D&D 5E Evil Vs. Neutral - help me explain?

[Dausuul]

I've always though of it as:
Good characters go out of their way to help people, with no reward necessary.
Neutral characters won't go out of their way to hurt or harm people, unless there is some reward.
Evil characters go out of their way to harm people, with no reward necessary.

I disagree; this means evil is limited to "sadistic psychopaths and cartoon villains." An assassin who kills innocent people for money is evil by any sensible definition. A tyrannical warlord who claws his way to a throne and then holds power by terror and slaughter, is evil. If you watch the scene in "The Dark Knight" where the Joker confronts the mob bosses, everyone in that room would ping an AD&D paladin's evil-dar (or in the Joker's case, cause it to short out and explode).

I see it as:

Good will take risks or make sacrifices to help others.
Neutral neither sacrifices for others nor harms them.
Evil will harm others for its own gain.

 

[Morlock]

Being hired to kill people and things is standard fare for adventurers.
Has he actively harmed anyone for reasons other than just gold?
Negotiating prices for tasks performed before hand, every time, is more lawful than chaotic however.

I'd say most adventurers' killing of monsters falls under just war theory. I.e., they're usually repelling an invasion of some sort. That's not the same as a contract murder at all. If you run the goblins off from their caves, the nearby village isn't going to gripe that you didn't fulfill the contract. Try that with a mob boss.

Edit: on second thought, adventurers also often wage offensive wars of colonization against evil in the bad guys' territory. Still just war IMO (the bad guys are still all about slaughter and mayhem), but not defensive in nature, either.

Good will take risks or make sacrifices to help others.
Neutral neither sacrifices for others nor harms them.
Evil will harm others for its own gain.

Yes, that's much better IMO.

 

[Flamestrike]

This dude sounds either chaotic or neutral evil.

If he is happy to kill innocents for nothing other than material gain, then yeah - he's evil.

Your player seems to think that 'Chaotic' neutral means: I can be evil and good.

That's not what it means at all.

 

[Celtavian]

I don't think contract killing would make him evil unless he was killing anyone he was paid to kill including good folk. If he is a contract killer for a good Church wiping out evil people, that wouldn't be evil. D&D by its very nature requires lots of killing. It very much depends on who you kill as to whether you're evil than if you're killing for profit. Most adventurers kill for profit and take the spoils of war. It's what we do in this game. That's why some joke that D&D is a game where everyone is playing murderous hobos.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

I disagree; this means evil is limited to "sadistic psychopaths and cartoon villains." An assassin who kills innocent people for money is evil by any sensible definition. A tyrannical warlord who claws his way to a throne and then holds power by terror and slaughter, is evil. If you watch the scene in "The Dark Knight" where the Joker confronts the mob bosses, everyone in that room would ping an AD&D paladin's evil-dar (or in the Joker's case, cause it to short out and explode).

I see it as:

Good will take risks or make sacrifices to help others.
Neutral neither sacrifices for others nor harms them.
Evil will harm others for its own gain.

That is indeed significantly better. But even those descriptions seem pretty cartoonish in my mind. I'd tend to rule more along the lines of the following:

* Good will take personal risks or make sacrifices to help others, even those who are unknown and unaffiliated with them. Good characters do not take actions that risk more than minor harm to outsiders with whom they hold no active conflict.

* Neutral will tend to take personal risks or make sacrifices only for those who are friends, family members, or those who share some personal identity/affiliation with them. Neutral characters may take actions which risk moderate but not more than moderate harm to outsiders with whom they have no active conflict.

* Evil characters will deliberately harm others for their own gain. Or take actions which result in risk of significant harm to those with whom they have no active conflict.

 

[Celtavian]

Alignment has essentially zero mechanical impact in 5E. Have NPCs react based on his (known to them) behavior. If he's an assassin who'll kill anybody for money, and this is known, he'll get hostile reactions from Knights of Solamnia, clerics of Paladine, and pretty much anyone else with a shred of decency. When the player complains, simply point out "They don't know what your alignment is. They're reacting to what they know about you."

Then if he wants to write "Chaotic Neutral" on his character sheet instead of the "Neutral Evil" that he clearly is, fine. He can put "Lawful Good" if he wants. Won't change anything.

You're right. They did basically eliminate alignment for everything but supernatural creatures as other than a background tool for fleshing out character. It means nothing mechanically.

This is good advice in 5E. That's all you can do as a DM is make NPCs react appropriately to your actions.

I hadn't quite coalesced this 5E change until you pointed it out in such a succinct manner.

 

[Celtavian]

In the Krynn setting it is pretty simple: would you murder an innocent child if I paid you enough money? If the answer is "yes," then you are evil. Period. If the answer is, "no," then the question is "where do you draw the line, and why?" For the most part, anyone willing to kill someone else who is harmless / benign for the sole reason that "somebody paid me to do it," is Evil by Krynn pantheon / cosmic order standards.

Heck, that was even true in the Greyhawk supplements of AD&D. The head of the Assassins' Guild was Evil (with Neutral Tendencies) he wouldn't kill children. He'd actively punish people who abused children. His disregard for the lives of adult humanoids, however, was so profound no among of orphan-saving could pull him out of the Evil category.

Marty Lund

It's true in anything I run. You kill without regard to who you're killing, you're evil. I wouldn't much care how that person views their alignment. That person would be despised.

 

[aramis erak]

Running a Dragonlance game and a certain player is decidedly evil. If the job is to assassinate someone, he will assassinate them. If it is to save a kitten then he'll save the kitten. This is all done for the right price. The problem is he stands by the fact he is chaotic neutral and can do whatever he feels like because he "could" do something good any time he wants to.

Everyone in the group agrees that contract killing is an evil thing amd the his excessive motivation by greed is evil as well.. This player however thinks it isn't and all but flips out.

We all have our opinions on ethics but to craft a world I'm using RAW. It helps me craft the reactions of NPCs in a world that has firmly entrenched sides of good and evil. So how do I do this? He's even carrying a powerful magical artifact that is very evil but I'm not going to spill the goods to bribe him into being evil.

Chaotic Neutral isn't the "does what he pleases" - it's the "avoids hurting people who don't get in his way, has no sense of honor nor law, and doesn't live up to inconvenient promises". It's the "totally untrustworthy but basically ok guy, so long as you don't piss him off."

Lawful Evil is the guy who lives up to his word, and will have no compunction about killing when the law allows. The issue is that many LE types don't accept the same law - guild assassins substitute guild law for civil law. If you treat them under their guild's law, you can screw them over safely...

LE can also be the Lawyer who screws your family out of every last cp on a technicality, then tells you to "read the contract's fine print next time."

What you're describing in behavior is Neutral Evil. Usually keeps his word, doesn't go out of his way to obey the law, kills casually, and is selfish enough to rescue the kitten. I'd lay odds he'd kill the guy who stole the kitten in order to return it. If so, he's NE.

He's not Chaotic if his word is trustworthy and he honors a contract.
He's not lawful if he'll accept assassination contracts from anyone with the money, and/or won't stay bought.

Oh, but note: you can award people up to an Easy encounter's worth for Good RP. Give it to everyone who plays their alignment, and not him. And explain why.

 

[Li Shenron]

Thankfully 5e does away with all mechanical consequences of alignment, so these kind of discussions become more academical than substantial...

Personally, I think alignment should be descriptive. As in, player controls character's behavior, and over time, the DM corrects the character's alignment to reflect that behavior. Ergo, the character in question is Neutral Evil. (Not that I'd force him to change his character sheet. He can put anything on his sheet that he likes, but for game purposes, he's what I decide, based on his behavior)

I can very much agree with that. I would probably suggest the player to completely remove alignmnent from the character sheet.

Personally, contracts are lawful things. Contracts for killing may or may not be lawful, depending on who you got them for, how you do it and what the laws of the land are. Players kill things all day long and they're only the "good" guys because their foes are "bad" so obviously there are times when killing is good, just as there are times when it is bad. So it really depends on who you're killing and how you're doing it.

Unless the player has actually done something good I'd say he's lawful evil.

Well not really. Life is full of contracts, every job is a contract (written or not), if I have a house rent contract, does that make me Lawful? We sign contract because we have to, otherwise no job no house no medical care and so on. What would rather matter, is how this character thinks of those contracts. But even if the assassin respects all contracts, the real reason might be that it's convenient for him to build a reputation of someone who carries out all assignments, so even in that case this doesn't make him necessarily lawful.

In general, lawfulness is quite a complex thing, depending on a lot of facets. Breaking contracts on a whim is a strong sign of unlawfulness, but the opposite i.e. respecting contracts is not necessarily a strong sign of lawfulness...

OTOH I agree with you that he's evil for sure.

I've always though of it as:
Good characters go out of their way to help people, with no reward necessary.
Neutral characters won't go out of their way to hurt or harm people, unless there is some reward.
Evil characters go out of their way to harm people, with no reward necessary.

This way of thinking is kind of the source of the problem. It might have to do with the fact that a lot of us gamers have mild OCD and are obsessed with symmetries, but this sort of symmetry in alignments just doesn't have anything to do with reality.

So we often also have the nonsense concept of "Neutral means half way between good and evil, or 50%/50%". Since when IRL you hear someone say "hey that guy did charity three times, so we should cancel his charges for three robberies"? It just doesn't balance out like that.

If you go with your definition of Evil, you are definitely in the "cartoon villain" area like Dausuul says. I am not saying you can't use these in your own fantasy game, but you must know that many players will expect a diffferent thing, so you have to clearly tell your players they should stop thinking of good/evil in the same way they naturally do, because by your definition probably even Hitler amd Attila the Hun they were Neutral.

I disagree; this means evil is limited to "sadistic psychopaths and cartoon villains." An assassin who kills innocent people for money is evil by any sensible definition. A tyrannical warlord who claws his way to a throne and then holds power by terror and slaughter, is evil. If you watch the scene in "The Dark Knight" where the Joker confronts the mob bosses, everyone in that room would ping an AD&D paladin's evil-dar (or in the Joker's case, cause it to short out and explode).

I see it as:

Good will take risks or make sacrifices to help others.
Neutral neither sacrifices for others nor harms them.
Evil will harm others for its own gain.

This one is quite a lot better definition! "Neutral" pretty much means "normal" or "average". Good and evil acts don't cancel each other out, it's more complicated than that.

 

[delericho]

The problem is he stands by the fact he is chaotic neutral and can do whatever he feels like because he "could" do something good any time he wants to.

Alignment is about what you do, not about what you could do.