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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6383675" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh, you ruined it.   Those statements are far less perfect than the table itself.   You introduce several of the major fallacies in describing alignment:a) Conflating anti-sociality with evil.  Keep in mind that Lawful Evil is intrinsically cooperative evil.  Lawful Evil is not at all backstabbing.  It very much admires the notion of a 'band of brothers', loyalty, and duty.  It just believes that the collective expression of loyalty and duty, and the best means of ruling, and the proper application of law is utterly brutal and unforgiving.  It's not at all interested in the contentedness, happiness, and ease of the people.  All of that in the eyes of lawful evil leads to slothfulness, disobedience, rebellion, strife, and weakness.  But lawful evil really does believe it is acting for 'the greater good', its just that it defines that 'good' entirely in terms of power and security.   The ultimate good will be established when there is no Other, and the whole of reality is assimilated by force into The Group.   So long as there is an other though, The Group must act with total ruthlessness.  Any other ideology would be the ultimate evil - allowing the extermination or subjugation of The Group to The Other or its dissolution into Chaos. b) Conflating selfishness with evil.   Keep in mind that Chaotic Good is intrinsically self-centered good.  Chaotic Good believes that the individual consciousness is the ultimate test of what is good and evil, and that evil arises most particularly out of failure to see persons as individuals, to treat with them as individuals, and to demand of individuals that they sacrifice themselves for others.  The demand to be self-sacrificing after all has at its counterpart, someone on the other end being selfish.  So any rule that prioritizes others over your own interest is almost inherently a scam.   The Chaotic Good expresses himself with maxims like, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  There isn't selfishness here in the sense of not thinking on the interests of others, but there is a self-centeredness here in that its left up to the individual to decide what that means - the phrase is stated relative to the self.  c) Identifying evil principally with a single fault:  Selfishness isn't necessarily the be all end all of evil.  It's just one vice.   You can be self-sacrificing and evil.  Plenty of people are willing to die for an evil cause.   Plenty of people who aren't virtuous are at least self-sacrificing and love something or somebody more than they love themselves.  While this might make them less that 'True Evil' by way of amalgamation and mixture, it doesn't make them good.   It might be sympathetic if a guy robs a bank and kills someone so that his kids will have a better life, but we wouldn't uphold doing that as an example of goodness.  There is a larger value we expect good to uphold beyond simply loyalty to ones own and willingness to sacrifice self-interest.  Beyond that, selfish is a problematic word because it can indicate both a mode of behavior and a personality.d) Calling out and defining 'chaotic evil' as 'evil, but more so'.   If evil's defining trait is selfishness and antisociality, then chaotic evil becomes just evil++.   Conversely, lawful evil tends to become 'a bit less evil' and lawful good tends to be defined as 'more good than good'.  This ends up creating a bias toward 'lawful' as good, and that in turn will cause you all sorts of problems at the average table where the authoritarian nature of 'law' being conflated with 'good' will tend to push tables toward 'chaos is good' and 'evil is good'.   This is I think exactly the opposite of the push you want to make on your tables habits.</blockquote>

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