says a character is either good, bad or neutral, characters will tend to be shoehorned into one category, a category with all sorts of inappropriate (for this specific character, but not in general!) implications.
Should it be symmetrical, once defined? Not necessarily, but it probably will be. Being in favor of freedom is the opposite of being in favor of oppression, that is symmetrical. Being in favor of protecting life is the opposite of being in favor of killing. Also symmetrical. But alignment should be defined as narrowly as possible, it seizes to be symmetrical otherwise.
This is where I think D&D 4e alignment is superior to 3.5e alignment. It defines it not as what kind of person you are, but which side you are on, and only that. You can be a very nice and carrying evil character in 4e, because evil means something very specific, which is rather unique to 4e. In 3.5e you can't, you'd be either good, neutral or evil. It "evens out" to neutral, but you're actually anything but neutral, you're on the evil side and you have a good personality, there's nothing neutral about that! Calling a character like this neutral completely betrays the fact that this is a good person in favor of evil goals. This form of alignment corrupts the character.
Those are my thoughts.

Deepbluediver
2012-03-20, 01:04 PM
In my heart of hearts I think alignment, morals and ethics is a matter of fluff and should not be represented mechanically, as I do not think these are objective descriptions of things. They are entirely valid subjective descriptions of things.
I don't really buy the whole "subjective morality" bit. Yes societies can have different value systems, and yes the circumstances of a situation may alter the morality of one particular act, but I think most people confuse subjective morality with just being overly-simplistic.
If I say "murder is bad" they counter with "but what about in self defense?" and I go "well then that's not murder now, is it?"
Also, just because your entire society agrees to something, does not make that thing automatically "good". To me, good and evil have concrete definitions; this isn't some kind of popularity contest, and "Good" as in the opposite of "Evil" is different from "good" in the sense of "what's good for me?"

I agree that this sort of thing can get very tricky, such as debating whether stealing in order to help the poor is a good or evil act, but that was why I advocated a reasonable amount of case-by-case determination.


That said, if we must have an alignment system then it's very important to clearly define what is and isn't alignment. Personality, preference, capacity for empathy, willingness for altruism, impulsiveness etc are all very much different things and to fold them into a system of alignment would be to destructively simplify the character since one thing will inevitably imply another thing, even when it shouldn't. Just because someone has very little capacity for empathy doesn't mean that someone isn't willing to self sacrifice for total strangers, but with a system that says a character is either good, bad or neutral, characters will tend to be shoehorned into one category, a category with all sorts of inappropriate (for this specific character, but not in general!) implications....

I think that a solidified alignment system works in D&D because it's a fantasy setting that doesn't need to conform to real-world rules. I'm certain that there are some game systems where such designations are trivial, much harder, or just less important, but that doesn't stop me from saying it works well in D&D.
I have never met a character that I absolutely couldn't place in one of the 9 given alignments, though like I said I tend to favor adding in a 10th spot for "unalligned".
I think that the D&D alignment system is moderately well defined (not that it couldn't be improved of course) and that you get far more problems from players using it badly. I.e., stuff like "I'm playing a paladin, and paladins are "good", so obviously whatever I say is good, and no one else in the entire party can question me."

At this point we're probably treading close to the "morality arguments" that get threads locked, so we need to go carefully, and if some one sends me a PM complaining then I'll edit posts or delete them as necessary. That's why I want to say that the following is ENTIRELY my personal opinion with regards to IN-GAME SYSTEMS, and disagreeing with it does not make either of us wrong.
I agree with Mastikator in that the alignment system should be defined (at least broadly) at the start of a game, and that it shouldn't be symetrical; that sounds to much like it's working on a "points" set-up. I think its possible for a small number of evil deeds to taint an otherwise good character, and some one who swings back and forth ends in evil territory. I also don't like it when the DM tries to "trick" people into doing things that get them alignment penalties, but some might call that a game-play issue.

Part of the reason that I think WotC wanted the original system to be more of a personality-description rather than a morality chart if partly due to the inclusion of law and chaos, which I believe are entirely seperate categories. Players need to be careful of playing certain alignments to the extremes, where individual action can start to look a lot like their polar opposite, but to me that's a failure of the player (or maybe their DM to reign them in), not a reason to junk the entire system.


It should be clear by now that I've got certain opinions that I'm not shy about sharing, but if anyone has an individual alignment issue or situation they are struggling with in-game, send me a PM and I'd be happy to discuss it with you, for all the my thoughts are worth.

hamishspence
2012-03-20, 01:58 PM
Under that logic someone who performs massively important good actions of enormous significance which culminate in him selflessly sacrificing himself to save the world, who also did a few moderately evil but trivial actions at the same time, would count as Evil. Doesn't make much sense to me.

Champions of Ruin helpfully points out that Neutral and even Good characters can be driven to commit evil acts from time to time- it is "repeatedly, deliberately committing these acts" that is the mark of an Evil character.

That is, a consistent pattern of Evil behaviour.

When a character has both a pattern of Evil behaviour- and a pattern of Good behaviour- should they "cancel out" or should one take precedence over the other?

Imagine the kind of character who is basically "a serial killer in the making"- routinely torturing animals to death to satisfy their own urges.

Along comes a paladin, not a smite-happy one, who Detects them as Evil, questions them, and learns they've not yet fallen afoul of the law (but concludes it's only a matter of time).

The paladin gently warns them about the fate that awaits Evil characters in the afterlife, suggests they rethink their life, and moves on.

The psychopath concludes that the best way to get along in life, is to commit enough good acts (being unwilling to forsake their pleasures) that they end up being Neutral.

So- they take up the path of the adventurer- and act in not just a good fashion- but a borderline saintly fashion- except for their regular animal-torturing sessions.

Do they eventually become Neutral?

Or does the fact that they "have a pattern of Evil behaviour" outweigh the fact that they are also someone who is altruistic, and routinely makes personal sacrifices to help strangers?

Yora
2012-03-20, 02:07 PM
And that's why people think alignment should be limited to outsiders.

hamishspence
2012-03-20, 02:15 PM
A more "metagamey" example would be- the player has taken a class/prestige class that requires them to be Neutral at best on the Good/Evil axis. The player's personal adventuring style is of a very, very nice guy. The DM enforces alignment change impartially.

The player concludes that the character should have a Vice- that is, an evil act they enjoy- to balance out their Good behaviour- and allow them to keep their powers.

So the character commits a specific kind of evil act regularly.

Saph
2012-03-20, 02:59 PM
Champions of Ruin helpfully points out that Neutral and even Good characters can be driven to commit evil acts from time to time- it is "repeatedly, deliberately committing these acts" that is the mark of an Evil character.

Eh. To be honest, I don't care too much what Champions of Ruin says. Quoting RAW on mechanics or character builds or setting details is one thing, but using D&D books as a moral compass seems a little bit off. I think you're better off using your common sense.

So ignoring the books, the problem I have with your reclassification is that it's unbalanced. A relatively trivial amount of evil acts, according to you, should outweigh any amount of good acts. This means that someone who runs up a 100:1 ratio of major good deeds to major evil deeds and saves the world in the process is (in your classification) worse than someone who does nothing at all. Why?

Tengu_temp
2012-03-20, 03:05 PM
A character who tries to balance each good act with an evil one and each evil one with a good one is not neutral. He's evil, just deluded and possibly insane.

hamishspence
2012-03-20, 03:14 PM
This means that someone who runs up a 100:1 ratio of major good deeds to major evil deeds and saves the world in the process is (in your classification) worse than someone who does nothing at all. Why?

Mostly because I don't see "saving the world" as a complete pass on an overall pattern of behaviour.

Plenty of villains have teamed up with heroes to save the world- that doesn't make them any less villainous.

Being "driven to evil" by desperate circumstances- and being remorseful about it, and trying to atone for the specific evil deeds afterward- is quite appropriate for Good/Neutral characters.

Committing moderate evil deeds regularly with little or no remorse, and no effort at atonement, on the other hand, is decidedly more "evil-appropriate".


Eh. To be honest, I don't care too much what Champions of Ruin says. Quoting RAW on mechanics or character builds or setting details is one thing, but using D&D books as a moral compass seems a little bit off.

Using D&D books that discuss morality as a compass for "D&D morality" makes sense to me though.

NichG
2012-03-20, 03:17 PM
While the kill puppies/save orphans neutrality is weird by most intuitive standards of morality, in a universe where good and evil are cosmic energies that accrete upon people based on their activities, you could very well have a situation where that effectively works despite the gods/arbiters of alignment not intending it to.

Generally in those situations I'd say that as far as spell interactions the character would appear neutral (because they just measure the amount of good/evil energy that has attached to the character), and if the character were trying to get into a generic afterlife or hadn't really made himself stand out to the gods, he'd probably even get a pass into a neutral afterlife, but if any deity looked closely and evaluated their actions in detail, then the afterlife would be determined by how that deity personally perceives the dichotomous neutrality. Basically, automated 'systems' would let them get away with it, but any eyes able to divine upon the events of their lives would make decisions about it like a person would, independent of what the energy tally says.

hamishspence
2012-03-20, 03:36 PM
Currently there's more evidence for "evil accreting" (the corruption system in Fiendish Codex 2, and the Taint system in Heroes of Horror) than for "good accreting" or "good cancelling out evil".

That might not be a guarantee that this was intended, but in BoVD, there's a system for evil acts "tainting an environment"- but in BoED there is no counterpart system for Good acts.

Eldan
2012-03-20, 05:19 PM
Another example I just thought of for the balance argument:

Think of a policeman (or city guard, or officer, or sheriff) in a noir themed world. His job is stressful, he hates it, though he thinks someone has to do it. His superiors are corrupt and everyone he sees around him is a criminal of the worst kind. So he goes out every night and weekend, gets absolutely horribly drunk and starts beating up people. Badly, with some ending up at the next healer's for the next two weeks.

Neutral?

hamishspence
2012-03-20, 05:44 PM
Dexter in the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a bit like this- only, as a forensic specialist, his job involves less "risking self to help strangers" than the cop example.

Rorschach from Watchmen might also qualify- and his alignment in D&D terms tends to be debated a lot.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 09:36 AM
Evil. Sympathetic, non-smite-worthy evil, but still evil.

He a) regularly commits evil acts (beating people up) b) without just cause and c) doesn't seem to do enough good to balance it out. Now, if he were exclusively beating up people who needed to be taken off the street (murderers, thugs, and rapists, oh my) then he could probably be neutral, maybe good-leaning neutral. He's still committing evil acts, but there's something approaching a just cause. I doubt that that's the case if he's getting drunk, though.

Back to the original topic:

I tend to think that good and evil should be roughly symmetrical. I mean, killing innocent A (evil act) in order to save Innocent B (good act) has the same net result as doing nothing (i.e. leaving innocent A alone and letting Innocent B die)*. If you manage to balance out your evil acts (say, engaging in a war of conquest) with good ones (drastically improving the lives of the people you've conquered), a neutral alignment is most appropriate.

That said, there are a lot more evil acts than good, and evil ones are easier to commit.

*Though, if we get into psychology, killing an innocent, regardless of motive, increases one's propensity to kill in the future, so that has to be considered too.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 09:39 AM
Evil. Sympathetic, non-smite-worthy evil, but still evil.

He a) regularly commits evil acts (beating people up) b) without just cause and c) doesn't seem to do enough good to balance it out. Now, if he were exclusively beating up people who needed to be taken off the street (murderers, thugs, and rapists, oh my) then he could probably be neutral, maybe good-leaning neutral. He's still committing evil acts, but there's something approaching a just cause. I doubt that that's the case if he's getting drunk, though.

Back to the original topic:

I tend to think that good and evil should be roughly symmetrical. I mean, killing innocent A (evil act) in order to save Innocent B (good act) has the same net result as doing nothing (i.e. leaving innocent A alone and letting Innocent B die)*. If you manage to balance out your evil acts (say, engaging in a war of conquest) with good ones (drastically improving the lives of the people you've conquered), a neutral alignment is most appropriate.

That said, there are a lot more evil acts than good, and evil ones are easier to commit.

*Though, if we get into psychology, killing an innocent, regardless of motive, increases one's propensity to kill in the future, so that has to be considered too.

Ravens_cry
2012-03-21, 10:19 AM
This is often the case in bad video game morality systems, and in a sad number of otherwise good ones, but in actual fact? I would label such a person Chaotic Evil.

Nizaris
2012-03-21, 10:44 AM
Committing acts of good for the sole purpose of trying to balance out their habitual acts of evil does not work. The intent of the Good acts is to make up for the acts of evil they know they will commit. They are doing Good so they can do Evil. While a character may think they're Neutral, since they are doing Evil intentionally through their good then they're still evil. Since you need to look at their acts of good as being intentional act from which they can do evil then they are actually acts of evil.

Good = actively trying to avoid doing evil
Neutral = trying to avoid evil when convenient
Evil = not caring about avoiding acts of evil

It's hard to make mechanics dealing with a highly DM subjective perspective. I've had a couple of DMs make radically different calls on behaviors. Poison a room full of Kobolds (90 kobolds drinking beer and ammonia) = neutral. Accept a boon from a dark lord (Temple of Environmental Evil) so you can fight his minions = evil from another. Not many good examples though, I never play good characters.

Lemmy
2012-03-21, 11:03 AM
Actions don't have alignment.

There are no good acts or evil acts. If you randomly do some things that a good character does, it does not make you good or negate your evil actions. Good and evil are not equal. Good is active, evil is passive. You don't do evil because you want to do evil. You do evil because you don't care how some people are affected by it. Evil people do bad thing because they want to gain something for themselves and that it hurts others doesn't stop them.

You know, Yora, this sentence makes me think you should be a druid... or cleric! The save DCs of your spells would be insane! :smallbiggrin:

About alignment and stuff... I guess most of us agree that actions weight more than words, but what about a character who is extremely sadistic and selfish, but has never ever, hurt anyone, or even commited a crime 'cause she's afraid of being caught? In fact, maybe she does good deeds only so that she is treated better by her neighbors.
She would probably hurt others if she had something to gain from it and was sure she couldn't be caught, however, she never did it out of fear of going to jail or whatever is the apropriate punishment.
Is she TN? I think such a character would just be NE posing as NG... What do you guys think?

Draco Ignifer
2012-03-21, 12:06 PM
Any alignment system that says a person who is a firefighter and a serial killer is a good person because he saves more people than he kills is so alien to any system of right and wrong as to be useless. Your average evil person is not going to be constantly committing acts of atrocity. They're going to spend most of their lives doing neutral to good things, just like everyone else, Nd occasionally let a child die because they made a mistake and might get in trouble if they take the blame for it. Or steal someone's life savings because they need the money. Or even murder someone for the sheer twisted pleasure of it.

I would say that the hard call is between good and neutral, not neutral and evil. Anyone who knowingly (including through willful blindness) disregards the health, wellbeing, or lives of others in achieving their goals is evil, full stop. You can do as many acts of good as you want, but as long as you are in that mindset of "I will harm you if it helps me to do so," you are evil.

Under that philosophy, a character who wants to maintain some sort of balance by killing people and saving them is definitely evil, and probably insane as well.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 12:08 PM
Committing acts of good for the sole purpose of trying to balance out their habitual acts of evil does not work. The intent of the Good acts is to make up for the acts of evil they know they will commit. They are doing Good so they can do Evil.

How about if the character is very powerful, and very curious, and simply wants to know if alignment can balance out or not?

A deity (or epic spell caster) goes on a killing spree, randomly murdering people. However, simultaneously, they are going on a "resurrecting spree"- bringing people back to life, equally randomly.

What happens to their alignment?

Suppose it's a "creating spree" that's used?- completely new humans are brought to life from scratch.

How about a "saving spree"?- the powerful being identifies people on the brink of death for various reasons- and removes them from danger (bringing them back to full health if death is about to ensue from injury, curing their terminal illness, and so on)

Somehow, I don't think any of these makes up for the murder spree.

Or what if the being has limited power to achieve what it does- which comes from life force?

A city is about to be struck by a meteorite- the being needs power to save the city- they reach out and snuff out another city of equal size- and with all that power- they can blast the meteorite just enough that it misses.

Do the needs of one group make murdering the other group "nonevil"?

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 12:45 PM
Any alignment system that says a person who is a firefighter and a serial killer is a good person because he saves more people than he kills is so alien to any system of right and wrong as to be useless.

I disagree. The only way to judge how ethical someone is is the sum total of their actions. The example you give is skewed, however. Murder causes more harm (in fear, pain, and terror) than a death from a fire. Also, each murder almost certainly fractures the killer's mind further, making further murders more likely.

Also, remember that whether someone is good or evil has no bearing on whether you should stop them. If someone repeatedly kills murderers in cold blood, they might still be neutral rather than evil, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be stopped.



How about if the character is very powerful, and very curious, and simply wants to know if alignment can balance out or not?

A deity (or epic spell caster) goes on a killing spree, randomly murdering people. However, simultaneously, they are going on a "resurrecting spree"- bringing people back to life, equally randomly.

What happens to their alignment?

Suppose it's a "creating spree" that's used?- completely new humans are brought to life from scratch.

How about a "saving spree"?- the powerful being identifies people on the brink of death for various reasons- and removes them from danger (bringing them back to full health if death is about to ensue from injury, curing their terminal illness, and so on)

Somehow, I don't think any of these makes up for the murder spree.

That's because you're using the wrong metric (which I sloppily did in my last post). It's not lives you should be counting, but pain and pleasure. The people you kill almost certainly suffer when you kill them, their families suffer, everyone is terrorized, while the resurrections and creations don't create an equivalent amount of pleasure or prevent/ease an equivalent amount of pain. That's why it's so ethically abhorrent.

The "saving spree" is slightly more ambiguous, because you are preventing a certain amount of pain by saving people who would otherwise die. But there's still the terror you're causing, and the fact that you're warping your own psyche ("soul", if you want to use that language).

Draco Ignifer
2012-03-21, 12:58 PM
I disagree. The only way to judge how ethical someone is is the sum total of their actions. The example you give is skewed, however. Murder causes more harm (in fear, pain, and terror) than a death from a fire. Also, each murder almost certainly fractures the killer's mind further, making further murders more likely.

In other words, as long as you entertain enough people, it's a good act to torture someone to death for the amusement of said people?

Mystify
2012-03-21, 01:12 PM
I disagree. The only way to judge how ethical someone is is the sum total of their actions. The example you give is skewed, however. Murder causes more harm (in fear, pain, and terror) than a death from a fire. Also, each murder almost certainly fractures the killer's mind further, making further murders more likely.

Also, remember that whether someone is good or evil has no bearing on whether you should stop them. If someone repeatedly kills murderers in cold blood, they might still be neutral rather than evil, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be stopped.




That's because you're using the wrong metric (which I sloppily did in my last post). It's not lives you should be counting, but pain and pleasure. The people you kill almost certainly suffer when you kill them, their families suffer, everyone is terrorized, while the resurrections and creations don't create an equivalent amount of pleasure or prevent/ease an equivalent amount of pain. That's why it's so ethically abhorrent.

The "saving spree" is slightly more ambiguous, because you are preventing a certain amount of pain by saving people who would otherwise die. But there's still the terror you're causing, and the fact that you're warping your own psyche ("soul", if you want to use that language).
So if you find some random hobo, with no attachments or friends, and give them a painless, lethal injection so their is no pain when they die, the act causes no suffering. And since he is homeless, his life probably sucks, so you are actually preventing suffering. Your metric says its ethical to kill random hobos if you do it painlessly, its obviously flawed.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 01:34 PM
If it were possible for such amusement to balance out the pain, yes. But you have to take the total effect of an action into account.

There's the obvious pain caused by the torture directly, but that's just the surface. There's the lost pleasure the victim would have had if they'd continued to live, the pain suffered by the victim's loved ones, the empathetic pain of every normal person who hears about it, the guilt suffered by you and the audience, the increased likelihood that you or the audience will kill or torture another person, the precedent it will set, increasing the likelihood someone will torture another person to death in the future. Plus probably some other harms I'm missing.

It's like time travel via FTL flight: yeah, it's theoretically possible, but in the real world it's impossible to get the numbers you'd need.

Edit:



So if you find some random hobo, with no attachments or friends, and give them a painless, lethal injection so their is no pain when they die, the act causes no suffering. And since he is homeless, his life probably sucks, so you are actually preventing suffering. Your metric says its ethical to kill random hobos if you do it painlessly, its obviously flawed.

Emphasis added. I'm sure if you asked him, he'd say that his life is worth living. If it weren't, he'd already have committed suicide. Pain and pleasure are entirely subjective; you can't make those determinations for other people. Also remember that the consequences aren't restricted to his death. Your psyche will fracture by killing him (see On Killing (http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society/dp/0316040932)), you will be more likely to kill in the future, and you will feel guilty. Plus, other people will see your example and be more likely to kill, and probably less exacting in their moral calculus.

Mystify
2012-03-21, 01:54 PM
Emphasis added. I'm sure if you asked him, he'd say that his life is worth living. If it weren't, he'd already have committed suicide. Pain and pleasure are entirely subjective; you can't make those determinations for other people. Also remember that the consequences aren't restricted to his death. Your psyche will fracture by killing him (see On Killing (http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society/dp/0316040932)), you will be more likely to kill in the future, and you will feel guilty. Plus, other people will see your example and be more likely to kill, and probably less exacting in their moral calculus.
So you are basically saying its wrong to kill him because he would want to live, which seems completely separate from how much pleasure and suffering the act causes.Or what if you then harvest his body for organs, and allow a dozen other people to go on to live happy, full lives, sparing their families the suffering and pain that would be associated with their death. And you get money from it, which will improve your life. Then you make a humanskin leather jacket out of his skin, and donate it to charity, so it will help keep somebody warm, so his death is reducing suffering elsewhere. Is it now morale to kill the hobo if you are harvesting his organs and making clothing out of his skin?

How about if you become a master of date rape? You have some method where you can ensure that they will not remember the act, that you will cause no harm or consequences afterwards, they never know. They will be unconscious, and so experience no adverse reaction even in the moment. Their is now no psychological harm to the victim. And in the process, you are getting pleasure. Is this somehow a morally justifiable act now?

As for the people copying you, assume you still do this in secret, so there is nobody to see and copy. And assume you are already a sociopath, so you won't feel guilty, and you mind can't fracture anymore.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 02:07 PM
So you are basically saying its wrong to kill him because he would want to live, which seems completely separate from how much pleasure and suffering the act causes.Or what if you then harvest his body for organs, and allow a dozen other people to go on to live happy, full lives, sparing their families the suffering and pain that would be associated with their death. And you get money from it, which will improve your life. Then you make a humanskin leather jacket out of his skin, and donate it to charity, so it will help keep somebody warm, so his death is reducing suffering elsewhere. Is it now morale to kill the hobo if you are harvesting his organs and making clothing out of his skin?

If a person wants to live, it's because they judge that the pleasure they get from being alive (or that they expect to have in the future) outweighs the pain they suffer.


How about if you become a master of date rape? You have some method where you can ensure that they will not remember the act, that you will cause no harm or consequences afterwards, they never know. They will be unconscious, and so experience no adverse reaction even in the moment. Their is now no psychological harm to the victim. And in the process, you are getting pleasure. Is this somehow a morally justifiable act now?

How do you propose to prevent the victims from finding out? It's not like they won't notice lost time, torn vaginal/anal walls, abrasions, pulled muscles, STDs, etc.


As for the people copying you, assume you still do this in secret, so there is nobody to see and copy. And assume you are already a sociopath, so you won't feel guilty, and you mind can't fracture anymore.

First, there's no way to do that. People will notice that homeless people are disappearing. Second, if you're a sociopath, you don't care about ethics... that's sort of the definition of sociopathy. A sociopath would be literally incapable of what you're suggesting.

The problem with testing this ethical system against these situations is that they're factually impossible. If a system breaks down in impossible situations, it's not a strike against it.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 02:30 PM
The way I see it "consistently behaving in an majorly evil fashion" outweighs any amount of "consistently behaving in a majorly good fashion" for the purposes of determining "is the character evil or not?"

However behaving in a mildly evil fashion, solely toward a Good end, might be compatible with a Neutral alignment.

Heroes of Horror suggests that "balancing evil acts with good intentions" is something that PC dread necromancers can do, and elsewhere, that an antihero who behaves in this fashion is probably Neutral rather than Good or Evil.




That's because you're using the wrong metric (which I sloppily did in my last post). It's not lives you should be counting, but pain and pleasure. The people you kill almost certainly suffer when you kill them, their families suffer, everyone is terrorized, while the resurrections and creations don't create an equivalent amount of pleasure or prevent/ease an equivalent amount of pain. That's why it's so ethically abhorrent.

The "saving spree" is slightly more ambiguous, because you are preventing a certain amount of pain by saving people who would otherwise die. But there's still the terror you're causing, and the fact that you're warping your own psyche ("soul", if you want to use that language).

Adjusting the magnitude of the evil acts relative to the good acts until they are "equal" wouldn't make it any less ethically abhorrent that the character is regularly committing evil acts without a good reason.

Draco Ignifer
2012-03-21, 02:41 PM
In a high-magic world, calling a scenario "impossible" is a little silly. If an alignment system breaks down when it encounters a deranged wizard, it isn't meant for a game featuring deranged wizards.

Regardless of such scenarios, the point we're trying to make is that the calculus-based system you're proposing completely breaks down when describing human morality. If your system's response to a character who periodically flays people alive for his own amusement is "well, as long as you spend enough time in the soup kitchen," you are describing something so contrary to any existing moral system that you may as well call them Blue and Orange instead of Good and Evil. Showing that, in extreme cases, you can break the system entirely and make obviously evil acts count as good ones only makes it more obvious.

That's the crux of the problem with any alignment system based on sum total of actions. Eventually, you wind up in a situation where an unrepentant monster is wielding a holy sword because he's balancing it out by giving to the needy.

Mystify
2012-03-21, 02:54 PM
If a person wants to live, it's because they judge that the pleasure they get from being alive (or that they expect to have in the future) outweighs the pain they suffer.

And what if their judgement is that pain is better than nonexistance? If they simply think that life, even a bad life, is better than no life? If they simply fear death? You think that everyone who thinks their life sucks and will always suck commits suicide?
What if you have perfect predictive capablities and know that their hope for a better future is unfounded? Say you can travel to the future and see.
And the mere fact you need to add in a clause like "only the person can judge their balance of pain and pleasure to determine if they are fit to live" means that the philosophy is flawed. If the philosophy is that pain and suffering is bad, pleasure is good, and you are trying for the net increase of pleasure, then it should be able to stand on its own. The fact you need a seperate explanation as to why killing is wrong means you are not really following that philosophy, but instead trying to fit it to your own views.


How do you propose to prevent the victims from finding out? It's not like they won't notice lost time, torn vaginal/anal walls, abrasions, pulled muscles, STDs, etc.

Lost time: Arrange it so they would be asleep then anyways.
Physical damage: If they are not resisting, should be possible to do it without damage
STDs: don't have any yourself.



First, there's no way to do that. People will notice that homeless people are disappearing.

Would people really? Most people, at most, will notice the homeless person isn't on the corner anymore. They could have been given a job. If you are worried that the homeless people disappearing off the streets on occasion will somehow promote people killing them,then offering them aid so they are no longer homeless will have the same effect, so helping the homeless is also bad.


Second, if you're a sociopath, you don't care about ethics... that's sort of the definition of sociopathy. A sociopath would be literally incapable of what you're suggesting.

Actually, what I suggested happens to go hand in hand with actions to not get caught. The actions proposed are feasible. The conclusion that the actions are now somehow more ethical because a sociopath is doing it is absurd, but the logical conclusion of what you are saying.


The problem with testing this ethical system against these situations is that they're factually impossible. If a system breaks down in impossible situations, it's not a strike against it.
They are not impossible. But you have to look at the extremes of the system to verify its legitimacy. If the system is true, then it should be able to take the most absurd situations, and produce a real answer. If it can't, then its flawed. The proper system may produce identical results in many cases, but just because you happen to be correct in a subset of cases does not mean that you have the right answer.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 02:55 PM
Personality traits can be tricky as well though, if the character has a mixture of good and evil ones.

Whether it's "personality" or "actions" there may come a point when, rather than "averaging them out" the DM must decide- one end or the other of the moral spectrum- but not the middle.

When one or both sets is very mild though, Neutrality is more plausible than when they're both strong.

NichG
2012-03-21, 03:03 PM
Why must an alignment system actually describe human morality at all? I think that ends up causing more problems than it solves. Its like if you were to try to write rules to determine NPC actions based on stimuli - trying to write an AI in rule form for the DM to emulate when he has a perfectly good AI in his head already. Worse yet, 'human morality' isn't a uniform thing - every single person at the table will have a different opinion on it in at least some cases, and those corner cases are exactly the kind of thing we're discussing (and in fact, that nonuniformity of human morality is the reason this discussion can even exist).

If alignment is actually part of the game universe, then it can have the same limitations of anything in the game universe, namely imperfection. Those imperfections are not something to cause the system to be discarded, but rather are potential for plot hooks, interesting cases, etc. And once you allow for imperfections, you can have a simple, fairly self-consistent system (that may have loopholes).

So I'd say, pick a fundamental 'source' of alignment and extrapolate:

- If alignment is the judgement of the gods on the actions of mortals, have a few gods whose job is it to actually make those judgements. Give them personalities and outlooks. Alignment is now a manifestation of the rulings they pronounce. If you can hide an act from the gods somehow, it doesn't count against your alignment. If your judge gods believe that saving a person and killing a person balance out, it does. If they believe that, for instance, it takes three good acts to cancel out an equally evil act, then that is your system (and yes, serial killers can still exploit this).

- If alignment is a cosmic force that is built up by certain actions, then you can make up a table of actions and 'how much/which way'. That'd suggest towards a 'good+evil = neutral' or 'good + evil = good and evil' math, but this can be modified if for instance evil repels good but good attracts evil. Be prepared to run with the consequences of that though - it means that by default, things in the universe tend to be more evil than good, since fluctuations towards evil tend to suppress fluctuations towards good, so it could be a very dark world. I'd tend to go with good and evil not canceling, but each being a separate material/energy that accumulates, just because it leads to more diverse and interesting possibilities.

- Alignment is 'attention'. Only outsiders actually 'have' alignment energies. As a person lives their life, they attract the attention of outsiders. These could be weak entities like the spirit of a rock that was used to kill a bird, or strong entities like a prince of hell. Those entities who are interested in a person may fight over them against opposed entities, or not as the case may be. In any event, a person's alignment is the result of the slew of outsiders that are following their story, and you can even have karma be the simple fact that some of these outsiders may choose to meddle (so someone who attracts the attention of evil beings will have evil happen to/around them, etc).

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 03:17 PM
In a high-magic world, one should expect counter-intuitive results from applying real-world physics or ethics. When you apply real-world notions of cause-and-effect Any ethical system is going to break down in the face of situations that are impossible in the real world.

Using a "one drop" rule for deciding who is evil is all well and good, but you still have to figure out which acts are good and which are evil. How do you propose to do that? You can't say it's obvious, because peoples' moral instincts vary, and it's been experimentally demonstrated that you can manipulate them.

And seriously?


If your system's response to a character who periodically flays people alive for his own amusement is "well, as long as you spend enough time in the soup kitchen," you are describing something so contrary to any existing moral system that you may as well call them Blue and Orange instead of Good and Evil.

...

That's the crux of the problem with any alignment system based on sum total of actions. Eventually, you wind up in a situation where an unrepentant monster is wielding a holy sword because he's balancing it out by giving to the needy.

I already said you can't justify that under utilitarianism. We can't discuss this if you're going to throw strawmen around.

------------


Lost time: Arrange it so they would be asleep then anyways.
Physical damage: If they are not resisting, should be possible to do it without damage
STDs: don't have any yourself.
You can't actually do those. There is a qualitative difference between sleep (when you have a sensation of time passing) and anaesthesia (when you don't). A person who is not an enthusiastic participant in sex suffers tearing and muscle damage even if they're not resisting. And yes, you have STDs. If you've ever had sex, you have STDs.


They are not impossible. But you have to look at the extremes of the system to verify its legitimacy. If the system is true, then it should be able to take the most absurd situations, and produce a real answer. If it can't, then its flawed. The proper system may produce identical results in many cases, but just because you happen to be correct in a subset of cases does not mean that you have the right answer.

That's not how things work. We are talking about formulating rules. It is impossible for rules to perfectly accommodate every situation: there's a saying in science, every model is wrong, but some are closer to right. Unless there is a method to produce better results than utilitarianism, it has to stand.


And what if their judgement is that pain is better than nonexistance? If they simply think that life, even a bad life, is better than no life? If they simply fear death? You think that everyone who thinks their life sucks and will always suck commits suicide?

First, it is entirely possible (and I think that, for me, it is true) that existance provides pleasure by itself. So, yes, a bad life is potentially better than no life. "Life sucks" is a relative statement. If it sucks more than non-existance (or whatever afterlife you believe in), then you commit suicide. If it doesn't, you don't.


What if you have perfect predictive capablities and know that their hope for a better future is unfounded? Say you can travel to the future and see.

If you have perfect predictive capabilities, then the future is fixed, you have no choice, and so there's no ethical dilemma.


And the mere fact you need to add in a clause like "only the person can judge their balance of pain and pleasure to determine if they are fit to live" means that the philosophy is flawed. If the philosophy is that pain and suffering is bad, pleasure is good, and you are trying for the net increase of pleasure, then it should be able to stand on its own. The fact you need a seperate explanation as to why killing is wrong means you are not really following that philosophy, but instead trying to fit it to your own views.

It's not a separate clause. It's just the nature of pleasure and pain. They are, by definition, not accessible to anyone except the person experiencing them. Now, there might, theoretically, be a way to precisely measure them (with futuristic brain scans, for instance). But if there were such a test, all it would do is confirm what the person told you.

----------------


Why must an alignment system actually describe human morality at all?
Because it uses the terms "Good" and "Evil," and those are terms we associate with human morality.

It's perfectly reasonable to say that "Good" =/= good and "Evil" =/= evil (which is actually what I prefer, for the sake of my sanity), and that certain acts that one might agree is evil will "ping" with the universe as good and vice versa, because Good and Evil are blind cosmic forces. (Say, the universe says killing Hitler pre 1930s in his sleep is evil, but everyone in their right mind disagrees).

Mystify
2012-03-21, 03:30 PM
So if you could measure the sum pleasure/pain of a single person, and determine that they are really on the poor side of the pleasure/pain summation, such that their death will result in a minor decrease in pleasure, a moderate decrease in suffering, and you are harvesting their organs to save a dozen people, which will lead to a massive increase in happyness and a large decrease in suffering, it would be moral to kill them for their organs?

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 03:33 PM
So if you could measure the sum pleasure/pain of a single person, and determine that they are really on the poor side of the pleasure/pain summation, such that their death will result in a minor decrease in pleasure, a moderate decrease in suffering, and you are harvesting their organs to save a dozen people, which will lead to a massive increase in happyness and a large decrease in suffering, it would be moral to kill them for their organs?

Yes, but then they'd agree.

Edit: I should note that we already have laws making that legal. In my home state, at least, as well as a number of other countries, physician assisted suicide is legal under certain, highly regulated circumstances. While it's generally only people with cancer or MS who avail themselves of the option, if someone who qualified were able to donate organs, there'd be no reason not to let them donate after they kill themselves.

Mystify
2012-03-21, 03:38 PM
Yes, but then they'd agree.
Would they really? If you went and offered all your organs for transplant right now, you can save a lot of lives. Is your life so amazing that it outweighs all of theirs? Losing your life and gaining the lives of a dozen other people will result in a greater happiness in the world. Do you volunteer?

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 03:44 PM
Would they really? If you went and offered all your organs for transplant right now, you can save a lot of lives. Is your life so amazing that it outweighs all of theirs? Losing your life and gaining the lives of a dozen other people will result in a greater happiness in the world. Do you volunteer?

No, because A) I'm not convinced it actually would result in a net happiness increase and B) I'm not a perfectly ethical person: I don't donate anywhere near as much of my income to charity as I ought (and really, no one does), I spend time on things other than improving living conditions/health/safety/etc. for the worst off, I don't sacrifice my safety for others all that often...

Also, remember, you said that the person would have a minor decrease in pleasure and a moderate decrease in pain. That means that they would judge their pain to be greater than their pleasure: that's the definition of suicidal.

Mystify
2012-03-21, 03:56 PM
No, because A) I'm not convinced it actually would result in a net happiness increase and B) I'm not a perfectly ethical person: I don't donate anywhere near as much of my income to charity as I ought (and really, no one does), I spend time on things other than improving living conditions/health/safety/etc. for the worst off, I don't sacrifice my safety for others all that often...

Also, remember, you said that the person would have a minor decrease in pleasure and a moderate decrease in pain. That means that they would judge their pain to be greater than their pleasure: that's the definition of suicidal.
ok, fine, a minor decrease in pleasure and a minor decrease in pain. My point is, you are asserting that this person will willingly submit, when that is clearly not the case. Yes, by your morality system, it is perfectly justifiable to kill hobos for their organs. In fact, it would be justifiable to kill almost anyone if you harvest their organs in the process. You could justify pretty much any atrocity if you can figure out how to exploit it for a net increase in pleasure.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 03:57 PM
Also, each murder almost certainly fractures the killer's mind further, making further murders more likely.

If alignment was symmetrical, then there could exist a Good act of equal magnitude to murder, which would "fracture the doer's mind" in the opposite direction.

Which would raise the question of what happens next.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 04:06 PM
ok, fine, a minor decrease in pleasure and a minor decrease in pain. My point is, you are asserting that this person will willingly submit, when that is clearly not the case.

You're the one who set up the hypothetical scenario that way.


Yes, by your morality system, it is perfectly justifiable to kill hobos for their organs. In fact, it would be justifiable to kill almost anyone if you harvest their organs in the process. You could justify pretty much any atrocity if you can figure out how to exploit it for a net increase in pleasure.

You keep forgetting the collateral effects. Yes, the saved lives could potentially outweigh the homeless person's death (by the way, I'm sure you don't intend it that way, but "hobo" is a fairly offensive term). But you are harming yourself, making yourself more likely to commit further, less justified murders, setting a precedent for others, terrifying other homeless people, and contributing to a societal belief that homeless people are worth less than others (even though, in this calculus, we're treating them exactly equally).

Remember, we do this sort of calculus all the time. In war we accept that collateral damage will happen sometimes, and accept that because (in a just war) the cost of not risking innocents' lives is too great. In medicine, we follow protocols that we know will kill some patients because we know that it will save more. The only difference between these trade offs and the situation you're describing is the premeditated, purposeful murder, which is covered by the collateral effects I mentioned.

Edit:

If alignment was symmetrical, then there could exist a Good act of equal magnitude to murder, which would "fracture the doer's mind" in the opposite direction.

Which would raise the question of what happens next.
It's been known to happen. People who are forced by the court system to do charity work sometimes have these sorts of moments of revelation. It's one of the reasons courts do it. Also, good works are a habit: a lot of people have gotten into charity work because of e.g. social pressure or religious obligations, and by just repeatedly doing it found that they enjoyed doing the good works.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 04:16 PM
"Good Feels Good"- but "Evil Feels Good" as well.

What I'm wondering is- when a character who notices both these facts, exhibits a pattern of both Good and Evil behaviour- what happens to their alignment?

My view is that they drop to Evil.

So you'd have an Evil aligned character who exhibit's much of the behaviour of Good characters- but their "vice" outweighs this.

They are a "habitual do-gooder" but also a "habitual evildoer".

Mystify
2012-03-21, 04:22 PM
You're the one who set up the hypothetical scenario that way.



You keep forgetting the collateral effects. Yes, the saved lives could potentially outweigh the homeless person's death (by the way, I'm sure you don't intend it that way, but "hobo" is a fairly offensive term). But you are harming yourself, making yourself more likely to commit further, less justified murders, setting a precedent for others, terrifying other homeless people, and contributing to a societal belief that homeless people are worth less than others (even though, in this calculus, we're treating them exactly equally).

Remember, we do this sort of calculus all the time. In war we accept that collateral damage will happen sometimes, and accept that because (in a just war) the cost of not risking innocents' lives is too great. In medicine, we follow protocols that we know will kill some patients because we know that it will save more. The only difference between these trade offs and the situation you're describing is the premeditated, purposeful murder, which is covered by the collateral effects I mentioned.
I'm not saying its never applicable, put presenting it as the end all and be all of morality is ludicrous. The whole "it will fracture your mind" argument is backwards. Its not wrong because it will fracture your mind; it fractures your mind because its wrong. It really feels like you have to scramble and come up with BS to explain why your morality system doesn't justify the murder of random people for their organs. Likewise, "It will set a bad example" is another indication that it is wrong. It sets a bad example because it is wrong, its not wrong because it sets a bad example.
Lets bypass the "it fractures your mind ad you are likely to do further acts that are less justified" aspects. Say you possess the capability to make a robot that will go out, find a homeless person, verify their quality of life, and if it is sufficiently low, kill them, and harvests their organs. To avoid the "homeless people are worth less" social stigma, free it from being limited to homeless people. Let it take anyone who's standards of living are too low. Some fear that you may get murdered by a robot is far less than the impact of extra lives being saved. After all, there are more murders going on than your robot harvestings. The robot will remain impartial and not suffer from a degradation of morals. Is it moral to make a robot to go around harvesting organs?

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 04:26 PM
Or, for a simpler example- imagine a D&D deity who creates life, does Good things equivalent in magnitude to killing it (in the opposite direction) then murders it without remorse.

Repeat numerous times. What is the eventual alignment of the deity?

I could see Boccob the Uncaring, when presented with the "evil acts and good acts cancel out if they're of equal magnitude" hypothesis, testing it.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 04:47 PM
I'm not saying its never applicable, put presenting it as the end all and be all of morality is ludicrous. The whole "it will fracture your mind" argument is backwards. Its not wrong because it will fracture your mind; it fractures your mind because its wrong. It really feels like you have to scramble and come up with BS to explain why your morality system doesn't justify the murder of random people for their organs. Likewise, "It will set a bad example" is another indication that it is wrong. It sets a bad example because it is wrong, its not wrong because it sets a bad example.

Actually, this has been pretty well documented and explained. It damages your psyche, not because there's some moral nature to the universe that punishes wrongdoers (there isn't) but because we evolved that way. In normal circumstances, being willing to kill another human being is not conducive to survival. So we have behavioral blocks to prevent it. When circumstances force you into killing someone, it's generally a sign that you're going to have to kill again (a rival tribe wants you dead, for instance) so those blocks get torn down, and you're more easily able to kill without compunction.

And you say that "it fractures your mind because it's wrong." How do you know something is wrong if not for its effects?



Say you possess the capability to make a robot that will go out, find a homeless person, verify their quality of life, and if it is sufficiently low, kill them, and harvests their organs. To avoid the "homeless people are worth less" social stigma, free it from being limited to homeless people. Let it take anyone who's standards of living are too low. Some fear that you may get murdered by a robot is far less than the impact of extra lives being saved. After all, there are more murders going on than your robot harvestings. The robot will remain impartial and not suffer from a degradation of morals. Is it moral to make a robot to go around harvesting organs?

No. First, you underestimate the power of fear. That robot would be f*cking terrifying, even if it didn't kill that many. Think of the school shootings in America in the '90s, or terrorism in Israel, or after 9/11 in the US. Second, you overestimate peoples' willingness to profit from others' misfortune. Sure, some people are willing to take organs from unethical sources. Most aren't.

Finally, you keep proposing impossible scenarios, and then saying that utilitarianism is wrong because it doesn't produce an intuitive result. That's like saying that relativity is wrong because, if you let something go faster than the speed of light, you violate causality, even though going faster than the speed of light is impossible.


Or, for a simpler example- imagine a D&D deity who creates life, does Good things equivalent in magnitude to killing it (in the opposite direction) then murders it without remorse.

What "Good things"? Because it's pretty hard to come up with something of that magnitude.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 05:03 PM
which is kind of the point.

"Creating" something living isn't especially good.
"Granting it an enormous amount of pleasure" isn't especially good
"Bringing it back to life when it dies prematurely" isn't especially good.

"Sacrificing something of great importance to you" to do any of these three things- does that make it better?

"Doing the same thing a whole lot of times, but remorselessly murdering it only once" raises the question of "does a hundred minor Good deeds equal one major Evil one"?

I'd say though that once the character's in the mindset of "all you need to do is balance Good deeds with Evil ones" they're already slipping.

Mystify
2012-03-21, 05:11 PM
For one, the system makes no real distinction between who is being sacrificed. Most people will agree that self-sacrifice is noble and good; but sacrificing somebody else in your place is not. If you are looking only at the net effect, then you can easily conclude that this other guy is a better sacrifice than you, and so sacrifice him in your place. You get scenarios where the ethical thing to do is for person X to be sacrificed, but if person X is not willing to sacrifice himself willingly, it is best to force the sacrifice.
More generally, such a system says it is wrong to kill someone because it causes suffering. There is no value to a human life beyond their capacity to experience pleasure and cause pleasure in others.
Plus, there is the added complication that it is entirely impossible to judge. You throw around abstract notions of how much pain and pleasure things cause, when you have no way to quantify it, much less measure it or predict it. It feels like a general guideline, not the definition of morality.

Jeff the Green
2012-03-21, 06:00 PM
For one, the system makes no real distinction between who is being sacrificed. Most people will agree that self-sacrifice is noble and good; but sacrificing somebody else in your place is not. If you are looking only at the net effect, then you can easily conclude that this other guy is a better sacrifice than you, and so sacrifice him in your place. You get scenarios where the ethical thing to do is for person X to be sacrificed, but if person X is not willing to sacrifice himself willingly, it is best to force the sacrifice.

The problem with other-sacrifice is that it's very easy to over-estimate your worth and underestimate others, so most of the time other-sacrifices aren't worth it, and all of them are suspect. It's not impossible for other-sacrifice to be good, though, even if the sacrifice is unwilling. Take, for example, D-day. The first wave of men was essentially doomed, and many of them were draftees, i.e. not willing. Eisenhower et al. decided (rightly, in my view) that sacrificing them was the right thing to do to take down Nazi Germany.


More generally, such a system says it is wrong to kill someone because it causes suffering. There is no value to a human life beyond their capacity to experience pleasure and cause pleasure in others.
Well, yeah. I mean, we don't value people who are braindead, and thus unable to have experiences, beyond the emotional effects on family. Nor do we value anencephalic fetuses beyond the emotional effects on their family. The reason we value human life is because human life is capable of experiencing.


Plus, there is the added complication that it is entirely impossible to judge. You throw around abstract notions of how much pain and pleasure things cause, when you have no way to quantify it, much less measure it or predict it. It feels like a general guideline, not the definition of morality.

It can be estimated, but you're right, you can't be precise. That doesn't mean it's wrong. You thought ethics would be black and white? For a game, sure, you could come up with rules. But we don't know why gravity happens, and we can't predict sunspots, and the sun is a lot less complicated than the human brain. What you can do is create heuristics that approximate morality, and then in high-stakes cases, do the best you can to step away from the heuristics and actually do the ethical calculus.

hamishspence
2012-03-21, 06:45 PM
While the character believing they can "balance good and evil deeds" is problematic, it may be less so for the player to be faced with having to do so.

Example- a player of a Neutral character insists on playing them as a kind, compassionate, altruist who routinely makes personal sacrifices to help strangers.

But for gameplay reasons, the player wants their character to "stay Neutral".

As a result- the player needs to talk over with the DM a "balancing vice" to prevent their character from "slipping into Good alignment".

Krenn
2012-03-21, 10:55 PM
Specifically, with respect to the interpretation of characters that "regularly commit evil and good acts in equal magnitude" are Neutral.

Under this interpretation, a character could, for example "make personal sacrifices (risking their life) to help strangers" every day, and murder one innocent child every month, and it would "balance out".

Or some other moderately evil act- like torturing an animal to death for pleasure.

I don't think it's supposed to work this way- and I think that regularly, unrepentantly, doing moderately evil acts outbalances any amount of good acts.

Thoughts?


Under the current Hackmaster system, which uses a close variant of the D&D law-chaos, good-evil alignment system, that's easier to handle.

Once you choose your alignment, your character's honor score is routinely altered based on, among other things, your overall roleplaying and adherence to alignment.

A 'neutral' character who routinely commits absurd and egregious acts of both good and evil, with no clear in-character rationale for the acts, would take an honor hit both ways: being penalized for both the extreme 'good' acts AND the extreme 'evil' acts.

Theoretically, if the characters honor ever hit zero, you'd assign a more appropriate alignment, but with behavior that irrational, there's not much point, since they'll just hit zero again later. The bottom line is that as long as a character is acting a clearly insane and irresponsible manner, they're Honor score will be at rock bottom. Which has all sorts of interesting in-game effects.... Everything from -1 to all die rolls and illegibility for certain classes or knightly/clerical orders, to the general public disdain of most in-game NPC's

Jeff the Green
2012-03-22, 05:56 AM
While the character believing they can "balance good and evil deeds" is problematic, it may be less so for the player to be faced with having to do so.

Example- a player of a Neutral character insists on playing them as a kind, compassionate, altruist who routinely makes personal sacrifices to help strangers.

But for gameplay reasons, the player wants their character to "stay Neutral".

As a result- the player needs to talk over with the DM a "balancing vice" to prevent their character from "slipping into Good alignment".

I think the ideal solution would be asking for an alignment waiver, but in the absence of that, it could work. Say, like Dirty Harry (with maybe a little more violence). He believes in good and wants to be good and generally does good, but he has a tendency to go overboard with violence, which is evil. Or if Rorschach were more altruistic and a little less violent (as is, I'd say he's evil).

hamishspence
2012-03-22, 07:14 AM
A 'neutral' character who routinely commits absurd and egregious acts of both good and evil, with no clear in-character rationale for the acts, would take an honor hit both ways: being penalized for both the extreme 'good' acts AND the extreme 'evil' acts.

Theoretically, if the characters honor ever hit zero, you'd assign a more appropriate alignment, but with behavior that irrational, there's not much point, since they'll just hit zero again later. The bottom line is that as long as a character is acting a clearly insane and irresponsible manner, they're Honor score will be at rock bottom.

Thing is, it's possible for a pattern of evil behaviour + a pattern of good behaviour, from the same guy, to have plenty of "in character rationale" and be neither absurd nor insane.

A "hero with a dark side" in short.

"Alignment waivers" seem to me to be not as interesting as "bending the alignment system until it can accomodate anything you can imagine".

Jeff the Green
2012-03-22, 07:49 AM
"Alignment waivers" seem to me to be not as interesting as "bending the alignment system until it can accomodate anything you can imagine".

But some concepts simply don't work without a waiver. Say, a barbarian dedicated to preserving his tribal traditions and his personal honor. That's a very lawful character, but the alignment requirement of the Barbarian doesn't allow it.

Or a cleric who worships death and does his best to bring death to others, but sees undead as an abomination. Pretty much all undead-killing classes require you to be non-evil.

maglag
2012-03-22, 08:23 AM
While the character believing they can "balance good and evil deeds" is problematic, it may be less so for the player to be faced with having to do so.


In Fiendish Codex from D&D, it states that good and evil acts do not neatly balance each other out. If you go making pacts with devils and the ocasional sentient sacrifice and torture, it doesn't matter how much orphans you save in your free time, you're still going straight to hell. Your only hope of salvation is renouncing your evil contracts, do your best to right what you wronged and geting some heavy attonment magic.

navar100
2012-03-22, 08:44 AM
Specifically, with respect to the interpretation of characters that "regularly commit evil and good acts in equal magnitude" are Neutral.

Under this interpretation, a character could, for example "make personal sacrifices (risking their life) to help strangers" every day, and murder one innocent child every month, and it would "balance out".

Or some other moderately evil act- like torturing an animal to death for pleasure.

I don't think it's supposed to work this way- and I think that regularly, unrepentantly, doing moderately evil acts outbalances any amount of good acts.

Thoughts?

This is not Neutrality. It is Evil. Since it is purposely calculated, it is Lawful Evil. A Neutral does not go out of his way to commit Good or Evil acts. He goes about his own business for his own interests, acknowledging that inherent right to live one's own life to others.

As the saying goes, even the Devil can quote scripture.

Krenn
2012-03-22, 08:57 AM
But some concepts simply don't work without a waiver. Say, a barbarian dedicated to preserving his tribal traditions and his personal honor. That's a very lawful character, but the alignment requirement of the Barbarian doesn't allow it.

Or a cleric who worships death and does his best to bring death to others, but sees undead as an abomination. Pretty much all undead-killing classes require you to be non-evil.

Assuming the tribal traditions and personal honor in question are based on personal responsibility, personal freedom, and avoidance of strict government supervision, the barbarian is still chaotic. Chaos is more of a political philosophy of general independence than a strict anarchist movement. you can still have personal honor and family traditions while being chaotic. At least in hackmaster. D&D alignment has gone in strange directions over the years.

And the Kalamar House of knives (Evil Religion of Assassins) probably has some unpleasant things to say about the undead.... it questions their professional competence.

Socratov
2012-03-22, 09:15 AM
Since so much is being said about Alignment it is impossible to be right. alignment, as much as the in game concepts of alignment is is an indication.

However, a few misconceptions about alignment do exist:
1) alignment is ridgid.
This is a misconception because alignment is merely a statistic indicating a certian tendency in thought and act for the character. Like BAB and ability scores, as well as for instance, wealth. the alignment box on a charactersheet is merely a representation of how the character has acted up untill now. However, if the character has some characterdevelopment and suddenly changes in outlook on life (people do change after all), the alignment should change too.

1) characters should behave like their alignment
This one is wrong because all the reasons under number 1. Much like a rogue doesn't have a open lock score of his bonus, it is merely represents the current skill at opening locks. Gaining enough experience enables him to become further able in opening locks. These skill roll modifiers are not rigid, but further influenced by the result of a roll with a d20. This comparison further teaches us that the statistics on a charactersheet are not a ruleset, but a representation of the mechanics of the game, and that they change. this goes double for alignment. Alignment is a reference to the characters outlook on life, but when the character is placed in certain situations, it adds to the outlook of the character. For instance, if your rogue carries the alignment of chaotic neutral, he sometimes want to act as if he lawful, or even commit lawful acts because he is falsely accused for a crime he did not commit.

3) Good does as good should, evil as evil should, and neutral a bit of both or neither

Partly. A good character will more so then others try to do good. to use his actions to make the world he loves in a better place (according to his view at least). Evil will not shun (and in some cases even embrace) evil act to further his personal goals. Evil will also have no regard for other beings in his vicinity while a good character will. A neutral character will behave more or less as humanity will. Not actively doing good, but certainly not actively doing evil too. In terms of morals the act of doing evil willingly and consciously is considered much worse then a reluctance to do good. the reluctance to do good does not make a good man, but certainly not evil. I think that is what the designers of 3.5 wanted to reach with the current system.

The same holds for the law-chaos axis. A neutral character is neither very lawful, nor very chaotic, and seldom consciously acts like both.

In my opinion the neutral character is not balancing and actively juggling the abstract concepts of morality, more likely showing a reluctance to use/act like/juggle those concepts.


That's why, unless the alignment change has severe consequences for the player, alignment should be reviewed on a regular basis and the DM should pay attention to this. Too many times I read that DM's waive alignments around like they are nothing (unless the old paladin comes around when the DM spontaneously grows a set of horns and hooves). I think just like the paladin every character should be evaluated on their actions, as the acts and their consequences shape the interactions within the party...

Deepbluediver
2012-03-22, 11:47 AM
I think a lot of this debate is coming from people thinking that we need to establish some sort of all-encompassing definition of good, evil, and nuetral, that will apply to each and every possibly act or series of actions, in D&D or any game system and also some how still seems applicable to the real world.

Frankly, this is ludicrous. In any given game, the DM should succinctly define the moral system being used, give a few examples to understand how things are going to be percieved (such as "does good justify evil", etc), and then interpret any troublesome queries from there. So long as they are consistent within that game, I don't forsee any issues.

This is the way most of my DM's did it, and we managed to keep every moral/ethical debate to under 5 minutes, which is less time than it took me read the last page and half worth of updates.

hamishspence
2012-03-22, 12:17 PM
If you go making pacts with devils and the ocasional sentient sacrifice and torture, it doesn't matter how much orphans you save in your free time, you're still going straight to hell. Your only hope of salvation is renouncing your evil contracts, do your best to right what you wronged and geting some heavy attonment magic.

Note that this has less to do with alignment and more to do with "afterlife destination"- a LN Dread Necromancer who is very altruistic, and who only ever summons/animates skeletons in order to protect others, but never actively atones for these acts (1 pt Corrupt acts by FC2), could end up with "Alignment Destination: Baator" without ever actually changing alignment.

Devils_Advocate
2012-03-23, 09:29 AM
I don't know if other editions are any better about this, but for all that 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons material has to say about alignment, I don't think I've ever seen a passage that actually comes out and specifies what it's supposed to mean to call either a creature or an action Good, Evil, Lawful, or Chaotic in the context of the alignment system. Which is why alignment is such a contentious subject! We are not provided with the standards needed to implement it, so we have to invent our own based on what the rulebooks do say, and there are various conflicting opinions on how best to do so.

Nevertheless, the Player's Handbook does specify what type of characteristics a character's alignment is supposed to refer to, right in the first sentence of the description of alignment: "A creature’s general moral and personal attitudes are represented by its alignment" (emphasis mine).

So to speak of a creature's alignment changing due to its actions is to speak of its general moral and personal attitudes changing due to its actions. Unless by "alignment" you mean something other than what the PHB says alignment is. In which case, maybe you could clarify what you do mean.

I thought that I'd point that out to start with, just so we're clear on that.

Personally, I agree with Mustard that if you are going to use "Evil-aligned" to mean "routinely commits Evil acts", then use "Good-aligned" to mean "routinely commits Good acts", and if a character is thereby both "Evil-aligned" and "Good-aligned" then so be it! I don't see how it's supposed to make sense to equate doing equal Good and Evil to being Evil and not Good.

So, yeah, I would prefer that alignment be symmetrical, i.e. that Good and Evil be opposites of each other. The idea that good is simply the absence of evil does not make sense given a third thing that is the absence of both. For that matter, like a lot of philosophical notions that are widely treated pretty seriously for reasons I don't understand, it is also pretty ridiculous! Wanting to hurt others is not only not the same thing as not caring what happens to them, but the two are mutually exclusive! Mere indifference to the welfare of others should be considered Neutral, not Evil. Because... it's neutral. Like, literally. Not caring one way or the other. That is what neutral means. If actual neutrality is to be classified as Evil, then that makes the Neutral alignment pretty egregiously misnamed, doesn't it? It also means that e.g. rocks qualify as Evil. Because they don't care about anyone, now do they?

And no, the proper resolution to such absurdities is not additional completely arbitrary rules that only exist to eliminate the absurdities (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ObviousRulePatch). The proper solution is to use the non-silly definition of "evil" in the first place.


"Creating" something living isn't especially good.
"Granting it an enormous amount of pleasure" isn't especially good
"Bringing it back to life when it dies prematurely" isn't especially good.
Does anything qualify as especially good in your view? :smallconfused: It sounds kind of like you think that extremely bad deeds can outweigh any amount of good deeds because there are no remotely extreme good deeds.

What about preventing something really bad from happening? Isn't that as good as the thing that you prevent would be bad? If not, why not?


"Sacrificing something of great importance to you" to do any of these three things- does that make it better?
Well, to equate being Evil with being self-serving is to equate being Good with being self-sacrificing, I suppose. To me, it makes more sense to say that Good is about valuing others, not about devaluing oneself, and that Evil is about devaluing others, not about valuing oneself. I get the impression that this might be a minority view, which I find unsettling.


Anyway, normal humans routinely commit Evil acts! And while you can try to draw lines between "moderate" and "minor" Evil, you're probably going to wind up doing this based on how strongly you personally object to actions, which doesn't really work well with the alignment system.

For example, if animals are indeed "incapable of moral action", then they're incapable of wrongdoing. Meaning that they're innocent. Like, fundamentally and inherently. In contrast, adult humans are almost never truly innocent. Which makes killing and eating animals, if anything, more Evil than doing the same to adult humans, all else being equal. Now, all else is almost never equal, but you still probably don't object to things in proportion to how Evil they are. After all, Good and Evil in D&D are, conceptually, objective. And objective morality, by its very nature, is independent from our opinions, right? So why would one even expect our opinions to line up with it in any particular way?

Seriously, if being Lawful Evil just means lacking general compunctions against killing innocents but still adhering to some sort of ethics, then humans are Lawful Evil, pretty much.


And what if their judgement is that pain is better than nonexistance?
In response to your question, a question: What if their judgement is that pain is better than pleasure? What if someone wishes to suffer? Is it then good, evil, or neither to prevent that individual's suffering? Furthermore, is it good or evil to forcibly eliminate a desire to suffer, if given sufficient power over another mind to do so?

More broadly speaking, what does it mean to say that something is good or evil?

hamishspence
2012-03-23, 11:08 AM
Does anything qualify as especially good in your view? :smallconfused: It sounds kind of like you think that extremely bad deeds can outweigh any amount of good deeds because there are no remotely extreme good deeds.

In the context of D&D "making a personal sacrifice toward a Good end" tends to be most good.


Well, to equate being Evil with being self-serving is to equate being Good with being self-sacrificing, I suppose. To me, it makes more sense to say that Good is about valuing others, not about devaluing oneself, and that Evil is about devaluing others, not about valuing oneself. I get the impression that this might be a minority view, which I find unsettling.

Personally I agree- but "Good people make personal sacrifices to help others" is what's in the PHB, and it goes on to say that Neutral people make personal sacrifices to help "loved ones" and suchlike, but not strangers.


More broadly speaking, what does it mean to say that something is good or evil?

Hard to say. Various books- even the PHB, list evil acts (the PHB's is "channelling negative energy") but they don't say why, often.

navar100
2012-03-23, 01:45 PM
Personally, I agree with Mustard that if you are going to use "Evil-aligned" to mean "routinely commits Evil acts", then use "Good-aligned" to mean "routinely commits Good acts", and if a character is thereby both "Evil-aligned" and "Good-aligned" then so be it! I don't see how it's supposed to make sense to equate doing equal Good and Evil to being Evil and not Good.


Because a Neutral does not pursue such things. It is old Gygaxian thinking that purposely doing Good and Evil things makes you Neutral. It was described this way in 2E (Earlier too? I don't know.) and what motivated Mordenkainen to sometimes side with Evil when Good became too strong in the world. Modern alignment thought disagrees, but the Old Ways still linger; hence the confusion.

A Neutral does not calculate how much Good or Evil he did then do the opposite to balance himself. To do so means he acknowledges the value of Good and Evil which he paradoxically is not supposed to. He pursues his own interests. He won't purposely hurt others because that violates their right to pursue their own self interests. He'll only help others if it furthers his own interests.

hamishspence
2012-03-23, 01:55 PM
A Neutral does not calculate how much Good or Evil he did then do the opposite to balance himself. To do so means he acknowledges the value of Good and Evil which he paradoxically is not supposed to. He pursues his own interests. He won't purposely hurt others because that violates their right to pursue their own self interests. He'll only help others if it furthers his own interests.

That could certainly be one kind of Neutral- the person who

"refuses to violate another person's rights" and

"refuses to make any kind of personal sacrifice (from their point of view)- they only help others when it's pleasurable or profitable to do so"

and disapproves strongly of both patterns of behaviour.

I would hesitate to say it's the only kind of Neutral though.

It is old Gygaxian thinking that purposely doing Good and Evil things makes you Neutral. It was described this way in 2E (Earlier too? I don't know.) and what motivated Mordenkainen to sometimes side with Evil when Good became too strong in the world. Modern alignment thought disagrees, but the Old Ways still linger; hence the confusion.

How about the "unintentional balancer"?

Imagine a person who's "textbook Good" in most respects- they will unhesitatingly help strangers at their own cost, they are compassionate in the extreme- they oppose the activities of "Evil" - but- they have a big flaw.

They are bigoted. They are, for example, an elf who hates dwarves and will regularly make efforts to hurt them in various ways.

How strong does the bigotry have to be to make them Evil?
What if they have enough "qualms" that their evil deeds against dwarves are very petty, more Poke The Poodle than Kick the Dog, in TV Tropes terms?

Can there be a point where they are a "habitual evildoer" and a "habitual do-gooder" but they're not actually Evil or Good- hence Neutral?

navar100
2012-03-23, 06:14 PM
How about the "unintentional balancer"?

Imagine a person who's "textbook Good" in most respects- they will unhesitatingly help strangers at their own cost, they are compassionate in the extreme- they oppose the activities of "Evil" - but- they have a big flaw.

They are bigoted. They are, for example, an elf who hates dwarves and will regularly make efforts to hurt them in various ways.

How strong does the bigotry have to be to make them Evil?
What if they have enough "qualms" that their evil deeds against dwarves are very petty, more Poke The Poodle than Kick the Dog, in TV Tropes terms?

Can there be a point where they are a "habitual evildoer" and a "habitual do-gooder" but they're not actually Evil or Good- hence Neutral?

He can hate dwarves all he wants. He can call them names. He can refuse to deal with them. Purposely choosing to hurt them is what crosses the line into Evil.

hamishspence
2012-03-23, 06:36 PM
Purposely choosing to hurt them is what crosses the line into Evil.

It's what crosses the line into "committing evil acts" certainly.

The question being - can a person commit (very minor) evil acts on a regular basis and not be evil-aligned?

Heroes of Horror does allow characters to "balance evil deeds with good intentions and remain Neutral".

How strong does a character's "Good behaviour" and how weak their "evil behaviour" have to be before, despite deliberately committing deeds that they know qualify as evil, the character becomes "not evil enough to be Evil aligned?"

In your view, is a person who "willingly chooses to hurt others" Evil, no matter how minor the hurt, and no matter how strong their other Good personality traits?

Or do you have a "line" beyond which the character could justifiably be Neutral?

navar100
2012-03-23, 10:43 PM
It's what crosses the line into "committing evil acts" certainly.

The question being - can a person commit (very minor) evil acts on a regular basis and not be evil-aligned?

Heroes of Horror does allow characters to "balance evil deeds with good intentions and remain Neutral".

How strong does a character's "Good behaviour" and how weak their "evil behaviour" have to be before, despite deliberately committing deeds that they know qualify as evil, the character becomes "not evil enough to be Evil aligned?"

In your view, is a person who "willingly chooses to hurt others" Evil, no matter how minor the hurt, and no matter how strong their other Good personality traits?

Or do you have a "line" beyond which the character could justifiably be Neutral?

There is a line, but it's like porn. Can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. :smallbiggrin:

Socratov
2012-03-24, 06:34 AM
and yet porn is easily defined:
It's simply a form of media where the purpose if said media in question is to showcase the inter (mostly) human intercourse in graphic ways as to where the point of the media in question is to showcase said intercourse in a way where all details are able to be viewed. Because of this focus porn usually lacks a valid backstory.

OK, now you try and define this line :smallamused:

Mystify
2012-03-24, 06:37 AM
and yet porn is easily defined:

OK, now you try and define this line :smallamused:
There is porn that does not fit into your definition.

Yora
2012-03-24, 07:05 AM
Define "graphic" and "the point of the media".

Mystify
2012-03-24, 07:06 AM
Define "graphic" and "the point of the media".

Also define the boundary between "artistic nudes" and porn

Ravens_cry
2012-03-24, 10:26 AM
Also define the boundary between "artistic nudes" and porn

Urns?:smalltongue:

Hazzardevil
2012-03-25, 04:35 PM
Under that logic someone who performs massively important good actions of enormous significance which culminate in him selflessly sacrificing himself to save the world, who also did a few moderately evil but trivial actions at the same time, would count as Evil. Doesn't make much sense to me.

There has to be a balance. In your proposed system of measurement, evil actions are effectively way more important than good ones - why?

I know what anime your quoting there.

Anyway, I think intent and action are important.

For a while now I have intended to redesign the allingment system.

My system would have all the standard allingments as well as another lot.

Instead of being lawful good, you would have one of 3 degrees of lawfulness.
Axiomatic, Lawful or Strict. And instead of being good you would be Exalted, good or Benign.

It would more accurately describe peoples allingments, without being too broad.

hamishspence
2012-03-25, 05:03 PM
I'd have gone with "mildly" "moderately" and "strongly"

With "tendencies" for those who are still Neutral, but closer to a particular alignment than would be expected.

So you could have a "mildly lawful mildly good" character.

Or you could have "neutral with lawful tendencies and good tendencies" character.

Or any alignment combination.

Maybe this could even be parlayed into mechanical effect. As it currently stands, one's "alignment aura" is dependant entirely on how high level one is- not on how closely one fits the specified alignment.

Which is to say, a "mildly lawful mildly good" 20th level character has a much stronger aura of Law and Good than a "strongly lawful strongly good" 1st level character.

When it really should be the other way round.

Occasional Sage
2012-03-26, 12:57 PM
Which I regard as a case of "cartoon evil" that only exists in bad fiction and has no relations to reality. Evil for the sake of evil is the same category as making paladins fall for only being able to save one of two people in danger.

In the real world, sure. But when you have active, verifiable gods of bloodshed and destruction, behavior like that becomes an article of faith rather than insanity.

/devil's advocate


I'd have gone with "mildly" "moderately" and "strongly"

With "tendencies" for those who are still Neutral, but closer to a particular alignment than would be expected.

So you could have a "mildly lawful mildly good" character.

Or you could have "neutral with lawful tendencies and good tendencies" character.

Or any alignment combination.

Maybe this could even be parlayed into mechanical effect. As it currently stands, one's "alignment aura" is dependant entirely on how high level one is- not on how closely one fits the specified alignment.

Which is to say, a "mildly lawful mildly good" 20th level character has a much stronger aura of Law and Good than a "strongly lawful strongly good" 1st level character.

When it really should be the other way round.

It sounds like what you want is a point scale with 1 being deeply lawful and 20 being deeply chaotic, or some such. Detect and smite spells could be redone to react to point ranges.

hamishspence
2012-03-26, 01:14 PM
Maybe- though the exact handling of it might be kept at the "guesstimate" level.

Templarkommando
2012-03-26, 09:03 PM
I'm inclined to agree with the OP. It's difficult for me to say that you could donate millions of dollars to an organization feeding hungry people and devote time and energy to that, and then unrepentantly murder someone and still call yourself neutral, especially if your campaign wants to take the morality spectrum very seriously.

On the other hand, if its a one time thing that the character later regrets seriously, I would think an exception could be made. Regret doesn't just mean "Oh, my character is laik soooooo sorry u gais!" I think actual regret requires some form of repentance.

It also occurs to me that the question of outright child murder is wondering into the decidedly taboo section of gaming. You'll notice in games like WoW ( I think Fallout might do this too, but I don't remember) that children are decidedly off-limits when it comes to violence. Furthermore, this sort of "no-kill" rule seems to be something that an aspiring DM might want to seriously consider.

Sotharsyl
2012-03-28, 05:23 AM
I think it depends how you look at it, yes you can present simmetry as this awfull thing where you donate money to orphanages to even out the fact you sacrifice one orphan per year to maintain your magical powers.

But if the changes you want implemented happen if after a number of evil actions you just become evil full stop no turning back whatever good deeds you do are null and void the world would be a horrible place.

On the side of good you're walking a tightrope do good all the time and without thinking that you're going to get good karma in return, because if it's not selfless it doesn't count, do enough actions which benefit yourself and boom you loose the much vaunted, but which you can't actually work towards or you wouldn't earn it, good badge and are now a neutral.

And if you do something so bad that you fall to the depths of evil, depths of evil being just under neutral because all evil is unredeemeable evil can't have good actions pushing you up that would be gasp symetry, well you might as well start looting,raping and pilaging because you're never going back to neutral or good.

Wait what are you saying, you're evil but you don't want to take more evil actions you'd actually want to do some good actions ok fine it's your call but you're not going back no matter what you do or why once thrown out of club Good and Club Neutral you don't get to redeeem yourself because redemption would be symetrical with falling :smallsigh:

By now I think I made my point enough without Good's ability to redeem which is simetric to Evil's ability to corupt you can't have redemption and hope just the ever present fear of falling to evil and staying there and I don't want to play in such a world.

hamishspence
2012-03-28, 05:43 AM
Absence of symmetry in some places doesn't mean one has to avoid all symmetry.

DMG helpfully points out that not all alignment change is a gradual process and requires deeds- it is possible, though rare, for a horribly evil character to have a total change of outlook and immediately become good.

Indeed, going by the various splatbooks- it's possible that no evil is irredeemable- any character, even a fiend, can reject evilness and become good.

Now atoning for past evil acts- that's often much harder than changing alignment is.

Mystify
2012-03-28, 07:12 AM
I think it depends how you look at it, yes you can present simmetry as this awfull thing where you donate money to orphanages to even out the fact you sacrifice one orphan per year to maintain your magical powers.

But if the changes you want implemented happen if after a number of evil actions you just become evil full stop no turning back whatever good deeds you do are null and void the world would be a horrible place.

On the side of good you're walking a tightrope do good all the time and without thinking that you're going to get good karma in return, because if it's not selfless it doesn't count, do enough actions which benefit yourself and boom you loose the much vaunted, but which you can't actually work towards or you wouldn't earn it, good badge and are now a neutral.

And if you do something so bad that you fall to the depths of evil, depths of evil being just under neutral because all evil is unredeemeable evil can't have good actions pushing you up that would be gasp symetry, well you might as well start looting,raping and pilaging because you're never going back to neutral or good.

Wait what are you saying, you're evil but you don't want to take more evil actions you'd actually want to do some good actions ok fine it's your call but you're not going back no matter what you do or why once thrown out of club Good and Club Neutral you don't get to redeeem yourself because redemption would be symetrical with falling :smallsigh:

By now I think I made my point enough without Good's ability to redeem which is simetric to Evil's ability to corupt you can't have redemption and hope just the ever present fear of falling to evil and staying there and I don't want to play in such a world.
You can have redemption without the sum of all your actions having to be totaled. alternating killing an orphan and donating to orphanages does not make you neutral. repeatedly committing evil acts makes you evil, no matter if you sprinkle good acts in. for redemption, you have to stop committing evil acts, and devote yourself to good. If the villain redeems himself, but still burns down orphanages on saturdays, but does good work the other 6 days of the week, he is not really redeemed, now is he?Good and evil are not points you pile on a cosmic scale to weigh against each other; your trends are very important.

Roderick_BR
2012-03-28, 11:48 AM
Someone that shifts TOO much from being good to evil must have some serious problem. I'd put the person under the XP penalty for alignment change all the time, since he must have some imbalance, or insanity, or something.
Alignment is not a straightjacker, but shouldn't be a revolving door either.

On the other hand, someone that commits evil acts, feels guilty, and then try to help people out, is an interesting concept to investigate.

In Sotharsyl's orphan example, your warlock needs to sacrifice a young kid every year to maintain his powers. Why is he helping the orphanage? Keeping kids hand for the sacrifice? Not good, at all. You are still evil, and is keeping a "farm" of kids.
Now, if the character feels bad about it, let's say he was desperate for the extra power (Like V did), and later found out he needs to continue, or the contract will remove ALL his powers. He needs to continue doing it. He feels guilty, though, so he tries to help the remaining kids, even knowing it's not enough, but he's doing his best. You could argue that he's usually good, but when "that time of the year" comes, the deed is so awful, so traumatizing, that it taints him, leaving him marked as evil for several weeks, XP penalty included, until he can start to feel (a little) better.
If well played, I'd remove the XP penalty and would even add some bonus, while building up a background with the player, for the day it all will blow up at the character's face.

Anyway, wouldn't be too hard to define where on the fence a character is, just need a little creativity.
And being too unstable doesn't work well, with or without alignment rules

hamishspence
2012-03-29, 05:43 AM
Champions of Ruin actually gives a very similar example of how an evil character's evilness may only show under certain circumstances.

It was of a werewolf who does evil acts on the full moon, and good acts all the rest of the month. "Most of the time they are good, but their curse wipes out all the good they do".

In 3.5 there generally aren't XP penalties for changing alignment. Though the DMG does say that a character who keeps changing back and forth from Good to Evil really ought to be Neutral because they won't commit.

Burner28
2012-03-29, 08:06 AM
Indeed, going by the various splatbooks- it's possible that no evil is irredeemable- any character, even a fiend, can reject evilness and become good.




Like the example of that succubus?

Sotharsyl
2012-03-29, 11:14 AM
You can have redemption without the sum of all your actions having to be totaled. alternating killing an orphan and donating to orphanages does not make you neutral. repeatedly committing evil acts makes you evil, no matter if you sprinkle good acts in. for redemption, you have to stop committing evil acts, and devote yourself to good. If the villain redeems himself, but still burns down orphanages on saturdays, but does good work the other 6 days of the week, he is not really redeemed, now is he?Good and evil are not points you pile on a cosmic scale to weigh against each other; your trends are very important.

Redemption implies going from evil to neutral and or good thus by definition you have to cross the boundary some time, I just want to be able to reach a point though my actions where I can say "Yes I did evil but thorugh my own actions I'm not evil anymore" you understand there has to be some actions which you can take to push you back you know a kind of reverse of a failling act.

It doesn't have to be points but since we're going with someone judging your action and say for X,Y,Z you are now evil for there to be hope there has to be in the same system which some actions A,B,C which can lift me up from evil.

hamishspence
2012-03-29, 12:49 PM
My view is that actions alone cannot lift one out of Evil- but actions + attitude change can.

That is to say- if the character does good deeds and repented their past evil acts and resolved to not do evil acts again and resolved to atone for past evil acts - then yes, they will stop being evil. And maybe even jump all the way from Evil to Good (DMG does suggest this is possible if unlikely).

You don't need to succeed at the atonement- you just need to honestly resolve to do it.

I don't take the same view for Good to Evil shift- as part of my view on how it is asymmetrical. IMO all it takes is the evil acts- they don't need to "repent good acts", they don't need to "resolve not to do good acts again" - they don't even need to change most of their attitudes. Just the acts- enough to establish that doing evil deeds has become habitual, is enough.

Whether one Evil act if sufficiently vile proves (to the DM) an alignment change to Evil has occurred, may vary from DM to DM.

Wardog
2012-04-05, 05:30 AM
Whether or not good can balance evil depends on how you define them.


This then made me realise that "whether or not an unpleasent act can be balanced with good" might make a good way of defining Evil.

Rather than trying to work out which if any of the things we (or D&D) class as "evil" can be balanced out by good acts, to make someone neutral (or even good), we could say:

1) True Evil isn't subject to "moral calculus", and cannot be balanced by any amount of Good acts. Conversely, any act that cannot be balanced by good is therefore True Evil by definition. Anyone who willingly commits a True Evil act automatically becomes Evil themselves. (Redemption may be possible, but will require more than just "doing more good than evil").

2) Lesser acts of unpleasentness and exploitation are not True Evil, and are subject to moral calculus. Conversely, any act that is or can be subject to moral calculus is not True Evil. Examples could include theft (as long as it doesn't cause the victim great hardship), bullying, and generally being a jerk.

Someone who does these sorts of things all the time, with no redeeming Good acts or behaviour can still end up with an Evil alignment. But someone who does them occasionally while spending the majority of the time doing genuinely good works can have a Good (albeit flawed) alignment.

hamishspence
2012-04-05, 06:45 AM
This is pretty much the same as my take on it- though I used the term "moderately evil" for True Evil, and "mildly evil" for acts that are unpleasant but subject to moral calculus.

I also favour it being consistant "true evil" acts that guarantee an Evil alignment even if the person does an enormous amount of good as well- rather than a single "true evil" act.

Devils_Advocate
2012-04-17, 11:22 PM
hamishspence, you seem to be using the word "moderately" in a fashion discordant with its definition. :smallconfused:

Also, if you'd rate evil as "mildly", "moderately", or "strongly" and describe "torturing an animal to death for pleasure" as "moderately evil", then... well, should I even ask what you'd described as "strongly evil", or do I not want to know? :smalleek:


Personally I agree- but "Good people make personal sacrifices to help others" is what's in the PHB
Right, but it doesn't say that Good equals making personal sacrifices to help others -- in which case helping others without making personal sacrifices isn't even Good!

One could argue that what Good is is kindness, which tends to be demonstrated through sacrifice. In which case someone primarily concerned with his own martyrdom is less Good than someone primarily concerned with improving others' welfare. Which makes sense, as the former is self-centered in a way in which the latter is not.

This is similar to how killing isn't explicitly said to be inherently Evil.

We aren't told what Good and Evil alignment definitively are. That's the problem!


IMO all it takes is the evil acts- they don't need to "repent good acts", they don't need to "resolve not to do good acts again" - they don't even need to change most of their attitudes. Just the acts- enough to establish that doing evil deeds has become habitual, is enough.
This seems to go against alignment representing general moral and personal attitudes and to go against alignment not being a straitjacket for restricting your character.


The question being - can a person commit (very minor) evil acts on a regular basis and not be evil-aligned?
This is actually kind of a weird question to ask. Because, well... maybe I'm completely misinformed about the conventions at work here, but... doesn't the default story for a D&D campaign deal with a group of Good and/or Neutral people who go around killing other beings? Like, in a forceful, uspleasant fashion, without their consent? It is rather implicit in this setup that this is a way that not only Neutral but Good people can behave!

Isn't the notion that violence should be a last resort generally pretty alien to the proceedings? Like, if a mayor hires a group of adventurers to deal with the goblin raiders that have been troubling his community, it's sort of assumed that the adventurers aren't going to try to discover and ameliorate the socioeconomic factors that bring neighboring groups into conflict, but rather that they're going to head down into some local subterranean complex and kill them some greenskins.

Now, you can say that Evil isn't just about hurting others but specifically about hurting innocents. But that isn't really the standard usually assumed to be in play either, is it? Like, if a Rogue kills the rest of his party in their sleep so he can take all of their valuables, that's typically regarded as marking him as Evil, I think. But the members of the Rogue's party probably aren't innocent. Because, well... they go around killing people. And then taking all of their valuables, usually.

A system that actually fits the conventions of the genre would seem to need to be able to say that killing people and taking their stuff can somehow be acceptable when the protagonists do it, and yet wrong when it's done to them. So character alignment sort of has to go beyond directly describing surface behavior and deal with deeper stuff like motivations and attitudes in order for it to even fit Dungeons & Dragons, like, at all.

Or am I completely missing something here?


Because a Neutral does not pursue such things. It is old Gygaxian thinking that purposely doing Good and Evil things makes you Neutral. It was described this way in 2E (Earlier too? I don't know.) and what motivated Mordenkainen to sometimes side with Evil when Good became too strong in the world.
But I wasn't talking about deliberately balancing Good and Evil. Part of my point is that ordinary people will routinely do both Good and Evil things.


Modern alignment thought disagrees, but the Old Ways still linger; hence the confusion.
So modern alignment thought disagrees but also still agrees because they never really got all of this stuff straightened out.


A Neutral won't purposely hurt others because that violates their right to pursue their own self interests.
The notion that pacifism is mandatory for Good characters, much less Neutral characters, seems to be a minority view.


He'll only help others if it furthers his own interests.
So, Evil characters can occationally behave altruistically, but Neutral characters can't?! :smallconfused:

Let me try to illustrate the issue here:

{table] | does not make sacrifices for others | makes sacrifices for others
does not hurt others | Neutral | Good
hurts others | Evil | ?????? [/table]

There a lot of sentient beings who aren't you, and you're likely to relate to different beings in very different ways. "Others" is a really, really broad category!


Can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. :smallbiggrin:
So are you endorsing adjudication of alignment by DM fiat? Not that this is necessarily an invalid position; I'm just asking so we're clear on your stance on the matter.

The thing is that sometimes a DM is gonna look at a character and say "Well, the alignment system is totally ambiguous about how to classify this guy, looks like I'll have to come up with clearer standards." And just as a matter of general principle, some people would like to have a consistent system for rulings. Discussions like these are about how to do that.

CGforever!
2012-04-18, 06:54 AM
Specifically, with respect to the interpretation of characters that "regularly commit evil and good acts in equal magnitude" are Neutral.

Under this interpretation, a character could, for example "make personal sacrifices (risking their life) to help strangers" every day, and murder one innocent child every month, and it would "balance out".

Or some other moderately evil act- like torturing an animal to death for pleasure.

I don't think it's supposed to work this way- and I think that regularly, unrepentantly, doing moderately evil acts outbalances any amount of good acts.

Thoughts?

Abstaining from evil acts will put you in neutral territory, and doing good acts will lift you out of neutral territory. A person is good because they do good and don't do evil. Someone who does good and evil, is evil.

In real life, people exist on a broad psychological spectrum. Some people are born incapable of anything but evil (psychopaths). It's not their fault. In a D&D world, a psychopath would be neutral like a construct.

In my opinion, free will doesn't exist. I think our actions are determined by our psycho-biological makeup and the circumstances of our environment. I think that we are a complex chemical reaction, taking the course of least resistance like water flowing downhill.

In D&D, it's assumed that everyone chooses to be what they are, nobody is forced to be evil. However, some races are inherently evil, sometimes because the god that created them is evil - which kinda shoots down what I just said. D&D is full of this kind of inconsistency.

Because of this, I'm partial to thinking that your alignment is based on both what you did, and why you did it.

I can't fathom why someone would help people out everyday but regularly kill chidren unless they are crazy (their brain is broken and cannot function correctly, which isn't their fault - which isn't possible in a D&D world where people choose to be good or evil).

Unless, they are doing it because they are forced to? A soldier in a war ordered to kill enemy children or die, or his family is killed, or whatever. He's a good guy, he helps people, but when the balor-general of the army he was forced into says to kill those children, it's do or die. If he does it, he becomes evil, if he doesn't, he becomes dead. It sucks to be him. Still, though, he has a choice. He chose evil. He's evil.

So, my argument ends here. A person from your example is either evil, or unable to make the choice in the first place (like a construct or animal). Actions, therefore, are subjective in the alignment sense. Killing a child is only evil if you recognize it as evil and do it anyway. You're evil if you kill a child knowing that its' evil to do so, you're not if you don't. Real life is a whole 'nother can of worms.

The alignment system is not symmetrical in the sense that you mentioned.

hamishspence
2012-04-18, 11:30 AM
hamishspence, you seem to be using the word "moderately" in a fashion discordant with its definition. :smallconfused:

Also, if you'd rate evil as "mildly", "moderately", or "strongly" and describe "torturing an animal to death for pleasure" as "moderately evil", then... well, should I even ask what you'd described as "strongly evil", or do I not want to know? :smalleek:


Destroying a person's soul, magically compelling people to torture themselves to death, and so forth.


Part of my point is that ordinary people will routinely do both Good and Evil things.


According to Fiendish Codex 2, (page 15) this is not true- most people are only weakly aligned, and they rarely "take actions dramatic enough to register as good, evil, lawful, or chaotic"

It's possible that their definition of "rarely" is the same as your definition of "routinely" but I doubt it.



This seems to go against alignment representing general moral and personal attitudes and to go against alignment not being a straitjacket for restricting your character.

Why? Making it easy to get into Evil alignment, and hard to get out of Evil alignment once you're there- doesn't "straitjacket" the character in the sense of limiting their actions- a character can do anything- but "anything" has consequences.

Devils_Advocate
2012-04-18, 08:55 PM
hamishspence, what does it mean for an act to be "evil" as you're using the term?

I would say that a bully tripping and kicking someone is evil because it's malicious. Whereas I'm getting the impression that you'd say that that's not exceptional enough to count as evil. In other words, that you're employing a "no true Scotsman" definition of "evil" under which the claim that only extraordinary deeds are evil is a vacuous tautology.

But in that case evil would seem to become relative to society. In which case the whole idea of turning mortals evil by creating societies in which evil is normal doesn't make sense; it can never be normal to be abnormally malicious.


Why? Making it easy to get into Evil alignment, and hard to get out of Evil alignment once you're there- doesn't "straitjacket" the character in the sense of limiting their actions- a character can do anything- but "anything" has consequences.
Well, if you go the "Don't base your character's personality off of her alignment" route, then it instead comes into conflict with alignment being "a tool for developing your character’s identity".

If being non-Evil is restrictive, then... being non-Evil is restrictive. In particular, if being non-Evil is more restrictive than being Evil, then being non-Evil is more restrictive than being Evil.


In my opinion, free will doesn't exist. I think our actions are determined by our psycho-biological makeup and the circumstances of our environment. I think that we are a complex chemical reaction, taking the course of least resistance like water flowing downhill.
How is it that some people think that our choices being determined by what we are is incompatible with our choices being determined by us, rather than that our choices being determined by what we are is the same thing as our choices being determined by us?

We are what we are. That which is done by what we are is done by us.


In D&D, it's assumed that everyone chooses to be what they are
In which edition is that the case?

In Third Edition, "Being good or evil can be a conscious choice. For most people, though, being good or evil is an attitude that one recognizes but does not choose." (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm#goodVsEvil)


D&D is full of this kind of inconsistency.
OBJECTION! This statement could be read to imply that the game is filled with inconsistency of only one variety! :smalltongue:

hamishspence
2012-04-19, 01:04 AM
hamishspence, what does it mean for an act to be "evil" as you're using the term?

I would say that a bully tripping and kicking someone is evil because it's malicious. Whereas I'm getting the impression that you'd say that that's not exceptional enough to count as evil.

I would actually count that as evil- however I wouldn't call it "normal" for people to routinely do this.

The average person does not "routinely" trip and kick people for their own personal pleasure- probably only a third or so of people routinely commit acts like this.

Which is consistent with the "1/3 of people are evil" model for a D&D world.

CGforever!
2012-04-19, 04:29 AM
In Third Edition, "Being good or evil can be a conscious choice. For most people, though, being good or evil is an attitude that one recognizes but does not choose." (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm#goodVsEvil)

Welp. You got me on that one. I think that officially puts me on the "alignment doesn't make sense" team.



OBJECTION! This statement could be read to imply that the game is filled with inconsistency of only one variety! :smalltongue:

And how.

hamishspence
2012-04-19, 06:41 AM
Welp. You got me on that one. I think that officially puts me on the "alignment doesn't make sense" team.

that particular quote is more than a little weird. Some D&D characters don't recognize their own alignment.

Maybe "does not choose" refers to "does not choose a side" as in- most people don't choose to be Lawful, Chaotic, Good, or Evil, though they recognize all of these- hence they're Neutral by default.

Or it could be that "most people don't choose they way they are"- they're "born Evil/Good/etc", have tendencies towards these right from the start, and simply don't "make a choice" to be anything other than their "normal" behaviour.

Mystify
2012-04-19, 09:23 AM
I interpret that line as "Your alignment is not always a conscious choice, its part of your nature, and people are normally capable of recognizing their natural tendencies."

Rasman
2012-04-19, 04:33 PM
You kinda sound like the type that believes that good vs evil is like unbalanced Math.

An example being: 10 Good Deeds > 1 Evil Deed.

Your example is also a bit extreme, IMHO, and doesn't exactly capture the essence of Neutral.

The goal of True Neutral is absolutely nothing. True Neutral just wants to be left alone and he/she will be the bane of either Good or Evil, depending on who screws with him/her first. Thus True Neutral lives by the Gray Rule, "Do unto others as they do unto you."

True Neutral does NOT go off saving the world while slaughtering babies along the way, too much effort to go looking for babies. True Neutral works a little more something like this...

True Neutral's party enters a Shadow Dragon's Lair and happens upon the Shadow Dragon's rookery. The Neutral Good Cleric of Pelor/Sarenrae instantly wants to destroy all the eggs because they are the eggs of a Shadow Dragon. True Neutral disagrees, fervently, because they are just eggs and believes that they should simply just take the eggs and train the Wyrmlings into becoming powerful allies for the party. The Cleric acts on the Lawful half of his Neutrality and begins smashing the eggs, thus True Neutral springs into action and saves as many Shadow Dragon eggs as he can, taking them, hiding them and raising them to train to become useful, loyal and controllable tools, rather than Chaotic Evil killing machines.

You are right in the sense that it is a balancing act, but that's a responsibility of the player, not the character. When I play True Neutral I, as the player, look at what my character has done recently and try to balance it like a scale. If I've been too Law abiding, then I create Snow on the party Wizard for no real reason other than my own amusement. If I've been too Chaotic as of late, he will be strict and stubborn and willing to use spells like Hold Person to prove a point and MAKE someone do as they should. If he's been too good as of late, he'll probably just watch as someone gets mugged. If he's been a little too evil then he'll do some random people saving or something of the like.

The character never has a sense of "I've been too BLANK as of late. I should probably..." however. I don't really see it as logical that a person would rationalize that as someone who is True Neutral. You would literally have to be crazy to actually think like that, I believe. I'd leave that to the Chaotic Evil BBEG that decides to screw with the True Neutral.

hamishspence
2012-04-20, 05:19 PM
Might depend on how common Neutrality is, or for that matter, Evil and Good:

Two campaign models with different frequencies of Evil and Neutral- one with it being about a third of the population for each:

Low Grade Evil Everywhere
In some campaigns, the common population is split roughly evenly among the various alignments - the kindly old grandmother who gives boiled sweets to children is Neutral Good and that charming rake down the pub is Chaotic Neutral. Similarly the thug lurking in the alleyway is Chaotic Evil, while the grasping landlord who throws granny out on the street because she's a copy behind on the rent is Lawful Evil.

In such a campaign up to a third of the population will detect as Evil to the paladin. This low grade Evil is a fact of life, and is not something the paladin can defeat. Certainly he should not draw his greatsword and chop the landlord in twain just because he has a mildly tainted aura. It might be appropriate for the paladin to use Diplomacy (or Intimidation) to steer the landlord toward the path go good but stronger action is not warranted.

In such a campaign detect evil cannot be used to infallibly detect villainy, as many people are a little bit evil. if he casts detect evil on a crowded street, about a third of the population will detect as faintly evil.
and one with Neutral being most of the population, and Evil (and Good) being rare:

Evil As A Choice
A similar campaign set-up posits that most people are some variety of Neutral. The old granny might do good by being kind to people, but this is a far cry from capital-G Good, which implies a level of dedication, fervour and sacrifice which she does not possess. If on the other hand our granny brewed alchemical healing potions into those boiled sweets or took in and sheltered orphans and strays off the street, then she might qualify as truly Good.

Similarly, minor acts of cruelty and malice are not truly Evil on the cosmic scale. Our greedy and grasping landlord might be nasty and mean, but sending the bailiffs round to throw granny out might not qualify as Evil (although if granny is being thrown out into a chill winter or torrential storm, then that is tantamount to murder and would be Evil). In such a campaign, only significant acts of good or evil can tip a character from Neutrality to being truly Good or Evil.

if a paladin in this campaign uses detect evil on a crowded street, he will usually detect nothing, as true evil is rare. Anyone who detects as Evil, even faintly Evil, is probably a criminal, a terrible and wilful sinner, or both. Still, the paladin is not obligated to take action - in this campaign, detecting that someone is Evil is a warning, not a call to arms. The paladin should probably investigate this person and see if they pose a danger to the common folk, but he cannot automatically assume that this particular Evil person deserves to be dealt with immediately.

Beleriphon
2012-04-21, 11:09 AM
Depending on the scale though, that can describe Evil as well. If someone is willing to enslave 98% of the world's population, torturing and beating them to keep them in line, all for the benefit of the 2% he cares about, is that Neutral? I don't believe it is.

Joe Commoner come across an attempted murder for somebody he doesn't know. If the poor schlub getting shanked is Jeb Commoner, Joe's cousin, them he'll probably try to intervene or at least call for help. If the poor schlub is Charlie Peasantman, who Joe has never met before, Joe is probably gong to keep on walking and do nothing. This is what D&D would classify as Neutral. Its the way most people would probably react. That doesn't mean Joe can't be a nice person, donate to charity, or take in stray puppies all day long. But when it comes to real personal sacrifice for somebody he's doesn't know, it's probably not going to happen.

Now lets take Karl Goodly, a roving fighter sort of fellow of good character (I'm specifically ignoring the paladin here, since I think we can all agree how the paladin would react to the scenario). At first level he comes across the scenario that Joe Commoner does. Karl is probably going to help the victim of attempted murder. He'll intervene even though he knows nothing of the attacker or the victim. The attacker could be a much stronger combatant than Karl, but since Karl is Good he'll go help.

In the scenario we have our attacker is Snidely Badinov. He's attack his victim because he was insulted at a bar. Last night. He's been following the poor victim around since then waiting for an opportunity to get revenge. For a verbal insult he's going to commit murder. All he wants is for people to know now to mess with Snidely or you'll get cut. This is the evil character, they don't generally care what they do as long as the result is the one they want.

Starbuck_II
2012-04-21, 04:01 PM
Depending on the scale though, that can describe Evil as well. If someone is willing to enslave 98% of the world's population, torturing and beating them to keep them in line, all for the benefit of the 2% he cares about, is that Neutral? I don't believe it is.
Whoa, the neutrality described was leaving them to rot: yours have him beating them.
That isn't the same example, that makes it a Strawman.


A character who tries to balance each good act with an evil one and each evil one with a good one is not neutral. He's evil, just deluded and possibly insane.

Well, 2nd edition thought it was. :smallbiggrin:

hamishspence
2012-04-22, 04:53 AM
I'm fairly sure 1st ed did too- that doesn't mean it's a very feasible moral mindset for anyone.

Opposition to both Good (in the form of self-sacrifice) and Evil (in the form of violating other people's rights) does seem like a more feasible "Neutral moral position" though.

Wardog
2012-04-22, 05:43 AM
Joe Commoner come across an attempted murder for somebody he doesn't know. If the poor schlub getting shanked is Jeb Commoner, Joe's cousin, them he'll probably try to intervene or at least call for help. If the poor schlub is Charlie Peasantman, who Joe has never met before, Joe is probably gong to keep on walking and do nothing. This is what D&D would classify as Neutral. Its the way most people would probably react. That doesn't mean Joe can't be a nice person, donate to charity, or take in stray puppies all day long. But when it comes to real personal sacrifice for somebody he's doesn't know, it's probably not going to happen.

Now lets take Karl Goodly, a roving fighter sort of fellow of good character (I'm specifically ignoring the paladin here, since I think we can all agree how the paladin would react to the scenario). At first level he comes across the scenario that Joe Commoner does. Karl is probably going to help the victim of attempted murder. He'll intervene even though he knows nothing of the attacker or the victim. The attacker could be a much stronger combatant than Karl, but since Karl is Good he'll go help.

I think that's a bit of an unfair comparison.

If Snidely Badinov is tough enough to murder a commoner, then there's probably not much another commoner can do to stop him. (Remember: a level 1 commoner has a reasonable chance of dying in a fight with a cat).

A fighter on the other hand, even at level 1, has the physical and mental training necessary to get into fights and win. (The name of the class is a bit of a giveaway).

I don't think its fair to say that a kind and generous person who gives to charity and looks after stray animals cannot be good just because they are afraid to challenge a would-be murderer. It's essentially makes alignment dependent on ability.

A better example of neutral would be another fighter who actually did have (or would be likely to have) the ability to stop the murder, but didn't because it was "none of his business".

Or maybe even better: an epic-level fighter who could crush Snidely Badinov's skull with his little finger. Then the only constraints on the fighter's actions are his own morals and decisions, not abilities and circumstances, so we can get a good impression of what sort of person he really is by what he does. (E.g.: walks on by = neutral; uses non-lethal force to restrain the attacker = good; tortures Badinov to death = evil).

eulmanis12
2012-04-25, 02:43 PM
I look at it this way.

In D&D style setting

When insulted in an unforgivable way:
The GOOD man challenges the other to an honorable duel with witnesses, judges, and seconds
The NEUTRAL man pulls a knife from his boot and attacks
The EVIL man obliterates the person, and most bystanders, then hunts down the other's family.

When fighting:
The GOOD man fights "honorably" with full respect for both "tradition", "Laws and Customs of War"
The NEUTRAL man fights to win, using tricks, and less respectable methods as long as they give him an advantage. He respects the "Laws and Customs of War" but "tradition" can go stuff it.
The EVIL man fights dirty. He uses WMD's or equivalent. He torches the village and sows the fields with salt. He has no respect for the "Laws and Customs of War" or tradition.

When asked for their motivation:
the GOOD man says "because it's right"
the NEUTRAL man says "Because I have to"
the EVIL man says "Because I can"

This system does not take into account the "in media only" types of characters such as the
"Card Carrying Villan"
"the Mr. Blue and Orange Morality"
"the altruist/philanthropist" (not saying charity doesn't exist, just the title of a thing from TV Tropes)
(for these and other in media only personalities see the above mentioned website)

In my view (I admit, rather cynical)
<1% of the world is good
<1% is evil
>98% don't care

another good way of judging is take any situation, and ask what the character would do if there were no consequeces.

A good person will still do good
An evil person evil
neutral, will do whatever

hamishspence
2012-04-25, 03:01 PM
I wouldn't call altruism or philanthropy an "in media only" attitude. Even the more dedicated types, who spend much of their life doing it, are feasible.

Personally I think it's a little over-wide a definition of Neutrality that has 98+% of people be Neutral. Especially since humans "tend toward no alignment, not even Neutrality" in the PHB.

eulmanis12
2012-04-25, 03:04 PM
I should edit that post. I was trying to refer to a thing from TV-Tropes I just cant find the link. Not refering to the actual concept IRL, thats why its in quotes.

hamishspence
2012-04-25, 03:08 PM
Chronic Hero Syndrome maybe?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChronicHeroSyndrome

There's a lot of D&D books that discuss the psychology of various evil characters- how a character might come to be doing evil deeds- and how much they compartmentalise.

Savage Species, BoVD, Exemplars of Evil, Champions of Ruin, all spring to mind.

Knaight
2012-04-25, 08:24 PM
When fighting:
The GOOD man fights "honorably" with full respect for both "tradition", "Laws and Customs of War"
The NEUTRAL man fights to win, using tricks, and less respectable methods as long as they give him an advantage. He respects the "Laws and Customs of War" but "tradition" can go stuff it.
The EVIL man fights dirty. He uses WMD's or equivalent. He torches the village and sows the fields with salt. He has no respect for the "Laws and Customs of War" or tradition.
So what happens here when the traditional way of fighting is to circumvent meaningful enemies, torch villages, raid civilian populations, so on and so forth, and the laws and customs of wars support this fully - such as most actual historical wars? As it is now written, "tradition" seems to assume only fighting head on, and "Laws and Customs of War" assume some sort of Geneva Conventions like system that is consistently adhered to. It also assumes this in a world where killing someone is apparently an entirely acceptable way to handle being insulted, given your previous example.

CGforever!
2012-04-26, 03:06 AM
Elumanis12, it sounds like you're using 1st edition alignment, where there was only good, neutral, and evil, which were effectively lawful good, neutral, and chaotic evil.

hamishspence
2012-04-26, 06:24 AM
Elumanis12, it sounds like you're using 1st edition alignment, where there was only good, neutral, and evil, which were effectively lawful good, neutral, and chaotic evil.

Actually, that was "0th edition" (Basic D&D) and not all versions of that had only 3 alignments- at least one (Eric Holmes version) had five: LG, CG, N, LE, CE).

The later Mentzer/Moldovay version only had Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic though. And while Chaotic tended to be Evil and Lawful tended to be Good, there were exceptions, such as genies (Chaotic but not Evil).

I think 1E had all nine.