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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6756120" data-attributes="member: 4937">The same could be said of any alignment.  While you will find individual players with highly congruent ideas about how the alignment system works, you'll find others with various subtle contradictory variations and to be fully frank, a lot of that has been the fault of the writers over the years.  I agree that this was one of the subtle biases infecting Gygax's writing on the topic in 1e especially.  Much of the rest of where he's coming from and what he means can be inferred I think by a closes reading of Michael Moorcock, which was initially the source material for his Law/Neutrality/Chaos cosmology before it got infected by other sources to become the complex two axis system we have now.  I think it can, and that it is also a lot of other things.  I find it helpful to understanding an alignment to note that alignments tend to deny the existence of or treat as a negative quality the opposite alignment.  The most well known example of this is that good views evil as being merely the absence of good, as dark is merely the absence of light.  But each alignment has a similar viewpoint.  The viewpoint of the True Neutral is that all the philosophical distinctions are actually unreal when applied to the real world.  Is death evil?  Maybe.  We can't really say one way or the other.  Is life good?  Maybe.  The classic example of this would be whether the death of the goat is good depends on the perspective of the goat or the tiger.  The Neutral views everything through a similar lens (of course, in the case of good and evil, Chaotic Neutrals and Lawful Neutrals would also share the opinion).  With that in mind, I think it ought to be possible to see the clear overlap - at least within this particular framework - between a pragmatist (especially what we'd call a materialist) and someone who hold a more philosophical view of balance.  Obviously these viewpoints differ, but they differ on a different axis perhaps than what either the law/chaos or good/evil axis is measuring.If you understand this writing as short hand for Moorcock ethics, then it becomes clear what is meant.  If on the other hand you don't understand that, and don't have that background grounding, then what you are likely to extrapolate from or understand that to mean is - even if you find Moorcock's ethics coherent on their own - likely to be freaky and counter-intuitive.Unless you live in a world where the Lords of one philosophy are clearly triumphant, I think it's quite obvious that people living in such worlds can disagree over how you properly ought to describe the world.  (And for that matter, it's possible to feel that the wrong Lord won, and judge the universe to be wrong.)  That is, someone might believe that they live in a world where true neutrality is the correct interpretation of how one ought to live, and another might believe that no on the contrary this is a world where true goodness or true law or some other philosophy is in fact the correct way to live.   Each will believe that their own philosophy is the right one to have, even if the label isn't 'good'.</blockquote>

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