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

[Mind of tempest]

Give it long enough and there isn't a difference between those two extremes. Imagine you take a bottle and fill it - in layers - with different colors of sand. The bottle now has several lines of color. Now shake it, and shake it again, keep shaking it and shaking it and shaking it. The layers will begin to lose their definition and merge - especially if there was any space left at the top of the bottle. Eventually there will only be ONE layer and that layer will be stable

they the extremes of pure stasis and pure chaos are equally boring and miserable that thus leads to logical neutrality of opposing forces.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Blue Rose is fascinating because it's like people don't understand the setup value of having a relatively utopian state surrounded by dystopian or at least non-utopian ones. It's a really strong setup for a campaign honestly.

And these people have watched Star Trek, read The Culture novels, yet they still don't get it! If the main society had weird-ass values like, say, Cormyr does (which is sometimes presented as sort of utopian, but is gross because it's a weirdly bureaucratic scraping-and-bowing-mandatory monarchy where Midwest-esque "yeoman farmers" are somehow the backbone of society), I could see it. But Blue Rose and similar societies aren't doing anything weird. And like, if there was a game where the PCs were like Special Circumstances from The Culture, people would be all over it, but the moment you're Special Circumstances in a fantasy setting, oh no we can't have that!

(Radiant Citadel I think I would question whether that's actually a utopian situation, because it's got that classic 1980s D&D "we slapped this setting together from disparate and incoherent elements and ideas we thought we cool, without really seeing if they fit" deal going, accidentally I suspect. I mean, on one level that means a lot of the haters are wrong to hate because that's absolute classic D&D there baby! There are times, for example, where it lapses into a sort of "authoritarianism is cool so long as the authorities are on what I perceive as my side" mode too, which ill-befits some of what it's doing, and other times where it's sort of trying to do IDIC but like, imho without real conviction, which makes it ring hollow.)

I can see ed perhaps finding cormyr as his sort of ideal fantasy setting place to live, thus to many others it by nature is not.
I have considered if a setting many of nothing but different disparate people ideal fantasy settings place to live would desolve into a fairly dynamic and interesting setting, as such culture react to each other.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

Now my issue with this and with a lot of how 3e handles alignments, seperate from any neutrality related concerns, is that it forgets that the Great Wheel is supposed to be a wheel. LE or LG are not any further from Neutral then LN is. The wheel is round and equally valid in any orientation.

The Great Wheel diagram is round. A standard Alignment Chart is square.
If you “square the circle” they’re equal.

Spoiler: Planar Tangent

< tangent >
(3e version)
The wheel cosmology has the strongly aligned planes on the rim. They touch and have a coterminous border with the two neighboring planes…that a character could walk across.

…but no mention that the Outlands borders are coterminous.. one does not just walk into the Outlands in 3e…you need a portal or magic.

—
Other D&D cosmologies also exist.
< /tangent >

 

[Brendan Byrd]

"True Neutral": Bunk or Hogwash​

Kosh: Yes.