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<blockquote data-quote="seebs" data-source="post: 6615174" data-attributes="member: 61529">Neutral implies a desire not to harm innocents. You might not be willing to sacrifice much for them, but you should be avoiding hurting them. If you don't care whether innocent people get hurt, that's pretty evil. Neutral does not mean &quot;does good things sometimes and evil things other times&quot;, and it certainly doesn't mean &quot;does evil things some times but could in theory do good things other times.&quot;I mean, yes, some people do both good and evil things, but by and large, the way D&amp;D will tend to look at it, if you've got a strong tendency towards one side over the other, that's going to be your alignment. Killing for money is, by and large, considered &quot;evil&quot; in D&amp;D.Note that in 3E, it was quite possible for a single creature to register as both strongly-evil and strongly-good for alignment. You can't actually check anymore in 5E; there's no &quot;detect evil&quot; as such, anymore. But I would tend to say that someone who did both good and evil things was better understood as having a conflicted alignment than being &quot;neutral&quot;. Especially if the good things are purely theoretical.Thing you might want to ask: Why does he care what alignment the character is? My guess would be, he identifies with the character and does not want people thinking that something he identifies with is evil. (As someone who could quite easily be identified as &quot;evil&quot; by some people's standards, I guess I'm a little sympathetic, but I think knowing yourself is more valuable than feeling good about things.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="seebs, post: 6615174, member: 61529"] Neutral implies a desire not to harm innocents. You might not be willing to sacrifice much for them, but you should be avoiding hurting them. If you don't care whether innocent people get hurt, that's pretty evil. Neutral does not mean "does good things sometimes and evil things other times", and it [b]certainly[/b] doesn't mean "does evil things some times but could in theory do good things other times." I mean, yes, some people do both good and evil things, but by and large, the way D&D will tend to look at it, if you've got a strong tendency towards one side over the other, that's going to be your alignment. Killing for money is, by and large, considered "evil" in D&D. Note that in 3E, it was quite possible for a single creature to register as both strongly-evil and strongly-good for alignment. You can't actually check anymore in 5E; there's no "detect evil" as such, anymore. But I would tend to say that someone who did both good and evil things was better understood as having a conflicted alignment than being "neutral". Especially if the good things are purely theoretical. Thing you might want to ask: Why does he [b]care[/b] what alignment the character is? My guess would be, he identifies with the character and does not want people thinking that something he identifies with is evil. (As someone who could quite easily be identified as "evil" by some people's standards, I guess I'm a little sympathetic, but I think knowing yourself is more valuable than feeling good about things.) [/QUOTE]

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