D&D General "True Neutral": Bunk or Hogwash

[Ruin Explorer]

Well, the utilitarian answer is ask your DM as they're the only one that can answer that for the game you are in (and perhaps not even then).

IMC (or at least most of them), True Neutral would seek to limit the effects of the outer planes. The prime material is not good or evil, lawful or chaotic, it is a mixture of all of them. Every world in the Prime Material works at least a little bit differently than the others and each has its own spiritual component and afterlife that matches the make up of the physical part of the world. The outer planes operate by different rules and can be considered pure Good or pure Evil; Law or Chaos. Both are not meant to be in the Prime Material and contradict the Natural Order no matter where they are in it. Thus, the True Neutral are those that seek to limit the effects of all of them.

Somewhere I have a scene written up of an angel meeting a good adventurer. It describes how it come from a plane where there is no death, suffering, war, or selfishness. It looks upon the adventurer with revulsion as its body is a churning charnel house of the things it considers Evil. There is birth and life, but it is locked in an eternal conflict of kill or be killed where animals and plants much be murdered to sustain life. Even inside of it, the bits that make up its body are at war with intruders and even deviant parts of itself. Still, it smiles as it knows the adventurer means good and seeks to be what it can never be. So it will help. However, it needs to do so as quickly as possible. Its very nature attacks the natural order. It can feel creatures to small to be seen land on it's body and failing to find anything that can sustain them begin to starve, suffer, and die. It's every step crushes living things under its foot. Even when its energies interact and bring forth new life to replace what was killed in their footsteps, of these new plants and creatures most will not survive as they are not meant for this world. Of the ones that do, they will just enter into the cycle of life and death, thus the angel contributes to the system it finds so repugnant. It is also meant to be an explanation of why the higher planes do not walk the prime material as much as the lower planes creatures who find pleasure in the suffering, death, and corruption they cause by just existing where they shouldn't.

This is probably the most coherent take I've seen on this - there's no logical reason it should be generally appealing or even seen as correct (it's basically a pure anti-change position) but it's one that has consistency and makes logical sense, even if you say "Well that's codswallop!", which I don't think is true of even one single other TN take I've ever seen (I have seen ones that seemed to be roughly pawing at this sort of idea, but never quite grasping it).

This would be a good take a Druid-type TN particularly.

What undermines it is that the G-aligned planes actually do have a lot of killing and eating and so on, but with different Good planes where that wasn't true (which there are plenty of in mythology), it would work.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Whenever someone asks about alignment, this picture comes to mind.

The guy on the right - classic neutral.

View attachment 429442

According to Gary Gygax literally everyone in this picture could be Lawful Good except the bearded guy holding Stabby back, who would have to be NG or CG. I'm not kidding or exaggerating, note, he was very clear that killing defenceless prisoners was A-ok for LG, even women and children (he was pretty specific, and used a phrase associated with genocidal ultra-racism, "nits make lice" to justify it), and he said it this century too, not in the 1970s or something.

 

[Professor Murder]

He talks the talk re: The Balance (which is a formal but basically deprecated concept in FR cosmology - it's been mentioned I believe once - in passing at that - in an official book the last 25 years!) but absolutely doesn't walk the walk on-screen because he'd be loathed if he did, because The Balance is a fundamentally stupid and evil-seeming idea in the same way as the more recently and more official/clearly deprecated Wall of the Faithless (which first got toned down to "boredom" rather than torment, and then just got said to not even exist anymore).

Basically this is my central point. Mordy's "Uphold the Balance" viewpoint would require him to not only abide by the existence of evil, which can be a reasonable, rational reaction to free will, but to be willing to aid evil in the world. Mordenkainan for example would believe that the universe needs some amount of slavery to keep the spheres spinning. That there need to be a quota of sexual assaults to prevent what exactly? Too much happiness and contentment because for some reason, reality can't allow for that?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Basically this is my central point. Mordy's "Uphold the Balance" viewpoint would require him to not only abide by the existence of evil, which can be a reasonable, rational reaction to free will, but to be willing to aid evil in the world. Mordenkainan for example would believe that the universe needs some amount of slavery to keep the spheres spinning. That there need to be a quota of sexual assaults to prevent what exactly? Too much happiness and contentment because for some reason, reality can't allow for that?

To be fair to Mordenkainen, which I don't really wanna be but w/e, the concept of The Balance in an FR perspective relates specifically to the gods, and is backed/enforced/desired by AO, the super-god, it doesn't relate to like, day-to-day activities/horrors normally. But it would mean, at the very least, stuff like making sure you, mega-powerful wizard, stood aside when the armies of the Zhentarim marched on Waterdeep or wherever (because that's essentially gods fighting through man, and even though it would presumably involve various atrocities/war crimes), and that you probably had to intervene if someone was about to kill/destroy an evil god or similar. Oddly, no-one, not even AO, ever has stopped an evil god getting killed/depowered, that I'm aware of, but that's just more failing to walk the walk.

Like the Wall of the Faithless, but even more so, it's a concept that appears a ton in the mid-1990s, when certain writers with some odd ideas (albeit also with some cool and detailed conceptions of FR faiths) were in charge of writing the FR religion stuff, and then like basically vanishes.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What exactly are you referring to? I can't see anything they did as actively fighting back against good or promoting evil for the sake of evil, but perhaps I'm forgetting something.

The mages actively talk about maintaining the Equilibrium of the world, which is both about not messing with the world too much with magic, but also not being too involved in the world and fixing things.

The problems of the last four books come from what is, in a pretty immature way of looking at things, an attempt to "solve" one of the great problems of the world, which ends up pretty catastrophically.

But the Mordenkainen version is much stupider, which is why I said it was a garbled read: "Something something, balance!"

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

IMC (or at least most of them), True Neutral would seek to limit the effects of the outer planes. The prime material is not good or evil, lawful or chaotic, it is a mixture of all of them. Every world in the Prime Material works at least a little bit differently than the others and each has its own spiritual component and afterlife that matches the make up of the physical part of the world. The outer planes operate by different rules and can be considered pure Good or pure Evil; Law or Chaos. Both are not meant to be in the Prime Material and contradict the Natural Order no matter where they are in it. Thus, the True Neutral are those that seek to limit the effects of all of them.

I've long thought that both Law and Chaos should be terrifying.

There should be a quantum physics element of this.

The force of Law is necessary to give the multiverse structure, without which, it would never coalesce to the point that even divine beings could survive.

But Law creates stasis, a rigid framework where nothing actually moves or changes, unless Chaos is implemented.

But unchecked Chaos turns the multiverse back into an always changing, never stable soup.

Neutrality is the range in which there's enough Law that things can form and enough Chaos that the system doesn't lock up into a giant crystal where nothing moves.

In this reading, Neutrality are, essentially, the folks keeping existence still happening and are, if not actually "good" (the moral axis is a whole separate discussion), the good guys as far as the rest of reality is concerned.

(This set-up also means you don't have cute modrons as the servants of Law. Instead, you'd want cosmic ants or bees turning the whole multiverse into a hive-like structure, the better to lock it down as the last bit of Chaos is eliminated. And conversely, slaadi with their rigid hierarchy should be replaced as the servants of Chaos with shapechanging beings that are almost too alien to relate to. Modrons should probably get nudged into the adjacent upper plane from Nirvana/Mechanus and Slaadi should get knocked down a run from Limbo into the lower planes.)

 

[Kurotowa]

True Neutral is the fantasy version of the realpolitik of a third world nation at the height of the Cold War. As a small player caught between feuding superpowers who would love nothing more than to turn you into a subservient puppet state or the battlefield for their latest proxy war, your best tactic is to play them against each other and strike a balance so that you survive with your independence intact.

This works narratively when the great cosmic forces are distant and disinterested, only regarding the Prime Material as it relates to their own struggles with each other. It fails completely as soon as the great cosmic powers are cast as either actively benevolent or malevolent, and show a specific interest in the conditions and outcomes of the Prime.

 

[TwoSix]

It underlines, for me, why I actually really like D&D's alignment system, even at the same time I think it's totally whack and unworkable as an actual system for representing morality.

100% with you here. It's not tenable as anything like a real philosophy, but it's something recognizable that can spur interesting discussions around ethics and morality that otherwise may not have happened, so I'm appreciative of it for that.

 

[TwoSix]

Gygax and Arneson also totally failed to provide a vision of what an all-Good or all-Evil universe would look like (particularly where both were negative and to be avoided), whereas Moorcock did provide ones for Chaos and Law.

I definitely think the lack of a vision for what's problematic about a "Good" world is the conceptually most difficult problem for the "Balance" worldview.

Any image I come up with shares way too many conceptual tropes with Law winning (a society of unchanging anodyne blandness and strict conformity). Most other "Good wins" concepts just end up seeming like an actual Heaven, which seems a weird, evil thing to struggle against.

The only idea I can come up with is that "Good" and "Evil" are just distractions from the actual struggle against some kind of Far Realm/universe-threatening conflict, and that a Good victory will prevent the struggle needed to make the people in this universe able to protect themselves from the true threat. For some reason, "Good" is unable to comprehend the nature of this existential threat, and thus must be prevented from winning in order to save the universe.

 

[Clint_L]

I've long thought that both Law and Chaos should be terrifying.

There should be a quantum physics element of this.

The force of Law is necessary to give the multiverse structure, without which, it would never coalesce to the point that even divine beings could survive.

But Law creates stasis, a rigid framework where nothing actually moves or changes, unless Chaos is implemented.

But unchecked Chaos turns the multiverse back into an always changing, never stable soup.

Neutrality is the range in which there's enough Law that things can form and enough Chaos that the system doesn't lock up into a giant crystal where nothing moves.

In this reading, Neutrality are, essentially, the folks keeping existence still happening and are, if not actually "good" (the moral axis is a whole separate discussion), the good guys as far as the rest of reality is concerned.

(This set-up also means you don't have cute modrons as the servants of Law. Instead, you'd want cosmic ants or bees turning the whole multiverse into a hive-like structure, the better to lock it down as the last bit of Chaos is eliminated. And conversely, slaadi with their rigid hierarchy should be replaced as the servants of Chaos with shapechanging beings that are almost too alien to relate to. Modrons should probably get nudged into the adjacent upper plane from Nirvana/Mechanus and Slaadi should get knocked down a run from Limbo into the lower planes.)

For me, this is a far more interesting take on Law and Chaos than is the morality gloop that typically gets mixed into it.