What is their alignment?

[Rhyltran]

Another one of those "What is their alignment" threads. We have a character (player) that players in the party can't decide what their alignment is. Originally she rolled her character as Lawful Neutral. These are things we know about the character in question:

She saw someone being mugged and her dog ripped the mugger's throat open. Even though she had healing spells, she heard a guard approaching, and decided that it wasn't her problem to save the mugger and left him to bleed to death. Earlier she broke into a man's house to retrieve a book. The dwarf had no problems stealing said book and she had no problems with the party breaking and entering (in fact aided the party doing this) the dwarf decided to take extra time to steal from the guy's safe but had no issue with this either. Though, she didn't help with this. When the rest of the party went for the chest she decided to remain downstairs to look for additional clues. At another part in the campaign the incompetent town guard she interacted with she started picking a fight with. Insulting and berating him for his failures.

When she fought a farmer who believed the party to be after his daughter she fought him with the flat of her blade to avoid as much non-lethal as possible. When he was taken down she attended to his wounds as the party went after the culprit. She has admitted if a party member was in trouble she'd have no trouble torturing someone for information if the person knew their whereabouts and if the person was bad was open to try this if intimidation failed. She admitted she WOULD torture a good person in the same situation if he was so afraid the BBEG would get him if all other avenues failed as her party would come first.

She admitted back in the mugger situation if she was caught by a guard she would turn herself in rather than fight the guard but only because she wouldn't want things worse for herself. She also doesn't want to hunt down evil, purge evil from the land, or anything like that. She only attacked the mugger because it was happening right in front of her. She doesn't actively seek to defeat evil.

It seems everyone is stuck on..

Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Good, or Neutral Evil. Though, everyone is agreement Lawful Neutral doesn't really stand. What do you guys think?

The player in question thinks her character fits the Chaotic Neutral spectrum after reading some.

[John Longarrow]

I'd say just "N"...

Tries to be good when it isn't too much bother, but isn't really evil. Would like to stay within the fabric of society, but doesn't always. She's also not a real rebel who's out to change society.

Just Neutral.

[Mechalich]

Either just plain Neutral or Chaotic Neutral.

This person seems quite clearly to not be strongly committed to either direction on the good vs evil axis and fits solidly within the neutral zone. As for the law vs. chaos axis they lack the consistency to fall into the lawful region, but it's not clear whether they are chaotic or just falls into neutral there. There certainly have been chaotic sequences, but whether they form a pattern of inconsistency is more of a judgment call.

[Rhyltran]

Thanks for the opinions. I think we're all in agreement (as is she) and we're going to adjust her to Neutral for now. :) She's happy with this as well.

[Mordaedil]

Yeah, she seems to be just a regular Joe, which is precisely what True Neutral should be like. The other alignments are for people who believe in a cause or something.

[Echch]

I give an additional vote to "cross out the L".
True neutral seems to be the way to go.

[Stealth Marmot]

Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Good, or Neutral Evil. Though, everyone is agreement Lawful Neutral doesn't really stand. What do you guys think?

The player in question thinks her character fits the Chaotic Neutral spectrum after reading some.

I once saw a video by Spoony that had a good rule of thumb for alignments: It doesn't matter what your alignment is, and it doesn't matter as much how you define that alignment, what is important is consistency.

The character shown here seems to define being chaotic neutral as doing whatever suits their purpose at the time, but will not irreversibly harm an innocent. They are willing to use whatever means they find necessary and expedient and don't feel they need to justify or explain themself.

In my opinion, this definitely falls into the Chaotic Neutral area, but could pass as Neutral as well easily.

[CasualViking]

To me, the defining characteristic of Chaotic Neutral is the consistent willingness to inflict their LOLrandom "fun" on others.

[Stealth Marmot]

To me, the defining characteristic of Chaotic Neutral is the consistent willingness to inflict their LOLrandom "fun" on others.

This is one definition of Chaotic Neutral, but I consider it to be the alignment of Chaotic Jackass.

[Calthropstu]

This is one definition of Chaotic Neutral, but I consider it to be the alignment of Chaotic Jackass.

Just because I superglued the paladins sword in his scabbard and put itch powder in his breast plate and coated the wizards familiars pouch with habenero extract doesn't make me evil.

They had it coming.


On topic: going to have to join the N crowd. The character stated "If the guard had caught me I'd give myself up." This shows respect for the law, if not total obedience.

[Geddy2112]

Second true neutral for all the reasons said above.

[Wolfkingleo]

@OP (A bit of story ahead):

Interesting enough I'm playing a Homebrew Warlock with the True Neutral alignment and I happened to commit some of the said acts that may have made my DM somewhat judgemental. In my case, I tended to uphold pacts and deals made by the party, including sometimes "reasoning" a Pyromaniac Chaotic Stupid Dragon Fire Adept party member to comply or restrain herself when wanting to burn everything (we got already several problemas in the campaign because of her....M.O.); but also when the brother of the party's cleric where imprisioned in the BBEG castle and we learned that some other guy escaped, we tried to reason with him, thing is, the NPC was uncooperative (and the DM was trying to push us into a fetch quest for him) and in the middle time the BBEG project a image direct into the clerics mind, showing him escalping his brother (that makes him enter into a rage and multiclass for barbarian), so instead we just subdued the escapee and I proceed to torture him until he gave us the information. Once he did it, we release him *later he send a message saying that there is still something that he withhold...DM cheap railroading su****

Anyways, after the session the DM asked me to change on the allignment (shift either to Chaotic or just to Evil since I resorted to torture this once) and we enter into a big discussion, but I always remember the easydamus link about the alligments and showed him how my char fit on it : http://easydamus.com/trueneutral.html. In the end I won because he got tired of arguing, and because everyone else in the group was supportive on my case.

That said, taking ONLY what you showed so far in your post, I would put this character as True Neutral with a tendecy to change to chaotic, althought not quite there....yet.

Cheers