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Message: <blockquote data-quote="QuietBrowser" data-source="post: 7069134" data-attributes="member: 6855057">An admittedly poor choice of words on my part. What I meant is that unless you really read the descriptions of the alignments and memorize them, the Neutral/Chaotic Good divide and the Lawful/Neutral Evil divide is often unintuitive and boils down to fiddly little details that are very hard to discern or even care about for the majority of players. In comparison, Lawful Good, Chaotic Evil, and the Morally Neutral Trinity (Lawful/True/Chaotic Neutral) all have fairly strong, defining attributes that make them instantly recognizable.Seriously, I have yet to see a writeup for Chaotic Good that doesn't amount to, in the end, "Neutral Good but more suspicious of the law" or "Kindhearted/Heroic Chaotic Neutral". Likewise, I have yet to see a writeup for Lawful Evil and Neutral Evil that makes the difference sound at all meaningful from each other, in comparison to simply not being "I wanna watch the world BURN!" for Chaotic Evil.Congratulations. Unfortunately, you cannot take your experiences as the norm. Despite his influence in Warhammer, in Warhammer 40000, and in Dungeons & Dragons, in the modern world, Moorcock is practically unknown except to a small band of devoted fantasy fans, and his themes are pretty counter-intuitive to the majority of new players.As Tony Vargas touched upon, we live in a world where, for centuries, the cultural norm has enforced the trope "Chaos is Evil, Law is Good". It's why "Anarchy" is a dirty word in most countries except a few (like Spain), where Anarchists have managed to actually become a viable political minority. As he said, the concept of Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good baffles many newcomers to the genre, because they sound so ridiculous to them: how can you be law-abiding and evil? How can you reject law and be good? So, really, it's no surprise that WoTC would choose to trim them down. Neutral & Chaotic Good mesh together so easily it's harder to argue for why you should separate them other than "It's tradition!" Same thing goes with Lawful & Neutral Evil. As for why LN and CN got the axe, I suspect it's because, in practice, these just tended to become excuses for players to be annoying more than anything. There's a reason "I ban all Evil and Chaotic Neutral PCs" is accepted as standard practice amongst DMs.Would it have been better if they'd just gone with Good, Evil, Law and Chaos, making them all entirely separate things? Maybe. But 4e's cosmology follows the Chaoskampf cycle of many real-world traditions. By the very setup of Primordials (pure Chaos) and Gods (strongly Orderly) fighting, Chaos is still upheld as predominantly a force for evil and ruination, whilst Order is held up as supporting and attendant to good.What exactly else are you supposed to call it? You're unaligned with Good, Evil, Law or Chaos. Yes, that makes Unaligned an umbrella term for "I strive for balance" alongside "I don't care to involve myself in the struggle" to "I consider myself above such definitions", but let's not forget that people haven't been able to agree if Lawful means "I obey external laws" or if it means "I adhere to a strong internalized code of conduct" since the days of 1st edition!The problem is, whilst that might have been the source in Moorcock's works, it's very much not the case in D&D. As I said, the very first definition of True Neutral was, to all practical purposes, a backstabbing traitor; they were explicitly told that they were supposed to balance out acts of good with acts of evil, and acts of law with acts of chaos, all to tinker with the balance by constantly switching sides and working alongside the current underdog. There's a reason that WoTC changed True Neutral to instead be "indifferent to the Four Powers" in its official writeup in 3rd edition, and that's because the official 1st and 2nd edition writeup for it made absolutely no sense.</blockquote>

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