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The Jack
2019-02-20, 11:11 AM
So a while back I thought up -the most antagonistic LG paladin ever who took inspiration from a whole load of nasty historical folks who thought they were doing the right thing (I have yet to play this character because I'm kind... Or I don't have a group for it, one of the two) but it got me thinking of more alignment-in-dispute joke characters.

Seriously, how would you rule these?

Gelbin is the malicious master craftsman. He secretly fixes and finishes all projects people are undertaking with perfect results, believing that he is denying craft workers the satisfaction of complete jobs. Gelbin is doing NG things with CE motivations, so what is he?

Gunther is an extreme paladin who enacts the harshest possible punishments on any act not LG which he can get away with he wholeheartedly believes he's doing the best for his people with his extreme behaviour. Gunther is certainly trying his best for a LG society, but you could argue he's tyranical and brutal and thus LN or LE. Gunther would certainly smite himself if he thought he ever acted LE (and maybe flog himself for acting LN).

Oslic is a genocidal rapist. Oslic is from a part-celestial -literallySuperiorRace- and believes that with the generous use of -charm person- he can uplift the quality of lesser races by breeding extensively with them; For instance by interbreeding he can make goblins and orcs more celestial and thus good. Unlike some nasty real-life colonial parallels, races in DnD are predisposed to good or evil, so Oslic's work has a genuine 'goodening' effect on his target populaces.
Also, like some colonial parallels, Oslic believes his breeding program is much better for his victims than the straight up murder-genocide of all evil races.

Sez is a dedicated homewrecker. She takes great joy in the seduction of husbands away from their wives. To make her anti-wife malice of the highest standard, she always treats the husband, children and parents far better than the wife does, and treats the wife respectfully (other than the whole affair deal). Many think of Sez as a goddess or saint of mistressing and believe that she shows a perfect example of the maternal roll to less-than-perfect wives (of course, Sez is a competitor at heart who just takes joy in the seduction of husbands at the expense of their partners) She even tries to ensure that she leaves on good terms with the family. Sez is commonly seen as LG even though she's got NE motivations.

Bondice is like Gunther's opposite. She's maliciously evil and so horribly cruel, but she lives in an extremely evil society. Out of pure perverse sadism against her sick and twisted neigbours she does her best to enforce lawful good behaviour from her neighbours, who naturally feel it's a form of torture and want to get back to their fiendish ways.

mucat
2019-02-20, 12:01 PM
A lot of these people just sound insane and not entirely responsible for their actions...which doesn't really speak to their alignments, but more to their grasp on reality. If I knew more about other aspects of their lives, I would probably give them whatever alignment describes their actions when they are NOT being weird and delusional.

However, going just from what you've described here, and assuming that they're sane enough to take responsibility...

I would describe Gelbin as true neutral. He's a grouchy curmudgeon, but that's not a crime in itself, and his actions do no serious harm. (If it turns out he is actually trying to make people's lives better -- for example, if he preferentially chooses to works on projects for "victims" who really do need the help, and would be in a bad situation without it -- then I'd say a grouchy NG.)

Gunther is somewhere in the LN-LE range, depending on exactly how far he takes those "harshest possible punishments," and how minor an "offense" he is willing to mete them out for.

I would call Oslic NE; he shows no respect for the autonomy of other sapient beings. His frequent use of enchantment spells to override people's free will makes him guilty of mind-rape as well as the more physical type.

Sez and Bondice both read more as "mentally ill" than as strongly aligned...but lacking any more information about either of them, I would call Sez true Neutral and Bondice CN.


In all the above, I've been thinking of alignment more as a description of someone's moral nature than as an overarching natural force. In a universe where Good and Evil really are objective cosmic forces, both Gunthur and Oslic might ping as "Good", and Bondice as "Evil", because they've "aligned" themselves with those sides of the great cosmic battle. In that kind of universe, an evil person can be Good-aligned, and vice-versa.

Maelynn
2019-02-20, 12:44 PM
Rather than go by each individual character, I can sum it up: it's not the actions, but the intent and the motivations that determine alignment. Killing someone isn't inherently evil, for example. If they're a child murderer killed by an LG Paladin, then it suddenly becomes an act of good. Evil is when you are intent on harming others, or don't care about harming others to get what you want.

Sez may be nice to the husband and children, treat them wonderful, she's doing it just to ruin a relationship and spite the wife. She is nice not out of the goodness of her heart, but for the sport of seducing a guy and the effect it has on the way people think about the wife. Downright evil.

Oslic on the other hand truly believes that he's improving a race. He believes he's not hurting anyone (although you didn't make it entirely clear if there was any consent or downright capture/rape), he doesn't kill others, he just adds a dash of good to an otherwise evilly inclined race. His method is ethically questionable, but his alignment isn't evil.

Dienekes
2019-02-20, 01:09 PM
Gelbin is the malicious master craftsman. He secretly fixes and finishes all projects people are undertaking with perfect results, believing that he is denying craft workers the satisfaction of complete jobs. Gelbin is doing NG things with CE motivations, so what is he?

Without further information, he's just true neutral. Kind of a delusional weirdo. But remember just being mean, or intending to be mean doesn't make you evil. It just means you're a douche.


Gunther is an extreme paladin who enacts the harshest possible punishments on any act not LG which he can get away with he wholeheartedly believes he's doing the best for his people with his extreme behaviour. Gunther is certainly trying his best for a LG society, but you could argue he's tyranical and brutal and thus LN or LE. Gunther would certainly smite himself if he thought he ever acted LE (and maybe flog himself for acting LN).

The Javert trope is usually regarded as Lawful Stupid. Depending on how rigorous and flawed his extremist behavior is we can't really place him on the spectrum until we get examples. Does he make it a habit to behead those who steal food to feed starving children? Or are his actions more split than that. Lawful Neutral is usually a safe bet.


Oslic is a genocidal rapist. Oslic is from a part-celestial -literallySuperiorRace- and believes that with the generous use of -charm person- he can uplift the quality of lesser races by breeding extensively with them; For instance by interbreeding he can make goblins and orcs more celestial and thus good. Unlike some nasty real-life colonial parallels, races in DnD are predisposed to good or evil, so Oslic's work has a genuine 'goodening' effect on his target populaces.
Also, like some colonial parallels, Oslic believes his breeding program is much better for his victims than the straight up murder-genocide of all evil races.

So, by DnD alignment using love potions and mind-controlling enchantments is not considered evil. I, strongly, disagree. Furthermore, rape is not listed as an evil action. Which, I again, strongly disagree with. I'd personally chalk this guy up as Neutral Evil, and insane. But, as stands in D&D he's probably still just True Neutral.


Sez is a dedicated homewrecker. She takes great joy in the seduction of husbands away from their wives. To make her anti-wife malice of the highest standard, she always treats the husband, children and parents far better than the wife does, and treats the wife respectfully (other than the whole affair deal). Many think of Sez as a goddess or saint of mistressing and believe that she shows a perfect example of the maternal roll to less-than-perfect wives (of course, Sez is a competitor at heart who just takes joy in the seduction of husbands at the expense of their partners) She even tries to ensure that she leaves on good terms with the family. Sez is commonly seen as LG even though she's got NE motivations.

She's a bitch. But nothing in this is evil or particularly good. Though striving to break up the lawful contract of marriage could be seen as chaotic. I'd personally just, again, go True Neutral with maybe Chaotic leanings.


Bondice is like Gunther's opposite. She's maliciously evil and so horribly cruel, but she lives in an extremely evil society. Out of pure perverse sadism against her sick and twisted neigbours she does her best to enforce lawful good behaviour from her neighbours, who naturally feel it's a form of torture and want to get back to their fiendish ways.

This character would be killed, if she truly lived in a deeply evil society. But before she bit it, this one's a bit of a trick. On one hand, just because they feel it's torturous doesn't make it torture. As everyone who has had to deal with teenagers can tell you. I suppose it would in part be influenced in how she acts. Does she follow the same standards she sets out to enforce on her neighbors?

Man_Over_Game
2019-02-20, 01:57 PM
A lot of these people are just stupid, and stupidity is kind of its own justification for their actions, isn't it?

The best way to sort them out is to guess what they'd do if they had the knowledge or the ability to escape their reality, and determine who they are from there?

Gelbin knows he is evil. He just happens to be doing good things for evil reasons.
Gunther is straight stupid, and if he knew better, he'd change. He might be doing evil things, but he's a good person.
Oslic is the odd man out. It's kind of hard to understand foreign entities. He is, however, knowingly interfering with free will, and that comes off as Neutral as best. "For the Greater Good" doesn't guarantee you a spot as a good person.
Sez knows she's evil. She's evil, perceived as a good person.
Bondice lives out of spite, and is definitely evil. She'd still do evil things when surrounded by good people.

OverLordOcelot
2019-02-20, 02:04 PM
What exactly are your alignment rules? Are you using them from a particular edition of D&D, or are they something you've come up with? Your examples seem to use a mix of definitions of what each alignment means. Notably, I'm not really sure what something like "enacts the harshest possible punishments on any act not LG" or "enforce lawful good behavior from her neighbors" actually means, as I don't know what you're defining as "LG" acts. Depending on definition, neither character is NOT trying their best for a LG society or engaging in LG acts. And two of the examples touch on sexual and relationship morality, which traditionally fall outside of D&D's alignment system because it's primarily an action game following American 'age appropriate' standards (where violence is OK but even nonsexual nudity is questionable). They don't hit tics on alignment in some versions of D&D not because of the complexity of alignment rules, but because the rules don't cover that area - it's sort of like trying to fit intellectual property issues into D&D alignment, the system doesn't touch directly on them.

Red Fel
2019-02-20, 02:25 PM
Oh, look, another "alignments are silly" thread.

Yes, we know they are. Well, let's get to it.


Gelbin is the malicious master craftsman. He secretly fixes and finishes all projects people are undertaking with perfect results, believing that he is denying craft workers the satisfaction of complete jobs. Gelbin is doing NG things with CE motivations, so what is he?

Bold is false. Gelbin fixing someone else's work isn't NG, and doing it to rob them of job satisfaction isn't CE. Gelbin is simply perverse.


Gunther is an extreme paladin who enacts the harshest possible punishments on any act not LG which he can get away with he wholeheartedly believes he's doing the best for his people with his extreme behaviour. Gunther is certainly trying his best for a LG society, but you could argue he's tyranical and brutal and thus LN or LE. Gunther would certainly smite himself if he thought he ever acted LE (and maybe flog himself for acting LN).

Bold proves a false premise. Gunther is not a Paladin, at least not in the D&D sense. I don't know what particular alignment system you're using, but if we're looking at a D&D model, alignment is objective, not subjective. That is, it doesn't matter whether you think your actions are Good or Evil, because there is an objective omniscient force weighing them to determine their value. A person who uses the "harshest possible punishments . . . which he can get away with" isn't really LG. He's just a thug who hides behind the veil of authority. He might be a small-p paladin, in that he is a particular class of knight, but he's no shining LG paragon.


Oslic is a genocidal rapist. Oslic is from a part-celestial -literallySuperiorRace- and believes that with the generous use of -charm person- he can uplift the quality of lesser races by breeding extensively with them; For instance by interbreeding he can make goblins and orcs more celestial and thus good. Unlike some nasty real-life colonial parallels, races in DnD are predisposed to good or evil, so Oslic's work has a genuine 'goodening' effect on his target populaces.
Also, like some colonial parallels, Oslic believes his breeding program is much better for his victims than the straight up murder-genocide of all evil races.

Again, rape is objectively Evil. Oslic forcing himself on any sapient he sees is an Evil act. The ultimate generational outcome of this action is not relevant.

As noted by others, though, mind control is not considered objectively Evil. In fact, in 3rd Ed., there's a spell that forcibly enslaves and mindwipes an Evil creature and turns it Good, and this spell is considered Exalted (super-Good). This is an illustration of how stupid D&D alignments can be.


Sez is a dedicated homewrecker. She takes great joy in the seduction of husbands away from their wives. To make her anti-wife malice of the highest standard, she always treats the husband, children and parents far better than the wife does, and treats the wife respectfully (other than the whole affair deal). Many think of Sez as a goddess or saint of mistressing and believe that she shows a perfect example of the maternal roll to less-than-perfect wives (of course, Sez is a competitor at heart who just takes joy in the seduction of husbands at the expense of their partners) She even tries to ensure that she leaves on good terms with the family. Sez is commonly seen as LG even though she's got NE motivations.

Okay, you're clearly having some issues with this. Let me clarify something. Minor acts of kindness or pettiness lack an alignment charge. You've now done this with Gelbin and with Sez. Being warm to a family, or doing someone else's work, isn't inherently Good; it's just nice. Seducing others, or depriving them of a job well done, isn't inherently Evil; it's just ordinary cruelty.

Now, in Sez' case, she's doing something deliberately to hurt others, habitually. You can make the argument that her cruelty is a very simple kind of Evil - not "world conquest" Evil, but more like "kicking puppies" Evil. But you've concocted this frankly perverse situation where... apparently none of them are hurt by this? I mean, this is some magical fairyland crap here. So she steps in, breaks up a family, and everyone's... happy about it? This is some alien mentality, here, and if she's not actually being cruel to them, it's just incomprehensible.

And, y'know, kinda dumb.


Bondice is like Gunther's opposite. She's maliciously evil and so horribly cruel, but she lives in an extremely evil society. Out of pure perverse sadism against her sick and twisted neigbours she does her best to enforce lawful good behaviour from her neighbours, who naturally feel it's a form of torture and want to get back to their fiendish ways.

On the one hand, she's being cruel to others, which could constitute Evil under the right circumstances (see above). On the other, because alignment is stupid, being Lawful Good is pretty much always a Lawful Good thing to do. On the other, doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still Evil (see e.g. a tyrant creating free public education to indoctrinate all children into revering their god-king). On the other, does being kind of a jerk to your neighbor even rise to the level of actual Evil to begin with?

And also, once again, you have this weirdly perverse magical fairyland crap going on. What kind of messed up society are you even imagining here? I mean, I invent Hellscapes for fun, and this is just silly to me.

I feel like you came up with these scenarios in an attempt to create these weird alignment "dilemmas" that are only challenging if you can accept the underlying premise. And I can't see a setup in which that underlying premise can even exist. It's kinda screwy.

OverLordOcelot
2019-02-20, 04:38 PM
Bold proves a false premise. Gunther is not a Paladin, at least not in the D&D sense.. He's just a thug who hides behind the veil of authority. He might be a small-p paladin, in that he is a particular class of knight, but he's no shining LG paragon.

BTW, this highlights why I asked what alignment rules you're using - the paladin as a "shining LG paragon" isn't true in D&D 5e, though it was the default in older editions. (And even then house rules changing that were common, there was at least one dragon article creating a paladin class for each of the 8 alignments the standard one didn't include.)

DaOldeWolf
2019-02-20, 05:35 PM
I dont know. The people in here all seem quite conscious of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Half of them, basically being sick fixated people and the other half are just petty.

More than wondering about the characters, I would wonder about the creators of such beings. Why would anyone create something like this? Yeah, they are a bunch of pretty dislikable people but so what?

I could create say Myriad, the stupid sorceress. She always tries to help and do good but she is pretty stupid and not introspective enough to see the harm in her actions. Nations have fallen due to her incompetence and lack of thinking. She travel around the world, part of the time being manipulated by evil people into creating chaos and death.

Why is she still alive? How does her actions affect her interactions with the world? What else is there in her life besides stupidly trying to help people? How conscious is her of the damage she has done? What is her perspective in life? Why does she do what she does?

The cases presented seem pretty narrow-minded. They seem to only exist isolated. I dont think I would really be able to define any of these people until I learnt about how effective they are at doing what they are doing, how the consequences of their actions have affected them, what else is going on in their lives and what kind of actions they usually take. These are the flat people with no backstory and poor shallow motives.

halfeye
2019-02-20, 07:48 PM
I could create say Myriad, the stupid sorceress. She always tries to help and do good but she is pretty stupid and not introspective enough to see the harm in her actions. Nations have fallen due to her incompetence and lack of thinking. She travel around the world, part of the time being manipulated by evil people into creating chaos and death.

Why is she still alive? How does her actions affect her interactions with the world? What else is there in her life besides stupidly trying to help people? How conscious is her of the damage she has done? What is her perspective in life? Why does she do what she does?

Not a magician of any sort, but...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oh-No-Its-Selwyn-Froggit/dp/B0042QHA6A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494017618&sr=8-1&keywords=selwyn+froggit

OldTrees1
2019-02-20, 08:09 PM
Have you considered learning about various moral theories and then applying those? Adopting that framework answers all alignment questions like these. Although you may still need to work before you reach an answer.

For example the root of your question is what has moral character.
Is it the intent itself that is moral/immoral/amoral?
Is it the action itself that is moral/immoral/amoral?
Is it the consequence itself that is moral/immoral/amoral?

Of the package "intent/action/consequence" you will find different moral theories that champion each of those points of judgement. If you consistently stick with one of those 3 then you will solve this thread.

Of course then the question becomes "Are our statements about Lawful/Chaos the same kind of statements as our judgements about Moral/Immoral/Amoral?" That question then takes meta-ethics (the discussion about what kind of statement we mean by our judgements about moral/immoral/amoral) and applies it to our alignment judgements about Lawful/Chaos.

Personally I see people use Lawful/Chaos to be one of these 3:
1) Intent based judgements akin to the moral judgements of Virtue Ethics but applied to having Orderly personality vs a Chaotic personality.
2) Allegiance based judgements (so unlike moral judgements) about how much loyalty the character has to the code of laws instituted nearby.
3) Inherently contradictory judgements akin to Error Theory (one of the meta-ethical positions that proposes the idea that all questions about morality are invalid statements).

Tanarii
2019-02-20, 09:59 PM
Which edition are we playing here? Alignment means something different in each edition.


Rather than go by each individual character, I can sum it up: it's not the actions, but the intent and the motivations that determine alignment.
That's the argument usually put forth for justifying things pretty clearly not within an alignment. In fact, it summarizes the OP attempts to twist ('reverse') alignments pretty succinctly.

Frozen_Feet
2019-02-21, 10:51 AM
D&D has a legalistic view of morality which combines elements from all of consequential, deontological and virtue ethics. The details change based on edition and some of these characters would have different alignment in different D&D games.

This said, few rules of thumb:

1) petty acts of no consequence, such as doing a thing out of spite that doesn't end up harming anyone, is neutral. Not Capital-N Neutral that'd change your alignment, just small-n neutral that won't change alignment at all.

2) good acts done with evil intent, as well as evil acts done with good intent, cancel out to small-n neutral. Paladins, Clerics, Druids (etc.) are exceptions because they have additional and stricter rules to follow. A Paladin who does evil with good intent has failed as a Paladin and will Fall, even if overall they are still Lawful Good.

3) Alignment is about longlasting trends in behaviour, not single acts. Again, Paladins (etc.) are exceptions, as are some magic items, like Helm of Opposite Alignment.

4) Good, in D&D, is not pacifistic and it is not secular. Paladins are armed servants, they are warriors, and when engaging in war, they can adopt "Kill them all and let God sort them out" mentality. ... because there usually is an actual God to sort them out and some semblance of a just afterlife. Even outside of war, the harshest possible punishment a Paladin can mete out that is both Lawful and Good is execution, as long as the one punished has been proven to be guilty of Evil acts.

---

With these in mind:

Gelbin: not enough information to decide. The behaviour described would not, in itself, make him of any alignment. Not even True Neutral.

Gunther: as noted, the "harshest possible punishment... he can get away with" is executing provenly Evil criminals, such as unrepentant murderers. Meanwhile, any genuinely Evil act on Gunther's part, as well as several not Evil violations of the Paladin's Code, make him immediately lose his powers as a Paladin! As long as he maintains rank, there is no argument, he is Lawful Good.

Oslic: Lawful Good. "Charm Person" is not Mind Rape, people. It isn't even Suggestion. It makes people friendly towards you and makes them view your suggestions favorably, but it does not compel them to obey your orders. In fact, they never obey obviously harmful suggestions. Conclusion: the only way Charm Person can get Oslic a lot of Orc booty is if Orcs consider Oslic non-threatening and kind of hot. Furthermore, as part-Celestial, Oslic's inheritance genuinely will make Orcs better both physically and morally. In short, the only way to see Oslic as Evil is by grosly misinterpreting what Charm Person does.

Sez: not enough information to decide. Calling her a homewrecker is a stretch to begin with if she always treats everyone respectfully. The description of her actions seems self-contradictory. What goes for Oslic goes doubly here: seduction is not mind control. If someone falls for and sleeps with Sez, that's on them.

Bondice: the only reason why this even sounds like a question is because you're implicitly assuming she only takes action in her own society. But if she's a horrible sadistic fiend herself, we have to assume she'd act the part if she ever got the opportunity to. So she's not only Evil, she is supernaturally, presciptively Evil in the sense AD&D uses Alignment for NPCs. (Meanwhile, AD&D specifies that Alignment for PCs is always descriptive.)

gkathellar
2019-02-21, 12:28 PM
The point at which you start deliberately trying to devise ostensibly good characters who you know are nothing of the sort is the point at which you should toss out alignment entirely. As an idea, alignment is only worth bothering with if it’s emotionally meaningful, which usually requires sincerity. That’s more than a lot of D&D’s writers managed, to be fair.

Look, the “Heaven and Hell are just different factions of space monsters with different aesthetic preferences” trope is a perfectly fine trope. But I think it’s poor form to keep the words good and evil in play while you invoke it, and kind of pointlessly edgy besides. There are exceptions, but they’re usually a function of having something to say.