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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6633214" data-attributes="member: 177">There is a problem with engaging that question via play - if you are in a game in which alignment is a *power* (say, stock 3e) then there is no question.  Forces of the Universe decide the question for you, and you can tell if they are lawful by casing, for example, Detect Law.  If you are playing a game that, for some reason, has alignments but there is no power associated with it, then the question is likely moot. I submit that the overthrow of previous social order cannot be a decisive measure for whether a person or people in a D&D universe are Lawful - context matters.  For example, if it can be well-argued that the previous social order had betrayed its people or its own principles (betrayal being a pretty non-lawful thing to do), the truly Lawful thing to do may be to replace that old order with a new one. And, then we get to bring in the alignment-of-person vs alignment-of-society question, but I have a different angle on it.When I use alignment for people, I take it to be a long-term average of behavior.  Single, non-magical acts rarely cause major alignment shifts.  You can consider the alignment of a society or group to be a similar, aggregate or average measure.  If most of the people are LG, the society as a whole is LG.  This doesn't preclude the occasional person who is different (or even very many differences, so long as the *average* works out), just as being LG precludes the occasional jerkish action from a person. Thus, Nazis in general can be LE, even if there are a couple of notable individuals in the ranks who are really more like CE.</blockquote>

Verification