PDA

View Full Version : Roleplaying None of the Above - A Guide to the True Neutral Alignment



Wraith
2018-07-18, 05:28 AM
As with the other guides published by like-minded Playgrounders, the essay below is written somewhat 'In Character' as a member of the True Neutral alignment. While you may infer bias at various points, I assure you that is entirely your own fault, as achieving balance is a key defining feature of the True Neutral alignment.

In a similar vein, I encourage you to disagree with as much of the essay as possible. Pulling in different directions to your own inner-guidance is truly within the spirit of True Neutral, and as well as that I make no claim that the examples below are exhaustive; thus I welcome additional suggestions, definitions, and references.


None of The Above
A Guide to True Neutral

“We cannot do wrong; neither have we any disposition to do it, for we know not what it is.”
~ Satan; ‘The Mysterious Stranger’

I. Introduction

Many people have turned their hand to discussing the philosophic merits of the Alignments (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?448812-Alignment-Handbook-Super-Thread); what each of them represents, what drives them, and what it takes to fully absorb the title of “Good” or “Evil” into one’s very being in day to day existence.

Perhaps harder to understand is when you meet a character who, for whatever reason, seemingly can’t or won’t commit to any of the extremes; or rather, they are instead committed to something so radically out of line with other moralities that it hardly compares to any of them at all. How does one begin to engage with such a different – indifferent? – character, let alone how to embody them as a Player Character in your own role?

Welcome to True Neutral. Let us muse together on the great vastness of the infinite universe, or the exquisite, terrible multitude of nature… Or not. That’s fine, too.

The goal of this little essay is not to tell anyone that they are “doing it wrong”. Rather it’s a place for me to explore a few common themes that might occur through several similarly-aligned characters, expressing my ideas that you in turn might wish to incorporate them into your roleplaying experiences. I welcome critique and discussion; the nature of True Neutral is that it usually appears to be something else, until you know what’s really going on in the inside, and the assumption here is that you’re welcome to use what you like and discard the rest if unsuitable to your game or character.

Do what you want. That’s the True Neutral way.


II. What is True Neutral?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/01%20birds%20and%20bats.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/01%20birds%20and%20bats.jpg.html)
“He who is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.”
~ Aesop; ‘The Bats and the Birds’

Dungeons & Dragons defines True Neutral thusly;


A neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. She doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil-after all, she would rather have good neighbours and rulers than evil ones. Still, she's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way.

Some neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to Neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run.

Neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. Neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

As is usually the case, they are not inherently wrong but in a few short sentence they fail to capture the broad scope of characterisations and attitudes that fall under the canopy of True Neutral. They seem to interpret the alignment as being… well, let’s face it; dull. That True Neutral characters just aren’t interested in what’s going on around them, that they are passive and naïve, and unwilling to work towards any kind of goal unless they are otherwise as much a zealot dedicated to some cosmic notion as the most devout Paladin is to her God.

What they have failed to capture, more than anything else, is the difference between being disinterested in what is going on around them and being more interested in something bigger and more important that other alignments probably haven’t considered. Occasionally, it’s even something that the other alignments are incapable of considering, physically as much intellectually. Worse than that, they seem to equate Neutral with the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want; no one else can judge you by their own trivial standards because you just don’t care what they have to say, or some arbitrary cosmic decree says so.

Nothing could be further from the truth. To be Truly Neutral is to stand against all sides of the Alignment grid equally, to face them all down in turn while they seek to pull you over to their own petty point of view, and to remain resolute in your own purpose against an entire universe that has the luxury of not knowing what you know.
The other alignments don’t see that; they interpret your alternative morality as an unwillingness to commit to any of their own and will try to pull you in any direction just to make you fit into something that they can recognise, and then judge accordingly. Lawful Good might hate the selfishness of Neutral Evil, but he at least understands why someone might be out to take everything that they can get for themselves – what he doesn’t understand is why True Neutral won’t judge with him. Chaotic Evil understands why Neutral Good will fight and try to prevent him from his rampage, but not the True Neutral who might simply be disinterested and thereby appear weak and cowardly.

While it is true that the lazy, laissez-faire beatniks are a part of the True Neutral family, it is more accurate to say that True Neutral is powerful force pulling a character in a direction more strange and abstract than those pulled by Good, Evil, Lawful and Chaotic, and not just the vacuum left by their absence.

Similarly, True Neutral characters aren’t all grey, boring and congenitally unable to understand the concept of ‘fun’. They can have interests outside of their alignment, just like anyone else; they can have hobbies and areas of curiosity which piques their interest, which they are capable of sharing with anyone on the Alignment grid equally.
If anything, their preference to disassociate the motives and goals from other peoples’ can potentially allow them to be amiable and friendly to anyone. You might be a sinister assassin dedicated to the God of Blood, or a righteous, beatific Knight sworn to protect the innocent; those two extremes might never be able to put aside their differences long enough for a brief conversation but provided they’re willing to behave themselves and not get too political the True Neutral character will happily sit down for a game of cards with either.
It’s not that the True Neutral character is blind to those peoples’ faults and always condones them, but they’re more interested in playing the game at hand.

Wraith
2018-07-18, 05:30 AM
III. Archetypes

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/02%20the%20neutrals.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/02%20the%20neutrals.jpg.html)
"What makes a good man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?"
~ Zapp Brannigan; ‘Futurama’

As with any alignment, there is not just one way in which to portray a character as True Neutral. They come in different flavours and in different scales of intensity, some of which have nothing to do with each other beyond the fact that they cannot easily be described by any of the other titles on the alignment grid. Now you start to understand; these people are nothing alike, but they are still True Neutral together and in unequivocally different ways. As they suggest, there is infinitely more to it than being the average Druid sat in his grove, eating moss and drinking rainwater….


The Fettered, aka The Dutiful

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/03%20witches.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/03%20witches.jpg.html)
“We look to… the edges,' said Mistress Weatherwax. 'There’s a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong… an’ they need watchin’. We watch ‘em, we guard the sum of things.”
~ Terry Pratchett; ‘The Wee Free Man’ (2003)

…But of course, that’s what you thought, isn’t it? As your friend sat down at the table to play and said that their character was going to be True Neutral, your brain leapt to the obvious conclusion: “Druid”. Just another hippy who just wanted nothing to do with the comings and goings or other characters, except to look after their own piece of land and talk to animals. The particularly generous among you might instead have thought “Monk”; The shaven-headed fellow in baggy robes whose idea of a fun time is to sit and meditate on the infinite nature of the universe for 30 years.
I am not trying to say that so-aligned characters don’t do these things, but to fully include them as True Neutral Characters rather than simplistic stereotypes, one should ask themselves; HOW and WHY are they doing them?

To be Fettered means to be bound or otherwise attached to something in a way that is difficult, or otherwise impossible, to break. A Paladin’s vows to do good and serve their God is a fetter, binding them in service to goodness; in the same way, a Druid’s unspoken promise to protect a glade or sacred forest by whatever means necessary are just as potent-a vow, albeit one with far more abstract responsibilities and consequences than a none-True Neutral character might expect.

In some ways, being a Fettered True Neutral looks remarkably close to Lawful Neutral; you have a code of conduct that, unspoken as it might be, you follow to the letter and without regard for the greater implications of ‘good’ or ‘evil’. The key difference between the two is that as True Neutral, it is YOUR code which you choose to follow, not one dictated by another person, deity or even society as a whole. Instead you put aside their concerns and criticisms to do what needs to be done to further your cause.

Likewise, do not mistake a Fettered True Neutral for someone who is Neutral Evil. You are not disregarding the laws of the kingdom because you are selfish and doing so brings you personal gain or satisfaction, you’re doing it because what you need to do is bigger than a single small kingdom, even if they can’t see it for themselves. And above all else you are not Chaotic; the code is there, and you know it in your heart, even if it leads you down a course of actions that seems bizarre and without discernible pattern to observers.

Fettered True Neutral characters are not typically thought of as leaders and are often imagined to be Lone Wolves, acting off on their own agenda without need or desire to socialise or cooperate with others. This is not necessarily true; A True Neutral character who needs to achieve an objective for his self-defined cause can be as proactive as any other adventurer, setting out on their own mission with purpose and determination and an inclination to pick up a wide variety of comrades along the way, so long as their ultimate goals align with the True Neutral’s.
Likewise, True Neutrals are potentially willing to join up with any party and partake on any adventure, just so long as the party’s goals are permissible to the Fettered True Neutral character’s code. The infamous ‘Team Evil’ might decide it’s fun to go out murdering orcs and hanging their skins up in trees as an example to others for no other reason than they enjoy the sound of screaming; the True Neutral Druid might be totally down for that, provided that the trees in question belong to her grove and had previously been razed and burned by the same tribe of orcs.

Many Fettered True Neutral characters often face the accusation of being ‘selfish’. While this is always potentially true – it’s a personality trait that can affect someone of any alignment, after all – it once again misses the whole scope of the character. Being able to “make up” your own code and apply it however you wish seems like a luxury, but the True Neutral character knows that such assumptions and prejudices are just one of the many sacrifices that they have to make and hardships that they have to endure in the name of the Cause.


The Unfettered, aka The Apathetic

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/04%20diogenes.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/04%20diogenes.jpg.html)
“Yes; Stand a little less between me and the sun.”
~ Diogenes the Cynic, having been offered whatever he desired by Alexander the Great. C.336AD

The mirror-image to the Fettered True Neutral character is the other popular stereotype; the naïve, non-committal fence-sitter who has no overriding goal or motivation and is usually content to follow whatever interesting thing that catches their fancy. They might join an adventuring party because they have nothing better to do and walking down one road is as good as another, often coming across as so passive as to seem Lawful Neutral, or as whimsically capricious as to be thought Chaotic Neutral.
The true difference between them and True Neutral is attitude and consistency. The Lawful Neutral character follows along because that’s what he’s been instructed or contracted to do, whereas the Chaotic Neutral does so in intentional defiance of such an instruction; doing it because you’ve told him not to or because it gives him an opportunity to stick It to The Man, or at least find a The Man to eventually stick It to.
In that sense, both Lawful and Chaotic Neutral are predictable whereas Unfettered True Neutral is not. A Chaotic Neutral character can be relied upon to defy an authority figure – the True Neutral character might go for long periods of doing what they’re expected to do before suddenly pulling a U-Turn for the own indecipherable reason, and vice versa. The key is that they’re not being led or influenced by outside forces, as likely to wander off and forget the fight as they are to switch sides as whichever holds their interest rather than a specific inclination to do one or the other.

Alternatively there are those who remain Unfettered by deliberate choice; a breed of True Neutral character who have actively opted to remain aloof from the trivial squabbles of the other alignments by refraining from interaction with them, or sometimes hindering all equally. These sorts of characters are often Nihilists or Cynics, weary of the world and acting as a living example of that belief. They’re not inherently destructive in their actions, but their reasons for doing anything usually involve sarcasm and a tendency to say “I told you so” whenever things go wrong. They’re usually capable warriors and intelligent sages, but their main motivation to join a party depends far more on finding something to sate their immediate interest rather than for long term goals.

Playing as an Unfettered True Neutral of any kind can be detrimental to a campaign if done badly. Of any alignment archetype, this is probably the one who is most likely to look at the plot synopsis and say, “My character isn’t interested in that”.
Not only is that incredibly rude, but it’s also hugely inaccurate; Unfettered True Neutral characters can still be curious in things that don’t directly concern them, and they can still be willing to help their friends and comrades on a whim. If anything, they’re even more likely to do so – if nothing is ultimately important, why not enjoy the interesting distraction between now and an inevitably pointless death?

As an aside, it is possible to play a character whose archetype can fall under either Fettered or Unfettered archetypes despite nominally having the same titles; as an example, Scientists and Explorers.

As with many types of True Neutral, both characters’ archetypes are determined by their intent and attitude towards their work.
The scientist can be both an air-headed forgetful ditz whose discipline is as vague as his acknowledgement of safety precautions, or he can be a barely-moral “Progress at Any Cost” type whose true guiding passion is to excel in his project even if it requires some dangerous methods. Explorers can be the same – following wherever the wind takes them for the thrill of the journey, or putting their goal ahead of all other concerns as the driving force behind their actions. In both cases the former is Unfettered and the latter Fettered; characters very different in terms of personality and actions, but both True Neutral for different reasons.


The Cosmic Moralist, aka The Equaliser

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/05%20uncle.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/05%20uncle.jpg.html)
"You destroyed the demon! Yin and yang! Now the world is out of balance; nobody told you to destroy the demon!”
~Uncle; ‘Jackie Chan Adventures’

Popularised by (usually inaccurate) mid-20th century interpretations of eastern philosophy and mysticism, the concept of the universe being a single unified entity wherein even the smallest actions have immense repercussions gives rise to a particularly active branch of True Neutral characters. Rather than ones whose overriding goal is a personal mission that falls between the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axis, there is instead someone who thinks of themselves being a counter-weight on the great universal scale. These characters see the universe as being balanced on a pivot where an excessive fall into Good can be just as catastrophic as a fall into Evil; all things work in balance, and to fall any way is just another flavour of tyranny.
As usual, the stereotype for this type of True Neutral is the Druid – a particularly obtuse fellow who deliberately turns on his commanders as soon as they start gaining the upper hand in order to support those he formerly fought against and citing “cosmic balance” for his reasons. A slightly less grimdark version will aid an underdog to the point of stalemate and then withdraw from the conflict entirely, allowing two equal forces to reach a “natural” conclusion of which the universe presumably approves.

To outsiders both types of this True Neutral archetype appear to be Chaotic or even Evil, betraying former allies or otherwise abandoning them to their fate without apparent motivation, but as with the Fettered True Neutral it’s more a matter of internal consistency than outward appearance. Switching sides might look Chaotic, but the truth is that they’re not doing it out of their own amusement or even malice but to answer a calling higher than individual lives, and they’re certainly not doing it randomly. It’s certainly a cold and occasionally callous True Neutral character who can go through with such an act without questioning the method, but sometimes that is the price of commitment to an ideal, no less so than a Paladin who finds it difficult to adhere to his holy vows.

Alternatively, there’s the type of character who will switch sides multiple times, not just allowing the sides of a conflict to fight on equal terms or to prevent an overall victory but to ensure constant and enduring conflict. Such a character will usually be called Evil by outsiders, but again they aren’t seeing the bigger picture – the battle isn’t being encouraged for battle’s sake. By ensuring endless conflict, both sides are too busy fighting each other to get their acts together and to amass enough power to be a threat to the world in general. Ensuring that the strongest antagonists are endlessly occupied with each other, this sort of True Neutral character is doing the moral equivalent of spinning a porcelain dish on her fingertip; so long as everything stays in motion, each side remains in balance.


The Mercenary, aka The Merchant

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/06%20quark.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/06%20quark.jpg.html)
“#34: War is good for business.”
“#35: Peace is good for business.”
~ The Rules of Acquisition; ‘Star Trek: Deep Space 9’

Contrary to popular opinion, True Neutrals do not necessarily avoid conflict, or otherwise restrict themselves to their own highly specific agenda. Instead they may simply have something that they wish to work towards that is not a moral or cosmic ideal; they just want money or prestige, and they aren’t too worried about how they get it. They are not, however, wantonly cruel in their pursuit and will often apply their own limits according to an unspoken internal code; they can be ordered to murder hundreds of people and they will do it with ruthless efficiency, but they won’t especially enjoy the process nor go out of their way to make their victims suffer as an Evil character might.

It’s easy to confuse this sort of character with a Lawful or Chaotic one, or even an Evil one depending on the actions being asked of them, but as before the difference is a matter of intent and the culmination of their actions; they fall into True Neutral “on average”.
The hired soldier who signs a contract and then follows orders to the letter, doing only what he’s told for money and won’t betray his boss without them first displaying an obscene disregard for the contract, is Lawful.
The hired soldier who accepts a contract and actively encourages situations wherein he can find someone to make him a better offer and get him out of it, and habitually tries to find ways to defy or exceed orders for his own gain, is Chaotic.
The True Neutral mercenary, however, is the hired soldier who follows the spirit of the command, following it through but usually to the extent that it suits their own judgement; They absolutely obey the order, but don’t be surprised if they do so in a way that chooses to interpret it in a specific and not necessarily direct manner.
For an example, an order to “clear the village” might be expected to result in a massacre. The True Neutral character is just as likely to organise an evacuation as they are to go in guns blazing, especially if it achieves the desired result for less effort. The chain of command will never know the difference, so why waste time and ammo on women and children if you don’t have to? Alternatively, he might just break out the nuke and “clear” the village; people, buildings, and all. He doesn’t take pleasure or grief either way, or have regard for what his superior officer thought he was going to do; the job got done quickly and without hassle so now I get paid, right?

If they’re approached with a “better offer” to swap sides, they’re likely to give it serious consideration and possibly even tell of it to their current employer to give them a chance to enter their own counter-bid. They’re also quite likely to simply walk away from a contract that they feel no longer serves their interests, compared to the (often explosive, and usually lethal) way in which a Chaotic character will make sure that the contract is burned to ash before they go, and the reluctant, pushed-as-far-as-they-will-go manner of the Lawful.

A sub-species of the mercenary archetype is the merchant; a character whose overriding goal is to make money through whatever means that they can, short of intentionally committing murder for it; after all, it’s never a good idea to kill someone if you can keep making more money off them tomorrow.

They’re not inherently liars, cheats and swindlers, but they’re also not entirely above such things when it suits them; The important thing is that they will lie, cheat and swindle everyone in equal measure. They’ll sell anything to anyone if it’ll make them a decent profit, often the same items to conflicting sides and having the two hold an auction to determine a winner regardless of what use to which they’d put the item in question. When caught selling weapons to a notorious group, they’re likely to be the first to point out that the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is just a matter of perspective.
Remember though that they stop short of actual Evil. They enjoy the act of earning money, rather than specifically relishing the sensation that comes from taking advantage of a vulnerable, desperate customer, and they’re not so blinkered as to sell the One Ring to Sauron without at least alerting an adventuring party to the situation. They’re Neutral, not suicidal - Sometimes, living long enough to spend a little money is better than a quick and lethal profit no matter how ludicrous.
Similarly, there’s usually something where they’ll draw the line and consider an unreasonable sale – weapons and chemicals might be sold freely, but child slaves might not be. They might not even be entirely against slavery, just the use of certain groups and the task they’re being set to – the truly Evil merchant has no such qualms, as close and arbitrary that they might seem to the outsider.


The Unknowable, aka The Alien

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/07%20xenomorph.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/07%20xenomorph.jpg.html)
“You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.“
“You admire it.”
“I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
~ Ash and Lambert; ‘Alien’ (1979)

True Neutral: The unofficial morality for characters whose best description is ultimately “None of the above”.

There’s a variety of ways to interpret such a broad statement, for it includes characters to whom we cannot assign a specific alignment due to their inability to comprehend ethical or moral concerns, as well as those so utterly and bizarrely inhuman that to try and attach human emotions to them is futile.
The former is most often applied to animals, as concepts of Good and Evil generally don’t apply to the natural world because they lack comprehension for laws, morality and ethics. Sharks might hunt and kill human beings, but they’re not evil – just hungry. Characters with this disposition therefore tend to either be non-human, feral, or otherwise trying to imitate a feral lifestyle; Druids again, but also Rangers who have forsaken civilization and some Barbarians who have little or no experience with society’s laws and etiquette but lack the belligerence of their Chaotic kin. The key is their ignorance of laws and morality, rather than a conscious choice to ignore them.

There’s also the possibility that a character is True Neutral simply because they’re a more-or-less good-natured Idiot. They literally don’t know the difference between Good and Evil and wander through life tripping over all sorts of people and problems with equal measure… But usually they’re too dumb to be selfish or intentionally destructive - ie, Neutral Evil - and too incompetent to take orders and follow them through like Lawful Neutral. Sometimes they’re instructed to do Good or Evil things by manipulative outsiders, but the character themselves remain Neutral simply by virtue of not understanding the implications of what they’re doing.

As opposed to a character wherein morality is absent, we can also find True Neutral characters who we give that label simply because we are to them, as sharks are to us; abstract, expansive and evolved beyond recognition.
Such characters might have a morality of a sort, but their motivations are as utterly incomprehensible as their goals; The surest thing that you can usually say about them is that they are probably not actively malicious or revel in the suffering of others, assuming that they even notice or comprehend it. They are often thought of – at least to begin with – Chaotic Evil if only because in their ignorance of us (and our ignorance of them) they are the cause of death and destruction, but it later becomes clear that it was not their specific intent. More a force of nature than a persona, such a creature is one of the very few archetypes which can be consistently portrayed as a True Neutral antagonist without forcing them to divert down an Evil or Chaotic path as the story unfolds.

Is it possible to play as such a creature? Probably not.
Their character is intended to be inscrutable and impossibly alien, but what one would perceive from the outside is a character that does apparently random things without attempting an explanation; one wouldn’t even be able to explain that they have a secret internal morality system as that implies that the character understands the difference between the two, which makes them even slightly relatable. It would likely come across as disruptive or asocial, if not just Chaotic Neutral in everything but name.
It’s certainly possible to take aspects of an Alien True Neutral character and incorporate them into something slightly more human, but it might be difficult to make it notably different to an Unfettered archetype.


The Bystander, aka The Nobody

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/08%20crowd.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/08%20crowd.jpg.html)
“We'll just pass him there / Why should we even care?”
~Black Sabbath; ‘Iron Man’ (1970)

The vast majority of people that you meet on the great path of life are True Neutral because they don’t have anything better to do. It’s not a criticism, only an observation that to achieve one of the extremes of the alignment grid usually takes conviction and determination, or at least some kind of revelatory experience, which the clear majority of the crowd don’t get.

Broadly speaking they’re nice enough, but not particularly driven either way. Most will probably think of themselves as good in that they don’t actively commit Evil acts, but at the same time comparatively few are capable of the self-sacrifice and conviction needed to actually combat the ills of society and become Good. By and large they won’t see a beggar in the street and kick him for sport – heck, they might even drop a few coins into his bowl. At the same time, almost none of them will stop to offer him food or a clean set of clothing unless there’s something in it for themselves.
Similarly, while being broadly law abiding it’s usually as a vague form of self-preservation, in that it’s far more hassle to go around breaking laws and being punished for it than to just obey them half-heartedly.

Even in large numbers, crowds of Bystanders tend to be True Neutral due to social pressure – individuals tend not to act out of line when they’re being watched - until a radical event drives them to an extreme; usually Chaos, exhibited in large scale acts of civil disobedience such as riots, however all crowds can be led by the extreme character of their ruler. A sadistic, evil King tends to create paranoid and fearful subjects, whereas Good Kings inspire generous and cooperative peoples. Left to their own devices though, and most people will mind their own business and get on with their day to day lives without looking to hassle or be hassled by anyone.

Can you play as this sort of True Neutral character? Well yes, but why would you want to? Even more than the Unfettered archetype, the key characteristic of the Bystander is that you don’t want to get involved – the moment that changes, you’re no longer a Bystander, and would there be any fun in being someone who intentionally avoids the plot and the group, not even to pursue your own agenda but to go about a hum-drum life?

Wraith
2018-07-18, 05:32 AM
IV. Motivations

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/09%20drmanhatten.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/09%20drmanhatten.jpg.html)
“Why should I be concerned?”
~ Dr. Manhattan; ‘Watchmen’ (1986)

Despite being an oddball bunch of apathetic onlookers and ineffable primordial beings, True Neutral characters still have the same emotions and desires as any other character. They might vary, be more subdued or change more often, but very few True Neutral characters have absolutely no reason to go anywhere or do anything.

Duty
Even if it’s to be held to a calling that is odd or just plain trivial in the eyes of others, True Neutral characters still understand that their commitment to a cause is important and is not to be shirked. Druids have their sacred groves to protect (which can involve pro-active adventuring to seek out and prevent threats before they get too close) and Monks have their ancient dojos and mystical paths of enlightenment to watch over which periodically need new students and custodians recruited. Both are sworn to a service that removes them from the morality of other people, and neither are typically inclined to sit passively and let trouble come to them.

Whimsy
True Neutral wouldn’t be the same if it couldn’t sometimes just wander off the beaten track and follow whatever has captured its interest for the day. Not all who wander are lost, after all, and sometimes the journey is more fulfilling than the destination.
As previously mentioned, True Neutrals who are likely to change their mind without rhyme or reason differ from Chaotic Neutral by consistency; upon confronting a sign that say “Take the left-hand path”, the Chaotic Neutral can safely be assumed to want to take the right-hand path out of sheer bloody-mindedness, whereas the True Neutral might as well flip a coin for all it matters. Remember also that even a ‘random’ choice might have the appearance of holding to a pattern – the character might obey or defy the sign twenty times in a row before suddenly switching. To a genuinely True Neutral the sign itself is irrelevant, regardless of what it says and what direction they pick.

Compensation
There’s very little that a True Neutral won’t do if you’re paying them enough to do it. They might not particularly enjoy what they’re doing or go out of their way to be cruel while doing it, but they’re content to get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and not create too many moral objections.
This might, of course, mean that they go out looking to get paid before being asked. A True Neutral adventurer is just as interested in kicking down doors, killing monsters and taking their gold as much as the next adventurer; the difference is, they’re not particularly bothered whether the tower they raid belongs to the Necromancer or the White Wizard, so long as there’s a magic staff and a fancy new spell-book in it for them at the end. They’re probably draw the line at brutally torturing the Faerie Princess with her own tiara if she refused to give up the combination to the safe, though.

Loyalty
True Neutral characters have friends – it’s possible that they’d have a lot of them in fact, as they’re not necessarily opposed to alternate lifestyles, or especially interested in going around and judging other people for what they consider ‘moral failings’. So, when your Neutral Good friend bangs on the door and shouts “There’s no time to explain! Grab your sword and follow me!” cryptically through the letterbox, what does it matter what they’re up to? Similarly, your Lawful Evil friend might sit you down in a dark corner of the tavern and ominously informs you that “I got a problem, and I need a favour…”? Well, why wouldn’t you help out a friend in need?

You might also have professional relationships to maintain – the Grand Druid of your grove or the High Abbot of your Temple has an errand for you to run; they’re both committed to the same unorthodox morality as yourself, so furthering their goals is likely to include furthering your own. Hopefully they won’t be too surprised when you decide on a better way to get it done, of course….

If you’re especially lucky, you might even find someone who loves you. As a True Neutral character, you have a much broader variety of potential mates than most alignments, as you’re far less likely to be put off by the excesses of their alternative lifestyle (a description which can apply as much to valiant Paladin as it does bloody-handed Warlords). You also have a much broader range of things that you’re willing to do to attract, impress and protect them, which again is a sliding scale between heroic acts and casual violence.
Who knows? With a sufficiently high Charisma check you may one day even find yourself as the lynchpin in a menage à trois between two other diametrically opposed lovers, bringing the world closer together by bringing them “closer” to True Neutral, as it were….

Inscrutable
There’s worse things to be influenced by, than the alignment of the stars. If you can explain that as your motivation though, then you’ve already missed the point. Probably something to reserve for Big Bad Guys rather than Player Characters, on the whole.

Alternatively, maybe even YOU don’t know what your goal is – all you feel inside is the urge to act and the deep, irresistible conviction that it is leading you to a great purpose. Destiny is calling you and you have to follow; we can worry about whether or not It is Good or Evil once we have found out what It is….

Wraith
2018-07-18, 05:37 AM
VI. Examples of True Neutral Characters

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/11%20shadow%20and%20wednesday.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/11%20shadow%20and%20wednesday.jpg.html)
Wednesday looked at him with amusement and something else—irritation perhaps. Or pride. "Why don't you argue?" asked Wednesday. "Why don't you exclaim that it's all impossible? Why the hell do you just do what I say and take it all so […] calmly?"
"Because you're not paying me to ask questions," said Shadow.
~Mr.Wednesday and Shadow Moon; ‘American Gods’ by Neil Gaiman (2001)

Let’s make it perfectly clear; very few characters start out True Neutral and stay there permanently. True Neutral is often too morally grey to support either a truly heroic or villainous interpretation of a character, leaving far too much room for claims of them being an Anti-Hero or just some kind of fickle lunatic, and if you’re not intentionally writing that sort of morally grey story then it’s hard to accept them as anything else.
In many cases a complex character will pass through a stage of True Neutral wherein they find themselves close to committing genuinely evil acts and associating with those who do, and then either shying away when they see what that leads to or otherwise plunging headlong into darkness. Similarly, many characters start out True Neutral to create a sense of ambiguity which can later be explored and developed as the character is revealed to go one way or the other over time.

As such, consider these examples to be snapshots of True Neutral behaviour, and not necessarily reflective of the entire character over a lifetime.

Batman (DC Comics - Fettered)
Okay, wait a minute – put down your pitchforks and hear me out. Yes, we know that Batman is a hero, in that he is a Good guy with strong principles. What I would like you to consider here is who his methods might outweigh his morals and make him, when all is said and done, too blurred to really fall on either side.
Is he Lawful or Chaotic? Well, he does fight criminals and bring them to justice, and absolutely doesn’t kill… But he does all this as a vigilante, using military-grade weaponry on hopelessly-outclassed civilians who he has no qualms about maiming and inflicting life-changing injuries upon. That might sound like Neutral Good – the right thing no matter the cost – until you realise just how dark some of his methods can be. He has worked alongside supervillains and mass-murderers when it suits him, rarely stooping entirely down to their level but absolutely coming close… Oh, and he’s been indirectly responsible for several murders, directly responsible for attempted murder on multiple occasions, and was the cause of at least one genocide.

You see what I’m getting at? He’s too noble and (usually) consistent to be considered evil, but he performs enough evil and chaotic acts to be considered wholly good; likewise, he disregards the laws as he sees fit, really only adhering to his “No Killing” rule… Until it suits him in a moment of desperation. There’s a very coherent argument that Batman is a good-leaning True Neutral, in that he disregards laws and morality in favour of his own personal code and everything else is ‘on balance’.

Treebeard (Lord of the Rings - Unfettered)
"I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side," quothe Treebeard. That really says it all, doesn’t it? He and the Ents just want to be left alone to their forests, so disinterested in the world of men that he can’t even tell the difference between an orc and a hobbit. It takes a severe and distressing calamity to tip them off the scale and to join the forces of good, and even then they almost immediately go back to Fangorn after the Siege of Isenguard instead of getting involved with the whole ‘Mordor’ thing.

Cernd (Baldur’s Gate 2 - Fettered)
The classic hippy-druid type. His key word is ‘balance’, which he interprets as being one with nature and having little to do with the civilised world unless otherwise forced to. And also says so out loud every 30 seconds, like some kind of verbal tic. Despite his persistent cheerfulness, he’s a great example of how a True Neutral character can be willing to adventure with almost any other alignment in relative peace; Baldur’s Gate 2 has several interactions where characters dislike the group’s good/evil reputation and either storm off in anger or try to kill the protagonist for his treachery. Cernd, meanwhile, doesn’t mind overly much and will happily chat with all of them about the various forest creatures they resemble until they go, so long as you eventually help him complete his plotline.

Snake Plisskin (Escape from New York – Mercenary/Unfettered)
A former soldier, disillusioned with the lies and betrayals from his government after they sent him on ever-bloodier Black Ops missions and then hung him out to dry. He is willing to help people who ask him for it, has no regard for instruction and he is utterly ruthless to those who cross him, but he isn’t a bad guy out gunning for his former commanders even though they might deserve it. Really, Snake now just wants to be left alone to live how he wants in an increasingly totalitarian world while everyone else tears each other to pieces, and when he’s forced back into action he doesn’t even an inch further than he needs to.

Dutch and Benny (Black Lagoon - Mercenary)
Two good examples of True Neutral approaching the same morality as Snake Plisskin, albeit from the opposite direction. Snake was a good guy who was left jaded and cynical by life and now he wants nothing to do with anyone, whereas Benny and Dutch are de facto criminals, smugglers and murderers who are none the less good to their word, honest, amiable and friendly; they just want a decent pay day. The fact that they regularly do good business with organised criminal gangs and cross blades with some truly deviant monsters really only makes them heroes by default rather than inclination.

Galactus (Marvel Comics - Alien)
Older than our universe, the great world-eater has been painted as evil by those whose planets he wishes to consume…. But he’s not evil. He doesn’t kill billions because he enjoys it, but because he is hungry and has no other choice. There’s also significant suggestion that Galactus is a visible component or even manifestation of the universal process of Entropy, and thus despite the deaths he causes he is an integral, albeit alien, necessity in the proper functioning of the universe.

Spawn (Vertigo Comics - Equaliser)
Al Simmons believed himself a Good man, despite being an assassin for the United States Government. Betrayed by his superiors, he was murdered and ultimately struck a deal with the devil in order to return to the world with the power to exact his revenge…. And then things got complicated. Now the Hell-Spawn protects his home in the alley and his former friends from both Demons and Angels alike; both sides in the War want him on their side, but he despises them both for their hypocrisy and would rather stand alone than see either Heaven or Hell emerge victorious.
He is literally powered by Evil, but he still has his line in the sand; innocent people are to be left alone, and the horrific things he does to enforce that message can hardly be considered “Good”.

Godzilla (Kaiju movies – Alien)
Arguably more animal than alien, Godzilla still manages to have a modicum of intelligence that raises him above mere beasts. Early on this was less so – just a big lizard looking for something to eat that managed to stumble upon Toyko along the way. Nowadays he is more often portrayed as heroic, but that’s really only a matter of perspective; while he fights off endless waves of kaiju and ultimately saves the day, it’s not particularly because he’s protecting humans. He’s just chasing other apex predators off of his claimed territory.

Sandor Clegane (Game of Thrones – Mercenary/Fettered)
Possibly another ‘on balance’ example of True Neutral, certainly by the end of season 05 and into 06. He starts out appearing evil, fighting and killing with apparent relish. He is, however, under orders from a decisively Evil King Joffrey – orders that he chooses to ignore when they become too cruel (saving Sansa more than once) and orders that he simply walks away from when they finally reach his limit and they disgust even him. As I said above; True Neutral characters tend to take on the appearance of those that they work for despite their own intentions.
He undoubtedly mellows out as he travels with Arya, revealing a more firmly True Neutral attitude – that everyone does what they have to do in order to get by. He shows wrath and mercy equally, and even in retrospect some of his more heroic acts could be interpreted as self-serving; did he intentionally save the Flower Knight, or was it just another chance to take a swing at his brother?
He’s definitely on a journey towards a dark and murky form of Good as the story continues, but he’s definitely passed through True Neutral on his way – some would even argue that even if his personality lightens up he’s still remaining True Neutral, joining with the Northerners only because it’s the only alternative to being eaten alive by the White Walkers’ army.

John Marsden (Red Dead Redemption - Fettered)
John Marsden is a stone-cold criminal, having murdered his way across the west and robbed everything there is to steal as part of Dutch’s gang. He realises just how close to true evil this has brought him, however, and with his wife and young son he retires to the life of a simple farmer, until his family is kidnapped and he’s forced to get back in the saddle.
He kills, steals, maims, fights and threatens his way across the game, teaming up with other killers, swindlers, revolutionaries and worse and he enables their own vicious schemes as quid pro quo for their aid. He’s also unfailingly kind and honourable to those who offer him genuine aid and, while he’ll look a man in the eye and shoot him square, he’s above the torture and sadism that his former gang-mates revel in.
The truth is, he just wants his family and his quiet life back and he’ll do whatever it takes to get them, way beyond the scope of Neutral Good but too compassionate for Neutral Evil. That’s his ‘code’, if you will; He recognises just how far beyond the morals of Good and Evil he has gone, but he isn’t concerned with them while on his quest.

Wraith
2018-07-18, 05:39 AM
VII. Final Notes

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/TheIllusionist/12%20army%20of%20darkness.jpg (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/TheIllusionist/media/12%20army%20of%20darkness.jpg.html)
“Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the gun.”
~ Ash Williams; ‘Army of Darkness (1993)

I would like to invite you to look back up through this short essay and take note of how often I described how True Neutral can appear to be something else.
Often they’ll follow orders when it suits them, which gets them labelled a Lawful; sometimes they’ll murder and maim without emotion and they get called Evil; usually they’ll change their mind and go off on a complete tangent to their previous actions, which looks like Chaotic; they’ll kill villains and purge monsters, and be thought of as Good.

This is all intentional, and appropriate.

As I mentioned above, it’s often difficult in an enclosed story to have a consistently True Neutral character in the role of either hero or villain. In either role, they should display actions and intentions which do not fit into the one category, instead creating grim Anti-Heroes or cheerfully sympathetic Antagonists. This is fine; you can write a story or play a game like that so long as you acknowledge the criticisms levied against you if you claim to be True Neutral but spend your time finding valid reasons to kill orphans. It’s the reasons which matter, in fact – True Neutral doesn’t shy away from a task that needs to be done, but neither does it engage in needless sadism.

Similarly, don’t be afraid to acknowledge that you don’t have to be True Neutral forever. Look back at the list of character examples I gave above – almost none of them start out or end up True Neutral after their world view has been contradicted and forcibly questioned by circumstance. It will be a much richer and more fulfilling character arc if you don’t force yourself to stay in a pigeon hole which you no longer enjoy or feel is appropriate; it’s perfectly within the scope of True Neutral to be ambivalent about your own perceptions and motivations evolving into something else.

And finally, if nothing else, remember this; True Neutral is not necessarily passive, or cowardly, or too afraid to commit to an opinion. They have a reason to do everything that they do, even if it appears abstract and trivial to other people – use that to your advantage. If they think you flighty and unreliable, then they are the ones in trouble when they cross your path and you find a reason to set your sights on them.

VIII. Acknowledgements

Dedicated to the following Playgrounders:

AvatarVecna, for curating the first Alignments Super-Thread and thus making it so easy to jump on the bandwagon at an opportune place.
Red Fel, as I shamelessly stole the template that he created in his Guide to Lawful Evil (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?448542-Compliance-Will-Be-Rewarded-A-Guide-to-Lawful-Evil).
atemu1234 and Seto, my fellow True Neutral scholars for their input (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?452830-I-Look-After-Me-and-Mine-A-True-Neutral-Handbook-(In-Progress-Bit-Sparse)) and inspiration (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?453304-Pursuit-of-Happiness-a-practical-Guide-to-playing-True-Neutral).

Picture and quotes references:
‘The Mysterious Stranger’; Quoted text by Mark Twain (c.1908).
’The Bats and the Birds’; Original story from Aesop’s Fables, c.600-564 B.C.
’The Bats and Warrior Bird’; Image by Melissa Crook: https://mcrook.ca/ .
’The Neutrals’; As depicted in ‘Futurama’ (s01e15) (1999), by 20th Century Fox.
’The Wee Free Men’; Quoted text by Terry Pratchett (2003).
’Witches’; Image by Josh Kirby (c.2002).
‘Alexander & Diogenes’; Painted by Sebastiano Ricci (1662-1734).
Apocryphal quote attributed to Diogenes the Cynic, c.336A.D.
‘Uncle’; As depicted in ‘Jackie Chan Adventures’ (s01e01) in 2000, by The J.C. Group and Sony Pictures Television.
Xenomorph creature as depicted in ‘Alien’ (1979), by 20th Century Fox; quote attributed to the same.
’Quark’; As depicted by Armin Shimmerman in ‘Star Trek: Deep Space 9’ (1993-1999), by Paramount Domestic Television; Quoted text attributed to the same.
’Crowd’; Stock image lifted from Google Images; original artist unknown.
’Iron Man’; Quoted text by Black Sabbath (1970).
’Watchmen’; Written by Alan Moore (1986-87); quoted text attributed to the same.
’Squall Leonheart’; As depicted in ‘Final Fantasy VIII’ (1999), by Square; quoted text attributed to the same.
’Shadow and Mr.Wednesday’; As depicted in ‘American Gods’ (s01e01)(2017), by Starz Originals.
’American Gods’; Quoted text by Neil Gaiman (2001).
’Ash Williams’; As depicted by Bruce Campbell in ‘Army of Darkness’ (1993); Quoted text attributed to the same.

Segev
2018-07-18, 02:08 PM
I think my biggest problem with the positions this essay takes is with the notion that being neutral can be about being dedicated to a cause that's "above" the other alignments.

Not because "being above good and evil" is an annoying trope (though it is), but because there are few, if any, causes I can think of that wouldn't naturally fall into an alignment.

Neutrality is almost always about moderation. Willingness to do "what's necessary" where Good would balk, but not willing to quite go so far into it as Evil would, and always with an eye towards pulling back out. Able to do it without feeling much guilt, but still requiring that it be truly necessary and not taking any enjoyment in it.

Similar for law/chaos.

The druid example is pretty good, though. Dedicated to emulating nature, both in its life-giving and its "red in tooth and claw" aspects. Wolves are not evil for killing and eating the deer. In this aspect, being willing to engage in war with other sentient races without guilt, but without malice, is a Neutral attitude. But it is hard to keep the "neutral nature" truths when you move into dealing with intelligent Agents. Beings able to know right from wrong. Part of what makes nature neutral is ignorance: it cannot know better.

Batman is a good example of "what's necessary, but not too bad." But he's also an example of being pulled every which direction. Supporting law and goodness through chaotic and sometimes questionable-to-malignant acts. Striving to be a hero while being the monster that evil fears. He's not dedicated to a cause "above" good and law. He's dedicated to their causes. HE just uses non-good and non-lawful means to support them.

noob
2018-07-18, 02:22 PM
Now the question is: true neutral in which kind of alignment framework?
For example how much does intent matters over results or means?
Does any of those three(intent, results and means) matters?

Pleh
2018-07-18, 02:35 PM
My biggest problem being, "if being neutral is doing whatever you want, then exactly how do you need a guide to help you do it?"

Also, this being System Independent as it's in the general Roleplaying area, how does this compare with some systems that distinguish "Neutral" from "Unaligned"?

Wraith
2018-07-19, 05:35 AM
I think my biggest problem with the positions this essay takes is with the notion that being neutral can be about being dedicated to a cause that's "above" the other alignments.

Not because "being above good and evil" is an annoying trope (though it is), but because there are few, if any, causes I can think of that wouldn't naturally fall into an alignment.

Thank you for that - perhaps it's something that I should go back and clarify.

On the one hand, the guide is written more-or-less in character. Some of the other guides did that and I thought it was fun, and as we know everyone thinks that their alignment is the best/most important; that's been deliberately reflected in the language that I used.
On the other hand, you're otherwise absolutely right. The various personal causes used by True Neutral characters are definitely 'alternative' causes rather than superior to the typical Good/Evil/Chaos/Laws axis, as no player character is more or less important than another.

I do, however, disagree that all causes have to be inherently G/E/L/C, though. Like the examples I gave above; while trees certainly are nice and all, a Druid protecting his grove isn't necessarily 'Good' any more than he uses Lawful means to do it, especially if he values the grove higher than the local human town and such.
As above, there's always shades of the other axis that a TN character can lean towards, and they might eventually fall off into a specific niche. TN can be a journey as much as a destination. :smallsmile:


Now the question is: true neutral in which kind of alignment framework? For example how much does intent matters over results or means? Does any of those three (intent, results and means) matters?

Without meaning to be facetious, I think that the "balanced" alignment True Neutral is a deliberate balance between all three, and they can distribute themselves more generously than other alignments.
A Lawful Good character should not intend to do Good, and get Good results, through Evil means; Likewise, a Chaotic Evil character probably shouldn't intend to do Good at all. A Lawful Evil can get away with Good things with Good methods, but is probably only doing it because they can use it as leverage later on, so their intent is questionable.

True Neutral can intend to do evil things with evil methods, but they rarely go "too Evil" all at once; if they do, their alignment slips like any other. The difference, I feel, is that they will do Good and Bad things deliberately, but at the core of their being they're not particularly enjoying it or going out of their way to revel in it which is what prevents them from going 'all the way'.
I know that sounds quite arbitrary, and I wouldn't blame a more studious DM than I to disagree, but it's where I would start the conversation.


My biggest problem being, "if being neutral is doing whatever you want, then exactly how do you need a guide to help you do it?"

Because if "what you want" is "to set fire to the world just to see it burn", you're probably not True Neutral no matter how much you tell other characters that you're disinterested in their opinion of morality :smalltongue:

In seriousness though, what I was aiming for was to try and give people ideas on how to play True Neutral that WASN'T just the whimsical, absent-minded meander that it sometimes gets thought as. In particular, to try and differentiate between the True Neutral "disinterested in other causes" and Chaotic Neutral, which I tend to see as more inherently destructive or at least random in action; True Neutral should have that solid core of reason to it, and have less of a knee-jerk reflex to events.

Or I could be completely wrong, of course. The aim was to start a discussion, and "you shouldn't have bothered" is as valid a comment as any other. :smallsmile:


Also, this being System Independent as it's in the general Roleplaying area, how does this compare with some systems that distinguish "Neutral" from "Unaligned"?

Honestly I hadn't thought of that specifically, but I think I stand by the sentiment that True Neutral and Unaligned are *mostly* interchangeable. In any morality system, Unaligned characters are usually so because they're actively avoiding a cause or because they have no concept of one, which is reflected in what I said above. If you have suggestions otherwise, I would be glad to hear them?

noob
2018-07-19, 05:47 AM
Without meaning to be facetious, I think that the "balanced" alignment True Neutral is a deliberate balance between all three, and they can distribute themselves more generously than other alignments.
A Lawful Good character should not intend to do Good, and get Good results, through Evil means; Likewise, a Chaotic Evil character probably shouldn't intend to do Good at all. A Lawful Evil can get away with Good things with Good methods, but is probably only doing it because they can use it as leverage later on, so their intent is questionable.

True Neutral can intend to do evil things with evil methods, but they rarely go "too Evil" all at once; if they do, their alignment slips like any other. The difference, I feel, is that they will do Good and Bad things deliberately, but at the core of their being they're not particularly enjoying it or going out of their way to revel in it which is what prevents them from going 'all the way'.
I know that sounds quite arbitrary, and I wouldn't blame a more studious DM than I to disagree, but it's where I would start the conversation.
So someone acting for the greater good but not ready to do too much evil things(even if it would have good results in the end) would be quite likely to end up true neutral? (especially if his vision of good does not fits with the standard vision of good)

Pleh
2018-07-19, 06:53 AM
In seriousness though, what I was aiming for was to try and give people ideas on how to play True Neutral that WASN'T just the whimsical, absent-minded meander that it sometimes gets thought as. In particular, to try and differentiate between the True Neutral "disinterested in other causes" and Chaotic Neutral, which I tend to see as more inherently destructive or at least random in action; True Neutral should have that solid core of reason to it, and have less of a knee-jerk reflex to events.

Chaotic Neutral is certainly a bit more aggressive about their whimsical pursuits, oftentimes flying off the rails just because they need to periodically reestablish their ability to be spontaneous.

But this does seem to touch on what is the essential challenge of this course of discussion; we've got three different alignments (and one non alignment) that claim to represent people who act on impulse without discretion.

Neutral, Chaotic, and Evil.

While the "balanced" neutral technically solves the problem by just doing enough good to balance evil and just enough law to balance out the chaos, it just never felt very natural to make any character intentionally diversify their ethical structure for the sake of maintaining ethical neutrality.

But if they DON'T try to intentionally balance themselves, then exactly how are they really different from Chaotic or Evil individuals? Is it really just a matter of passing some threshold of chaos and evil?


Honestly I hadn't thought of that specifically, but I think I stand by the sentiment that True Neutral and Unaligned are *mostly* interchangeable. In any morality system, Unaligned characters are usually so because they're actively avoiding a cause or because they have no concept of one, which is reflected in what I said above.

Well, any system that applies both a True Neutral Alignment and an Unaligned status seems to imply that choosing a Neutral alignment means an Active Pursuit of Neutrality (or perhaps like the case of the Alien, a pursuit of some cause or goal that is inherently perfectly neutral). This suggests that Neutrality itself actually is a cosmic "direction" of sorts.

I suppose the real problem to me seems to be in the foundational assumptions about what Alignment is. Systems like 3.5 D&D suggest that all creatures have some form of alignment on the given spectrum, which implies that every creature in the game possesses thoughts and behaviors that must be described according to alignment. Hence small acts of Good are just as much a part of the Good spectrum as supernatural Good effects, and so on. The Neutral category is meant to handle the problem cases, but problematically conflates fanatical neutrality with apathetic neutrality. These probably shouldn't be categorized together.

Then other systems introduce Unalignment, which suggests that some thoughts and behaviors actually fall outside the alignment system altogether. I think this a useful and valuable distinction, but it does raise the question of where we draw the line between unalignment and neutral alignment.

I feel as though the most useful thing is to set Alignment as an Opt In Only affair, saying that these cosmic forces acting upon the multiverse require some active dedication before you can be considered "aligned" to them. This way, only characters that choose a special devotion to a cause would ever be considered Aligned to anything; the default state of each creature is Unaligned.

Now, this shouldn't stop a DM from applying alignment descriptively. "Your psychotic behavior has corrupted your soul and you now have the Evil Alignment." Nor should this (necessarily) force a character to play differently (as if they fell to the Dark Side). All I'm really saying is that when you start trying to actually define what makes something Aligned Neutral as opposed to Freeform Chaotic, Pragmatic Evil, or Basic Unaligned, you kind of have to really ask what the subject in question is pursuing. If there is a disproprotionate amount of desire for personal satisfaction, it's trending evil. If defying authority, it's trending chaos. If there is a large amount of intentional ethical diversity (still seems insane to me), then trend neutral. If there isn't any particular motivation in any direction, it remains unaligned.

But all this is an example for what makes more sense to me. Lumping all these ideas into the same Neutral band seems to do injustice to the topic.

So I would ask again, "if neutral is just doing what you want, how is that different from being chaotic, evil, or unaligned?" You know, since each of these alternatives can likewise be described in such a manner.

And keep in mind...


if "what you want" is "to set fire to the world just to see it burn", you're probably not True Neutral no matter how much you tell other characters that you're disinterested in their opinion of morality

...a holy deva from the highest ranks of the celestial cosmic goodness might want to see the whole world burn, if its become wholly corrupt and irredeemably evil.

Four character motivational directions (neutral, chaotic, evil, and unaligned) that say, "do what you want." At the end of the day, you can only tell what they are by what they want.

So maybe this thread should examine more closely what it is that Neutral Character tend to want that sets them apart from what Chaotic, Evil, and Unaligned individuals want.

Kaptin Keen
2018-07-19, 09:16 AM
I wouldn't have thought it possible to write so much about any alignment. It's great - don't get me wrong - I'm just slightly baffled by the sheer immensity of it. Like opening a door and finding the universe behind it.

That standard interpretation of TN as being essentially just uninterested - the lazy, uncaring, lacking in conviction of any kind - those I consider to be unaligned. Those who just let the world wash over them without taking a stand or forming an opinion either way, those are the unaligned, doomed not to the pyre or the pit, but to a blank page of history, forgotten by all who ever met them.

So .. no reason to discuss those. Among other things, they are boring NPC's, and thus ... do not appear.

That leaves us with all those who somehow feel strongly about neutrality. I consider it TN to have an attitude of you do what you want, I'll do what I want .. and I'll form an opinion about what you're doing if and only if it somehow intersects with what I'm doing. Without assigning any sort of value to it, this is pretty much how I see China. Aggressively neutral, insisting that no one interferes with me, and refusing to interfere with others.

Another version of TN would be the defensive neutrality. Basically by not chosing any sides, I also make no enemies - I can be moderately friendly with everyone, in a sort of non-committal way, but since I don't pick sides, no one is going to drag me into their fights. Say, Switzerland or Norway. Again, no value assigned, just an example of how it could look in real life.

I like to think of these as respectively how you act if you feel you're in a position of strength, and if you're in a .. vulnerable position.

A third position is the 'grey druid' one - how druids almost always are in my games: Survival of the fittest, with a bent towards keeping civilization in check. As in what civilization has to make it strong is merely organisation - if I help nature become organised, we'll just see who's stronger. And since druids are natural, clearly it's also natural for them to organize nature.

You can strive for most things and remain neutral. Striving for genocide or something similarly awful pretty much makes you evil, but otherwise, money or power or whatever is not inherently good or evil.

How you strive is what makes you good or evil. If you don't really care if it's legal or not, so long as you get away with it, you're still neutral. If it doesn't really matter to you if you do ill or well for others, you remain neutral.

One thing that you can't really do and still be neutral is to be very extreme. I think neutral characters shrug a lot, going that's lamentable, but nothing I can do anything about or well, good for you, then.

noob
2018-07-19, 11:57 AM
So the problem that I see is that you clearly see the defender of balance as doing a good thing since you say that there is two possible outcomes at a moment:
1:one side win
2:none of the sides win and everything goes fine.
And that when one side win then bad stuff happens and the winning side is tyrannical.
Therefore with that logic the one working for balance is in fact working for getting the best outcome possible.
So unless the person defending balance is wrong on the idea that if a side wins bad stuff happens then that person is working for getting the best result and therefore his end is good.
So defenders of balance needs to be wrong on the fact breaking balance is bad or else they would be good instead of true neutral.
Or they need to defend balance without thinking about the outcomes of breaking it: defending balance as if it was a purpose on itself and not for avoiding bad stuff.
Too bad but you wrote the defender of balance as a believable person and if that believable person is right then that person is good.

Beleriphon
2018-07-19, 03:50 PM
Batman is a good example of "what's necessary, but not too bad." But he's also an example of being pulled every which direction. Supporting law and goodness through chaotic and sometimes questionable-to-malignant acts. Striving to be a hero while being the monster that evil fears. He's not dedicated to a cause "above" good and law. He's dedicated to their causes. HE just uses non-good and non-lawful means to support them.

Batman also falls into a comic book trope: punching things harder is a solution to all of life's problems. Superman punches things hardest as a primary solution to life's problems.

The current run of Detective Comics and Batman (up to about #50, so this month's issue) even has Batman identifying that being Batman is actually kind of a laughable thing to be doing.

I'd also argue Batman isn't really neutral as such, he beats people up sure, but its not like its any worse than what we see a Lawful Good Paladin do in D&D what with the murder of sapient creatures. Of course with a character with 70 years of unbroken published stories its really, really hard to pin down any real traits about Batman without coming up with an equal number of counter examples.

NichG
2018-07-19, 10:07 PM
So the problem that I see is that you clearly see the defender of balance as doing a good thing since you say that there is two possible outcomes at a moment:
1:one side win
2:none of the sides win and everything goes fine.
And that when one side win then bad stuff happens and the winning side is tyrannical.
Therefore with that logic the one working for balance is in fact working for getting the best outcome possible.
So unless the person defending balance is wrong on the idea that if a side wins bad stuff happens then that person is working for getting the best result and therefore his end is good.
So defenders of balance needs to be wrong on the fact breaking balance is bad or else they would be good instead of true neutral.
Or they need to defend balance without thinking about the outcomes of breaking it: defending balance as if it was a purpose on itself and not for avoiding bad stuff.
Too bad but you wrote the defender of balance as a believable person and if that believable person is right then that person is good.

This is not a problem if Good != 'best outcome possible', which is kind of the point. What the defender of balance is saying is that they strongly believe (and can be correct about) a victory of Good over all actually creating a place that, while being Good in the alignment sense, is actually a pretty bad outcome for the world, people in general, or a specific subset of people which the defender of balance identifies with.

For example, a Lawful Good victory (Celestia-style) might look like someone destroying the very ability for sinful thought or action to exist anywhere in the multiverse - literally ripping that potential out of the mortal subconscious. At the same time (a TN character) might conclude that this is a bad thing on a number of different bases that are - at heart - simply not about Good and Evil. They could be right about this, but be valuing things differently than the Lawful Good extremists. Since they disagree with respect to values, they disagree as to which outcome is the 'best outcome possible', meaning that the TN person pursuing what they see as the 'best outcome possible' is not in agreement with Good's 'best outcome possible'.

- For example, they might observe that without having to deal with some degree of misbehavior, societies and cultures become more brittle, and should a Far Realms incursion happen that isn't hobbled by the absence-of-sin treatment, this perfect and good society would fall to it much more easily than otherwise. They value the long term stability of the system, while the LG extremists value the purity and perfection of each moment. Neither is wrong for valuing what they do, but they're different.

- They might believe that the full range and form of mortal experience is an essential part of being a living, thinking entity, and that burning away large swaths of it for any externally driven ideal (be it Good or Evil or Law or Chaos) is simply a less optimal result than buckling down and dealing with the consequences of a multiverse with a diverse set of behaviors and beliefs. LG would say 'well, we don't place any value on those aspects of mortal existence, they're strictly bad' whereas TN could say 'they may be harmful, but they also make life more interesting, and that isn't worth nothing'. Both are right, within their own values, but their values are different.

A Chaotic Good victory might similarly be something where everyone becomes an immortal free spirit (Ysgard-style), unable to truly harm each-other but able to interact as they please with others so long as all participants will it - a transformation of the rules of interaction in the multiverse as to make it impossible for Evil to flourish or take root as there is no ability for any individual to hold true power over another. And yet, while that outcome may satisfy the condition of being an extreme of Chaotic Good, a TN character might say 'well wait a minute, look at all the stuff we're losing to pay for that benefit - we can't really have cities anymore, or collective endeavors, or for that matter any kind of real challenges; that's going to make personal growth pretty hard too'. The CG exemplar might say 'you can't weigh those things against the suffering and oppression of others' while the TN character would respond 'everything has a weight and there's a limit to how much I'm willing to sacrifice to prevent that suffering and oppression - find another way'. Neither is wrong, they just value things differently - their 'best outcomes' are not the same.

A Neutral Good victory might look something like Elysium, with every thinking being in the multiverse frozen into a permanent state of enforced, transcendent bliss. For some, that'd be an ideal outcome, but similar objections could apply among those who are interested in things that, by their nature, ultimately would require paying some price in suffering to achieve them and therefore would now be impossible.

Good as a philosophy can be nebulous and inclusive, but Good (or any other alignment) as an 'outcome' means more than just the philosophy, it means committing to a specific implementation of that philosophy into the state of the world. In doing so, particularly in doing so with regards to an extremist version of it that brooks no compromise, there's inevitably going to be some kind of trade-off - something gets sacrificed in order to push so hard for the boundary of the possible. A TN character could simply be someone who refuses to agree that some things in the world should be seen as so totally without value that it's okay to sacrifice them on the altar of the alignment ideals.

Kader
2018-07-19, 10:51 PM
So the problem that I see is that you clearly see the defender of balance as doing a good thing since you say that there is two possible outcomes at a moment:
1:one side win
2:none of the sides win and everything goes fine.
And that when one side win then bad stuff happens and the winning side is tyrannical.
Therefore with that logic the one working for balance is in fact working for getting the best outcome possible.
So unless the person defending balance is wrong on the idea that if a side wins bad stuff happens then that person is working for getting the best result and therefore his end is good.
So defenders of balance needs to be wrong on the fact breaking balance is bad or else they would be good instead of true neutral.
Or they need to defend balance without thinking about the outcomes of breaking it: defending balance as if it was a purpose on itself and not for avoiding bad stuff.
Too bad but you wrote the defender of balance as a believable person and if that believable person is right then that person is good.

Yeah... imagining Good as reverse-Evil that truly has to be restrained by Neutral for the greater, er, good... (see the problem?) sort of involves Neutral stealing Good's lunch, the problem being somewhat that Neutral ends up with Good's lunch but even more IMO that Good ends up without its lunch - not really coming off as Good. I don't care for this one bit.

The alternative resolution is that the Equalizer is, objectively, ridiculously wrong, which doesn't trash the alignment system but does trash the Equalizer archetype.

I know there are plenty of people who do care for the neutral-is-good resolution, so I won't post any more about it (and however much I dislike it, given how many people like it, it does belong in the thread), but I feel compelled to give my 2c just the once.

------

On other topics, you need an archetype for a basically decent but not strongly moral person who isn't a milquetoast nothing in every other aspect of their life as well (i.e., not what you have as "The Nobody"). What about the person who has genuine compunctions against hurting people but generally follows (important, ambitious) goals of their own rather than setting them aside to help others?

"Look, I really do hope you find someone else to fight off the bandits, but I'm hot on the trail of the Lost City of Shulme-Silule, and if I stop to help you I'll lose my lead!"

This isn't any variety of your merc/merchant archetype (not the kind of person who's just as likely to nuke a village as peacefully evacuate it, or even at all likely to choose to interpret "clear," as "nuke," which, by the way, I'm not sure that's quite the right balance for N). You don't present that archetype as a generally decent person who just mostly avoids making big personal sacrifices to his sense of goodness; he's someone who isn't aiming at good at all but is quite happily aiming at neutral (or rather lower, village-nuker).

Basically, you need to cover the person who is this:


Such a character probably thinks of good as better than evil—after all, she would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, she’s not personally committed to upholding good.

but who isn't The Nobody because this isn't true:


Can you play as this sort of True Neutral character? Well yes, but why would you want to?

(After all, turning down the fight-the-bandits adventure in favor of the lost-city adventure might lead to great achievements IC and fun OOC).

noob
2018-07-20, 06:46 AM
This is not a problem if Good != 'best outcome possible', which is kind of the point. What the defender of balance is saying is that they strongly believe (and can be correct about) a victory of Good over all actually creating a place that, while being Good in the alignment sense, is actually a pretty bad outcome for the world, people in general, or a specific subset of people which the defender of balance identifies with.

For example, a Lawful Good victory (Celestia-style) might look like someone destroying the very ability for sinful thought or action to exist anywhere in the multiverse - literally ripping that potential out of the mortal subconscious. At the same time (a TN character) might conclude that this is a bad thing on a number of different bases that are - at heart - simply not about Good and Evil. They could be right about this, but be valuing things differently than the Lawful Good extremists. Since they disagree with respect to values, they disagree as to which outcome is the 'best outcome possible', meaning that the TN person pursuing what they see as the 'best outcome possible' is not in agreement with Good's 'best outcome possible'.

- For example, they might observe that without having to deal with some degree of misbehavior, societies and cultures become more brittle, and should a Far Realms incursion happen that isn't hobbled by the absence-of-sin treatment, this perfect and good society would fall to it much more easily than otherwise. They value the long term stability of the system, while the LG extremists value the purity and perfection of each moment. Neither is wrong for valuing what they do, but they're different.

- They might believe that the full range and form of mortal experience is an essential part of being a living, thinking entity, and that burning away large swaths of it for any externally driven ideal (be it Good or Evil or Law or Chaos) is simply a less optimal result than buckling down and dealing with the consequences of a multiverse with a diverse set of behaviors and beliefs. LG would say 'well, we don't place any value on those aspects of mortal existence, they're strictly bad' whereas TN could say 'they may be harmful, but they also make life more interesting, and that isn't worth nothing'. Both are right, within their own values, but their values are different.

A Chaotic Good victory might similarly be something where everyone becomes an immortal free spirit (Ysgard-style), unable to truly harm each-other but able to interact as they please with others so long as all participants will it - a transformation of the rules of interaction in the multiverse as to make it impossible for Evil to flourish or take root as there is no ability for any individual to hold true power over another. And yet, while that outcome may satisfy the condition of being an extreme of Chaotic Good, a TN character might say 'well wait a minute, look at all the stuff we're losing to pay for that benefit - we can't really have cities anymore, or collective endeavors, or for that matter any kind of real challenges; that's going to make personal growth pretty hard too'. The CG exemplar might say 'you can't weigh those things against the suffering and oppression of others' while the TN character would respond 'everything has a weight and there's a limit to how much I'm willing to sacrifice to prevent that suffering and oppression - find another way'. Neither is wrong, they just value things differently - their 'best outcomes' are not the same.

A Neutral Good victory might look something like Elysium, with every thinking being in the multiverse frozen into a permanent state of enforced, transcendent bliss. For some, that'd be an ideal outcome, but similar objections could apply among those who are interested in things that, by their nature, ultimately would require paying some price in suffering to achieve them and therefore would now be impossible.

Good as a philosophy can be nebulous and inclusive, but Good (or any other alignment) as an 'outcome' means more than just the philosophy, it means committing to a specific implementation of that philosophy into the state of the world. In doing so, particularly in doing so with regards to an extremist version of it that brooks no compromise, there's inevitably going to be some kind of trade-off - something gets sacrificed in order to push so hard for the boundary of the possible. A TN character could simply be someone who refuses to agree that some things in the world should be seen as so totally without value that it's okay to sacrifice them on the altar of the alignment ideals.

You forget to factor willingness in good.
Many visions of good include "not doing things to people who does not want those things to happen to them"
In such visions of good any of those three ends would be impossible as long as there is a single person not wanting one of those ends since those ends needs everybody to be willing or else the force of good linked to that end would think "no we can not do that to everybody: someone does not wants that to happen to him" and at least exclude that person from that.

NichG
2018-07-20, 09:35 AM
You forget to factor willingness in good.
Many visions of good include "not doing things to people who does not want those things to happen to them"
In such visions of good any of those three ends would be impossible as long as there is a single person not wanting one of those ends since those ends needs everybody to be willing or else the force of good linked to that end would think "no we can not do that to everybody: someone does not wants that to happen to him" and at least exclude that person from that.

Willingness isn't always a factor in D&D and Pathfinder variants of Good (more so Chaos, though not quite). For one thing, Good pretty freely fights and kills manifestations of Evil that cross a certain minimum level of active threat without sitting down and saying 'do you consent for me to destroy your plans and usher you into death?'. What Good does is to justify its violation of willingness by identifying actions - sins - which, when taken to sufficient extremes, absolve others to use force to stop them. It'd be consistent for a cosmic manifestation of Lawful Good to plan to destroy sin (and only sin) itself as a cosmic concept, thereby precisely removing those parts of all entities in the multiverse for which the LG creed holds it justified to unleash the use of force, while leaving everything else about them untouched and unharmed - a much greater Good than being forced to imprison or kill all of those people who were tempted into paths of great evil.

A much more sinister version of Good is the one that says 'willingness can be compelled' - which is basically the logic behind priests of the Goodly gods trying to perform proselytization and conversion. In fact, any kind of pushy intervention sits on that spectrum, and since its a spectrum its something where trade-offs can exist. A (Chaotic) Good exemplar may place willingness and even self-discovery fairly high, exhorting priests to only preach to those who come to seek them. But a Lawful Good exemplar may instead decide that being exceptionally epically skillfully persuasive isn't quite the same as actually bypassing a convert's consent, and could justify what amounts to something that seems, from the point of view of the external observer, forced conversions. A Solar (Diplomacy +34) appearing before a village and sternly exhorting them to reject Evil might as well be casting Dominate Person when it comes to the predictable outcome, but they're doing it in ways that Good encourages (using awe rather than terror or dominance, carrot rather than stick, etc).

I read the Planescape Elysium as a form of this 'sort of sinister' Good. On the face of it, it's a plane where the dead can rest. But it does this via a plane-wide gradually imposed state of bliss, which is actually quite dangerous to anyone who ever intends to leave since after a period of time it's possible to become irreversibly addicted to the effect. The souls of the dead who go there never get a chance to say 'no' to that treatment.

Keltest
2018-07-20, 10:08 AM
My take on the whole "balance between good and evil" thing isn't that too much Good is dangerous and unstable the way too much Evil is, but rather that too much Good can lead to stagnation and suffocation. Like having a really thick quilt thrown over you; it might be comfortable, but its also weighing you down and limiting you. Take altruism too far and you have people all working for each other's benefit to the detriment of themselves. And a society can function like that, but its kind of like going a low speed in a high gear. Society wont collapse, at least not immediately, but it doesn't work smoothly and you have people inadvertently doing dumb things out of a desire to help.

Segev
2018-07-20, 10:27 AM
I've never liked "cosmic balance is required" interpretations of the Great Wheel. Cosmic balance is. It's not "good" for the multiverse, it's just how the multiverse is. Good is what's good for the multiverse. Evil is bad. Neutral is indifferent. Order organizes. Chaos creates and changes. Neutrality isn't "better" except by its own lights. Balance may be desirable from a Neutral person's perspective, but he's not somehow fundamentally right.

There should never be a situation where players, out to be heroes, need to side against Good "for the greater good of all existence" or somesuch. That's not creating a moral dilemma; that's undermining what "Good" is, and is where the "nah, they don't actually mean 'good' and 'evil' so much as they're team jerseys" arguments come from.

At absolute worst, you might have a misguided Good plot to defeat Evil by allying with something those duped Good guys really shouldn't have...but then they're not actually being Good. They're just being fooled into not realizing how they're actually serving Evil.

If you want moral dilemmas allowing players to side against Good outsiders, come up with moral conflicts where "what is the Good choice?" is going to vary based on what you think is more important. Colored, perhaps, by Law/Chaos, but also just plain a hard decision.

It undermines the objective morality system of the Great Wheel to try to come up with a "deeper" truth that somehow 'proves' that Evil is sometimes good and Good is sometimes bad.

NichG
2018-07-20, 10:50 AM
I've never liked "cosmic balance is required" interpretations of the Great Wheel. Cosmic balance is. It's not "good" for the multiverse, it's just how the multiverse is. Good is what's good for the multiverse. Evil is bad. Neutral is indifferent. Order organizes. Chaos creates and changes. Neutrality isn't "better" except by its own lights. Balance may be desirable from a Neutral person's perspective, but he's not somehow fundamentally right.

There should never be a situation where players, out to be heroes, need to side against Good "for the greater good of all existence" or somesuch. That's not creating a moral dilemma; that's undermining what "Good" is, and is where the "nah, they don't actually mean 'good' and 'evil' so much as they're team jerseys" arguments come from.

At absolute worst, you might have a misguided Good plot to defeat Evil by allying with something those duped Good guys really shouldn't have...but then they're not actually being Good. They're just being fooled into not realizing how they're actually serving Evil.

If you want moral dilemmas allowing players to side against Good outsiders, come up with moral conflicts where "what is the Good choice?" is going to vary based on what you think is more important. Colored, perhaps, by Law/Chaos, but also just plain a hard decision.

It undermines the objective morality system of the Great Wheel to try to come up with a "deeper" truth that somehow 'proves' that Evil is sometimes good and Good is sometimes bad.

One point of playing True Neutral though is to have a character who, at their core, rejects the moral argument as the central driver of their choices. That is to say, a party of TNs might oppose Good not 'for the greater good of all existence', but rather simply because 'we don't like the world that Good exemplars are currently trying to create'. To them, it's not about them being 'right' or 'wrong' in a cosmic sense, but rather that by not being strongly aligned with the cosmic ideals they have the option of placing other motivations above those considerations. And that view may hold for not just them, but a group of likeminded people - a culture, a set of fellow members of the same philosophy or interest, etc.

If I were to sum it up in a viewpoint, it would be to say that the 'objective morality system of the Great Wheel' consists of ideals which serve some aspect of the arrangement of the cosmos, but moreso than any other alignment, TN is best able to represent the idea that mortals, themselves, are not in fact exemplars of objective cosmic alignment, but are rather individual, nuanced, and complex - and that regardless of the configuration of cosmic alignments, to mortals, it's those nuanced complexities that can matter most.

It might be objectively better for the multiverse if everyone were transformed into archons, but that doesn't make it inherently unreasonable for someone to say 'I don't want the world to be like that, so I will act to resist that outcome', nor does it immediately make their motivations described better as Evil.

Segev
2018-07-20, 11:08 AM
One point of playing True Neutral though is to have a character who, at their core, rejects the moral argument as the central driver of their choices. That is to say, a party of TNs might oppose Good not 'for the greater good of all existence', but rather simply because 'we don't like the world that Good exemplars are currently trying to create'. To them, it's not about them being 'right' or 'wrong' in a cosmic sense, but rather that by not being strongly aligned with the cosmic ideals they have the option of placing other motivations above those considerations. And that view may hold for not just them, but a group of likeminded people - a culture, a set of fellow members of the same philosophy or interest, etc.

If I were to sum it up in a viewpoint, it would be to say that the 'objective morality system of the Great Wheel' consists of ideals which serve some aspect of the arrangement of the cosmos, but moreso than any other alignment, TN is best able to represent the idea that mortals, themselves, are not in fact exemplars of objective cosmic alignment, but are rather individual, nuanced, and complex - and that regardless of the configuration of cosmic alignments, to mortals, it's those nuanced complexities that can matter most.

It might be objectively better for the multiverse if everyone were transformed into archons, but that doesn't make it inherently unreasonable for someone to say 'I don't want the world to be like that, so I will act to resist that outcome', nor does it immediately make their motivations described better as Evil.

Indeed. People of whatever alignment should, in theory, be supporting their alignment because their alignment ... aligns... with what they want. Selfish and cruel people want the world to be a more wicked and evil place because they can do more selfishly cruel things. People who aren't in for that "altruism" stuff, but aren't out to hurt anybody, are likely not going to want to support the Good guys trying to spread an ideal where aiding others is socially expected. Although that's more LG than NG, so...

In truth, I think a lot of Neutral people would prefer a world as constructed by the Good than by other Neutrals or (especially) Evil folks. Unlike the Evil folks, the Neutral people will see little issue with the required restraint from one's darker impulses. And they'll enjoy a world where people aren't out to hurt them. That said, Neutral people might have their own vices that they feel they need to hide from Good rulers, whereas they'd be acceptable peccadillos to other Neutral people. A little mean-spiritedness here, a little greed there, doing "acceptable" amounts of harm to others for sufficient personal gain.

Beleriphon
2018-07-20, 12:57 PM
I like neutral, I the sense of actively seeking out neutrality is that the creature/character doesn't necessarily see any extreme as positive. While the Lawful Good paladin does help people their methods are to extreme and too restrictive, while a Chaotic Evil is awful because they wantonly take what they want without care. This is actually the view that the Greyhawk wizard Mordenkanien takes, he actively seeks to remain neutral and encourage the world towards neutrality or balance between all forces.

NichG
2018-07-20, 02:20 PM
Indeed. People of whatever alignment should, in theory, be supporting their alignment because their alignment ... aligns... with what they want. Selfish and cruel people want the world to be a more wicked and evil place because they can do more selfishly cruel things. People who aren't in for that "altruism" stuff, but aren't out to hurt anybody, are likely not going to want to support the Good guys trying to spread an ideal where aiding others is socially expected. Although that's more LG than NG, so...

In truth, I think a lot of Neutral people would prefer a world as constructed by the Good than by other Neutrals or (especially) Evil folks. Unlike the Evil folks, the Neutral people will see little issue with the required restraint from one's darker impulses. And they'll enjoy a world where people aren't out to hurt them. That said, Neutral people might have their own vices that they feel they need to hide from Good rulers, whereas they'd be acceptable peccadillos to other Neutral people. A little mean-spiritedness here, a little greed there, doing "acceptable" amounts of harm to others for sufficient personal gain.

Vices is one thing, but I think priorities is the place where there will be a much stronger (and more interesting) conflict between the motives of Neutral and Good. If society as a whole has a limited amount of resources, I could easily see Neutral people whose primary interests are ideals such as progress, discovery, artistic expression, etc say 'hey, you don't have to earmark every single resource towards elevating the poor and sick and hungry and uneducated and mentally disturbed and discontent - those people will always exist, and every problem you solve just makes way for the next. You should just dedicate enough resources to keep the serious cases under control and give everyone a fair chance, and put the rest towards grand projects.'

A TN 'progress is the only true reason for being' character may well enter into significant conflict with Good agents in such a case if they see some project they see as important getting stonewalled or openly decided against. A TN 'our history is valuable and helps us know who we are and how we got here' type might balk at the 'for public safety' destruction of religious materials of Evil deities or records containing true names of devils, etc. I doubt characters like that would agree that the point of conflict with Good has anything to do with darker impulses or vices they have, but would instead say that the things that Good is telling them they should care about just aren't the things they care about.

I think the connection between TN and the whole balance schtick is that these sorts of things don't actually become sticking points in a mildly aligned society, but once you push things towards an all-in mentality there's much less room to be different. A society that dedicates some resources towards social welfare and other resources towards art and other resources towards progress and so on is one in which a TN character with some particular interest can find enough flexibility to make compromises and achieve what they want. Similarly, even a mildly Evil society doesn't really prevent such things - the arguments or maneuvers they need to do in order to obtain the agency to pursue their interests shift a bit, but most things remain in the realm of the possible. But the extreme ones tend to shut down options - you might be able to pursue a variety of artistic endeavors in a somewhat Evil society by finding a way to stroke the ego of a patron, but a society that has gone full Baatorian slave hierarchy and is throwing all of its resources into a planet-wide conquest is going to provide much less room to explore such things. You can pursue dangerous !!science!! in a society that is mildly concerned about people's welfare with perhaps some permits or insurance, but in a society that places absolute safety, care, and wellbeing over all - even that of individuals who try to ask not to be protected - you might be prevented from even risking your own life for something which you'd consider worth the risk. So when things start to look like they're tilting in those directions, TN people may get nervous and may pick what seem like counterintuitive sides in a conflict to support.

Beleriphon
2018-07-20, 09:08 PM
Vices is one thing, but I think priorities is the place where there will be a much stronger (and more interesting) conflict between the motives of Neutral and Good. If society as a whole has a limited amount of resources, I could easily see Neutral people whose primary interests are ideals such as progress, discovery, artistic expression, etc say 'hey, you don't have to earmark every single resource towards elevating the poor and sick and hungry and uneducated and mentally disturbed and discontent - those people will always exist, and every problem you solve just makes way for the next. You should just dedicate enough resources to keep the serious cases under control and give everyone a fair chance, and put the rest towards grand projects.'

A TN 'progress is the only true reason for being' character may well enter into significant conflict with Good agents in such a case if they see some project they see as important getting stonewalled or openly decided against. A TN 'our history is valuable and helps us know who we are and how we got here' type might balk at the 'for public safety' destruction of religious materials of Evil deities or records containing true names of devils, etc. I doubt characters like that would agree that the point of conflict with Good has anything to do with darker impulses or vices they have, but would instead say that the things that Good is telling them they should care about just aren't the things they care about.

I think that kind of the normal true neutral route. Its not balance as an ideal. The balance as an ideal means that you keep things in the status quo, or work to move things towards a balanced result. I think it comes from standpoint that good and evil are inevitable, but at the same time neither can ever truly win. This is either because for good to win it must become evil, and this would be terrible, or because evil is generally terrible so we don't want it to win.

Wraith
2018-07-23, 04:35 AM
And keep in mind...

...a holy deva from the highest ranks of the celestial cosmic goodness might want to see the whole world burn, if its become wholly corrupt and irredeemably evil.

While I would not want to pick you out just to refute every possible combination of events and try to explain "no that's neutral!" or anything, in this case I'd suggest that the Deva is not burning the world to see it burn - they're doing it to actively fight Evil.

Does that make them Good? A Paladin who turned on his Evil-O-Vision and was inclined to punch everything that glowed red might say so; the innocents caught in the crossfire, less so. Does that make them Neutral? Maybe, if Evil currently has a significant advantage and owns two worlds, and burning the world will put them back on an even footing with the one that Good has.


So maybe this thread should examine more closely what it is that Neutral Character tend to want that sets them apart from what Chaotic, Evil, and Unaligned individuals want.

Interesting idea. Personally I would suggest something thus:

Chaotic - Inherently destructive, but not all destruction has to be 'bad'. Toppling a government is Chaotic, but it's still Good if the government in question is tyrannical. The Chaotic actively seek out situations to defy Law and express themselves for a variety of reasons, but the act usually isn't focused on the victim, rather the rebellion that it represents. The phrase "nothing personal" might get employed a lot.

Evil - Inherently selfish. They do what they want, specifically at the expense of others; they can do it 'nicely' (Lawful Evil) or they can smash and grab (Chaotic Evil) but cooperation is a one-way street.
As opposed to Neutral, who might appear selfish but are internally consistent to a specific scheme or cause that is not actively (key word) looking to harm others.

Unaligned - Indifferent, either through choice or (in)ability to determine.

Not comprehensive, but certainly how I'd start such a definition.


I wouldn't have thought it possible to write so much about any alignment. It's great - don't get me wrong - I'm just slightly baffled by the sheer immensity of it.

I'm glad that you think so. Apologies if it came across as long-winded, I shall endeavor to add a TL;DR if I do another one. :smalltongue:


And since druids are natural, clearly it's also natural for them to organize nature.

An interesting viewpoint, slightly different to my own. I was hopefully trying to convey the view that nature is not necessarily 'organised' but rather it's usually a form of 'status quo' - it's not 'made' that way, it just is. It only thrives in the absence of outside interference and influence... Which is also reminiscent of how a True Neutral character can be perceived to sway, depending on who they interact with?


Too bad but you wrote the defender of balance as a believable person and if that believable person is right then that person is good.

Is that not true of any morality system or alignment, though? I appreciate also that all of the alignments often have their own dedicated afterlife to reward their followers, so it gets weird and complicate when ALL of them are 'right' at the same time. Not exclusively a D&D thing, but that's probably the best example without going into real-world religious discussion.


I'd also argue Batman isn't really neutral as such, he beats people up sure, but its not like its any worse than what we see a Lawful Good Paladin do in D&D what with the murder of sapient creatures. Of course with a character with 70 years of unbroken published stories its really, really hard to pin down any real traits about Batman without coming up with an equal number of counter examples.

I'm honestly of the opinion that Batman could probably represent all of the alignments in some way, except perhaps Chaotic Evil. There's enough events and contradictions even in just the modern films and books to support him at least going through phases of each, depending on the writer and circumstance - that's why I suggested him only as a 'snap-shot' example rather than a solid one. :smalltongue:


This is not a problem if Good != 'best outcome possible', which is kind of the point. What the defender of balance is saying is that they strongly believe (and can be correct about) a victory of Good over all actually creating a place that, while being Good in the alignment sense, is actually a pretty bad outcome for the world, people in general, or a specific subset of people which the defender of balance identifies with.

While a lot of my inspiration for this essay came form D&D morality, I did also consider a few others and the one that stands out best for his would be the Magic the Gathering universe.

In Magic, there are essentially 6 alignments who represent different traits; Red, Black, White, Blue, Green and Colourless - nominally, White is the 'Lawful Good' colour which promotes cooperation, faith, duty, loyalty and all the similar virtues.
How Magic chooses to interpret it, however, is that all of the colours are inherently invasive and to have too much of ANY of them is a bad thing. A White-aligned character is generally a reliable and 'good' person, but a White-dominant society slowly becomes more and more totalitarian and oppressive; faith becomes zealotry, loyalty becomes fanaticism, cooperation becomes the brutal suppression of individuality, and so on.

In that regard, 'balance' - either by less individual dedication to a morality or by 'splashing' into other colours to dilute the dominant one's effect - is crucial the survival of a Plane/country, because too much of any one leads to excess and radicalism. That's where True Neutral comes into play.


The alternative resolution is that the Equalizer is, objectively, ridiculously wrong, which doesn't trash the alignment system but does trash the Equalizer archetype.

'Trash' isn't the word I would have chosen - depending on the setting in which you're playing, a True Neutral character who is WRONG about their alignment is a perfectly acceptable character to play. A tragic one, perhaps, and hopefully one that might one day realise their error and change their outlook - or, perhaps more interestingly, bring about a change in the world to make themselves right....

No alignment would be 100% correct, every time, all the time. As I said above, True Neutral can often be a pit-stop between other, more opinionated alignments... But who is to say that such a move has to be the correct one?


"Look, I really do hope you find someone else to fight off the bandits, but I'm hot on the trail of the Lost City of Shulme-Silule, and if I stop to help you I'll lose my lead!"

There's a little bit under the Fettered/Unfettered headings about this, specifically about explorers and scientists - that character isn't denying that fighting of the bandits is important, but just that following their lead is MORE important.
That's their focus, their cause, their Fetter; other people might think them selfish, deluded or irrational, but on the inside they know that what they're doing is the better course of action for the greater good.

Of course they could be wrong - It'd be a poor story if everyone was always right about everything - or they could just be Chaotic. I make no claim that either is better or worse than the other, so long as your character can justify it to themselves then so be it. :smallsmile:

noob
2018-07-23, 08:50 AM
Sorry but seeing yourself as good and doing stuff which would be considered good by most people(avoiding really bad things and tyrannies would be considered as good by most humans on earth(not all of them)) should count as good since else it is as much nonsensical as saying "oh okay most humans on earth calls that quadrupedal animal a dog but we are going to name the specie of that animal neutral"

Wraith
2018-07-23, 10:18 AM
I think that's the inherent problem with moralities and alignment grids in role-playing games; how many people actually go around saying "Hello, my name is Wraith and I am Chaotic Neutral" in a non-ironic manner?
It just doesn't happen - what you're describing is a genuinely good, if possibly deluded Good person, whereas I believe that there are reasons as to why a True Neutral character could act in a similar way and be judged different by her motivations and moral consistency.

You say "seeing yourself as good" - is that different to Good (actually being of the alignment) and what does that entail?

There's a Druid in her grove - she sees herself as Good, because she kills trespassers and protects her sacred place from harm. Society might see her as Good because she's killing criminals and preserving something beautiful.

She's also a murderer who inflicts capital punishments on minor transgressions without trial or legal authority; she thinks she's good, society might see her as good, but his she - cosmically, as the cardinal points of the universe are decided by the Gods and their respective afterlives - Good? What if the society around her are also grove-protecting Neutral Druids who unanimously applaud the killing of outsiders for misdemeanors? Does that make them all good because they approve of the same value, no matter that it might be intrinsically skewed?

See where I'm coming from? Morality is bigger than what people believe they are (key phrase there) and how they are seen; it's a standard which the universe applies, and I believe that a True Neutral's label comes from a balance of act, perception, intention and consistency; thinking that you're good and having other people agree with you is not enough by itself.

It's also not guaranteed - I happily concede that the scenario which you propose is also true, and that every Player should decide for themselves which side of the argument they wish to play as. As I said, there's plenty to get out of a character who thinks they're acting True Neutral but actually isn't very good at it. :smallbiggrin:

noob
2018-07-23, 01:35 PM
I think that's the inherent problem with moralities and alignment grids in role-playing games; how many people actually go around saying "Hello, my name is Wraith and I am Chaotic Neutral" in a non-ironic manner?
It just doesn't happen - what you're describing is a genuinely good, if possibly deluded Good person, whereas I believe that there are reasons as to why a True Neutral character could act in a similar way and be judged different by her motivations and moral consistency.

You say "seeing yourself as good" - is that different to Good (actually being of the alignment) and what does that entail?

There's a Druid in her grove - she sees herself as Good, because she kills trespassers and protects her sacred place from harm. Society might see her as Good because she's killing criminals and preserving something beautiful.

She's also a murderer who inflicts capital punishments on minor transgressions without trial or legal authority; she thinks she's good, society might see her as good, but his she - cosmically, as the cardinal points of the universe are decided by the Gods and their respective afterlives - Good? What if the society around her are also grove-protecting Neutral Druids who unanimously applaud the killing of outsiders for misdemeanors? Does that make them all good because they approve of the same value, no matter that it might be intrinsically skewed?

See where I'm coming from? Morality is bigger than what people believe they are (key phrase there) and how they are seen; it's a standard which the universe applies, and I believe that a True Neutral's label comes from a balance of act, perception, intention and consistency; thinking that you're good and having other people agree with you is not enough by itself.

It's also not guaranteed - I happily concede that the scenario which you propose is also true, and that every Player should decide for themselves which side of the argument they wish to play as. As I said, there's plenty to get out of a character who thinks they're acting True Neutral but actually isn't very good at it. :smallbiggrin:

Except that most real life people would consider the druid in its glade killing people to be evil (there would be some which would consider it good but not all) while if someone goes and try to discuss with a creature of pure "GOOD" which is not good at all and which will impose tyranny on the world and make bad stuff happen in order to discourage that creature from making a tyranny by killing all opposition then most people in real life would consider that person good as that person would be protecting people from being murdered and tyrannised.
But that druid does not fits the alignement keeper archetype you wrote since that druid is not maintaining the balance between the varied alignements

The fact the forces of "GOOD" are trying to kill the forces of evil meant that those "GOOD" forces were not good in the first place since killing is bad in most modern philosophies and is considered bad by most people(because no matter what killing people have a tendency to make them dead which is usually a condition most people does not want to have).
Maybe a millennium ago killing forces of evil was seen by most people as good but now it is seen as bad by the majority.

Basically saying "the keeper of balance is protecting the world from "GOOD" and "EVIL" because he thinks both are bad for everybody once they win" means that 1: the forces of "GOOD" were not good or else they would not make bad stuff happen to people and would not tyrannise them.

2: That keeper is good because he is making the outcome better for everybody.

Or the keeper is wrong.

You could just admit that the way you wrote the keeper it is not neutral but good(unless he is wrong) since having diverging opinions on how to do good is already allowed in the dnd alignment system as long as you have a positive outcome and do not harm people for pleasure.

Do not forget there is a difference between "the majority of the real life people agree" and "some real life people agree"
But if you needed everybody to agree you were good to be good then we could remove the good alignment since nobody would have that alignment.

So for defining the current keeper as not being good you need to either say "nobody is good since there is never everybody who agrees you are good" then remove good from the alignment chart or say "ok I use one definition of good only" and then say the definition of good you use but everybody would disagree with your definition since that definition would be made in order to be harmful or else it would not be able to create tyrannies which is what you ask from good since the starting point of the keeper is that good is harmful for everybody and causes tyrannies once it have no opposition.
Or simply you need the keeper to believe a wrong thing.

Wraith
2018-07-24, 05:50 AM
Except that most real life people would consider the druid in its glade killing people to be evil... But that druid does not fits the alignement keeper archetype you wrote since that druid is not maintaining the balance between the varied alignements

The Druid protecting their glade is Fettered, and Druid fighting for cosmic balance is Equaliser. They're two different archetypes, that's why it doesn't 'fit'.


2: That keeper is good because he is making the outcome better for everybody.

Believes that what he is doing is better for others. It's the same in which a Lawful Evil believes that they are campaigning for the greater good - you wouldn't say that they weren't Evil because they intend to be doing the right thing for what they perceive the right reasons. In fact, they're Evil because they're wrong, and True Neutral is True Neutral because they're wrong in a different way.


You could just admit that the way you wrote the keeper it is not neutral but good(unless he is wrong) since having diverging opinions on how to do good is already allowed in the dnd alignment system as long as you have a positive outcome and do not harm people for pleasure.

Please clarify; by 'keeper' (a term I haven't used up until now) you are referring to... Equaliser?

Assuming you are: I won't, because I didn't. You are using a D&D specific definition of alignments, and I am not - please consider again my example in the Magic universe, where being "good" literally means to be mildly attached to a specific flavour of morality, and neutrality means to be attached to some, all or none of them. It's a different direction available to a character, apart from "fighting evil is good and fighting good is evil".

Again, I admit that D&D doesn't work that way. But I'm not just talking about D&D.


the starting point of the keeper is that good is harmful for everybody and causes tyrannies once it have no opposition.

No; Good itself is not inherently the problem, but the overwhelming domination of Good being detrimental to the running of the universe. This isn't *my* theory, that's how it's been explained since AD&D, which also makes provisions for actions not always being an absolute indication of morality.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be working under the idea that if anyone does a deed which they can interpret as good, for a reason that they can justify as good, then they must be a Good aligned person.
I do not believe that to be true - Evil people can sometimes do good deeds when it suits them, just as Good people can sometimes do Evil things if necessary and it doesn't always dent their alignment. Would you honestly call someone who does Good and Evil in almost equal measure a Good person based on that 1% difference? Or if they do things which are only broadly Good out of convenience, rather than a deliberate intention to be Good?

Neutrality can be a specific, identifiable direction of morality separate from Good and Evil. That's my line in the sand upon which this essay stands, I think - if you disagree with that then fair enough, but I feel that might be because you have a greater problem with the alignment grid in general, than my specific definitions.


Or simply you need the keeper to believe a wrong thing.

Which I've already admitted, if that's how you want your universe to run, then fine. The first paragraph I wrote started with me explaining that these were just some ways that True Neutral can go, and if you don't want to use it, then you don't have to - certainly not in D&D, whose cosmology has it's own thing going on.

I, however, am focusing on the games where someone may want to use that concept, and I have hopefully suggested some ways in which to make it interesting. Simply insisting that I am wrong and should retract my suggestions because they might not work in your one specific head-canon setting is not appropriate.

Segev
2018-07-24, 09:29 AM
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be working under the idea that if anyone does a deed which they can interpret as good, for a reason that they can justify as good, then they must be a Good aligned person.

I think it's more, if you do deeds that are defined as "good," and think of yourself as "good," and don't do deeds that are defined as "evil," and think of "evil" as undesirable...you're probably genuinely Good.

Kind of a "looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, says it is a duck" situation.

The fact that such seemingly-obvious claims are necessitated at all seems to stem from a weird position being taken that doing good and wanting to do good means you're probably secretly evil. Which hasn't really been said, but some of the "yeah, but Neutral..." comments tread around that ground, making it understandable that people would feel like that weird position IS being implied.

Beleriphon
2018-07-28, 11:24 AM
The fact that such seemingly-obvious claims are necessitated at all seems to stem from a weird position being taken that doing good and wanting to do good means you're probably secretly evil. Which hasn't really been said, but some of the "yeah, but Neutral..." comments tread around that ground, making it understandable that people would feel like that weird position IS being implied.

My general take on Good vs Evil vs Neutral is this scenario.

The Dark Overlord is rampaging across the land and rounding up all of the gnomes. The intention of the Dark Overlord to kill all the gnomes because F those guys. A family of gnomes has arrived on the doorstep of your farmhouse begging for a place to hide for the night, they are on the run from a Dark Overlord hunter. If the hunter catches them death, but if they can hide for the night they might be able to make it to the border of a dwarven citadel that is taking in the refugee gnomes. The hunt is sure to ask you if you've seen the gnomes since you have the only homestead for miles, you know there is a bounty and a money will be offered in exchange for information.

So what dos a good character do? They take in the gnomes, and probably do their best to hide them from the hunter when it shows up at the door as well.
The neutral character? Probably turns the gnomes away, but isn't going to tell the hunter about them when it shows up at the door.
The evil character? Takes the gnomes in and turns them over to the hunter for a reward when it shows up.