Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Maxperson" data-source="post: 9568211" data-attributes="member: 23751">I mean, it's what has been told to us for a looooong time.2e pg 46: "Philosophers of neutrality not only presuppose the existence of opposites, but they also theorize that the universe would vanish should one of the opposite completely destroy the other (since nothing can exist without its opposite). Fortunately for these philosophers (and all other sentient life), the universe seems to be efficient at regulating itself. Only when a powerful, unbalancing force appears (which almost never happens) need the defenders of neutrality come seriously concerned."There's that belief that you have to keep things from going to extremes.3.5e PHB page 105:  "A neutral character does what seems to be a good idea.  She doesn't feel strongly one way or another when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos.  Most neutral character exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality.  Such a character thinks of good as better than evil-after all, she would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones.  Still she's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way."Another that says what I am saying.4e page 20 Unaligned(neutral): "If you're unaligned, you don't actively seek to harm others or wish them ill.  But you also don't go out of your way to put yourself at risk without some hope of reward.  You support law and order when doing so benefits you.  You value your own freedom, without worrying too much about protecting the freedom of others."5e page 122: " (N) is the alignment of those who prefer to steer clear of moral questions and don't take sides, doing what seems best at the time." ~ even this vague short sentence supports my view over yours.1e was the only edition where neutrality wasn't "I just don't care enough about good/evil/law/chaos, but even Gygax in 1e said that alignments can vary and that a true neutral individual could tend towards good.No. Nonviolent resistance like Ghandi enacted was not neutral and placed him and others like him at risk. It just just non-violent good.  What I am talking about is someone who doesn't care enough about good to go risk himself in non-violent resistance to evil.  And accepting the suffering of yourself and the many others that are also suffering, rather than take the action to end the evil is morally good?!  No. It may not be evil, but it's not morally good................or any other kind of good.I never said such a person is less good.  I said people lack the conviction to go and protest, etc.  The wheelchair person does not lack the conviction, but the means.  That's different and not at all a part of my thinking.My thinking also does not ignore the definitions we are working with.  They remain altruism, respect for life, etc., but just that those parts of that person aren't as strong in conviction as the good individual. It also doesn't matter when the motivation comes from fundamental qualities of moral identity or whether they come from society and circumstance.  What does matter is that regardless of where the motivation comes from, it's not as strong as someone committed to good, law, evil, or chaos.You are attributing things to my thinking that are not there.It's not as bizarre as you think.  Yes those things do interconnect, but they also exist in ways that do not. You can have a hermit who has been isolated since he was 3, raised by rabbits and wolves, still fundamentally be committed to good, evil, law(order, personal code, etc., not actual laws) or chaos.  Or he might not be strongly committed in any direction and be neutral.  This is especially true in D&D which treats alignment as universal forces, devoting entire planes and races to them.Why do you assume that I want to go protest? Or that most of us do? The overwhelming majority of people that I have known in my life wouldn't go to a protest even if they could.  That doesn't mean that they don't believe in laws, goodness or whatever. It just means they don't believe strongly enough to do so.  I've also know a very few people who would fly across the country to protest and/or are very vocal on social media about these things.  They DO have strong commitment to their ideals and would not be considered neutral.Too much love is often enabling people to their detriment.  It enables drug addicts to overdose and die.  It enables people who need mental health care to suffer longer before getting that care, because loved ones want to help them through their difficulties out of love and they are not experts.  It enables alcoholics to not get the treatment they need and perhaps get into a drunk driving accident or die of liver failure.  Too much love causes people to neglect their health and safety in order to take care of the needs of others, damaging their ability to continue to help.I watched too much love put my wife's grandmother at risk.  She had advanced alzheimer's and her family wanted to care for her at home, not put her into a home.  Because of that, she more than once escaped from the people that she didn't know and made breaks for it down the road. If she had gone far enough, she could have been one of those stories we hear about every year when someone like that vanishes, or she could have wandered in front a car and been killed.At extremes, too much love is also bad. Not evil, but bad.I think you are missing the "at extremes" portion.  At extremes, good loses sight of or the interpretation of those things becomes twisted.  A zealot is very altruistic, often living in poverty so others can have things.  A zealot can totally respect live by forcing it to be better at being good so that it can have eternal reward later on, and who better to have the greatest dignity than those who behave in the greatest goodness!  Zealotry twists perception and those people have gone to their belief to such an extreme that again, it becomes bad.  Most zealots didn't start out as bad people.  They just took their philosophy too far.Why do you have to kill them? Just breaking up their power structure so that they aren't able to overwhelm as they threaten to is enough.  Besides, good, evil, law and chaos are defined by their opposites.  You can't be good, if there's not evil and/or neutrality for it to be balanced against.  Imagine a world where everyone in it was 100% altruistic, respectful of life, etc.  That's no longer good, but the average status quo.  It's that world's neutral state of being.  For something to register as good, it has to stand out from the rest of the background noise.Nothing I have said involves trying to make the world into moral 0 sum game. It's about lack of enough conviction to fall into the category of good or whatever, and stopping a side from winning as extremes are pretty much always bad.  I've certainly never heard of a good extreme, and that includes love.It makes no such assumption. It doesn't act unless one hits an extreme.  It doesn't try to balance things to 0 sum like you are saying. Suppose it takes one side going past 80% to trigger muscular neutrality.  A world could be 80% good and 20% evil and nothing would be done to change that. Please don't read into that that I think 20% evil is okay.  I'm just putting out a hypothetical for the sake of D&D muscular neutrality and to show that good and evil to have to be fundamentally equal to trigger it.Both are are both.  There's good reactiveness when the good person reacts to step in and save someone from an evil threat.  And there's good proactiveness where the good person goes to poor people and brings food and other supplies to care for them.  There's evil reactiveness where someone gets triggered by kids playing ding dong ditch and shoots them as a reaction. And there's evil proactiveness where folks go out and commit crimes.Those are stories, not real life or RPGs. In a book, yes you have to have evil be proactive and good then reacts. Otherwise it makes for a very boring story.In real life and in RPGs, both are both.  Evil is reactive and proactive.  Good is reactive and proactive. While a story does come out of game play, it's not the same kind of story that you get in a novel.</blockquote>

Verification