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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 1768219" data-attributes="member: 18832">I tend to assume that racial tendencies prevail, but that populations fall closer to the neutral point as a whole than to strong extremes.Elves as a people are chaotic good, and their social structures and traditions will reflect this, but an individual elf will have significant "neutral tendencies"; most people are not greatly motivated by moral or ethical impulses. It's the strong-willed, prominent personalities of elven society who gather the groundswell of opinion that leads to the chaotic good character of elven social institutions - elves won't get behind a lawful neutral system, but they're happy to go along with proposals which suit their natural inclinations.The same is just as true for, say, orcs. Their societies are not brutal and cruel because they're all mindless bullies - they're brutal and cruel because strong leaders run the show that way by embodying their natural racial inclinations, and it's something that orcs are more or less willing to go along with because they understand it. You couldn't get away with a lawful neutral system in an orc tribe either, but it's not because all orcs are deeply chaotic evil.Most people are passive about their alignments, in other words. This can include "heroes" - not every neutral good warrior who saves a kingdom is motivated by purest altruism. True, paladins are required to be actively committed to high-minded ideals, and won't have the passive tendencies I ascribe to the majority of people, but I think they're alone of the Player's Handbook classes in necessitating that level of commitment. Even clerics won't necessarily have to feel strongly about such issues - Wee Jas is hardly an exemplar of lawful thought and deed, for example, so her clerics need not be such themselves.That said, I would probably choose to divorce alignment-detection spells from character power and establish a looser metric of "commitment". An evil cleric of Wee Jas wouldn't radiate evil the same way a cleric of Hextor would, precisely because Wee Jas' interest in death and the undead strikes me as fairly distant from the alignment axis while Hextor's tyranny necessitates genuine commitment to order and evil from both the god and his clerics. Similarly, a deeply altruistic and benevolent wizard would radiate more strongly than his decent but hardly philosophically-committed warrior friend.</blockquote>

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