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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 9533552" data-attributes="member: 6937590">I like this idea.Muscular neutrals want to prevent the conflict from escalating.Good wants to prevent the conflict from escalating too but, by themselves, they can't. Their gains cause Evil to escalate the conflict, which is bad for everyone--and Evil's gains force Good to escalate, for fear of losing and allowing more people to come to harm by Evil. Escalation might just mean sending more outsiders and empowering more mortal vessels at first--but everybody knows that world ending power is on the table if things escalate too far.The two can't maintain a peace between themselves because Good doesn't trust Evil (justifiably) and Evil doesn't trust Good.They need a 3rd party guarantor--the muscular neutrals. Muscular neutrals have to fight both sides, or they wouldn't work as a guarantor. Generally they spend more time fighting Evil ...because obviously. But if they don't also fight good, Evil will just escalate the conflict as they would have when threatened by good.It requires no special cosmological justifications, just the logic of escalation.It also gets us to the jaded I-know-more-than-thou wizards from secret societies sadly or stoically doing what they see as their duty to destroy the forces of good (and druids, which the preceding sort-of describes)--which, I think, is what many of us imagine muscular neutrals to be.Sidenote: I'm leery of the term "pragmatic", it's essentially consequentialism with a bunch of unstated goals and assumptions snuck in.</blockquote>

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