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

[jmartkdr2]

I can think of three kinds of True Neutral:

Unaligned: your motivations don't really qualify as good, evil, lawful, or chaotic. The 4e version usually specifies that this mostly applies to beasts and other creatures that just don't have the mental capacity to moralize, though I might also apply it to the chronically despirate.

Intentionally TN: someone who tries to keep themsleves in balance between good and evil, and between law and chaos. A druid or cleric could well fall into this category.

Incidentally TN: when added up, your actions put you squarely in the middle of the chart. Probably common among non-adventurers who don't often do things that are very anything, or people who are very pro-ingroup and anti-outgroup.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I can think of three kinds of True Neutral:

Unaligned: your motivations don't really qualify as good, evil, lawful, or chaotic. The 4e version usually specifies that this mostly applies to beasts and other creatures that just don't have the mental capacity to moralize, though I might also apply it to the chronically despirate.

Intentionally TN: someone who tries to keep themsleves in balance between good and evil, and between law and chaos. A druid or cleric could well fall into this category.

Incidentally TN: when added up, your actions put you squarely in the middle of the chart. Probably common among non-adventurers who don't often do things that are very anything, or people who are very pro-ingroup and anti-outgroup.

Right. And these are all quite different things, yet the alignment cannot tell us this.

 

[payn]

Right. And these are all quite different things, yet the alignment cannot tell us this.

jmartkdr2 just told you how alignment tells you.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

jmartkdr2 just told you how alignment tells you.

It doesn’t. It can’t differentiate between the three types.

 

[payn]

It doesn’t. It can’t differentiate between the three types.

It doesnt need to. That distinction is up to the player and/or GM.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It doesnt need to. That distinction is up to the player and/or GM.

It is complexly different thing whether a creature is obsessed with maintaining balance in all things or just doesn't care, or is incapable of making moral choices, and I would want to know which it is but the alignment doesn't tell me. It is a crap way to convey information.

 

[payn]

It is complexly different thing whether a creature is obsessed with maintaining balance in all things or just doesn't care, or is incapable of making moral choices, and I would want to know which it is but the alignment doesn't tell me. It is a crap way to convey information.

I have never seen an RPG system that can inform to that level of context. I still find it strange there is this expectation of alignment to be some kind of Myer Briggs test or its of no value.

 

[Celebrim]

I can think of three kinds of True Neutral:

Unaligned: your motivations don't really qualify as good, evil, lawful, or chaotic. The 4e version usually specifies that this mostly applies to beasts and other creatures that just don't have the mental capacity to moralize, though I might also apply it to the chronically desperate.

Intentionally TN: someone who tries to keep themselves in balance between good and evil, and between law and chaos. A druid or cleric could well fall into this category.

Incidentally TN: when added up, your actions put you squarely in the middle of the chart. Probably common among non-adventurers who don't often do things that are very anything, or people who are very pro-ingroup and anti-outgroup.

I think the only real distinction between those three things is how you conceptualize your alignment. From the standpoint of the universe - perhaps some incarnated representation of balance - all of those are fine distinctions that don't amount to much. They do change how you conceive and play the character, but there are a lot of different ways of being within each of the alignments. Indeed, it's possible to be within the same alignment and be in conflict with someone else in the same alignment for a variety of reasons.

I point back to my comment on how character with different amounts of INT and WIS invariably view alignment differently. Low INT characters are not going to verbalize, describe, and conceptualize their alignment well. They won't feel the need for a systematic philosophical description of what they believe. They are going to be more likely to view their behavior in terms of what you call "intentionality", where they mentally examine their own beliefs and work out algorithmically what they feel they ought to do in a situation. This is true of every alignment, including ones like Chaotic Neutral. A high INT CN you would expect to have a worked-out philosophy to defend their choice of being a self-willed and self-determined being, whereas at low INT CN they are just acting on impulse and whim to satisfy their own desires and this amounts to the same thing just with less verbiage.

But that "intellectuality" of alignment is just one of many things that can create variation in a character of a particular alignment that alignment itself does not attempt to answer. It's not a one stop shop for finding out everything about a character. It tells us something important about their most deeply held beliefs, but it doesn't tell us everything about those beliefs, how they rationalize their beliefs, how self-aware they are of their own beliefs, or exactly how they codify those beliefs. For example, imagine two Lawful Evil characters, one sworn to the service of a member of a tyrannical hierarchy who rules an empire and the other who is a leader in an organized crime family acting within that community. Both fundamentally believe the same things, and both would understand and perhaps even respect the other. Both believe the needs of the group are more important than the needs of the individual. Both believe that they are bound by external codes of honor that they must follow even when it would seem impractical or go against their own impulses. Both believe that there is no good but holding power ruthlessly in order to protect your in group from those that are doing the same. Both believe that strength comes from pain and overcoming pain. And they would both despise self-indulgence, lack of self-control, weakness, dishonorable conduct, betrayal, and mercy as vices to be avoided. But they would have differences in what they believed their code of honor demanded of them and to whom they were sworn to be loyal that would almost invariably leave them enemies. Alignment can't possibly describe all the details of an individual's belief system, and it's left to the individual player and GM to work out within the broad framework provided what the nitty gritty details are.

 

[Celebrim]

You mean re: Chaos-Nature connection? I think it's something a lot of fantasy fiction has considered, unfortunately none that I'd recommend really makes it a central point. Miles Cameron's Traitor Son series (starting with The Red Knight) makes it a core point = Law = Civilization/Safety/Sanity, Chaos = Nature/Risk/Instinct, but I didn't really enjoy those (and only read the first and part of the second), so can't endorse them.

D&D has touched on it at times, but has been utterly hamstrung by the boneheaded and nonsensical "Druids = True Neutral balance-keepers" bad idea from back in the day (where on Earth they got that from I do not know). Also a lot of authors can't really handle the ambiguity so end up leaning excessively to one side or another, which makes the conflict boring or even stifling.

Whether you identify nature with chaos or nature with balance is a really interesting choice I think you'll need to make at the time of campaign start. Different human philosophies have over the centuries made both identifications. If you identify nature with balance, then the inner life of animals is probably a lot like Kipling's "Jungle Book" or Disney's "The Lion King", where their lives are governed not just by their instincts but by universals laws that all animals recognize. Different animals can become out of balance, like Sher Khan and the Red Dogs, but largely we see animals inner reasoning as agents of nature who understand the necessity of the food web and the ecosystem and are who acting to keep it in balance according to their role in "The Circle of Life". Animals in this conception are mostly "Neutral" aligned.

Whereas if you identify nature with chaos, then animals are pure creatures of instinct and impulse each acting according to its own savage whim. Animals in this conception are mostly "Chaotic Neutral". This is nature at its most red in tooth and claw, and civilization as the balancing power that brings order to a savage world - but whose triumph might threaten to unbalance the world in the other direction.

 

[Celebrim]

I have never seen an RPG system that can inform to that level of context. I still find it strange there is this expectation of alignment to be some kind of Myer Briggs test or its of no value.

Not only that, but the 4 axis of a Brigg-Meyer test are each describing something tangential to alignment. We could imagine each of the 16 Briggs-Meyer types as each of the 9 alignments. "My character is a NG-INTJ"? And again, since Brigg-Meyer only analyzes 4 axis of a personality, we could imagine a lot of variation in the personality of people within the Brigg-Meyer space some of which would independent spaces which would not map to any set of B-M spaces and some of which would be strongly correlated to one or more combinations of personality types.

And of course, as a descriptor of personality B-M probably has even more short comings than alignment has as a descriptor of moral and ethical philosophy. We could make a number of valid criticisms of the approach, starting with one of the same criticisms we could make of alignment - it describes a person's self-conception and not who they actually are or how they are actually perceived by others. We would expect low Wisdom characters to broadly err when assigned self-description tasks because high Wisdom is required to self-perceive. And of course there are many other problems, including some that parallel questions about D&D's two axis system - are the axis really independent and not correlated? But any short-hand is probably going to have limitations when describing something so complex, but at the same time short-hand is very useful for communicating from the character creator to the one tasked with animating the character a framework for how the character is expected to think and behave. Or at least, I can't think of a better system than using some sort of shorthand if the goal is to communicate consistently and tersely.