D&D General Which type of True Neutral are you?

[Celebrim]

In the Galactic Civilizations games, there actually are three alignment poles, but the third isn't called "Neutral." You have Benevolent, Malevolent, and Pragmatic.

Pragmaticism as a moral philosophy tends toward neutrality. However, note that merely describing yourself as pragmatic is no guarantee at all that you are. For example, if you think it is pragmatic to wipe out all other sentient life before they get a chance to wipe you out, then you are malevolent and pragmaticism is part of your intellectual justification for your beliefs. The true pragmatist would point out that the most likely result of such extremist views is everyone else banding against you or the biggest most advanced civilization in the area deciding you are a problem that needs solving.

 

[payn]

I've long enjoyed the discussions on true neutral. If you think about it, its the absolute worst alignment for an adventurer. A TN individual just wants to go about their business. Occasionally, they have to get off the fence and make a decision, but they put it off until then. So, naturally folks start gravitating towards warden of neutrality in both evil and good measure or commits equally extreme good and evil acts to balance their alignment accounting sheet. Folks gravitate towards these archetypes because they are actually motivated, but dont really make sense for the alignment. A hack I think is what the kids call it.

 

[Celebrim]

I've long enjoyed the discussions on true neutral. If you think about it, its the absolute worst alignment for an adventurer. A TN individual just wants to go about their business. Occasionally, they have to get off the fence and make a decision, but they put it off until then. So, naturally folks start gravitating towards warden of neutrality in both evil and good measure or commits equally extreme good and evil acts to balance their alignment accounting sheet. Folks gravitate towards these archetypes because they are actually motivated, but don't really make sense for the alignment. A hack I think is what the kids call it.

Low intellectuality True Neutral as I conceive it just wants to be left alone to go about its affairs without taking any extreme risks. High intellectuality True Neutral tends to be motivated towards the practice of detachment and indifference to the changes of the world. So you would expect true neutral to be pretty rare in an adventurer, precisely because heroism or villainy or whatever is a pretty extreme response to the problems of the world. The first response of a true neutral is always, "Sure there are problems, but why should I get involved in them?" Or maybe at a more intellectual level, "All the problems are being caused by people who are confident that they can fix the problems. The collective desire to fix the world is the source of the evils you want to fix." This is precisely what you'd expect of someone who takes detachment, indifference, and stoic endurance as the highest virtue.

 

[Umbran]

Or is that what Neutrality and the agents of “The Balance” want you to believe?

Couldn’t you say Mordenkainen’s agenda is no less ideological than the schemes of Asmodeus or the meddling of Paladine?

It is ideological. It is not a separate pole from the other ideologies. It is only defined with respect to the others, and cannot exist without them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"What makes a man turn neutral?" -Zapp Brannigan

Lust for gold, for me.

Seriously though, I've always thought of the, "everything in balance" type as True Neutral, and the "I don't really think about this stuff, and most just care things that affect me and my loved ones" as Unaligned, like in 4e. Most people are Unaligned IMO.

Of course, I also think alignment works best in a "Who's team do you support?" fashion anyway, like in B/X and its derivatives.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What about if you're just complex and conflicted like a real person, and as the alignment system cannot handle that, you end up reading as neutral. Like if you're a super organised anarchist or something. Lawful or chaotic? Has strong traits of both, so they cancel out, so neutral...

 

[payn]

What about if you're just complex and conflicted like a real person, and as the alignment system cannot handle that, you end up reading as neutral. Like if you're a super organised anarchist or something. Lawful or chaotic?

Potentially. Alignment doesnt stop people from being complex. Being organized doesnt forbid you from being chaotic. I believe you are getting too bogged down into the minute details of a personality and how it maps to alignment.

Has strong traits of both, so they cancel out, so neutral...

Yes. If you are as likely to do something good as you are evil, you are in between and neutral.

 

[Umbran]

What about if you're just complex and conflicted like a real person, and as the alignment system cannot handle that, you end up reading as neutral. Like if you're a super organised anarchist or something. Lawful or chaotic?

So, I get that the organized anarchist would read as neutral, at least until their anarchy had real impact (personal organization will be small in comparison to, say, destroying a rigidly controlled government).

But... the organized anarchist isn't conflicted. The organization is personal, anarchy is about governmental forms. They coexist without conflict.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So, I get that the organized anarchist would read as neutral, at least until their anarchy had real impact (personal organization will be small in comparison to, say, destroying a rigidly controlled government).

But... the organized anarchist isn't conflicted. Organization is personal, anarchy is about governmental forms. They coexist without conflict.

Yes, in the real life, not in an alignment system.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What do you think? Does being neutral mean partaking of either extreme in relatively equal measures, or does it mean avoiding them?

True Neutral as balance-keeper is like, the dumbest thing on the planet.

It only really works in single-axis alignment system where Good and Evil aren't an axis, and both Lawful and Chaotic are powerful forces which essentially seek the destruction of the world, and even then it's kind of laughable (hence the wonderful joke referenced in the OP).

4E got a lot wrong about alignment (let's not even start) but it did one think spectacularly right - it put in a valid alignment of "Unaligned" - i.e. you weren't pushing any specific Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos, you just were nice to people you cared about and like, and maybe mean or uncaring to people who you didn't like. Which, realistically, is like how about 60% of adventurers actually act - the rest who don't are exceptional.

Druids as True Neutral was particularly dumb, because the associations between "Chaos" and nature in mythology and fiction are infinitely stronger than those between Law and nature. And they should have been disregarding Good and Evil, not trying to achieve a balance - it just never made any sense at all for their ethos. They should have been a whole different kind of CN or something - like "protect nature = primary directive". This is assuming you go with D&D's nature-focused Druids, which are very much a D&D invention.

So, I get that the organized anarchist would read as neutral, at least until their anarchy had real impact (personal organization will be small in comparison to, say, destroying a rigidly controlled government).

But... the organized anarchist isn't conflicted. The organization is personal, anarchy is about governmental forms. They coexist without conflict.

Also anarchism is not necessarily Chaotic - a lot of anarchistic thought actually promotes quite rigid standards of expected behaviour in order to make anarchism work. It's about destroying hierarchy rather than destroying order. You can have extremely elaborate hierarchies that are very disorderly and chaotic in their real function.

One of the big problems with Law/Chaos though is that it doesn't map as well as one might think from literary fiction and mythology to actually working in games, let alone mapping to how people think (rather than to characters in novels). For my English A-Level, I wrote a lot about Law & Chaos and how they've been expressed in different forms of literature through the ages - I compared Moorcock to Bronte's Wuthering Heights for example, and both to classical Greek ideas of Nomos and Physis - and I think there's a connection that Moorcock kind of overlooks but Bronte doesn't between Chaos/Physis (the classical Greek more literal word "Khaos" is a very different thing/being more similar to "nothingness") and nature. But it interested me that Moorcock and Bronte used a lot of similar fire/brass/darkness imagery re: Moorcock's literal forces of Chaos and the dwelling of the Earnshaws, and likewise there's similarity with the imagery around the Lintons.

Anyway, I'm getting off-track - point is - Chaos and Order are difficult to make terribly compelling in the very abstract way they're used by most games (and I'd argue Moorcock isn't entirely successful in this either).