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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9540016" data-attributes="member: 907">Active neutrality works in the context of Moorcockian Law vs Chaos, where neither end state is desirable, and I think it's likely that that's the context in which Gygax made it a thing in Greyhawk. But adding a good/evil aspect to it makes it nonsensical.It also works well in the context of actual mortal shades-of-grey factions or nations: you don't want Cormyr to grow too strong at the expense of Amn because that might interfere with your own power base in Waterdeep (or whatever the Greyhawk equivalents are). Cormyr might be a "good" nation while Amn is "evil", but for you it's better if they are competitive with one another so you can play them off against each other. You're not being oppressive to your own population, but you don't really mind if someone else is as long as the trade keeps flowing. This is quite a few tiers below the cosmological good vs evil though.A third option is that of recognizing your own limits, and how you might not have all the context of a situation and therefore stay out of it. We don't have to go that far back in history to find foreign policy actions that were well intended (for some values of well intended) but didn't work out quite as planned (and that's probably about as far as "no politics" will allow me to go). This probably applies more to staying out of a situation rather than intervening in favor of "evil" though.</blockquote>