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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6190321" data-attributes="member: 4937">I going to quibble and say that personality and alignment have only a very tenuous connection.I can easily imagine a neutral good sarcastic, greedy, miserly, jerk.   I can easily imagine a generous, sociable, friendly neutral evil person.  Good people can be cowardly.  Evil people can be brave.Alignment for me is really something that is rarely expressed in a person.  It's not something about a person you immediately notice and rarely have proof of.   It's a deep underlying motivation.  It's what a person does when the chips are down, when he's under stress, and what a person does about it.Take the example of the good greedy miser.   Everyone in town knows he's stingy.  He haggles unrelentingly.  He weighs every everything down to the grain and never charges for anything a penny less than what he can get for it.  What's the difference between the good greedy miser and the evil greedy miser?  Well, the good one is probably honest in the conduct of his business for one thing.  He'd never cheat anyone.  He'd never steal.   If the good miser finds a purse along the side of the road, he's greatly tempted to say nothing and keep the contents - but he doesn't, even if it involves great cost to himself.   That's one big difference.   If the town burns down, the greedy miser overcharges everyone for everything to recoup his losses or to gain greater control over the town.   The good miser on the other hand realizes that he's been a skin flint his whole life for this moment, and the purpose of his saving, scrimping, and grasping has been to help the town.  He heroically gives everything he has away, not because he doesn't love his money and it doesn't cost him anything to do so, but because he is good and the proof of that is how much it costs him to give.To make an example, consider the question of 'George Bailey' from 'It's a Wonderful Life'.  George wants, really sincerely wants, to live his whole life for himself.  To get out of Bedford Falls, to see the world and do what would make George Bailey happy.  He's sincerely envious and ungrateful and regretful and sometimes even angry because he can't get what he wants.   He lives in the continual temptation to live only for himself.  But... every time that the chips are down and he has to actually make a choice between himself and loving someone else, he always choose the later.   He does this not without cost because he's just such a naturally generous person who doesn't value himself or his money, but because he is sincerely a good person.  The really interesting character designs for me are the ones that play in that tension between personality and alignment, where the alignment and the personality are both well realized.  I think one of the really big differences in playing a good and an evil character isn't so much personality but that the good character experience a great deal of anguish at his own insufficiency and (at least potential) wrongness.  (The complete lack of this introspection and tension is my strongest evidence that the characters in The Authority are evil, above and beyond how carelessly murderous that they are with their near unlimited power.  Contrast Superman's portrayal in 'Red Son'.)  The good character tries to make things right.  The evil character doesn't usually care, and has no interest in making things right.  (Although Rich does a wonderful job playing against this type by having Belkar internally anguished because of the conflict between his personality and perceived insufficient evilness.  Belkar's resolution of this, the realization that he's evil to advance his own interests and not only for evil's sake, is likewise brilliant.)  Again, I'm going to quibble around this and say that the real purpose here is to provide a very simple framework around the exploration of otherwise very complex topics in a way that is useful to heroic narratives.  I'm not happy with the word 'cudgel', but do think that players need to accept that for the purposes of the game, 'good' and 'evil' and so forth have specific definitions.   What doesn't follow from this that 'Neutral Good' is more right than 'Lawful Evil', and in fact it may be central to the philosophical space being explored by the narrative that it is not obvious that 'Neutral Good' is right and 'Lawful Evil' is wrong.  I can making compelling arguments on behalf of each alignment in my game.  If I couldn't, it wouldn't be believable that anyone would believe in any of the alignments in the game.   Frequently, even most of the time, even 'Team Evil' believes that they are in the right, that 'Evil' is good and 'Good' is evil (or at least just plain wrong).  I don't ask that the player believe exactly what I believe (which is in some cases different than the way the game world works anyway).   I just ask for the sake of consistency that you drop a particular belief in the fantasy bucket designated to contain those beliefs.  You can then go about trying to prove through your play that Communism or Objectivism or Pacifism or Fascism or whatever is in 'the right' as you like, or that the whole thing is just made up and arbitrary, or ignore the whole construct as meaningless, or whatever.   The NPCs within the world certainly have these arguments.  It's not considered obvious that 'Good' is right, and in fact most of the time far from it.</blockquote>

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