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

[tetrasodium]

also IMO, players often far underestimate what it should take to qualify themselves as being Good aligned, take a honest look at yourself you're a glorified mercenary.

There's also the tendency for them to think that they aren't dirtied when Bob's "LG" paladin decides to squeeze every orphanage grad quest giver for every last coin before reluctantly accepting a quest∆ or gets stabby while slowly "questioning" captives∆ just because they decide to contribute by brushing up on their dice tower building skills.

There used to be risks that came with channeling [kermit drinking tea none of my business] too hard or being the demented pc that were hard to ignore as soon as players started finding weapons with alignment effects like holy & whatnot.

∆both examples made up as easy examples

 

[CreamCloud0]

Nah, no XP for gold. Modern D&D characters definitely tend to have heroic motivations, especially in the WotC adventures, where even the collection of heist adventures is reframed as being heroic activity.

i'm not even talking XP for gold, i just don't think most characters are actually adventuring out of pure benevolence, if it requires you to be employed to do it or expect there to be a reward for you afterwards to clear out a nest of goblins i don't think you qualify for good alignment. how often are your players donating to churches and paying for orphanages purely out of good will, healing injured villagers without recompense.

 

[jasper]

True Neutral Murderhobo = Kill everything and let whatever, if any, afterlife sort it out. And keep all the loot.
True Neutral Pacifist = Find an out of the way place and ignore the rest of the world.

and keep your adventurers off my lawn. Racks his +6 Holy shotgun.

 

[Bohandas]

"What makes a man turn neutral. Is it lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?"
-Zapp Branigan

 

[M.L. Martin]

Depending on the source, though, that's either for essentially "Lawful" reasons in that he was getting above his station and challenging the authority of the gods, or because of the "Doctrine of Balance", which is a very vague and wishy-washy Krynnian concept from the 1980s, one which is rarely mentioned and like all other TN ideas in D&D, never really explained, let alone fully explicated with reasons and conditions.

The closest I think we ever get are in two sources. First is the explanation of the Law of Gilean in Dragonlance Adventures; while I don't have my copy to hand at the moment, it talks about a need for contrast and 'unity in diversity.'
Second is the material on souls' progession in Holy Orders of the Stars, which I do not and have never owned, but which I believe states that the 'gods' are embodiments/examples of fundamental principles that are all necessary for souls to progress to a higher state of being through the full experience--good and evil--of mortal life. (At the risk of bending ENWorld rules, you can see parallels to Hickman's own beliefs in this.)

As near as one can get, it seems like the Good/Neutral/Evil gods in Krynn did a sort of detente where they have this "Doctrine of Balance" to prevent them warring etc. (no sign this in any way works, so it's very odd that it's supposedly a thing, they fight constantly through proxies), but that's just tyrannical gods acting in their own best interests, really, isn't it? There's no depth to it and no justification on the basis of "this is needed by the people of Krynn". Further, the very conceit of the Doctrine of Balance seems to be inherently Lawful, which means it isn't really arguable as TN concept.

If you go back to the very earliest, proto-DL material--Jeff Grubb's homebrewed pantheon--you'll find the three pantheons are Lawful/Good, Lawful/Evil, and a loose Neutral and Chaotic alliance. And there's been a tendency for the past thirty years to emphasize the gods as forces of order unified against Chaos.

Even people who are insane experts on Krynnian lore can't square the circle on the Doctrine of Balance without inventing tons of stuff that simple hasn't been suggested to be the case (hell even with inventions and additions not in canon, it's pretty shakey): Meditations on the Balance - Dragonlance Nexus.

Despite the date on the webpage, that essay actually dates back to 1998. It doesn't address one of the deeper issues--how can Evil be both fundamental to the world and yet be Evil as we understand it. This tension shows up from the beginning--the Queen of Darkness is described in Dragons of Spring Dawning as one of the 'forgers of the world', and one of the three participants who will bring the world to completion at the Last Day, and yet in Test of the Twins, we get Astinus--essentially the mouthpiece for Gilean--saying outright "Evil cannot create; it can only destroy."

Evil as something that must be opposed and should not be, but yet something that has a role in the unfolding of the world or divine providence, is something that can be worked with, but Dragonlance often gets away from that and the idea that "'tis not in mortals to command success" to the idea that "Evil is just as fundamental to the world as Good, and Good unchecked would be just as destructive as Evil."

I would argue that the Old Testament vibes here are merely superficial, underlying a weirder and more D&D-specific concept. Sure, it's a flashy-ass meteor and bazillions of totally innocent people are killed for "reasons" which vibes with a lot of 1700s and later conceptions of, for example, the Biblical Great Flood, but the core reasoning from the gods isn't the same - i.e. everyone is basically bad except for the few chosen people is the Biblical reasoning - indeed it's almost inverted! The Krynnic gods nuke the site from orbit to get rid of one guy who they feel is totally out-of-line, and it's not "the Good gods" alone who do it, either, it's the whole lot of them as far as we can tell - Good, Neutral, Evil together.

Looking at the two major inspirations/allegories for the Cataclysm--the Flood and the Downfall of Numenor--we never get a sense that Istar has reached the levels of wickedness comparable to antediluvian human civilation or Late Second Age, imperialist, human-sacrificing, Melkor-worshipping, Numenor. One of several reasons the Cataclysm doesn't work for me, along with the religious allegories wrapped up in Istar and the post-Cataclysm 'abandonment of the gods.' (Note that for those reasons, I've never read the Kingpriest Trilogy, so maybe I've missed a reimagining of Istaran civilization.)
I think Hickman's original concept--made explicit in his proposal notes that he placed online a few years back, and still hinted at in places like DL12 and Tales of the Lance--works better. The Cataclysm was simply the magical backlash from the Kingpriest's hubris-filled attempt to magically summon a god to Krynn to wipe out Evil.

There was also the hilarious retcon later-on that after the Cataclysm, it wasn't the gods weren't listening/were sulking, it was just that people didn't pray to them, which like, is quite clearly textually untrue in earlier Krynn works, given that people explicitly did, and that some of the gods basically apologise for sulking. But I imagine Hickman/Weis wanted to retcon that because it made the gods look real bad.

That's from the earliest material--the people only see the wrath of the gods and not the call to repentance. But the gods pull all their faithful clerics from the world beforehand, and apparently never seek to reach out to the people after that. (Yes, I'm familiar with the 'parable of the gem' from Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Makes Krynn's gods sound like the idols criticized in Isaiah 44: "they see nothing, know nothing, and so they are put to shame.")

TLDR: Like the FR, Krynn's "Balance" thing is never properly explained or reasoned or details, it's just sort of mindlessly assumed. Again I trace the fault back to Gygax/Arneson for extending TN to include Good/Evil without providing any actual reasoning for doing so.

As mentioned, you'll find this whole 'balance' concept in a lot of fantasy from the 1980s--The Dark Crystal, early Masters of the Universe, I think Legend--so I'm not sure where the ultimate source is.

 

[Hriston]

So...it...won't result in the end of reality?

Because if that's so, then the Neutral is either Evil With Good Publicity, or Evil In Denial With Extra Steps.

It (ultimate victory over Evil) will result in the end of this reality and the creation of a new one in which the greatest good is realized. My assumptions here, which I believe I should unpack, are that the D&D multiverse exists to serve as a battlefield in which polar extremes are pitted against one another and that it will all come to an end in a final battle when one polar extreme prevails over the other. TN, like many of us, wants this reality to go on existing. They are deluded in thinking the victory of Good will not bring about the greatest good, so sometimes they side with Evil. At such times, they are effectively Evil while, at other times (when they side with Good), they are effectively Good.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Free will is a Chaotic ideal. You can definitely have a Good surveillance state. There are a number of what we'd consider Lawful states in real life that have convinced their public to give up a significant degree of personal liberty in return for the greater Good.

Too many examples would likely run afoul of ENWorld's politics rules, but I would Google collectivist nations and cultures. Some of them aren't great, but others are pretty clearly trying to create a great quality of life for their residents, which is definitely what we'd consider a Good motivation in D&D terms.

I think the problem here is that the bolded bit is hard to support, and it's extremely easy to argue that in practice this is purely about protecting elites and allowing the targeted suppression of any dissidents, not creating "great quality of life" generally. The more closely you look at laws in both real-life and fictional surveillance states, the more apparent and certain this becomes.

There are plenty of non-oppressive somewhat-collectivist states (again fictional and RL) which aren't creepy, but I cannot think of a single one which engages in mass surveillance. Speaking historically, the concept of the panopticon is a good example of "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", and basically every attempt to construct an RL torment nexus panopticon has proven that it's incredibly deleterious to mental health of the people subjected to it (and people have tried) and absolutely fails to achieve any objective beyond making prisons cheaper to run at the expense of the well-being of the prisoners (and there are a million ways to do that, if that's your clearly non-Good goal). Humans simply aren't intended to be surveilled at all times, they're not psychologically equipped for that. I imagine the same would be true of most D&D races, because most have fundamentally human ways of thinking.

The closest I can think of with a society that isn't just trying to protect elites is the fictional The Culture in Banks' novels, but that doesn't engage in totalitarian surveillance, it just de facto has an awful lot of surveillance because of all the technology and Minds and so on bumping around. Canonically Star Trek's society doesn't usually have a very high level of surveillance, even on paramilitary vessels like the Enterprise. Rather the sensors tend to be intentionally directed at certain places at certain times (which is definitionally not continuing "surveillance" in the same sense).

Krynn is interesting here too because they could have had the gods desperately want to take out the Kingpriest for two totally legitimate reasons:

1) Genociding entire races and virtually everyone who disagrees with you is not Good and is generally bad for everyone.

2) Putting yourself and your indoctrinated psychopathic religious war followers as the sole determiners of who gets to live and who gets to die in your genocidal campaign of mass murder is clearly not Good, and unlikely to work well in the longer-term.

I remember when I first read about the Cataclysm, I sort of just assumed that was the motivation for the gods taking him out.

But every single source that clarifies anything about the cause of the Cataclysm is like "Nah, nah, nothing to do with all the genocide, nothing to do with putting yourself above everyone, even the gods, and deciding who lives and who dies, that's all fine and cool actually", and it's instead it's all "weird bollocks" (as DCI Seawoll would put it) about "The Doctrine of Balance" or "challenging the gods" (in a rather different sense - i.e. doing something they don't like) or the like.

It honestly raises some very large questions about how "thought-through" Krynn's setup was, and how much of it was just slapped on the page without even considering it. I feel like there's no way that say, Tolkien or GRRM or most modern writers would have missed those y'know, pretty huge issues with what the Kingpriest was canonically up to. Even writers who didn't want to make a moral point would probably have at least acknowledged that this kind of mass slaughter he was apparently engaging was y'know, bad. But it just never really comes up with Krynn. Perhaps because the response of the gods was a genocide (and it was unarguably a genocide, entire countries and peoples were wiped out, whereas others were largely unharmed, and the gods knew what they were doing) on a scale even larger than the Kingpriest, so it would obviously be hypocritical if that's the reason they used?

It's funny because I think you could tell essentially the same story as Krynn, i.e. a nutcase decided to "wipe out Evil", and got so bad and powerful that even the gods could only shut him down with apocalyptic destruction, and then were so horrified they left for hundreds of years, and make it vastly more compelling and make sense, relatively easily. But perhaps that's hindsight because we've got this clear evidence of how far wrong you can go?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

i'm not even talking XP for gold

Right, I meant the play loop no longer incentivizes people doing things for money in WotC D&D.

i just don't think most characters are actually adventuring out of pure benevolence, if it requires you to be employed to do it or expect there to be a reward for you afterwards to clear out a nest of goblins i don't think you qualify for good alignment. how often are your players donating to churches and paying for orphanages purely out of good will, healing injured villagers without recompense.

I disagree. Characters tend to be drowning in gold after a few levels, IME. At that point, they're doing things because they want to, not because they can't feed themselves if they don't.

YMMV

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As mentioned, you'll find this whole 'balance' concept in a lot of fantasy from the 1980s--The Dark Crystal, early Masters of the Universe, I think Legend--so I'm not sure where the ultimate source is.

I think that's a very interesting question because the sheer common-ness of the concept does suggest a common ultimate source, but I'm 47 and have been thinking about this for a long time, but haven't really seen any place this "We need like, good and evil both maaaaaaaan" concept comes from.

Maybe it's just a general fusion of dodgy "Orientalist" takes on Eastern religions which were common in the 1960s and 1970s fusing with Michael Moorcock (who used to be incredibly influential in fantasy) and his work which does hammer on about a balance between Law and Chaos. There's obviously also Gnostic/Manichaeist thinking involved too - again stuff that sort of made a come back in the 1960s and 1970s.

But what's so remarkable to me is that this "balance" concept is so... unreflective. It's so unquestioned, so mindlessly assumed, in so many of these things. There's little to no philosophical (let alone rational) justification of it, at best it might be sort of breezily stated by some omniscient narrator as "There must always be a balance between light and darkness", and it's like, who says? No, seriously who says? And why do they say that? Never a good answer to either question.

I am also tempted by the idea that certain people might have popularized concepts that light and darkness had to both exist because it gave them cover for being awful people and doing objectively awful things, and certainly there was some of that going on in the 1960s and 1970s generally. Not suggesting this is why it became popular in fantasy, I think that's more mindless "totally superficial concept that sounds cool/profound so long as you don't think about it for even one second" probably, but hmmmm.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

i just don't think most characters are actually adventuring out of pure benevolence

In real life? Sure, they wouldn't be.

But in the vast majority of D&D groups and groups in a lot of other games, realistically they are basically doing as a form of demented benevolence.

how often are your players donating to churches and paying for orphanages purely out of good will, healing injured villagers without recompense.

Not sure I'd equate donating to churches in D&D with benevolence given how awful most gods are, but I've absolutely seen PCs drop huge amounts of money on stuff like building/supporting orphanages, cast healing spells on villagers with no expectation of pay and so on. I think that's routine in my experience. Ironically it's often PCs who talk a lot of smack about how they're "just mercenaries" who actually do it. This is something that comes up in fiction from time to time too - just look at the recent "Sentenced to be a Hero" anime, where the hilariously-named Xylo Forbartz tries to pass himself off as like like a hard-bitten selfish badass in the Snake Plissken mode, but as pointed out by other characters, he's anything but that, and virtually everything he does is about helping innocent or helpless or weak people or minimizing casualties or the the like. Even his "horrific crime" which lead to being made into a Hero (basically someone who can be resurrected and made to fight demons over and over) was (minor spoilers, resolved in like E2 or E3), an act of pure mercy/compassion which cost him everything.