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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8691286" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, on some levels I'm baffled by your response and can only assume I have done a really bad job in describing what I believe.  I won't worsen the situation by trying to immediately reexplain myself and likely end up with you just more confused.   I assure you I don't believe that the alignments are just teams.   I don't know how you read that, but it wasn't my intent.I will try to address some of the statements you've made in this post in their own right.No, that won't work.  You cannot use alignment as a marker for personality or culture at all.  It is not descriptive enough to do that and IMO no simple array or list is complex enough to describe personality or culture.  That isn't what alignment is for and it does a really bad job of that and cannot be made to do a good job of that.  Each of the alignment buckets contains a very large number of personalities, cultures, and philosophical belief systems.  You might can analyze a personality or culture and figure out in which bucket to throw it, but you can't do the reverse and take something out of the bucket and know its personality or culture.My favorite way to explain this is to go the best article ever written on personality in D&D NPCs, which is the old Seven Sentence NPC from Dragon #184 by C.M. Cline.  Read that article and its example NPCs and think about them for a moment.  I contend that as beautifully described as the personalities are in those examples, they do not tell us what the alignment the characters are.  Further, that each of the example personalities could be any of the nine alignments, and most importantly that if we also knew the alignment of the example NPCs we would know something additional about them that we could not know just by knowing their personalities.So if you are looking for a way to map Alignment to personality, not only have you missed the point of alignment but your project is doomed.  You'd be better off doing the Seven Sentence Personality or the Seven Sentence Culture.And you can go ahead and do that project and say, "Oh, Drow believe in Strength."  But what you'll find is that even after you do it, you know more if you also know their alignment because it will tell you a lot about what they think Strength is and how they think it is acquired, or conversely if we know a lot about what they think Strength is or how they think it is acquired, then we probably can guess what alignment bucket to put them in.No, no no.  Bravery and loyalty are neutral terms.  Whether we equate them with goodness depends entirely on what the person is being brave and loyal about.  If you are brave and loyal in defense of a terrible cause, we might admire that bravery and loyalty to a certain extent, while still thinking it is foolishness and evil.  Merely being brave or loyal tells us nothing about whether someone is good.  It just maybe tell us something about their self-control and self-discipline.  But Darth Vader is not good just because he's brave and loyal to the Emperor, and he doesn't lose his goodness when he betrays the Emperor - quite the contrary.  And, I don't mean to make you feel bad or anything, but so much of the problem in discussing these issues is just sloppy thinking where I feel the person is making statements that, if they thought about them hard, they wouldn't even agree with them.  I don't think you really do think Loyalty is "Good", because there are few modern Western cultures that really take that idea seriously and really claim that Bravery and Loyalty are in and of themselves Good.  If you did think it didn't matter in what service you were Brave or Loyal, I think we could characterize that belief system in D&D terms as something other than Good and you'd need to evaluate your biases when trying to describe alignment.And you get that because you go on to say:But don't you think that does matter what you are brave and loyal about?  I mean these aren't merely just teams.  The perception that all teams are equal and it doesn't matter what they believe you always defend your own is also an alignment viewpoint.  It does matter what belief system you have.  I mean it is and it isn't.  It depends on what you mean by "behavior".  It is a very useful descriptor for determining whether or not the individual or society values things like compassion and mercy.  It's not a very useful descriptor for determining whether or not the individual lies tea ceremonies or music. Why?And I'm not understanding the problem here.</blockquote>

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