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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5686949" data-attributes="member: 4937">Just for the record, CE and LG are not moral extremes.  They are, almost by definition, alignments based on compromise.  The extreme alignments are those that don't represent a mixture: LN, NG, CN, and NE.   If you think that CE and LG represent moral extremes, then that is your first point of confusion.In practice, I think that the problem is that the alignments are so poorly defined and so poorly written that most people don't have a clue what they represent.  What you tend to see in practice - and 4e explicitly encourages this - is for LG to be treated as a particularly extreme personality that is good and for CE to be treated as a particularly extreme personality that is evil.  This of course gets to be ridiculous, as the sterotypically LG personality is anything but 'more good' and is often as not difficult to separate from the personality of a pyschopath.When in fact, if we looked at just the blank definitions of the alignments themselves it would be Neutral Good that is true Good and pure Good unadulturated by any other consideration.  There is a tendency by a lot of players to mistake alignment for personality, or to conflate alignment with intelligence, charisma or wisdom.  The result is stupidly sterotyped characters who act in stupidly unreflective ways that are often as not poor reflections of the sort of things that the character supposedly believes.  Indeed, I don't think there is much reflection on what characters of different alignments believe and why; in my experience there is much stronger focus by players on what a particular alignment will 'allow them to get away with'.   Typically poor RPers of alignment actually map all 9 alignments into a single axis of, "How restricted am I in playing the character the way that I want/the way that results in me winning."  This typically results in all sorts of 'hilarity'.  I don't, though I admit that the writers of earlier editions did little to help the matter.  Writing on the subject of ethics has been terribly impoverished, contridictory and confusing over pretty much the entire history of the game.  You are pretty much required to come up with your own internally consistant description of what alignment is, because the game won't provide it for you and of course many players/DMs simply gave up trying.</blockquote>

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