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Message: <blockquote data-quote="M.L. Martin" data-source="post: 9857488" data-attributes="member: 4086">I'm afraid I have to go with the 'hogwash' answer to the question of True Neutrality/Active Balancing Between Good and Evil, since it's tied up with another one of D&D's very silly ideas--the moral and ontological equivalence of Good and Evil, which is probably both root and fruit of the game's long obsession with what the 4E design team called 'needless symmetry.'The game doesn't always fall down in this regard--witness the classic paladin (and Gygax's disdain for the concept of the antipaladin), the superiority of Good dragons, outsiders, etc., over their Evil counterparts, and other elements. But the idea that 'Evil is just as necessary as Good; Good can be just as destructive as Evil' does crop up, especially in the settings. Given that the 'Good and Evil must be kept in balance' idea is fairly common in late 70s/early 80s fantasy, I'm not sure how much of this comes from a conscious design by Gygax, Arneson, and others, and how much was just in the air of the time.But if I ever write up that Very Long List of Reasons Mainstream D&D And I Are Not Good Fits For One Another, this goes at or near the top. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>