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Which type of True Neutral are you?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9311048" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>True Neutral as balance-keeper is like, the dumbest thing on the planet.</p><p></p><p>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).</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9311048, member: 18"] 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. 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). [/QUOTE]
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