need advice on playing lawful neutral

[Hardhead]

Um..you're misdefining neutral, what you're describing is LE. To quote the SRD:
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

By extrapolation, they probably also have compunctions about causing lesser harm; they just won't go out of their way to be helpful.

I think that's a fallacious extrapolation. They "lack the commitment to make sacrifices to help or protect others." If the CEO knwos that doing A boosts his stock but causes Bob the Midling to go bankrupt, the LN character will do A. He won't sacrifice his own wealth gain to help Bob the Midling. And he's working within the law, so he reasons that it's OK. After all, someone has to be the looser in capitalism.

Actually, that's NE. An LN CEO would certainly lay off workers if it would boost the bottom line, but will attempt to gain power within the normal structure of the company, rather than through external means (such as spreading lies), and doesn't have any special interest in crushing his opposition.

Yet the LN character might see it as part of the game of politics. Someone like Vetinari, the Patriarch of Ankh-Morpork is probably LN. He was a well-acomplished assassain before, (in a city where assassination is considered legal and regulated), and now he has no moral compunction doing in less-than-nice things, but does it all for the overall benefit of the city, the continuation of order, and views it all through the lens of someone playing a great game of chess. He doesn't want to hurt people, but he doesn't not want to hurt them, either. And he's VERY lawful. He's the iconic LN character in my mind.

Also, I don't think spreading lies makes someone "evil," unless it was framing them for murder or something.

 

[apsuman]

I don't know if this will help, or if it will just muddy the alignment waters but here goes...

I think of Lawful as loyalty to something else, a code or a group, while I think of Chaos as loyalty to self.

Chaotic people can have codes too but the focus of the codes has to be themselved.

I try to think of the loyal soldier as an example of LN. They follow orders. Good ones and evil ones. Their loyalty lies with their corps, or their general/admiral, or their family, or their clan.

g!

 

[Particle_Man]

Also, I don't think spreading lies makes someone "evil," unless it was framing them for murder or something.

Actually, lying would not really be that lawful. Lawful people keep their promises, tell the truth, etc. and thus avoid lying. Lying about the competition would be seen as breaking the basic rules that any society relies on (that others are telling the truth). Otherwise, communication would become ineffective, as no one would have reason to believe what anyone is saying. Thus, by good old fashioned Kantian rules (and Kant was a lawful real-world philosopher if ever there was one) lying is simply not on. In the real world, spreading lies about the competition can get one charged with slander or libel or false advertising. In other words, for breaking the law. Not lawful behaviour.

LE people would find ways around this, by "Technically" not lying, but implying things, leaving out information, etc. (the traditional deal with the devil tale is like this). LN people would not try to find ways around this. No double-dealing or going behind someone's back. Everything up front and honourable and by the rules. I think the samurai would fit in as LN. LG people might (might!) try to bend the laws if necessary to save lives, or in an emergency situation, but would be really stressed out about it.

Oh, and Veterinari from Discworld would be Neutral, in my books. He happens to like laws because he happens to be the boss. IMHO.

More generally, I sort of see the good-neutral-evil axis, as usually a help everyone in need vs. help your friends vs. help yourself deal. The law-neutral-chaos axis would be how you accomplish these aims. So a LN dude would help those he saw as his friends/family/in-group, and do so by lawful means. He would also likely have (lawful) ways of dealing with those in the out-group/not friends/outsiders.

It gets trickier when there are different sets of laws, but the LN person would be inclined to both have a personal code that they would want to follow in determining how they act, and be more willing to obey the local laws of the land. Where sets of laws conflict, the LN person would prefer it if there were an additional set of laws on how to deal with conflicts between different sets of laws (a UN or Geneva convention or something). They would be unhappy "winging it", but if forced to would fall back on their traditions, codes of honour, etc.

 

[AnthonyJ]

Also, I don't think spreading lies makes someone "evil," unless it was framing them for murder or something.

It's not, unless the lies are malicious and deliberately harmful. They're definately not lawful, however.

 

[roguerouge]

First off, alignment is relevant. Think of it as an exceptionally broad standard from which players have their character deviate. You can have that Neutral Evil character donate gifts to the orphanage, or the Lawful Neutral break a rule or two. But it's the quality of being an exception that gives such acts meaning. If the deviations become standard, however, your character is now operating within a different set of operating parameters.

By and large, I agree with Light Phoenix's description of LN, but it's one type of LN. There are others, of course, as I'm sure s/he would agree. (You'll note though that my language above indicates my belief that a predisposition towards mathematics and logic would be apt. Of course, ability with mathematics also tends to be paired with ability in music...) I have some other ideas that might add to, supplement, or complicate his depiction.

First, I would argue that anyone who describes a lawful character as having a personal code of anything is describing the operating parameters of a chaotic character. Lawfuls subsume their identity within a larger whole. They're the characters who would say, "My country, right or wrong." A modern analogy might be to think of true lawfuls as strict constructionists of the US constitution, a rule utilitarian or someone who regards the Bible as an instruction manual. (Lord, forgive me...) Basically, the idea is that you, the individual, do not have the knowledge or the ability to see the broad picture for what is best for society. So you follow a set of rules handed down by a trusted authority figure who does. This enormously simplifies your life. You don't have to figure out what the right law is; you have to figure out the intention of the Founding Fathers or Church hierarchy.

A true lawful might even find the notion of individual rights to be a foreign concept. A true lawful might see nothing wrong with charming or compelling someone after persuasion failed.

A true lawful might conceive of EVERYTHING as a contract. The PCs are bound by an implicit social contract. Promise to do something? A binding oral contract. A true lawful might do everything he says and exactly that and nothing more. A true lawful might feel that if the other party read something into his words, that was the other party's mistake, which he cannot be held accountable for. And if the other party fails to ask the right questions... well, it's only your lawful responsibility to provide the absolutely correct answers. Shade it to good or shade it to evil, these true lawfuls are the debaters and lawyers and lawyers of the party. A true lawful will always cite precedent.

A true lawful would likely be keenly aware of the relationships between party members and how they change. To him, the world might be essentially a web of relationships binding people together in various configurations. Some are more efficient than others and the closer people are bound together the better. His primary method of getting to know someone might be best described as a process of decoding them, finding out how they work, what their strengths/weaknesses are, their pressure tolerances, etc.

A true lawful could be completely amoral. He might not give a hoot about the fact that the demonic BBEG wants to make everyone evil. The fact that BBEG wants to end the world, would bother him greatly. (Demons are anarchists, you see.) True lawfuls could be the consummate nationalists, which might be the primary reason he's against the end of the world. From there, a persuasive party member might convince a true lawful of a great many things. The druid might convince him to become environmentalist because she persuaded him that to love your nation requires loving your land as well as its people. A true lawful might be perfectly willing to forcibly convert someone to the cause. He might also willing to commit random acts of kindness, because to him, they aren't random. It's an efficient use of resources to provide carrots as well as sticks.

A true lawful could have an incapacitating fear of oozes and filth, as they are the embodiment of chaos.

A true lawful might even have a hierarchy of principles to resolve conflicts efficiently. As a player, figure out what organization defines him and a few basic and unalterable rules of behavior. Violate them rarely and only for dramatic effect.

If ending slavery is the end that justifies the means, figure out what means are always already a part of the ends. If ending slavery is the goal, what authority told this character that it was a justifiable one? A True lawful doesn't end slavery because he believes that slavery is wrong or because it corrupts both its victims and its masters. True lawfuls would fight slavery because an appropriate authority told them to, because slavers had disrupted the natural order of society, or because slavery harmed the (national, clerical, business) institution the true lawful was a part of.

Is this type of character nice? No. Is he a good party member? Yes. He has his priorities straight.

roguerouge

 

[Norfleet]

My iconic LN characters happen to be Inspector Javier from Les Miserables and Judge Dredd. For these guys, law and order is everything. Good and evil are entirely irrelevant to them, only the letter of the law matters.

A character that merely has a self-imposed code of honor he always adheres to isn't necessarily lawful: In order for it to be considered lawful, the code that a character adheres to should be external to the character: He follows it because it's the code of his order, a tradition, etc. The fact that the character may have a very rigid pattern of behavior which isn't part of any tradition is simply a collateral side effect from the way he thinks about rules: The lawful character is fixated on rules for things, so if there isn't a general, externally imposed rule for it, he's likely to impose one on himself if he feels the need for it: However, this is more collateral damage, than actual lawfulness: A character who simply has a bunch of personal rules is just obsessive-compulsive, not lawful neutral.