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

[Sword of Spirit]

I don't agree - see my post 33 upthread.

In 1st ed AD&D, good people are those who care about human wellbeing, truth and beauty. Gygax puts forward various conceptions of human wellbeing - happiness, dignity, rights, etc - without really distinguishing between them.

Evil people, on the other hand, are those who do not regard these valuable things (truth, beauty, others' wellbeing) as any sort of constraint on their actions. As Gygax puts it, for them purpose is the determinant. I think this represents people pretty well.

Yes. That's because most people either act in a way that is respectful of values like truth, beauty and wellbeing, or else disregard those things. So most people are either good or evil (as conceived of in the framework presented by 1st ed AD&D).

In this scheme, I don't think that "neutrality" is some sort of grey-zone between good and evil. As I said in that earlier post, each of LN, CN and TN is its own thing. LN people are those who pursue order for its own sake - they are not evil, because they value something outside themselves (namely, social organisation) but they are nevertheless guilty of moral error, because the thing they value is not worth valuing as an end in itself. The CN make a parallel error, but in respect of freedom rather than order. And TN is a more-or-less Stoic or Taoist prioritisation of nature over artifice, and a corresponding belief in the importance of harmony and balance.

I think that 3E, by trying to treat neutrality as a grey-zone between good and evil, tends to cause confusion. What counts as a sacrifice? The neutral are said to have compunctions - suppose, because of those compunctions, a person gives up the opportunity to make a profit which would require evicting a poor family from their land. Does that count as a sacrifice? If so, how does neutrality differ from goodness? If not, what does count as a sacrifice?

There is also a tendency for 3E's evil to collapse into "takes pleasure from harming others", which is a pretty narrow range of personalities. If you expand evil to include "Doesn't worry about harming in others in the pursuit of desire" (which is the 1st ed AD&D definition) then you've removed the space for neutrality, because someone who will forego desire in order to avoid harming others looks like someone who will make sacrifices, which is how good has been defined.

The way I see it, the AD&D slant on it actually tends towards alignment debates. When the line between good and evil is so fine, it's a lot easier to try to argue for evil characters being good. It also makes way too many creatures good in my opinion. Good should be special. It shouldn't apply to 90% of the human race.

3e, on they other hand took normal humanity as a baseline and allowed the characters and creatures of D&D to go above (or below) and beyond the expectations of behavior.

"A neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. She doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil—after all, she would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, she’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way."

"People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships. A neutral person may sacrifice himself to protect his family or even his homeland, but he would not do so for strangers who are not related to him."

"Someone who is neutral with respect to law and chaos has a normal respect for authority and feels neither a compulsion to obey nor a compulsion to rebel. She is honest but can be tempted into lying or deceiving others."

Perfect baseline of humanity. Being a neutral person (on both axes) means you are a decent, law-abiding citizen. You might be a jerk on occasion, and you probably don't stress over speeding or parking violations, but there's a good chance you might give a bit to charity or help an elderly person cross the street.

What such a person isn't likely to do is go out of their way to help others at significant sacrifice. I think that's a key point we are seeing differently. Sacrifices need to be significant to justify a good alignment. Not killing someone when it might be advantageous isn't sufficient. Taking a bullet to stop another evil person from killing someone is.

I'm not trying to say it has to be a life-threatening situation either. Foregoing desire in order to avoid harming others isn't good--it's just neutral. Foregoing desire in order to actively help others can be good, but only if it requires giving up something significant. Helping the neighbor kid get their cat out of a tree after you've finished mowing your lawn isn't really a good act. It will take you another 5 minutes to get inside and sit down with a cool beverage. Whoop-de-doo. You want a medal? That's just being a decent neighbor. Doing (or not doing) that is not morally significant enough (in D&D terms) to justify shifting out of the neutral zone. Giving up opportunities for professional advancement in order to spend time volunteering full time with a charity is a sacrifice that is significant. It can also be a general manner of behavior. Maybe you don't have an opportunity to do significant specific sacrifices, but you consistently and reliably help kids get cats out of trees (and similar little acts of kindness) throughout your life. That's a big enough thing, given how much time ends up going into it, to count as good. Such a person is going to make a big sacrifice if given the opportunity (unless they are just doing things for show).

This is something that isn't difficult to get. Most people can understand the difference between normal decent people, "bad" people, and real heroes and wonderful people.*

The only thing that needs to be said to D&D players in order to get the idea across to them during character creation is to simply think in real world terms about the difference between those three types of people, and think of how they want their adventurer to behave.

It's actually easier for adventurers than regular real people, because they have the chance to put their life on the line regularly! Is your character helping out the strangers they run across because they want to and believe it's the right thing to do? Or are they doing it mostly for the money? Would you still protect the villagers from the zombie invasion even if they didn't have the means to reward you? Those are good attitudes, most of the time. If, on the other hand, you would do that simply because you hate orcs and undead with a passion and take every opportunity to slay them, you aren't getting good points for it. If you are simply fighting in defense of your homeland, you aren't making a lot of good points either. Maybe some law points, but even neutral people can be patriotic. Quick and dirty method: how much empathy does your character have?

Law and chaos are a bit trickier, but again, 3e takes a baseline of the average human being as neutral. A normal law-abiding citizen. Sure, you probably tell little white lies, and you didn't ask before eating your roommates tempting pastries left so seductively on the counter, but you aren't likely to break into people's houses and steal their stuff, unless you have no honest way of surviving. Lawful people don't just maintain natural levels of order, they go out of their way to be orderly. These are the people you know that won't break the rules even when the rules are wrong, or are actually getting in the way of accomplishing the purpose of the rules. You see tensions between lawful characters and neutral characters in TV and movies all the time. Usually the heroes are NG and they are dealing with LN or LG superiors. (Sometimes the show presents the superiors as more LN, until you later find out that they really do have a heroic level of empathy for others and "can be counted on to do the right thing," not just the lawful decent thing.) Chaotic are the people that really don't care about the laws, honesty, etc. They come in different types. Some are real jerks, others are just your harmless but unreliable friends. As with G/E, neutrals are more common than either L/C amongst the real world human populations.

I agree with the AD&D definitions of evil you described though. I think 3e agrees also.

"“Evil” implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master."

Just change "some" to "most" when you are talking humans rather than monsters. They generally don't go out of their way to harm others. If they are living a normal, non-adventuring life, they may never murder anyone--but they would if they thought it would benefit them. A good shorthand way of saying it is that an evil person is a sociopath. Most sociopaths never murder anyone, but they lack empathy and a sense of guilt. They would kill someone if they thought it would benefit them.

DM: "Are you are normal decent person, a bad person, or a really good person?"

That's all you need to ask to sort them into neutral, evil, or good in 3e terms. Do this first. Then you can worry about chaos, neutrality, law.

*I think it's a pretty good commentary on the beneficial social elements of D&D that I find myself re-evaluating whether I'm actually living up to my real world ideals when I start looking at the definition of good in 3e D&D.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Gygax asserted that assassins must be evil, but the reasoning is not very persuasive.

Someone with a specialized skill set of "I make other people dead" wouldn't necessarily be evil. For example, a sniper working for a special forces division of a nation's army is, in general, a highly-trained specialist in making people dead who cannot defend themselves--yet such people at least have the possibility of being good. So yeah, I'd agree that the assassin class is not inherently evil. The problem is that "the assassin class" and "is a killer for hire available to the highest bidder" are not the same thing. The former describes a skill set; the latter describes an intentional attitude. Anyone--Assassin-class or not--can be a "killer for hire." I think the issue with Gygax was that he saw classes as defining more than just what you're capable of: he saw them as defining your whole outlook on the world. Hence all the various alignment restrictions: "Druid" isn't just "skilled with nature magic," it's a whole intentional outlook, a complete philosophy of the world; "Paladin" isn't just "holy warrior," it's a Lawful Good way of life, just one that happens to have practical applications to the typical dungeon-delving adventurer.

The most basic D&D campaign assumes that the PCs are mercenaries to some degree, who will fight goblins and orcs in exchange for reward and the right to keep the loot. The reasoning given for supposing that the PCs aren't evil is that the orcs and goblins are legitimate targets. If the contract killer only kills legitimate targets - say, people who aren't deserving or aren't innocent (eg greedy merchants, corrupt mayors, vicious slave-masters etc) then I don't see why, within the basic D&D alignment framework, s/he has to be evil at all.

Of course. But, and this may be reading something into the OP, the idea I got from this was that there were no unacceptable targets. I wasn't sure, hence my writeup of the questions above: I need to know if there are unacceptable targets, and if so, why they are unacceptable. If there are no unacceptable targets for a sufficiently high price, I would call that Evil. If the only unacceptable targets are unacceptable specifically because they are either (a) useful or (b) intimately associated with the killer (relatives, lovers, dear friends), and not for any reasons of principle (e.g. NOT a rule like "never kill a child"), I would also call that Evil. If there are unacceptable targets for reasons of principle, then I'd buy it, but the character would toe a very thin line, depending on how narrow or wide those reasons of principle are. As an example, "never kill a child...unless it's a non-elf child, because non-elves aren't people" would be sufficiently narrow that I'd call it Evil--such philosophy would accept genocides, which are pretty clearly evil.

Furthermore, it very much sounds like the standards you're applying to the "acceptable targets" *also* apply to our contract-killer in question. That is, the OP specifically talks about him being "motivated by greed." If "greedy merchants" are acceptable targets, shouldn't greedy "I kill people to make myself fabulously rich" people ALSO be on that acceptable targets list? And if someone is among the acceptable targets for *legitimately* Good people to kill, doesn't that say something about that someone's alignment?

There's not a lot of information there about the targets of assassination, or who is supplying these jobs, or what role the GM has in having NPCs approach the PC to take on the jobs (or is the player having the PC hang out his shingle as a killer-for-hire? - we haven't been told).

To me this seems like the majority of the group don't like how this one player is playing his character. I would suggest that the group should talk about that real issue, rather than try to sublimate it through a discussion of ingame questions like which group of gods does or doesn't approve of the PC's actions.

Again perhaps I was reading too far into this, but I figure as a "fresh" character, this PC is almost certainly trying to "get his name out" as the kind of person who will do ANY job, EXACTLY as prescribed, for the right price. I could be wrong here--but that was a pretty clear implication from the "kill someone" vs. "save a kitten" example.

Which, as stated, is why I would approach this as a series of questions. We could add to the questions above stuff like, "If you know the person in question is a BBEG type, would you still take a job?" and "Do you always follow your contracts to the letter, exactly as stipulated? Do you take liberties or modify contracts on the fly?" The former would pretty clearly put the character on *at least* the darker side of Neutral--accepting contracts regardless of who the contractee is or what they'll ask you to do, as long as they pay you enough, isn't exactly what I'd consider "neutral" behavior. That is, I would expect a Neutral person to refuse contracts on both ends, regardless of pay, because they ask too much.

Finally, there's another line from the OP that I think is worth considering. Specifically:

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.

The player is clearly having the character do things he thinks are evil, and justifying his continuing succession of evil deeds by parroting the oft-heard addict's line: "I can stop whenever I want." That's both an extremely flimsy excuse, and demonstrating a serious divergence between the player's idea and the group's idea of alignment. Specifically, the player seems to think that Alignment is an intrinsic attribute, such that nothing the character ACTUALLY does influences it--rather, Alignment is first, a priori, and it determines what the character could consider doing.

Which, of course, makes Neutral the "Anything Goes" alignment. You can do whatever you want, for as long as you want, and it will never matter because you always COULD be non-evil (or non-good!), you just want one more hit have one more job to do. Which, of course, makes Neutral almost *worse* than Evil, because it can be everything Evil is while masquerading as something okay and acceptable.

 

[pemerton]

The way I see it, the AD&D slant on it actually tends towards alignment debates. When the line between good and evil is so fine, it's a lot easier to try to argue for evil characters being good.

<snip>

I think that's a key point we are seeing differently. Sacrifices need to be significant to justify a good alignment.

I guess I don't feel that the line between 1st ed AD&D good and evil is as fine as you suggest.

I agree that there are behaviours that are hard to categorise as Good or Evil in the AD&D scheme. A simple example: someone regularly lies to save a group of villains trashing a gallery, thereby sacrificing truth to preserve beauty - is s/he good or evil?]

A more complex example: a ruler suppresses consumption to build up capital (eg by stockpiling grain for trade, by making clerics cast Stone Shape spells rather than healing spells, etc) in order to do long-term improvement works in the city. (Many modern European cities, at least, were built in something like this way.) As a result, the people are hungry, child mortality is higher than it might otherwise be, etc. But N years down the track, the people living in the nicely built, well-sewered city with straight, safe roads are very happy, and don't feel any personal connection to the suffering of their ancestors. Is the ruler good or evil?

But I don't think these difficulties of classification arise because of a "fine line". I think they arise because AD&D works with a very broad and loosely defined notion of goodness. If it matters in play to be more precise, I think that's left for the GM and players to work out.

I'm not sure that the 3E definitions do a significantly better job of getting these cases right, either. For instance, if they tell us that the character in my two examples are straightforwardly evil, then I think something has gone wrong, because they are producing an answer that is too glib relative to the complexity of the trade-offs and choices that are being made.

I agree with the AD&D definitions of evil you described though. I think 3e agrees also.

I agree that AD&D 1st ed and 3E aren't too far apart in how they define evil. I also think there is some overlap in relation to good, probably more than you do, because I don't (or at least in the past, haven't) made as much of the sacrifice notion as you have stressed in your post.

Good should be special. It shouldn't apply to 90% of the human race.

I think there are two ways of going here.

In the Feb 1976 edition of The Strategic Review, Gygax said that "most of humanity falls into the lawful category, and most of lawful humanity lies near the line between good and evil. With proper leadership the majority will be prone towards lawful/good. Few humans are chaotic, and very few are chaotic and evil." So I think he agrees with you that, on his definitions, most humans will end up good.

But here is my take, posted upthread: a person who, despite professed LG convictions, always cheats on taxes, always finds a reason to tell the beggars to go elsewhere for alms, always evicts squatters relying on the thought that it's "someone else's" job to find them somewhere to live, etc, is probably LE but moderately self-deluded. Despite this person's convictions, in fact s/he is cultivating a system of socially-ordered power in which s/he has her place and pursues her desires, imposing a yoke upon those beneath her.

I think I could have just described more than 10% of the inhabitants of a typical fantasy world, once even just a little bit of the "cheerful peasant" veneer is peeled away.

 

[pemerton]

If there are no unacceptable targets for a sufficiently high price, I would call that Evil.

<snip>

the player seems to think that Alignment is an intrinsic attribute, such that nothing the character ACTUALLY does influences it--rather, Alignment is first, a priori, and it determines what the character could consider doing.

My view on this is that, if the player's protestations that his PC could do good things if he wanted aren't to count for anything, then likewise his brazen boasts that he would kill anyone for a high enough price probably shouldn't count for much either.

Just as there are plenty of people who find it hard to do the right thing when the time comes, so there are plenty of boasters who find it hard to do the wrong thing when actually presented with an opportunity.

While perhaps in the fiction only the gods truly know the content of the PC's heart, at the table we either have to take the player's claims at face value, or look at the actions the PC has actually committed. But holding the PC to account for one set of possibilities (imagined assassinations) but not another set of possibilities (imagined acts of kindness) doesn't seem very principled to me.

Now perhaps the PC has, in fact, killed innocent people for money, but we've not been told that. Nor have we been told the context in which the player is making the choices for his PC that he is. What role does the GM have in framing the PC and player into situations where contract killing comes up as a viable choice for the PC to make? I think knowing the answer to that - more generally, how is the game run? who plays the dominant role in driving the story dynamics, the range of options open to the PCs, etc? - is very important before giving any advice on how the GM should respond to the choices that a player is making for his/her PC.

it very much sounds like the standards you're applying to the "acceptable targets" *also* apply to our contract-killer in question. That is, the OP specifically talks about him being "motivated by greed." If "greedy merchants" are acceptable targets, shouldn't greedy "I kill people to make myself fabulously rich" people ALSO be on that acceptable targets list? And if someone is among the acceptable targets for *legitimately* Good people to kill, doesn't that say something about that someone's alignment?

Yes. It tells us that they're not good. But it doesn't tell us they're evil. Lawful neutral and chaotic neutral people are sources of misery for others, because they prioritise other external goals (order or freedom, respectively) over human wellbeing, truth and beauty. Hence they may well be legitimate targets, provided they pose a sufficiently proximate threat (fill in the details based on your theory of permissible violence - D&D tends to default to a very relaxed permissibility threshold!).

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I guess I don't feel that the line between 1st ed AD&D good and evil is as fine as you suggest.

I agree that there are behaviours that are hard to categorise as Good or Evil in the AD&D scheme. A simple example: someone regularly lies to save a group of villains trashing a gallery, thereby sacrificing truth to preserve beauty - is s/he good or evil?]

A more complex example: a ruler suppresses consumption to build up capital (eg by stockpiling grain for trade, by making clerics cast Stone Shape spells rather than healing spells, etc) in order to do long-term improvement works in the city. (Many modern European cities, at least, were built in something like this way.) As a result, the people are hungry, child mortality is higher than it might otherwise be, etc. But N years down the track, the people living in the nicely built, well-sewered city with straight, safe roads are very happy, and don't feel any personal connection to the suffering of their ancestors. Is the ruler good or evil?

But I don't think these difficulties of classification arise because of a "fine line". I think they arise because AD&D works with a very broad and loosely defined notion of goodness. If it matters in play to be more precise, I think that's left for the GM and players to work out.

I think a good case can be made for those examples being neutral in 3e terms. What I'm getting at is just that if you don't have a significantly large territory between two extremes, then it can get difficult to tell which extreme you fall into, and there is going to be a lot more disagreement.

For instance, there isn't much debate about whether a person is liberal or conservative (on whatever axis), because there is always moderate to fall into. Debate might come in about whether someone is conservative or moderate, but not liberal or conservative. In my opinion, the system is working better if the good and evil question is the same way. Good and evil should be so far apart that there just isn't any ambiguity between the two. Neutral is the moderate of alignments.

I'm not sure that the 3E definitions do a significantly better job of getting these cases right, either. For instance, if they tell us that the character in my two examples are straightforwardly evil, then I think something has gone wrong, because they are producing an answer that is too glib relative to the complexity of the trade-offs and choices that are being made.

Many alignment decisions are still left in the groups interpretation, even in 3e. Both AD&D and 3e are pretty consistent in telling us that it isn't all about motivation. (Sorry to those on this thread who have argued otherwise, but no edition has supported "motivation only" based alignment.) Actions do matter, by the books (and it doesn't matter which books). What we aren't explicitly told to my knowledge is whether motivation also matters. I think common sense would say alignment is a combination of actions and motivations, since that's how we judge people in the real world.

Given that assumption, 3e alignment comes out on top again. There are situations in any edition where characters of different alignments might perform the same action for different morally relevant reasons. Happens all the time. But those differences are usually at the G/N or the N/E divide. We aren't going to have a lot of cases where motivation can make the difference between a questionable action being good or evil.

I agree that AD&D 1st ed and 3E aren't too far apart in how they define evil. I also think there is some overlap in relation to good, probably more than you do, because I don't (or at least in the past, haven't) made as much of the sacrifice notion as you have stressed in your post.

I think there are two ways of going here.

In the Feb 1976 edition of The Strategic Review, Gygax said that "most of humanity falls into the lawful category, and most of lawful humanity lies near the line between good and evil. With proper leadership the majority will be prone towards lawful/good. Few humans are chaotic, and very few are chaotic and evil." So I think he agrees with you that, on his definitions, most humans will end up good.

But here is my take, posted upthread: a person who, despite professed LG convictions, always cheats on taxes, always finds a reason to tell the beggars to go elsewhere for alms, always evicts squatters relying on the thought that it's "someone else's" job to find them somewhere to live, etc, is probably LE but moderately self-deluded. Despite this person's convictions, in fact s/he is cultivating a system of socially-ordered power in which s/he has her place and pursues her desires, imposing a yoke upon those beneath her.

I think I could have just described more than 10% of the inhabitants of a typical fantasy world, once even just a little bit of the "cheerful peasant" veneer is peeled away.

I'm not sure where I'd put the person in that example, but I agree with you that they aren't good. It probably depends on whether they'd knowingly kill someone. Many such people probably wouldn't let the beggar starve if they actually ran across them emaciated in the street. They just generally have a warped view and don't realize such things are going to happen. Now, if they saw the beggar starving right in front of them and refused to do anything to help (even if helping was just contacting someone else to do it), that's a clear case of evil. So, we have a non-good situation where motivation is the difference between neutral or evil.

As far as Gygax's thoughts on most humans being lawful, I think that was a poor call on his part. AD&D did seem to skew that way, but even before 3e came along the inconsistencies with the system started causing it to break down.

For example, if you look at NPCs in published sources during AD&D times, quite of lot of otherwise normal people are TN or CN. Their described personalities simply don't accord with the AD&D alignment descriptions, and actually fit better into the 3e description. And they never could really stick with druids following the TN thing. I believe it was the Complete Book of Thieves that said that many people fall into the "True Neutral" alignment simply because they don't fit anywhere else. And that's true! If you read through the 9 alignment descriptions (at least in 2e) you would have a difficult time fitting in a whole lot of normal people. That's the problem with Gygax's thoughts. If lawful is the human standard, then we have no way to say "well, my character is really lawful", but we end up with, "okay, so how non-lawful do you want to be? Are we talking you don't follow laws and order unless you feel like it, or do you intentionally break them just because you hate order?" That's absurd in my opinion. Instead of relatable characters it tends toward caricatures.

The problem with the nine alignment system as envisioned by Gary Gygax is that it is unworkable. 3e salvaged and made sense of it.

If AD&D had defined alignment the same way 3e did from the very beginning, most alignment debates never would have appeared. "Is this character good or evil" most definitely wouldn't have come up often, and whenever it did someone would have immediately pointed out how they definitely aren't one or the other and the only question is whether they are X or neutral--in that "you're obviously new to the game" sort of way.

3e alignments actually work to define recognizable characters. Sure, there is plenty of disagreement and ambiguity--but its reasonably possible. I have some pretty strong lawful traits, and some pretty strong chaotic traits, and I've varied quite a bit in them over my life. Best call is to make me neutral in that regard. My best friend has a very spontaneous personality and tends to have problems ordering his time. I'd say he tends towards chaotic. However, he has a strong personal commitment to lawfulness in certain areas (and prefers to self-identify as lawful). I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say that his attempts to be lawful move him into neutral. Since there really aren't people with strong good traits and evil traits as defined by 3e, you never have a situation where they can balance out to neutral. (Any such person would be insane and not representative of alignments.)

Gygax's alignments defined aliens in an alien world--and that just isn't as useful for my gaming as the reasonable 3e revisions.

@pemerton, by the way, I'm enjoying your thoughts and the refreshers on AD&D alignment.

 

[Unwise]

The first post reminds me of a great scene from Red vs Blue:

"I'm not mean, I just get hired to do mean things"

"Yeah, but you like it..."

"Think it's important to like what you do"

 

[pemerton]

The problem with the nine alignment system as envisioned by Gary Gygax is that it is unworkable.

<snip>

Gygax's alignments defined aliens in an alien world

Whereas my take is that he made social order vs self-realisation the focus of conflict. I've got an active thread talking about how I see this working.

On this approach, other questions, like what exactly is the best theory of human wellbeing, are put to one side. And the fact that some people are hard to categorise as good or evil, or that most people end up in (say) the LE or LG camps, is not a problem. Because on this approach the goal of the alignment system wouldn't be to categorise the range of human moral outlooks and practices, but to make one particular conflict, which has some resonance in fantasy literature (especially REH's Conan, I think), come to the fore.

I believe it was the Complete Book of Thieves that said that many people fall into the "True Neutral" alignment simply because they don't fit anywhere else.

I agree there are issues with the way TN is used. In single-axis Law vs Chaos, Neutral is exactly what it's name suggests: neutrality as between the cosmic struggle. But in 9-point alignment it becomes something else. In his DMG, Gygax says of TN that "This alignment is the narrowest in scope." Which makes sense when you think of TN as being the stoic/naturalist view that human interference in the world is a source of problems, and the the world should simply be allowed to take its course; but doesn't make sense if TN is meant to be a catch-all for the uncommitted.

Interestingly, in the Strategic Review article I mentioned upthread, Gygax says that "Druids serve only themselves and nature, they occasionally make human sacrifice, but on the other hand they aid the folk in agriculture and animal husbandry. Druids are, therefore, neutral - although slightly predisposed towards evil actions." That looks more like its in line with your 3E approach than the "official" AD&D approach. On the "official" approach, the reason that they are TN is because of their belief in the wheel of nature, and their commitment to keeping it in harmony.

As for the "live and let live" types that the Complete Book of Thieves says should be TN (I don't know that book myself, but am guessing from your account that that is what they are talking about), I think in AD&D alignment those people can go two or three main ways.

If they are "live and let live" but within received systems of social power, they probably end up as weakly LE (as per my example above). This is the sort of casual disregard for the wellbeing of others on which devils thrive!

If they are "live and let live" in the sense of asserting their own personal freedom and letting others do likewise (and so, for instance, turning a blind eye to law-breaking that doesn't affect them personally) they look CN (much like Conan as portrayed in stories like The Tower of the Elephant, though not so much in the stories where he is king). I think that CN actually has much more scope to do useful work than the very strange 2nd ed AD&D definition.

The third option is as the CN option, but weakly CG, if they also sometimes make an effort not just to leave people alone but to help them out.

I'm enjoying your thoughts and the refreshers on AD&D alignment.

Thanks!

 

[Mephista]

Lots of things are objective but subject to dispute.

Alignment, within the context of the D&D game, is an objective force. It is literally a power akin to raw elemental forces of Fire, Earth, Water, Air. What the alignment means between table to table can change; hells, between campaign settings the meaning can change. However, once inside the game, there's no dispute. You have beings literally comprised of Good, Law, Evil, and Chaos. There is no philosophical debate over what is, or is not, Good - you can objectively prove it through the Outer Planes. You can make experiments that demonstrate it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

What this means is that, if the GM says that certain actions are Evil or Chaotic in his game, then that is a literal, inarguable truth about the world, just as if she had said that there are three moons that control wizardly magic instead of a Weave of magic.

Outside the game, we can argue it about how different tables interpret it. Inside, though, we have to go with what the DM, the final arbiter of the rules and setting, says.

Final say isn't equivalent to unilateral say, nor to anything goes.

Ideally, you are correct. Realistically, however? The DM can overrule the entire table if they want something, and the only alternative is to walk away from the game. For example - when 5e first came out and we were still arguing if elves got the benefit of a full rest in four hours thanks to Trance, the DM said no. We at the table disagreed, then, instead of arguing, the entire group asked for a house rule to change it. We were shot down. Were we upset and frustrated? Yes. Did we have any choice other than quitting the game? Not really.

I would never advise a GM to make unilateral changes to how Fireball works at a table with an evoker. For more-or-less the same reasons that I think it's a mistake for the GM to make unilateral determinations about the moral meaning of a PC's actions.

This and what I said have nothing to do with each other. I said the player would be the one trying to change it specifically against GM wishes.

Gygax asserted that assassins must be evil, but the reasoning is not very persuasive.

Irregardless, if that's how the setting is designed, and the gods of assassination is an Evil force, then within the setting we have an objective definition. Just because you disagree with it as a player doesn't give you the power to change that definition. If you were the DM, you have that power. You might consider it a necessary evil, but that's the funny thing about necessary evils. They have evil in the name because its still evil, no matter how necessary.

In fact, balancing Good and Evil is often a theme in a lot of D&D games.

If the contract killer only kills legitimate targets - say, people who aren't deserving or aren't innocent (eg greedy merchants, corrupt mayors, vicious slave-masters etc) then I don't see why, within the basic D&D alignment framework, s/he has to be evil at all.

Strawman. You are well within your rights to say that as the DM. As a player, you don't get to - you follow what the setting establishes.

The OP says that:

the PC is willing to kill anyone for the right price, negating your whole "the right targets" argument.

 

[Mephista]

For instance, there isn't much debate about whether a person is liberal or conservative (on whatever axis), because there is always moderate to fall into. Debate might come in about whether someone is conservative or moderate, but not liberal or conservative. In my opinion, the system is working better if the good and evil question is the same way. Good and evil should be so far apart that there just isn't any ambiguity between the two. Neutral is the moderate of alignments.

I don't think of Neutral as "moderate" of the D&D axis. I think that Neutral has its own definitions and positions. Personal freedom and achievement is the embodiment of CN, but CG embodies beauty, love, and life. CE is destruction and entropy. The three are all different.

Both AD&D and 3e are pretty consistent in telling us that it isn't all about motivation. (Sorry to those on this thread who have argued otherwise, but no edition has supported "motivation only" based alignment.) Actions do matter, by the books (and it doesn't matter which books). What we aren't explicitly told to my knowledge is whether motivation also matters. I think common sense would say alignment is a combination of actions and motivations, since that's how we judge people in the real world.

While motivation isn't everything, I think it is very applicable to telling different types of killing apart. War is not murder. Self-defense or defense of others is not murder. Contract killing is, however, murder and thus evil.

As far as Gygax's thoughts on most humans being lawful, I think that was a poor call on his part. AD&D did seem to skew that way, but even before 3e came along the inconsistencies with the system started causing it to break down.

He was a man of his times - society fluxuates between social order (Law) and personal freedom (Chaos). He was from a time of heavy emphasis on social order. Times and personal views change.

The problem with the nine alignment system as envisioned by Gary Gygax is that it is unworkable. 3e salvaged and made sense of it.

The system started off as Law v. Chaos, then evolved. Took some time to get right and put old conceptions behind. We still have some previous misconcenptions going forth, and we're still evolving the alignment system.

 

[Mephista]

I agree that there are behaviours that are hard to categorise as Good or Evil in the AD&D scheme. A simple example: someone regularly lies to save a group of villains trashing a gallery, thereby sacrificing truth to preserve beauty - is s/he good or evil?

Lying, in the D&D verse, is generally considered a Chaotic attribute, irregardless of Good and Evil. Specifically, if the character is attempting to preserve beauty or liberty, that is generally considered to be a guiding principle of Chaotic Good.

A more complex example: a ruler suppresses consumption to build up capital (eg by stockpiling grain for trade, by making clerics cast Stone Shape spells rather than healing spells, etc) in order to do long-term improvement works in the city. (Many modern European cities, at least, were built in something like this way.) As a result, the people are hungry, child mortality is higher than it might otherwise be, etc. But N years down the track, the people living in the nicely built, well-sewered city with straight, safe roads are very happy, and don't feel any personal connection to the suffering of their ancestors. Is the ruler good or evil?

Lawful neutral. Forcing clerics to do what the ruler says is instead of following the tenants of their religion is not considered lawful good behavior. Nor is it tyranny as embodied by the LE planes. It is, however, resonating with the exercise of law and order as embodied by Mechanus, the ideal LN Outer Plane. Most gods of rulers are also LN, suggesting that rulers have to make hard choices and engage in necessary evils for the sake of promoting an ordered civilization.

My view on this is that, if the player's protestations that his PC could do good things if he wanted aren't to count for anything, then likewise his brazen boasts that he would kill anyone for a high enough price probably shouldn't count for much either.

The difference, based off the information presented, is that the character can choose to do good things, but has established that he does do evil things. Not would, does.

While perhaps in the fiction only the gods truly know the content of the PC's heart, at the table we either have to take the player's claims at face value, or look at the actions the PC has actually committed. But holding the PC to account for one set of possibilities (imagined assassinations) but not another set of possibilities (imagined acts of kindness) doesn't seem very principled to me.

In the case above, the OP has said that the character in question does do evil - his argument that he's Neutral is that he can do good to "balance it out." Its not imagined, its an established part of the background. At least, no more imagined than the rest of the game. The two - contract killing and good acts - are not on the same level.

Now perhaps the PC has, in fact, killed innocent people for money, but we've not been told that.

Nor have we been told the context in which the player is making the choices for his PC that he is.

Clearly, we've been reading different posts. We've flat out been told that he will willing kill people for the sake of greed. While its not explicitly spelled out, its implied that innocents are on the menu for the right price.

Yes. It tells us that they're not good. But it doesn't tell us they're evil. Lawful neutral and chaotic neutral people are sources of misery for others, because they prioritise other external goals (order or freedom, respectively) over human wellbeing, truth and beauty. Hence they may well be legitimate targets, provided they pose a sufficiently proximate threat (fill in the details based on your theory of permissible violence - D&D tends to default to a very relaxed permissibility threshold!).

Its those very goals that are what provide insight. To preserve life and beauty? CG. To maintain the Hierarchy? LE. For Justice? LG. For greed? NE.

In D&D, killing is not innately evil. However, murder for profit is.