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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6619242" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.</blockquote>

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