The 1 and the Prime
First Post
There is no such thing as "neutral survivalist"! Or, if there is, everyone is that. Everyone thinks what they are doing in fact does maximize their survival. Just some people think the best way to do that is to rely on others to help when they can and thus help others in order to make sure they will be around to help oneself; others could view people as threats and expect other persons to view themselves as a threat, therefore encouraging aggression. This is what was being pointed out by Celebrim in the "Player vs. DM mentality" thread when he suggested the OP was not giving his players meaningful allies: the reason to be good is that in the future you could possibly eventually get (meaningful) help from the people you are helping presently.
Likewise, some think that methodical consideration and logical deduction are the best methods of deciding on actions, while others are more willing to experiment and let the chips fall where they may. Neither is necessarily correct; there is an implicit trade off between time spent accomplishing stuff and time spent thinking about accomplishing stuff. The "correct" balance in this dichotomy is as important and metaphysically unknowable as the "correct" balance of altruism and selfishness; just as it is always possible that you could "get away with it" when doing something bad, there is always some possibility that thinking about something a little longer will reveal that what you're about to do is wrong. This addresses some arguments made in the month and a half old "Why Did They Get Rid of the Law & Chaos Alignment?" thread and answers many criticisms leveled in the early 2009 "Good/Evil vs. Law/Chaos" thread.
So with that said, here is an explanation of the eight cardinal 1e alignments:
As pointed out above, alignment is the reaction to the survivalist instinct. So, in order to describe the alignments, I need a dictum from the survivalist instinct to which the alignments will react. In composition of this essay, my mind has focused on "go to the top of a mountain" as a reasonably arbitrary example. But to be more concrete: The king is ordering the character to go to the top of a mountain OR ELSE!
So let's start with the somewhat obvious. The lawful neutral person goes to the top of the most suitable nearby mountain. Law is about taking what the universe hands you and going with it, following the dictums of life as you see it in the most direct way possible. Moreover, when acting with absolute order, a character is injecting nothing into the universe, he is allowing the inertia of the universe to move through himself. When it is unclear how to act, the lawful person is pulled toward either good or evil depending on their level of trust. Certainty is what distinguishes Law in absolute from Lawful Good or Lawful Evil (a very certain LE guy is practically LN, similarly for a very certain LG guy; Dr. Manhattan as an example of sliding to LN from LG due to [absolute godlike] certainty).
From here, evil is a little more straightforward, so let's head that way before coming back and doing good.
The lawful evil guy looks at the order and thinks to himself "the King has no jurisdiction to do this, I am technically the property of Baron XYZ who is the only person that legally can order me around, although he'd better not do that or I'll tell the world about his big black pecadillos," Lawful evil fastidiously protects himself from interference from others, and thus doesn't care about what others want. However, in fastidiously protecting himself thus, he is forced to undertake certain actions and must bow to the will of the Universe in this way.
The neutral evil guy looks at the order and thinks to himself "the king is ordering me around?! I'll kill him!" The neutral evil guy kills everything that gets in his way. Note the distinction between this and lawful evil: the neutral evil guy is attempting to kill the other thing, not protect himself from its effects. He himself may die in the process of the attempt at killing the other thing. This isn't necessarily less survival oriented: he doesn't have to see the situation coming a mile away to prep for it, he is more able to deal with situations as they arise.
The chaotic evil guy hires someone to rig up a dummy on top of the mountain so it looks like someone wearing his clothes is waving from the top. The chaotic evil person doesn't care about anything but himself, but will deceive sometimes at least. They are unpredictable, and while they might genuinely mean the comforting things they say while saying them, they have no respect for honesty or consistency and will turn on a whim. Note this disregard may come back to bite him in the ass when the king sends up a message saying he needs the guy to collect a rare flower from the top of the mountain. Now he's gotta fake a rare flower.
Now for the good. The lawful good guy is bound to his code. If it is right to go up the mountain, he will go. However if it is not right to go up the mountain at the behest of the king, he will not. This is not necessarily detrimental to the lawful good person's survival, indeed it may be detrimental for him to go up the mountain if his personal code is correct, and detrimental to the health of the king if the king were to succeed in getting the lawful good guy up the mountain. Like the lawful evil guy, he is bound to a set of behavior that is externally dictated by the Universe and fastidiously upholds that code as fastidiously as the lawful evil guy protects himself. The lawful good guy of course sees this upholding of his code as self interest. The main difference is that the lawful good code is humanistically encompassing while the disciplined fastidiousness of lawful evil is self focused.
The neutral good guy asks what the king really is after, and when he finds out he needs an extract of a rare flower to revive his entranced loved one he packs up the vial of espressisimo he acquired last month on his jaunt to the elemental plane of caffeine and sends it to the King. The neutral good guy is the guy that is most willing to acquiesce to the wishes of others, albeit in a way that is convenient for himself as well. He would also be the most willing to ask for something in return, even if that is only an immaterial understanding that is he "owed one" until he can call in a favor.
The chaotic good guy goes looking for a high mountain. When he climbs it he notices an even higher mountain, and promptly climbs down to go and scale that mountain. A similar thing happens three more times after he scales the second mountain. The result is that while most of the time he is not actually on top of a mountain, when he is actually on top of a mountain he is on top of a very tall mountain (assume here that tall is equivalent to mountain-iness). Similar to the chaotic evil guy, he is somewhat unreliable in his accomplishment of the directive. However, in contradistinction to chaotic evil, he is trying to do what is asked of him (and sometimes spectacularly succeeding) as opposed to just BSing. He also might expect a reward of some kind, in abstract, but wouldn't think to ask for it.
This leaves the least obviously interpreted alignment: chaotic neutral. The chaotic neutral guy has never heard of a "mountain" and assumed the King must have misspelled "mountinn" which is of course a contraction of the words "mount" and "inn". Being aware of stables but not proper inns for mounts he sets about designing and building his own multi-story building which resembles a set of stables except with a second and third floor equipped with divided stalls for animals rather than bedchambers. At completion he stands atop his creation. Unexpectedly the King is not upset at this result, but rather sees potential for a resolution to the horrendous traffic congestion in his capital city through the development of the medieval fantasy equivalent of parking structures. The chaotic neutral guy is kinda nuts. Somewhere between Meatwad and Dr. Weird depending on intellectual firepower. He wants to obey the directive, but can't for some reason, although this doesn't guarantee a bad thing will happen, sometimes really good stuff happens. As CE and CG become less and less reliable and more whimsical, they revert to CN.
The Cast of Star Wars
Lawful Neutral: Beru and Owen Lars.
Lawful Evil: Palpantine (as portrayed in the prequels mostly). He has a fastidiously constructed plan (however poorly written by Lucas) which he executes.
Neutral Evil: Vader. 'Nuff said.
Chaotic Evil: Jabba. He doesn't get a lot of screen time, but his double dealings and willingness to turn on his allies mark him as chaotic. Vader will kill you when you screw up, Jabba will kill you when he's bored. Jabba also has no respect for truth. For example: changing Chewbacca's bounty after Leia brings him in.
Lawful Good: Leia. I think 'nuff said.
Neutral Good: Han. Yeah, he's not chaotic good. He's actually more reliable than Luke, who takes off to Dagobagh for three quarters of a movie while everyone else gets jacked. The only time he is MIA is when he is frozen in carbonite.
Chaotic Good: Luke. Guy can't do anything competently for a while, then he's mister clutch all of a sudden. Half the time he's got his head up his ass thinking about bullseyeing womprats in his speeder, the other half he is blowing up the Death Star.
Chaotic Neutral: Maybe C-3PO. He inadvertantly sets off the whole New Hope by convincing Luke to purchase himself and R2.
Characters from The Wire
Lawful Neutral: Ervin Burrell. THE careerist bureaucrat.
Lawful Evil: Stringer Bell. This guy is the brains of the drug operation and is responsible for the design of all the protective anti-eavesdropping countermeasures used on the Street. Very LE.
Neutral Evil: Avon Barksdale. He'll kill you.
Chaotic Evil: Kenard. It is hard to find a single character which embodies the chaotic evil surrounding The Wire. The Wire is really a story about how the other alignments exist within a chaotic evil backdrop of street hustlers and thugs (and apathetic passive bigotry). In Bodymore, Murdaland chaos doesn't allow one to rise far in the ranks, but that doesn't mean it is any less powerful (indeed, the chaotic whims of the Baltimore voters is what preserves the drug war responsible for the tragedy of the show; arguably this is the most powerful force in that universe, although it is not focused through a single character). Kenard embodies the malicious mischief that is chaotic evil (at one point he is seen preparing to set a cat on fire). Kenard likes to do hoodrat stuff with his friends 'cause it's fun to do bad things. This street urchin is the incipient thug. He will either flame out or moderate himself to Neutral Evil in order to survive. Either way, his actions in the series conclusion guarantee a meteoric rise (fall?) through the Bodymore underworld. A close runner-up is the oldest character, Valchek, whose cruelty and political dealings (e.g. his escalation of conflict with the Union in season 2, opposition to Hamsterdam) represent the conservative malicious whim responsible for the tragedy of the show.
Lawful Good: Omar Little. "A Man's Gotta Have a Code." Only guy in Bodymore that doesn't swear. 'Nuff said. For those of you who didn't watch the show, Omar is the biggest badass in Bodymore. He robs drug stashes for a living and walks the streets in a bullet proof vest carrying his DE .50cal, sending waves of street thugs fleeing before him calling "Omar comin'," Despite the regular necessity of killing in his line of work, his most brutal on screen action was his stabbing of another character in the anus. Not the standard boring paladin. He lives by a code and never kills innocents or unnecessarily. Cederic Daniels is more the standard paladin.
Neutral Good: Lester Freeman. Lester is the guy who will contemplate an issue until he knows precisely when and where to act. He also takes the opportunity to hook up with the young stripper who was a witness in one of his cases. Lester might have been CG before getting busted down to the evidence locker for doing whatever he did. Bunny Colvin is a close second as a NG exemplar.
Chaotic Good: McNulty. Sometimes the guy is a complete mess with the alcoholism and such. Other times he is solving the whole case. Does kind things on whims without much thought to their ultimate consequence similar to Kenard's whimsical maliciousness. Constantly getting into conflict, especially with Cederic Daniels, because of the whimsical goodness.
Chaotic Neutral: Prez. Guy is a basket case pretty much, although he does crack Stringer Bell's telephone code allowing the case to come in. Bubbles maybe also, if he was more representative of a dysfunctional crackhead instead of like Crackhead Buddha.
Falling
A LG character can fall down the law side by becoming too convinced of his beliefs. He may passively ignore the incongruities that will necessarily invade his (mortal and therefore imperfect) understanding of what is right. He could respond to this with "the benefit of the doubt" in which case he will stay LG. However, if he responds with annoyance and belligerence that "they just don't get it: they are wrong" he will slide further. If he reaches the point of resentment when his predicted negative effects do not result for those whom break the code he believes in, it is only a matter of time before he ends up unable to trust good can come of anything. This is the path Gandolf was afraid he would follow if he were to take The Ring.
A CG character can fall down the chaotic side by exploring too far. As the new spectacular discoveries draw them in further, they discover something they totally did not expect, something bad. This spooks them, and in their erratic flailing, more bad stuff could happen. This leads to mistrust and fear, moments of mania when things appear not so bad interspersed with erratic lashing out. Eventually they give up in disgust and no longer can trust anything. This is the path Galadriel was afraid of taking if she wore The Ring.
A Word About Ozymandias
Ozymandius is difficult to classify in alignment because he practically has no ethical decisions to make. He is almost as godlike as Dr. Manhattan and is similarly alien to our moral universe. He is beyond peer, beyond ever possibly being in a position to need help from one of the humans he is "helping" in his plan nor could one of the humans he kills in his plan ever potentially pose threat to him. If there were peers to his superhumanity (and his absolute physical dominance if not superiority over all other watchmen except Dr. Manhattan is demonstrated) then his actions towards them could be judged. As is, he could be some super-powerful spectator, motivating his love of humanity through what is essentially entertainment value. He demonstrates no trust nor any mistrust. However, that he engages in this whimsical exercise with lesser beings at all does suggest a leaning towards chaos. That said, you could argue that Ozymandias is not as powerful as I perceive him to be and that the sum total of humanity does in fact present him with a viable peer, in which case his actions would lean towards the good and negate the premise of my argument for a chaotic leaning.
In Conclusion:
The Law end of the alignment axis reacts to the universe that is generated by the whimsical actions of the Chaos end. This is not unbalanced; there is a trade off between the two: nothing ventured is nothing gained. Good and Evil is the degree of altruism the character thinks is in his (broadly conceived) self interest.
Likewise, some think that methodical consideration and logical deduction are the best methods of deciding on actions, while others are more willing to experiment and let the chips fall where they may. Neither is necessarily correct; there is an implicit trade off between time spent accomplishing stuff and time spent thinking about accomplishing stuff. The "correct" balance in this dichotomy is as important and metaphysically unknowable as the "correct" balance of altruism and selfishness; just as it is always possible that you could "get away with it" when doing something bad, there is always some possibility that thinking about something a little longer will reveal that what you're about to do is wrong. This addresses some arguments made in the month and a half old "Why Did They Get Rid of the Law & Chaos Alignment?" thread and answers many criticisms leveled in the early 2009 "Good/Evil vs. Law/Chaos" thread.
So with that said, here is an explanation of the eight cardinal 1e alignments:
As pointed out above, alignment is the reaction to the survivalist instinct. So, in order to describe the alignments, I need a dictum from the survivalist instinct to which the alignments will react. In composition of this essay, my mind has focused on "go to the top of a mountain" as a reasonably arbitrary example. But to be more concrete: The king is ordering the character to go to the top of a mountain OR ELSE!
So let's start with the somewhat obvious. The lawful neutral person goes to the top of the most suitable nearby mountain. Law is about taking what the universe hands you and going with it, following the dictums of life as you see it in the most direct way possible. Moreover, when acting with absolute order, a character is injecting nothing into the universe, he is allowing the inertia of the universe to move through himself. When it is unclear how to act, the lawful person is pulled toward either good or evil depending on their level of trust. Certainty is what distinguishes Law in absolute from Lawful Good or Lawful Evil (a very certain LE guy is practically LN, similarly for a very certain LG guy; Dr. Manhattan as an example of sliding to LN from LG due to [absolute godlike] certainty).
From here, evil is a little more straightforward, so let's head that way before coming back and doing good.
The lawful evil guy looks at the order and thinks to himself "the King has no jurisdiction to do this, I am technically the property of Baron XYZ who is the only person that legally can order me around, although he'd better not do that or I'll tell the world about his big black pecadillos," Lawful evil fastidiously protects himself from interference from others, and thus doesn't care about what others want. However, in fastidiously protecting himself thus, he is forced to undertake certain actions and must bow to the will of the Universe in this way.
The neutral evil guy looks at the order and thinks to himself "the king is ordering me around?! I'll kill him!" The neutral evil guy kills everything that gets in his way. Note the distinction between this and lawful evil: the neutral evil guy is attempting to kill the other thing, not protect himself from its effects. He himself may die in the process of the attempt at killing the other thing. This isn't necessarily less survival oriented: he doesn't have to see the situation coming a mile away to prep for it, he is more able to deal with situations as they arise.
The chaotic evil guy hires someone to rig up a dummy on top of the mountain so it looks like someone wearing his clothes is waving from the top. The chaotic evil person doesn't care about anything but himself, but will deceive sometimes at least. They are unpredictable, and while they might genuinely mean the comforting things they say while saying them, they have no respect for honesty or consistency and will turn on a whim. Note this disregard may come back to bite him in the ass when the king sends up a message saying he needs the guy to collect a rare flower from the top of the mountain. Now he's gotta fake a rare flower.
Now for the good. The lawful good guy is bound to his code. If it is right to go up the mountain, he will go. However if it is not right to go up the mountain at the behest of the king, he will not. This is not necessarily detrimental to the lawful good person's survival, indeed it may be detrimental for him to go up the mountain if his personal code is correct, and detrimental to the health of the king if the king were to succeed in getting the lawful good guy up the mountain. Like the lawful evil guy, he is bound to a set of behavior that is externally dictated by the Universe and fastidiously upholds that code as fastidiously as the lawful evil guy protects himself. The lawful good guy of course sees this upholding of his code as self interest. The main difference is that the lawful good code is humanistically encompassing while the disciplined fastidiousness of lawful evil is self focused.
The neutral good guy asks what the king really is after, and when he finds out he needs an extract of a rare flower to revive his entranced loved one he packs up the vial of espressisimo he acquired last month on his jaunt to the elemental plane of caffeine and sends it to the King. The neutral good guy is the guy that is most willing to acquiesce to the wishes of others, albeit in a way that is convenient for himself as well. He would also be the most willing to ask for something in return, even if that is only an immaterial understanding that is he "owed one" until he can call in a favor.
The chaotic good guy goes looking for a high mountain. When he climbs it he notices an even higher mountain, and promptly climbs down to go and scale that mountain. A similar thing happens three more times after he scales the second mountain. The result is that while most of the time he is not actually on top of a mountain, when he is actually on top of a mountain he is on top of a very tall mountain (assume here that tall is equivalent to mountain-iness). Similar to the chaotic evil guy, he is somewhat unreliable in his accomplishment of the directive. However, in contradistinction to chaotic evil, he is trying to do what is asked of him (and sometimes spectacularly succeeding) as opposed to just BSing. He also might expect a reward of some kind, in abstract, but wouldn't think to ask for it.
This leaves the least obviously interpreted alignment: chaotic neutral. The chaotic neutral guy has never heard of a "mountain" and assumed the King must have misspelled "mountinn" which is of course a contraction of the words "mount" and "inn". Being aware of stables but not proper inns for mounts he sets about designing and building his own multi-story building which resembles a set of stables except with a second and third floor equipped with divided stalls for animals rather than bedchambers. At completion he stands atop his creation. Unexpectedly the King is not upset at this result, but rather sees potential for a resolution to the horrendous traffic congestion in his capital city through the development of the medieval fantasy equivalent of parking structures. The chaotic neutral guy is kinda nuts. Somewhere between Meatwad and Dr. Weird depending on intellectual firepower. He wants to obey the directive, but can't for some reason, although this doesn't guarantee a bad thing will happen, sometimes really good stuff happens. As CE and CG become less and less reliable and more whimsical, they revert to CN.
The Cast of Star Wars
Lawful Neutral: Beru and Owen Lars.
Lawful Evil: Palpantine (as portrayed in the prequels mostly). He has a fastidiously constructed plan (however poorly written by Lucas) which he executes.
Neutral Evil: Vader. 'Nuff said.
Chaotic Evil: Jabba. He doesn't get a lot of screen time, but his double dealings and willingness to turn on his allies mark him as chaotic. Vader will kill you when you screw up, Jabba will kill you when he's bored. Jabba also has no respect for truth. For example: changing Chewbacca's bounty after Leia brings him in.
Lawful Good: Leia. I think 'nuff said.
Neutral Good: Han. Yeah, he's not chaotic good. He's actually more reliable than Luke, who takes off to Dagobagh for three quarters of a movie while everyone else gets jacked. The only time he is MIA is when he is frozen in carbonite.
Chaotic Good: Luke. Guy can't do anything competently for a while, then he's mister clutch all of a sudden. Half the time he's got his head up his ass thinking about bullseyeing womprats in his speeder, the other half he is blowing up the Death Star.
Chaotic Neutral: Maybe C-3PO. He inadvertantly sets off the whole New Hope by convincing Luke to purchase himself and R2.
Characters from The Wire
Lawful Neutral: Ervin Burrell. THE careerist bureaucrat.
Lawful Evil: Stringer Bell. This guy is the brains of the drug operation and is responsible for the design of all the protective anti-eavesdropping countermeasures used on the Street. Very LE.
Neutral Evil: Avon Barksdale. He'll kill you.
Chaotic Evil: Kenard. It is hard to find a single character which embodies the chaotic evil surrounding The Wire. The Wire is really a story about how the other alignments exist within a chaotic evil backdrop of street hustlers and thugs (and apathetic passive bigotry). In Bodymore, Murdaland chaos doesn't allow one to rise far in the ranks, but that doesn't mean it is any less powerful (indeed, the chaotic whims of the Baltimore voters is what preserves the drug war responsible for the tragedy of the show; arguably this is the most powerful force in that universe, although it is not focused through a single character). Kenard embodies the malicious mischief that is chaotic evil (at one point he is seen preparing to set a cat on fire). Kenard likes to do hoodrat stuff with his friends 'cause it's fun to do bad things. This street urchin is the incipient thug. He will either flame out or moderate himself to Neutral Evil in order to survive. Either way, his actions in the series conclusion guarantee a meteoric rise (fall?) through the Bodymore underworld. A close runner-up is the oldest character, Valchek, whose cruelty and political dealings (e.g. his escalation of conflict with the Union in season 2, opposition to Hamsterdam) represent the conservative malicious whim responsible for the tragedy of the show.
Lawful Good: Omar Little. "A Man's Gotta Have a Code." Only guy in Bodymore that doesn't swear. 'Nuff said. For those of you who didn't watch the show, Omar is the biggest badass in Bodymore. He robs drug stashes for a living and walks the streets in a bullet proof vest carrying his DE .50cal, sending waves of street thugs fleeing before him calling "Omar comin'," Despite the regular necessity of killing in his line of work, his most brutal on screen action was his stabbing of another character in the anus. Not the standard boring paladin. He lives by a code and never kills innocents or unnecessarily. Cederic Daniels is more the standard paladin.
Neutral Good: Lester Freeman. Lester is the guy who will contemplate an issue until he knows precisely when and where to act. He also takes the opportunity to hook up with the young stripper who was a witness in one of his cases. Lester might have been CG before getting busted down to the evidence locker for doing whatever he did. Bunny Colvin is a close second as a NG exemplar.
Chaotic Good: McNulty. Sometimes the guy is a complete mess with the alcoholism and such. Other times he is solving the whole case. Does kind things on whims without much thought to their ultimate consequence similar to Kenard's whimsical maliciousness. Constantly getting into conflict, especially with Cederic Daniels, because of the whimsical goodness.
Chaotic Neutral: Prez. Guy is a basket case pretty much, although he does crack Stringer Bell's telephone code allowing the case to come in. Bubbles maybe also, if he was more representative of a dysfunctional crackhead instead of like Crackhead Buddha.
Falling
A LG character can fall down the law side by becoming too convinced of his beliefs. He may passively ignore the incongruities that will necessarily invade his (mortal and therefore imperfect) understanding of what is right. He could respond to this with "the benefit of the doubt" in which case he will stay LG. However, if he responds with annoyance and belligerence that "they just don't get it: they are wrong" he will slide further. If he reaches the point of resentment when his predicted negative effects do not result for those whom break the code he believes in, it is only a matter of time before he ends up unable to trust good can come of anything. This is the path Gandolf was afraid he would follow if he were to take The Ring.
A CG character can fall down the chaotic side by exploring too far. As the new spectacular discoveries draw them in further, they discover something they totally did not expect, something bad. This spooks them, and in their erratic flailing, more bad stuff could happen. This leads to mistrust and fear, moments of mania when things appear not so bad interspersed with erratic lashing out. Eventually they give up in disgust and no longer can trust anything. This is the path Galadriel was afraid of taking if she wore The Ring.
A Word About Ozymandias
Ozymandius is difficult to classify in alignment because he practically has no ethical decisions to make. He is almost as godlike as Dr. Manhattan and is similarly alien to our moral universe. He is beyond peer, beyond ever possibly being in a position to need help from one of the humans he is "helping" in his plan nor could one of the humans he kills in his plan ever potentially pose threat to him. If there were peers to his superhumanity (and his absolute physical dominance if not superiority over all other watchmen except Dr. Manhattan is demonstrated) then his actions towards them could be judged. As is, he could be some super-powerful spectator, motivating his love of humanity through what is essentially entertainment value. He demonstrates no trust nor any mistrust. However, that he engages in this whimsical exercise with lesser beings at all does suggest a leaning towards chaos. That said, you could argue that Ozymandias is not as powerful as I perceive him to be and that the sum total of humanity does in fact present him with a viable peer, in which case his actions would lean towards the good and negate the premise of my argument for a chaotic leaning.
In Conclusion:
The Law end of the alignment axis reacts to the universe that is generated by the whimsical actions of the Chaos end. This is not unbalanced; there is a trade off between the two: nothing ventured is nothing gained. Good and Evil is the degree of altruism the character thinks is in his (broadly conceived) self interest.
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