D&D General "True Neutral": Bunk or Hogwash

[Professor Murder]

Both 1E and 2E had planar effects on magic and had weapons that could do more damage to someone based on their alignment. As I recall, there were also some non-core spells that specifically harmed people based on their alignment as well.

So, in the TSR era, alignment was a measurable thing, even if the measurement was "does that guy catch fire when we cast this specific spell?"

That's as far as we can go, as I recall.

More of what I mean is, do we ever get "If there is too much "Good" it will cause multiversal calamity." as an actual in the game belief or mechanical truth or is it simply the case that we the audience assume that must be the case?

 

[Professor Murder]

I guess it is just the English Professor of me just getting annoyed that people make eager assertions without any textual evidence.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

however my biggest criticism of it is that it exists in a game where players hate being told how their characters are meant to act and are absolutely dogwater at objectively considering the morality of their actions, especially in a game system which has primarily devoted most of it's mechanics to killing and the the game was originally based around looting anything you could get your grubby little mitts on.

"Players" very much including DMs here, I presume?

Most of the absolute worst takes on alignment that I've ever come across "in the field" have been from DMs. Indeed the very first time alignment became an issue in D&D for my group was one I've mentioned a few times - when a DM told us we "had to" kill a bunch of literal toddler-age/development orc babies or we couldn't be considered "Good" (really channelling Gygax there I guess, but we didn't know that), we were just 12-13 y/o kids but this was beyond abhorrent to us.

Over the years I've seen DMs behave unreasonably re: alignment way more than players. Sure there's Lawful Stupid and CN causing big problems from time to time, but for every Lawful Stupid Paladin or Cleric causing the entire session to grind to a halt, there are two DMs trying to litigate the exact and precise bounds of certain alignments, particularly CG and LG in my experience (as someone who has almost never played a PC who wasn't NG, I generally avoided these conflicts), usually totally and completely unnecessarily and dragging the entire session down as a result. Stuff like "Well you can't go along with this plan, you're LG!!!" and the plan really isn't that illegal (or simply pits one law against another) and would do huge good, or "Omg how dare you steal that item from these obviously-bad people, you're CG, and it's not Good to steal!" (insane take imho but I've seen it). Not that that never happens when alignment isn't involved, but it drags out far more when it is.

And yes the "invade places, kill the "bad" people who live there, and take their stuff" deep-set colonialist-imperialist subtext to D&D is one of the things we generally don't openly talk about, but which certainly problematizes D&D on a fairly deep level. There are ways around it, and I know a lot of modern WotC and 3PP adventures skirt or avoid those tropes, but some don't and others just run smack-bang into other problematic tropes (like "black bagging people and imprisoning them forever with no trial, no real judicial or investigatory basis, and no chance of reprieve is cool, actually", I mean did the CIA write this lol? IYKYK re: which WotC adventure I'm referring to).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

More of what I mean is, do we ever get "If there is too much "Good" it will cause multiversal calamity." as an actual in the game belief or mechanical truth or is it simply the case that we the audience assume that must be the case?

There's no actuality to in any edition of D&D that I'm aware of.

This is what I was referring to when I pointed out that Gygax/Arneson have a lot to answer for, because they were the ones who decided to expand TN from being between Law and Chaos (where it made sense, and where the consequences are semi-obvious, or at worst explained in Moorcock novels) to also being between Good and Evil. But they never successfully justified it, or really even attempted to it. It was held that this truth was self-evident, I guess, or self-evident to TN people at least.

I've never read any vision/explanation in 2E or earlier of what "too much Good" would actually look like, and how that would actually, legitimately be a bad thing. And Planescapian ideas of planes changing or slipping just didn't exist prior to Planescape in 1994, by which time this idea of TN or "too much Good" was decreasing in popularity.

To be specific though if you're just asking if any NPCs think that, Mordenkainen seems to have thought that at one point at least, on the basis on mid-1990s material, but that was for setting-specific reasons specific to the mid-1990s FR cosmology, which has since been abandoned.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

More of what I mean is, do we ever get "If there is too much "Good" it will cause multiversal calamity." as an actual in the game belief or mechanical truth or is it simply the case that we the audience assume that must be the case?

I assume there's a silver-tongued literal devil out there arguing this, but I don't recall anything being said like that. That said, I didn't own all the Planescape boxed sets. If that idea was anywhere in TSR D&D, it'd be there.

 

[CreamCloud0]

"Players" very much including DMs here, I presume?

Most of the absolute worst takes on alignment that I've ever come across "in the field" have been from DMs. Indeed the very first time alignment became an issue in D&D for my group was one I've mentioned a few times - when a DM told us we "had to" kill a bunch of literal toddler-age/development orc babies or we couldn't be considered "Good" (really channelling Gygax there I guess, but we didn't know that), we were just 12-13 y/o kids but this was beyond abhorrent to us.

Over the years I've seen DMs behave unreasonably re: alignment way more than players. Sure there's Lawful Stupid and CN causing big problems from time to time, but for every Lawful Stupid Paladin or Cleric causing the entire session to grind to a halt, there are two DMs trying to litigate the exact and precise bounds of certain alignments, particularly CG and LG in my experience (as someone who has almost never played a PC who wasn't NG, I generally avoided these conflicts), usually totally and completely unnecessarily and dragging the entire session down as a result. Stuff like "Well you can't go along with this plan, you're LG!!!" and the plan really isn't that illegal (or simply pits one law against another) and would do huge good, or "Omg how dare you steal that item from these obviously-bad people, you're CG, and it's not Good to steal!" (insane take imho but I've seen it). Not that that never happens when alignment isn't involved, but it drags out far more when it is.

And yes the "invade places, kill the "bad" people who live there, and take their stuff" deep-set colonialist-imperialist subtext to D&D is one of the things we generally don't openly talk about, but which certainly problematizes D&D on a fairly deep level. There are ways around it, and I know a lot of modern WotC and 3PP adventures skirt or avoid those tropes, but some don't and others just run smack-bang into other problematic tropes (like "black bagging people and imprisoning them forever with no trial, no real judicial or investigatory basis, and no chance of reprieve is cool, actually", I mean did the CIA write this lol? IYKYK re: which WotC adventure I'm referring to).

oh yeah i certainly won't deny that GMs are often just as guilty for trying to pass judgement on the morality of actions (even actively looking and setting circumstances to do so), but in those situations i feel that it's less that they can't view the actions in objective morality but that they've missed the mark on what the morality was in the first place, though i do recognize what each alignment has represented has changed over various editions.

 

[Morrus]

All the alignments are nonsense.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

I assume there's a silver-tongued literal devil out there arguing this, but I don't recall anything being said like that. That said, I didn't own all the Planescape boxed sets. If that idea was anywhere in TSR D&D, it'd be there.

What about the Dragonlance setting/Krynn?
Wasn’t there a large chunk in the setting lore about what happened when “good” almost “won”?
(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about that setting, and didn’t read the novels.)

 

[Alzrius]

What about the Dragonlance setting/Krynn?
Wasn’t there a large chunk in the setting lore about what happened when “good” almost “won”?
(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about that setting, and didn’t read the novels.)

Yes, there is. And that tracks with the game rules as well: the 3.5 supplement Legends of the Twins has an alternate timeline where the Kingpriest won, rather than causing the Cataclysm, and it gives stats for the "Godpriest" (i.e. the Kingpriest after having taken over and forcibly bound Paladine within the Godcage), which includes noting that his alignment is Lawful Good and that he also has the Good subtype.

 

[Voadam]

What about the Dragonlance setting/Krynn?
Wasn’t there a large chunk in the setting lore about what happened when “good” almost “won”?
(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about that setting, and didn’t read the novels.)

The cosmic balance of good against evil is a big thing in Dragonlance.

Good started to ultimately triumph in the world with wars against evil that ended up turning into a war of genocide against evil and then neutral by the king-priest and then going after the gods, which triggered the Cataclysm.

The main god of good in the novels is an advocate of working toward the balance of the gods, while the evil goddess seeks to gain ultimate power in herself alone.

It is also a big criticism of the setting as it is fairly easy to conclude the balance logic is nonsense and the King-Priest stuff was not actually good.