OOTS #1063 - The Discussion Thread

[Aeson]

dancrilis, "Neutral characters can act to prevent an organization from becoming dominant without reference to cosmic balance" does not imply "Neutral characters cannot act to prevent an organization from becoming dominant for reasons of cosmic balance."

[dancrilis]

dancrilis, "Neutral characters can act to prevent an organization from becoming dominant without reference to cosmic balance" does not imply "Neutral characters cannot act to prevent an organization from becoming dominant for reasons of cosmic balance."

I am not sure what you are getting at/referring to.

[LadyEowyn]

I can think of a variety of different ways someone could be True Neutral.

The most obvious one is just living their lives and not going particularly out of their way to help or harm anyone. By that definition, the overwhelming majority of people are true neutral - how many of us regularly put our lives on the line to help others? But, as has been noted, in D&D that doesn't give someone a motivation to become an adventurer.

An option that allows a more active adventuring role is having a priority that's orthagonal to the good-evil and law-neutral axis. The previous example of a character whose motivation was preserving knowledge is a good one. Another example could someone from a village like Right-Eye's in Start of Darkness, whose objective was to protect their home and their people from any attackers: they'd be equally willing to defend the village from anyone who attacked it, whether the attackers were paladins, bands of robbers, evil clerics, or whatever. If they also went out to look for other people of their kind and let them know there was a (comparatively) safe place they could live, that could involve adventuring that was oriented towards "protect my people" rather than "defend all the innocent" or "prey upon the weak".

In short, there's lots of motivations that don't boil down to "protect the innocent" (good) or "harm other for my own benefit" (evil).

The idea of "preserving the Balance", though, strikes me as utter nonsense. I think Dragonlance has thrown people off in this regard. It acts as though Good and Evil are two political parties, which is a basic misunderstanding of the concept.Good is characterized by preserving others from harm. Evil is characterized by harming others to achieve selfish or malicious goals, and/or by acting with utter disconcern for the well-being of others. There's not supposed to be a balance between those things. If a Good persons saves someone's life, and you respond by murdering someone in order to "balance" things, that's not a Neutral act, it's a deranged Evil act.

There doesn't need to be a "balance between Good and Evil" in order to prevent the Inquisition, because the Inquisition isn't Good, it's Lawful Evil masquerading as Good.

[8BitNinja]

I am not seeing your distinction here.

Let us say a kingdom is about to have a new leader (currently a baron) - this person is a LG fanatic, all should be good and all laws should exist to enforce and promote good.

One of the laws they have enforced on their barony is as follows:


Now the law is intended to promote good behaviour and secure the safety of the realm and be fair to all, but some TN (and others) might find it excessively controlling and so oppose it and seek to have the baronies reject this new king and install someone less concerned with how they speak after bowel movements. They would oppose any such extremism.

This would meet the stated: 'a TN character can act with the specific intent of preventing any one alignment from becoming dominant'

Is it bad that I think that this is an okay law?

[Snails]

If a particular group is overbearing while in power, then reacting against it is just reacting against perceived tyranny. The philosophy of the suspect group in power does not tell us anything important about whether the perception is true enough to warrant acts of rebellion. A justified rebellion is not Good or Evil or Lawful or Chaotic or Neutral or True Neutral or Cosmically Balanced Neutral by virtue of the particulars of the personality of the tyrants.

Imagining that the universe is somehow fundamentally built on a framework with two distinct moral axes, each axes with diametrically polar opposite philosophies, makes for a lot of lazy game design. I do not mind the addition of Slaads and Inevitables, but the Protection from X, Smite X, anti-X Word spells make this all look like it is about choosing the color of paint to slap on your religion. Giving every direction similar stuff only means all directions are the same mechanically, which is sort of equivalent having no directions to choose from at all.

I hold that True Neutral is not a specific philosophy, but simply a lack of a strong commitment to any particular moral philosophy. Of course, such persons could well be very committed to other things like knowledge, family, clan, city-state, etc. In other words, there is no such thing as True Neutral...just plain Neutral describes this well enough.

[Snails]

Another example where thinking in terms of balance leads to lazy assumptions is: Robin Hood.

Now it definitely can make sense for someone who takes from the rich and gives to the poor to be CG. I not suggesting such must be wrong. But there are other traditions as well.

The version of Robin Hood I just read, he is most definitely LG. He is unfairly targeted because he is suspected of subversion of the treacherous money-grubbing ways of the Sheriff, but the main reason he is singled out for persecution is for being too vocally supportive of the absent King Richard while the pretender John wants such things forgotten. This deposed Earl Fitzrobert, now Robin Hood, is an outlaw specifically because he held resolutely to his oath and to what he views is the true king's concept of justice.

That is classic Lawful and Good. The fact the John and Sheriff are LE does not matter. Robin's personal motivations are Lawful, not Chaotic.

[hamishspence]

I can think of a variety of different ways someone could be True Neutral.

The most obvious one is just living their lives and not going particularly out of their way to help or harm anyone. By that definition, the overwhelming majority of people are true neutral - how many of us regularly put our lives on the line to help others?

For Good-aligned non-adventurers, "going out of their way to help others" doesn't have to mean putting their lives on the line. It can mean giving up a lot of their free time, a lot of their personal luxuries, etc.

TN should be a majority, for humans, but it doesn't have to be an overwhelming majority, it can simply be a bit more common than any of the other alignments.

[Aeson]

dancrilis, let's try this:
You are the government and have proposed a law. I am some portion of the populace which opposes this law as it infringes on personal freedoms and is overreaching on the part of the government. Obviously, in D&D alignment terms, the "infringing on my personal freedoms" bit is a Law-Chaos axis issue where I am acting in response to a perceived threat to my ability to act in a Chaotic manner. How about the governmental overreach bit? In order for me to have a concept of governmental overreach, I must have an expectation that the government will act in accordance with some code, tradition, or set of values which imposes constraints on the type and degree of the actions which the government can take, and when I say that the government is overreaching itself (or overstepping its bounds, or some other similar metaphor), I am saying that the government is acting in a way which is not in accord with this code, tradition, or set of values. In D&D alignment terminology, then, I expect that the government will act as a more or less Lawful entity, and when I say that the government is overreaching itself (or overstepping its bounds, or some other similar metaphor), I am saying that the government is acting in a manner which is inappropriately Chaotic.

So. When I oppose your law, am I acting to prevent an overabundance of Law because I want to be free to act in a more Chaotic manner than your law permits, or am I acting to prevent a overabundance of Chaos because I want the government to act in a manner more Lawful than I think it's acting? I would say that both or neither is the right answer, while only one or the other is the wrong answer. In opposing this law, I am not acting to oppose the dominance of a specific alignment.

There are also reasons for which I could oppose your law which have no real bearing on or basis in alignment. I could regard the law as being unenforceable. I could regard the law as diverting resources from something else which is in my opinion more important. I might dislike you personally to the point that I oppose anything that you suggest merely because you were the one to suggest it.

TN should be a majority, for humans, but it doesn't have to be an overwhelming majority, it can simply be a bit more common than any of the other alignments.

When talking about majorities of populations, a majority is defined as a subset of the population which exceeds 50% of the total population. In order for the majority of humans to be TN, then, most or all of the 8 other alignments must be significantly less common than TN.

An example to demonstrate this: Let's assume that humans are as likely to be Evil as they are to be Good, as likely to be Lawful as they are to be Chaotic, and that alignment with respect to one axis has no strong correlation to alignment with respect to the other axis. Let us further suppose that 50.4% (a small majority) of humans are True Neutral. The above being the case suggests that about 14.5%/71%/14.5% of humans are Good/Neutral/Evil on the Good-Evil axis, and that 14.5%/71%/14.5% are Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic on the Law-Chaos axis. With this distribution on the two axes, each corner alignment would account for only ~2.1% of the total population and each edge alignment for only ~10.3%, while 50.4% of the population is TN. True Neutral would be roughly five times as common as the next most common alignment, and roughly 25% more common than the four next most common alignments put together.

If even a small majority of humans are TN, then TN must be overwhelmingly more common than most of the other alignments, and it will be overwhelmingly more common than all of the other alignments unless the distribution of human alignments is uneven about the midpoint on at least one of the two axes. In order for TN not to be overwhelmingly more common than any of the other alignments, then, the majority of humans cannot have a TN alignment. TN can still be the most common alignment, of course, but when the largest subset of a population consists of no more than 50% of the total population it is properly called a plurality, not a majority.

[hamishspence]

"Plurality" may be better here, yes. "Simple majority" is occasionally used in place of plurality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority

"Humans tend toward no alignment, not even Neutral" was what the PHB says - suggesting that it's less than would allow for "Often Neutral"

[8BitNinja]

Another example where thinking in terms of balance leads to lazy assumptions is: Robin Hood.

Now it definitely can make sense for someone who takes from the rich and gives to the poor to be CG. I not suggesting such must be wrong. But there are other traditions as well.

The version of Robin Hood I just read, he is most definitely LG. He is unfairly targeted because he is suspected of subversion of the treacherous money-grubbing ways of the Sheriff, but the main reason he is singled out for persecution is for being too vocally supportive of the absent King Richard while the pretender John wants such things forgotten. This deposed Earl Fitzrobert, now Robin Hood, is an outlaw specifically because he held resolutely to his oath and to what he views is the true king's concept of justice.

That is classic Lawful and Good. The fact the John and Sheriff are LE does not matter. Robin's personal motivations are Lawful, not Chaotic.

That's why RP is involved

[Aeson]

"Humans tend toward no alignment, not even Neutral" was what the PHB says - suggesting that it's less than would allow for "Often Neutral"

"Humans tend towards no alignment, not even Neutral" strongly suggests that the distribution of alignments within the human population is uniform along each axis. Unless there is a strong correlation between alignment on the Good-Evil axis and alignment on the Law-Chaos axis, then, we would expect that the human population may be divided up by alignment into nine portions which are as close to equally sized as matters by any reasonable measure. If there's a strong correlation between alignment on the Law-Chaos axis and alignment on the Good-Evil axis, we can get differences between the sizes of the nine segments but will still need to have a uniform distribution of alignment on each axis, and TN is not guaranteed to be one of the larger segments - if, for example, Neutral on the Law-Chaos axis correlates strongly with Good, and Chaotic correlates strongly with Evil, then Lawful must correlate strongly with Neutral on the Good-Evil axis in order for the distribution along each axis to be uniform, and both LN and NG would be more common than TN.

[hamishspence]

"Tendencies" I can see applying to anything from "often X alignment" upwards.


The typical alignment for humans is TN (PHB alignment chart) even if they don't tend toward Neutral.

This suggests that TN is slightly more common than the others, but not by much.

[Jasdoif]

The typical alignment for humans is TN (PHB alignment chart) even if they don't tend toward Neutral.

This suggests that TN is slightly more common than the others, but not by much.

Or possibly, that the median on each axis was taken to get the "typical" alignment when no single majority was committed to by the designers could be consistently determined.

[Sir_Norbert]

"Plurality" may be better here, yes. "Simple majority" is occasionally used in place of plurality:

That sense of "plurality" is American-only, though. On an international forum, some of your audience will read "plurality" as "the state of being plural, i.e. more than one".

[pendell]

The idea of "preserving the Balance", though, strikes me as utter nonsense. I think Dragonlance has thrown people off in this regard. It acts as though Good and Evil are two political parties, which is a basic misunderstanding of the concept.Good is characterized by preserving others from harm. Evil is characterized by harming others to achieve selfish or malicious goals, and/or by acting with utter disconcern for the well-being of others. There's not supposed to be a balance between those things. If a Good persons saves someone's life, and you respond by murdering someone in order to "balance" things, that's not a Neutral act, it's a deranged Evil act.

There doesn't need to be a "balance between Good and Evil" in order to prevent the Inquisition, because the Inquisition isn't Good, it's Lawful Evil masquerading as Good.

Thank you, LadyEowyn. The Star Wars 'balance to the Force' and Dragonlance's version of true neutral are precisely those instances I am most familiar with, and consider adolescent and laughable.

The most obvious one is just living their lives and not going particularly out of their way to help or harm anyone. By that definition, the overwhelming majority of people are true neutral - how many of us regularly put our lives on the line to help others?

Hrm ... I would argue that this is evil, not neutral. The first law of robotics is as follows:

A robot may not injure a human being or, by inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

I contend that the "neutral" person you describe is evil by omission, rather than evil by deliberate action. In the obvious 20th century historical example, most people were not active supporters of the Evil Empire but neither were they part of the resistance. They simply went about their lives and did nothing. They did not hurt anyone , but neither did they lift a finger to help the people going on the trains , and closed their eyes to the camps.

"Good" in that environment didn't simply mean passively living out one's life in the context of great evil. "Good" meant seeking out and attacking the problem. And when faced with genocide of that magnitude, there is no neutral answer. If you are not actively trying to prevent genocide then you are an accomplice in it.

Many of the evils that exist in the world are not done with the wholehearted support of all the people. Instead, you have a small minority of active people and a vast, apathetic mob who simply lets it happen.

That mob may not have the same level of guilt as someone who actively planned or participated in atrocities, but they aren't free of blame either.

"'Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no".

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Kish]

The Star Wars 'balance to the Force' and Dragonlance's version of true neutral are precisely those instances I am most familiar with, and consider adolescent and laughable.

The Star Wars prequel "Balance to the Force" is what you said.

("Why are the Jedi happy to find someone who will bring balance to the Force when obviously that means killing a lot of them and restoring the Sith to the status of a major power?" is an incorrect fan-interpretation; George Lucas was always clear that balance to the Force meant the permanent destruction of the Sith, which had nothing to do with mass slaughter of Jedi but which Anakin, eventually, accomplished by killing the Emperor and dying himself. Disney, wisely in my opinion, simply discarded the whole concept and acted like the prequel movies had never been.)

[littlebum2002]

I contend that the "neutral" person you describe is evil by omission, rather than evil by deliberate action. In the obvious 20th century historical example, most people were not active supporters of the Evil Empire but neither were they part of the resistance. They simply went about their lives and did nothing. They did not hurt anyone , but neither did they lift a finger to help the people going on the trains , and closed their eyes to the camps.

I would disagree, according to the definition of "Neutral" in D&D:

People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.

The Star Wars prequel "Balance to the Force" is what you said.

("Why are the Jedi happy to find someone who will bring balance to the Force when obviously that means killing a lot of them and restoring the Sith to the status of a major power?" is an incorrect fan-interpretation; George Lucas was always clear that balance to the Force meant the permanent destruction of the Sith, which had nothing to do with mass slaughter of Jedi but which Anakin, eventually, accomplished by killing the Emperor and dying himself. Disney, wisely in my opinion, simply discarded the whole concept and acted like the prequel movies had never been.)

I mean, it's pretty much a given that Disney is going to make boatloads of Star Wars movies since they're basically just a license to print money, so I wonder how long it will be before someone floats the idea of redoing the prequels.

[Kish]

That would be potentially awesome and I regret that I doubt it will ever happen.

[8BitNinja]

("Why are the Jedi happy to find someone who will bring balance to the Force when obviously that means killing a lot of them and restoring the Sith to the status of a major power?" is an incorrect fan-interpretation; George Lucas was always clear that balance to the Force meant the permanent destruction of the Sith, which had nothing to do with mass slaughter of Jedi but which Anakin, eventually, accomplished by killing the Emperor and dying himself. Disney, wisely in my opinion, simply discarded the whole concept and acted like the prequel movies had never been.)

This makes what Obi-Wan said in Revenge of the Sith make much more sense.

[Jasdoif]

That would be potentially awesome and I regret that I doubt it will ever happen.

I don't know...There've been a lot of remakes the last couple years; it's probably only a matter of time before the prequels get remade.

Remains potentially awesome, of course. Especially if that means the gist of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith get melded with key episodes of (3D) The Clone Wars to make another movie trilogy; that could sell way better than strict rehashing of the prequel movies...although I will admit I'm curious how retelling the prequels without Lucas' direct oversight would go.

[factotum]

In the obvious 20th century historical example, most people were not active supporters of the Evil Empire but neither were they part of the resistance. They simply went about their lives and did nothing. They did not hurt anyone , but neither did they lift a finger to help the people going on the trains , and closed their eyes to the camps.

And that makes them all Evil in your eyes? Got to say I think you're setting a rather low bar for what it means to be Evil there.

[littlebum2002]

I don't know...There've been a lot of remakes the last couple years; it's probably only a matter of time before the prequels get remade.

Remains potentially awesome, of course. Especially if that means the gist of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith get melded with key episodes of (3D) The Clone Wars to make another movie trilogy; that could sell way better than strict rehashing of the prequel movies...although I will admit I'm curious how retelling the prequels without Lucas' direct oversight would go.

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Let's look at the merits:

1) 3 movies means high box office potential
2) Star Wars means HUGE Box office potential
3) Movies that tell a story that lots of people want to hear, however
4) Movies were executed poorly

I mean, they literally have every ingredient that goes into a good remake. If I were Disney I'd have a clock on a wall ticking down the minutes until I had the rights to those movies to remake them.

[pendell]

And that makes them all Evil in your eyes? Got to say I think you're setting a rather low bar for what it means to be Evil there.

What D&D defines as "good" , "neutral", and "evil" I define as "good", "apathetic/evil by omission", and "deliberate evil/evil of commission" .

In the first category are those people like Roy, who deliberately resist evil and bring about the good. Who continued to fight Xykon even when Xykon offered to allow him to escape during the battle of Azure City.

These people who are willfully causing pain and trouble to the world are deliberate evil. Xykon is one. Kubota is another. Redcloak is a third, although he shades into the territory I'm talking about. That's the third category.

The second category is the vast majority who go along to get along. These people are neither villains or heroes. They're victims, but they're also the kind of person villains make into henchman. Like this guy from Game of Thrones, before he repented. Was a soldier. Kept his head down. Obeyed every order he received no matter how evil it was. "Burn that village". "Steal those crops". "Kill those children so they won't grow up to fight us". He'd do it all.

Because he was actually in the first category and not the second, he eventually had pangs of conscience and checked out of the entire system, went to building things rather than killing people. But a non-good person stifles those thoughts if he ever has them in the first place, shuts up and soldiers. They may not have specifically ordered farmers to be robbed or people to be killed, but because they've followed those orders without question, they are without question agents of evil, at least in the sense of making the world a more evil place.

Which brings up a second point -- we can't expect even good people to all be like Roy, because not all good people have double-digit class levels. A good level 1 expert can't be expected to confront a hobgoblin horde with a sword -- but he might be expected to, say, take a victim of same into his home for a season. Or put some portion of his work towards paying for healing services at the local temple, rather than working solely for his own profit. But to be good, he can't simply go along with the systemic evil in the world, Just Following Orders. He's got to, in some way, be going the extra mile to promote good or restrain evil.

If he doesn't do that ... if he just goes along to get along ... then he's just a henchman who hasn't been signed up yet.

Got to say I think you're setting a rather low bar for what it means to be Evil there.

Only because humans are caught up in systemic evil in almost every society. To keep things forum-safe, let's look at the societies of OOTS. Tarquin's Empire of Blood, obviously, has systemic evil. But Tarquin cannot manage this empire on his own. If not for the masses of ordinary people willing to follow orders and not rock the boat, his empire could not exist.

Greysky city has other problems. Even Azure City has a system in place which wages war on and exterminates nonhumans. And that's the only city we know of that's actually secretly run by Paladins. Far from confronting this evil, the Paladins were responsible for it.

And if that's a problem even among the lawful good Sapphire Guard, what hope has the rest of the world?

Systemic evil is a common feature of a lot of human societies, both in fiction and reality. The "neutral" outlook, in such a case, becomes an evil one because, since they are not resisting and opposing this evil, they are therefore an accomplice in it.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[littlebum2002]

What D&D defines as "good" , "neutral", and "evil" I define as "good", "apathetic/evil by omission", and "deliberate evil/evil of commission" .

"Evil by omission" is still "Evil", not "Neutral". People who are Neutral are, by definition, not Good or Evil.

I mean, you are free to make up your own definitions to the words "Good", "Neutral" and 'Evil", just please don't pretend those are the same definitions that are used in the D&D game. You don't have "Good" "Neutral" and "Evil", you have "Good" "Kinda Evil" and "Really Evil".

[Keltest]

"Evil by omission" is still "Evil", not "Neutral". People who are Neutral are, by definition, not Good or Evil.

I mean, you are free to make up your own definitions to the words "Good", "Neutral" and 'Evil", just please don't pretend those are the same definitions that are used in the D&D game. You don't have "Good" "Neutral" and "Evil", you have "Good" "Kinda Evil" and "Really Evil".

I agree. If your definition of "evil" is "not good" then, well, good for you I guess, but please do not insist that others adhere to your definitions, and understand that they are not shared by terribly many people in this conversation.

The whole point of neutral is to encompass the large group of people who are generally unwilling to deliberately antagonize other people if they can help it while also being unwilling to go out of their way to help others.

[factotum]

Yeah, I'm with those two--the Neutral alignment is not "kinda evil" or "evil by omission". By the same logic you could argue that someone who is Neutral is actually "good by omission", because they don't actively go around oppressing people and murdering infants for jollies.

The real issue with the D&D alignment system as applied to the Empire of Blood, of course, is that by the law of averages a third of the people in that society ought to be Good, so why aren't *they* speaking out? It beggars belief that the entire society consists of Neutral and Evil people, so if even the ones who are avowed Good don't speak out against the tyrannical government or attempt to overthrow it, why are the Neutral ones going to have a go at it?

[hamishspence]

The real issue with the D&D alignment system as applied to the Empire of Blood, of course, is that by the law of averages a third of the people in that society ought to be Good, so why aren't *they* speaking out? It beggars belief that the entire society consists of Neutral and Evil people, so if even the ones who are avowed Good don't speak out against the tyrannical government or attempt to overthrow it, why are the Neutral ones going to have a go at it?

It is possible that the 1/3 figure only applies to "normal" communities with no bias one way or another.

A community with an Evil power center and a moderately long period of influence by that power center, may end up with a much lower percentage being Good and a much higher percentage being Evil, than normal.

Fiendish Codex 2 gives an example of a LE-dominated society - where 90% of mortal souls can be expected to go to the 9 Hells after death.

[factotum]

We know the Empire of Blood and its antecedent LE governments have only existed for maybe 20 years, because Nale was a child in the flashback we saw of Tarquin escaping after his first effort at a continent-wide government failed. I really don't think that's long enough for every single Good person to have either died or been corrupted.

[hamishspence]

There's a third option - fleeing elsewhere.

There's going to be good people present in the kingdom - but the percentage is likely to be a lot lower than 1/3.

[Kish]

I don't think it's possible to really address pendell's long post without getting at the real-world political/religious assumptions that lead to Evil being a default which people struggle against to be Good, and it's not board-legal to address them, so here I am: posting just to say that I'm not posting. (But would generally prefer my silence not be seen as agreement or acquiescence on any level.)