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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6736221" data-attributes="member: 22779">The thing is, D&D defines good and evil in modern senses, not medieval ones.  We cannot really apply medieval moral sensibilities to the game when the game itself doesn't use those definitions.  We can, for example, appreciate Roman civilization for a lot of things, but, in D&D terms, it's still an evil empire.  Widespread slavery and circuses pretty much pin that down.  Every single D&D civilisation that has those is considered evil.  That I can think of, none of the good civilisations practice either of those things.Which is why I'm fairly convinced that LN is untenable.  The laws of the land will slide to either good or evil over time.  Either morality and a respect for life will begin to enter into the laws of the land, pushing the civilisation good, or the laws will become more and more out of touch with morality and the civilisation will slide into evil.  Modern US is not a LN society in the least.  You have all sorts of laws protecting the weak - social programs for the feeding and care of those who can't help themselves, laws which work to prevent things like discrimination and whatnot, which are entirely based in morality, and criminal laws which have the idea of reform, not punishment, as their goal.  Now, how well society achieves those goals is another issue, and this is not the place to discuss that, but, that IS the goal of law in the US.  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, all people are created equal" is a call to good, not neutral.  Neutrals wouldn't give a toss about "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".  Why would neutrals care if the people were happy?  That's a moral judgement.  I guess, I do agree with @Celembrim that LN isn't an oxymoron.  It's not.  But, it doesn't apply to most groups either.  It's simply not stable.The example, upthread, of the wandering samurai (ronin) working for different masters is a good case in point.  Neutral is not "do good this time and that balances out the evil next time".  That doesn't work.  The LN Samurai works for one master and saves a village from a couple of oni.  Great.  No problem.  The next master orders the samurai to burn a village and kill everyone in it because the head man insulted him.  If that Samurai slaughters a village full of women and children, he's not neutral, he's evil.  It doesn't really matter that he does nothing but non-evil things from then on.  He's still evil because he slaughtered a village full of women and children.  This is why I think LN is ultimately unstable and untenable.  LN becomes, in D&D terms, largely indistinguishable from LG in play because you have this character that does nothing but morally-neutral or good things for his entire career - but never does anything outright evil.  How is he any different from a LG character who does exactly the same things for his entire career?I remember having a player years ago, fairly new to my group, who insisted his character was CN.  I wasn't really thrilled with the idea, since I'd seen disruptive players pull that one in the past, but, I let it slide.  The player played a character that was entirely dependable, never did anything on a whim or irrational and behaved as a total team player.  After four or five levels of this, I came back to the player and asked him why he thought the character was CN.  He never really did come up with any real explanation, but, vehemently insisted his character was CN and that his character could do anything he wanted to do.  He just wanted to be a team player.  After a few conversations about this, I realized what the player was actually trying to tell me.  In his mind, if  the character was Lawful, that would empower me, as DM, to step in and force him to do things.  He wanted to build a nice box around his character that would allow him to play his character however he wanted to play it without me interfering.  Even though what he was playing was pretty much cut and dried LG, he didn't want to allow me any levers to dictate his actions to him.I totally backed off, let him keep CN on his sheet and promptly dropped the whole thing.  One of the best things out of 4e was the idea of Unaligned and I do wish that 5e had kept this.  It's the perfect alignment for most players who aren't interested in playing up the moral angle of a character.  But, LN, at the end of the day, is largely indistinguishable from LG over the course of a campaign.  The two characters will behave in almost exactly the same fashion.  Why bother having a "slightly dirty" LG?  Just call it LG, or maybe NG and be done with it.  LE?  Sure, I can see that.  There's a ton of examples we can point to for that and lots of iconic characters and societies.  But LN and CN?  Meh, outside of a few very sketchily defined characters, I really don't think the game is better for having those alignments.  And, really, thinking about it, you can wrap LE into NE quite often, since LE groups tend to be so corrupt and corruptible, that the L part of the alignment is just a stand in for self interest.Again, when demons and devils look pretty much identical, what's the point in having two alignments for them?  When you can have impulsive devils interested in destruction and planning demons with strong senses of organization, what's the point of distinguishing the two through alignment?</blockquote>

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