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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaro" data-source="post: 6405132" data-attributes="member: 48965">No what Moorcock asserts and what D&D enforces as well through the nine-point alignment system is that one cannot be absolutely one cosmological force (chaos or law) and still also be absolutely another cosmological force (good or evil)... it's an impossibility since absolutely would mean metaphysically that is the whole of your being.  Until that point of absoluteness is reached Moorcock shows us that chaos and law have the propensity to cause both good and evil.  Now most/many of Moorcock's works posit that balance in law and chaos is the only way to promote the greatest good (i.e. to be unconcerned with promoting law or chaos but instead promoting good on it's own)... however from most of the stories I remember the only place that comes close to this idealized balance is the city of Tanelorn.I don't have 1e so take my comments with a grain of salt since they are based on googling the graph, but... I think You're reading that graph wrong... that person is maximally lawful good... not both maximally lawful (which would mean he is totally devoted to and in essence law) and maximally good (which would mean he is totally devoted to and totally in essence good)... but you can't be totally two different things... since total is a finite sum that encompasses all...  The fact that instead of going straight up the middle where good would be positioned you are pulled towards the left (towards law) shows that you have a value system that must by it's very nature sometimes conflict when the most lawful action or result is not the most good action or result... at that point you must be one or the other and thus are not maximally one or the other... this is supported in the descriptions of alignments...Lawful Good characters, especially paladins, may sometimes find themselves faced with the dilemma of whether to obey law or good when the two conflict — for example, upholding a sworn oath when it would lead innocents to come to harm — or conflicts between two orders, such as between their religious law and the law of the local ruler.   Actually, at least in 3.x, the HD determine how "evil" something registers as and thus different fiends would in fact register at different intensities of evil... So this is more evidence to support the fact that the LE alignment of fiends is an umbrella that encompasses a variety of actual levels of evil as opposed to being one consistent level..., Also note they did not base this on how chaotic or lawful it is...It does make sense when law and chaos are cosmological forces in their own right, that both have their own traits they wish promoted across the planes that are independent of the morality of good and evil.  As an admittedly imprecise example... would you say the required obedience in some forms of the code of Bushido as it relates to order is any less a statement on morality than kindness is as it relates to goodness?  I don't think it is, I think both are a form of morality and that obedience in and of itself is neither good nor evil... but does speak to the conflict of law vs. chaos.</blockquote>

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