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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Radiant Citadel I think I would question whether that's actually a utopian situation, because it's got that classic 1980s D&D "we slapped this setting together from disparate and incoherent elements and ideas we thought we cool, without really seeing if they fit" deal going, accidentally I suspect. I mean, on one level that means a lot of the haters are wrong to hate because that's absolute classic D&D there baby! There are times, for example, where it lapses into a sort of "authoritarianism is cool so long as the authorities are on what I perceive as my side" mode too, which ill-befits some of what it's doing, and other times where it's sort of trying to do IDIC but like, imho without real conviction, which makes it ring hollow.

I do feel that, if the citadel setting got the spotlight, rather than the Concord Worlds, it would quickly become apparent to WotC that there are a lot of groups in conflict (ancestral spirits of a culture vs. living members of the culture, living citadel legislature vs. Concord World rulers, essentially immortal founder who doesn't seem to really want to give up power despite otherwise being a good guy) that make it hard to see how it'll last in its current state.

I would love to see a campaign based on the citadel, with the missions to the Concord Worlds being sidequests for the main action, sort of a Deep Space 9 structure for this fantasy Star Trek set up.

 

[tetrasodium]

In real life? Sure, they wouldn't be.

But in the vast majority of D&D groups and groups in a lot of other games, realistically they are basically doing as a form of demented benevolence.


Not sure I'd equate donating to churches in D&D with benevolence given how awful most gods are, but I've absolutely seen PCs drop huge amounts of money on stuff like building/supporting orphanages, cast healing spells on villagers with no expectation of pay and so on. I think that's routine in my experience. Ironically it's often PCs who talk a lot of smack about how they're "just mercenaries" who actually do it. This is something that comes up in fiction from time to time too - just look at the recent "Sentenced to be a Hero" anime, where the hilariously-named Xylo Forbartz tries to pass himself off as a hard-bitten selfish badass in the Snake Plissken mode, but as pointed out by other characters, he's anything but that in terms of what he does (as opposed to the persona he adopts), and virtually everything he does is about helping innocent or helpless or weak people or minimizing casualties or the the like. Even his "horrific crime" which lead to being made into a Hero (basically someone who can be resurrected and made to fight demons over and over) was (minor spoilers, resolved in like E2 or E3), an act of pure mercy/compassion which cost him everything.

(EDIT: As an aside, Sentenced to be a Hero is interesting in that it's a rare modern example of dark fantasy that definitely isn't grimdark, even though there are tons of signifiers that make you think it's going to be.)

It's a critically important difference then vrs now now for purposes of measuring alignment. Because characters who hypothetically donate wealth to churches or use it start orphanages and whatever are not giving up anything that they need now it's an action that carries no weight should alignment ever be relevant. In every past edition those actions carried weight (as did the inverse) because that wealth was a thing PCs were expected to spend significantly on growing stroner.

Being particularly good/evil carried weight in the world and it could manifest in play with memorable visceral results. The gm no longer has that weight to consider and the loss is mirrored in the lack of weighty good/evil for the world/gods/etc to take action with.

 

[Scribe]

I think it's probably a reflection of a large strain of patriarchal thought in American culture, especially at the time, with both religious leaders and God being seen as the ultimate authority figure and that what they do is inherently right, even if we disagree with it, by virtue of their position.

Yes, and as one who came up through that and the particular branch of it which informed a lot of Dragonlance, I gotta say its wild that people dont get it but then I had a conversation with my now adult son a few months ago, who was very much NOT raised under that same uh....structure, and he just couldnt get it at all.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

Went digging through my copy of the 3e MotP to see what it said about Sigil & The Lady of Pain…

This seems relevant to the discussion of militant neutrality:

 

[Celebrim]

So, I think it is helpful to think about what we mean by "True Neutrality"

Neutrality in general is indifference to all the other claims by all the other alignments. Neither in weal no woe, creation or destruction, self nor in community, objectivity nor subjectivity do neutrals find any real and absolute value. Instead, they find all value to be wholly circumstantial. Nothing is good nor evil except that circumstances make it so. They are pragmatists. Life has no purpose, neither does the destruction of life. Instead, everything is just about getting by and adapting to change. Change is neither good nor bad, it just is. Death is neither good nor bad, it just is.

We can easily imagine a being who has this perspective out of a lack of introspection or understanding about any deep philosophical matter. They aren't contemplative, they are just trying to get by amidst the complexity of reality. Carving out their little niche and trying not to get too involved in anything bigger themselves. 5e tends to call this brand of Neutrality - Unaligned. What it is really is just indifferent by happenstance or nature. You don't care enough to care.

By "True Neutral" we mean someone is philosophical about this state of affair and while indifferent to the claims of other alignments they are not passive in their response to the winds of change. They see the absolutism and extremism of all of the other alignments and their servants as being wrong and dangerous - even and including Good. It's that last one that is I think a sticking point for people. They try to rationalize it by saying, "Too much Good becomes Evil". This nonsense shows up in for example Dragonlance. A True Neutral person would not be convinced by this augment. Rather the True Neutral person has to believe that some amount of evil is better than none of it. That's a bit of an alien belief system, but it does show up both in the real world and in fiction. That is to say the True Neutral is not only rebelling against evil's end goal of infinite pain, infinite loss, total destruction, and to make everything not, but also against literal paradise of no unhappiness, unending growth, unending health, endless bounty and joy - not because they believe those things were evil but in some sense they believed them wrong anyway. The True Neutral has to honestly believe that paradise is made better if someone is unhappy in it, even if that someone is themselves. They wouldn't see a point in knocking it all down. But they would see a point in grief and loss being a part of existence, and something wrong with trying to end them.

 

[Celebrim]

Maybe it's just a general fusion of dodgy "Orientalist" takes on Eastern religions which were common in the 1960s and 1970s fusing with Michael Moorcock (who used to be incredibly influential in fantasy) and his work which does hammer on about a balance between Law and Chaos. There's obviously also Gnostic/Manichaeist thinking involved too - again stuff that sort of made a come back in the 1960s and 1970s.

I would so love to engage with this but these threads are always on such shaky ground from the board rules, but yes, I think you are very much on the right track.

I think as nerds one way this really comes out in in comparing the original Star Wars trilogy which has a very traditional dark/light and good/evil divide were the author (unconsciously or intentionally) wants us to see the Jedi as the good guys and the Sith as the bad guys, but then by the time the author gets to the prequel trilogy they've decided that the divide between good and evil is overly simplistic, and instead we see the Jedi/light side sort of pushed toward being Law and the Sith sort of pushed toward being Chaos and we get a lot of talk of "bringing balance to the force" without really addressing what that means, and the problem with this change in the moral focus and the meaning of things is that he's made the dark side such psychotic sociopathic killers that instead of any new clarity coming out of that we just get a lot of really muddled motivations and a general impression that both groups were pretty morally questionable and unclear about what it meant to be good.

But at the same time, there are hints of that even in the original trilogy with Obi Wan's "certain point of view" speech.

But yes, since at least the 1960s it's been in the public consciousness that there is something about being moral relativists that makes you more intellectual and smarter than being a moral objectivist, and there has been a lot of things like Dragonlance where that has come out and held up where it just doesn't make a like of sense in context.

And I strongly suspect though that really you need to go back to the 1920s or maybe even earlier to source that to the dead philosophers whose guiding hand eventually steered society and pop culture, because it takes a generation or two for those sort of ideas to filter out of their academic context and origins and become pop culture memes. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find World War 1 was the real tipping point where disillusionment with the Law (society) which had declared itself to be the Good turned academic thought toward what ends up showing up in D&D as "True Neutrality" (although it's pervasive elsewhere in the culture).

 

[wicked cool]

Is a sports referee true neutral or should be?

 

[Bohandas]

And I strongly suspect though that really you need to go back to the 1920s or maybe even earlier to source that to the dead philosophers whose guiding hand eventually steered society and pop culture, because it takes a generation or two for those sort of ideas to filter out of their academic context and origins and become pop culture memes. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find World War 1 was the real tipping point where disillusionment with the Law (society) which had declared itself to be the Good turned academic thought toward what ends up showing up in D&D as "True Neutrality" (although it's pervasive elsewhere in the culture).

There's this, and there's also the converse. If we go the other way and make good too idealized then it becomes unable to defend itself of accomplish anything.

Tangentially, I recently remembered something like an argument for neutrality that I encountered in a scientific source. Chapters 10 and 12 of The Selfish Gene deal with the iterated prisoner's dilemma as it relates to modeling evolutionary strategies; here is chapter 12's summary of chapter 10:

"Remember the Grudgers of Chapter 10. These were birds that helped each other in an apparently altruistic way, but refused to help—bore a grudge against—individuals that had previously refused to help them. Grudgers came to dominate the population because they passed on more genes to future generations than either Suckers (who helped others indiscriminately, and were exploited) or Cheats (who tried ruthlessly to exploit everybody and ended up doing each other down)."

Went digging through my copy of the 3e MotP to see what it said about Sigil & The Lady of Pain…

This seems relevant to the discussion of militant neutrality:View attachment 429560

Now my issue with this and with a lot of how 3e handles alignments, seperate from any neutrality related concerns, is that it forgets that the Great Wheel is supposed to be a wheel. LE or LG are not any further from Neutral then LN is. The wheel is round and equally valid in any orientation.

 

[Mind of tempest]

The notion of there needing to be a "balance" between law and chaos seems to fly in the face of entropy. Assuming that physics in D&D works the same as it does in reality (and at least the Doomguard of Planescape do), someone like Mordenkainen or a druid circle interested in maintaining "the balance" would actually be working constantly towards law and order, knowing that they are fated towards failure.

loook cosmic law likely is closer to pure stasis verse infinte chaos

 

[Bohandas]

loook cosmic law likely is closer to pure stasis verse infinte chaos

Give it long enough and there isn't a difference between those two extremes. Imagine you take a bottle and fill it - in layers - with different colors of sand. The bottle now has several lines of color. Now shake it, and shake it again, keep shaking it and shaking it and shaking it. The layers will begin to lose their definition and merge - especially if there was any space left at the top of the bottle. Eventually there will only be ONE layer and that layer will be stable