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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6615449" data-attributes="member: 1465">Thankfully 5e does away with all mechanical consequences of alignment, so these kind of discussions become more academical than substantial...I can very much agree with that. I would probably suggest the player to completely remove alignmnent from the character sheet.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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