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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4726034" data-attributes="member: 2067">For me, it works a bit like this:There is a literal "Evil Energy" in the world (also good and law and chaos). Certain actions attract this energy and house it in you, coating your being (your soul) with it. This energy is what composes the physical stuff of the lower planes, of most undead, of demons, devils, and the like -- it is evil made flesh, physical philosophy, the material essence of baby eating and puppy-kicking. Magic can interact with this energy, detecting it, pushing it away, enhancing it...most often divine magic, but arcane magic, too.This evil energy is attracted by actions that the game deems "evil." It doesn't care about the mitigating factors or the context, very much, it just cares about the action. Casting an evil spell, or burning down an orphanage and collecting the insurance money, or going out of your way to torment something, all are evil -- they attract "evil energy."Now, most people have a mix of energies of most alignments in them -- good, evil, law, and chaos all flow through them, none of them gaining a real hold. Most people are thus neutral/unaligned. They do bad things, they do good things, they don't really dedicate themselves to one or the other.With conscious choice, you can change your actions to attract different sorts of energies. This is what having an alignment means -- your soul is filled with this kind of energy, and, when you die, it will go to become the substance of the outer planes, the stuff of which angels are made. Alignment is thus descriptive: it tells you what kind of person you have been in the past and, from that history, perhaps what you're most likely to do in the future. An unapologetic baby-eater who really likes eating babies isn't likely going to stop, unless someone changes their mind with force. Because it's descriptive, it's about your past, and it is not an accurate predictor of future action. Any creature with an Intelligence score -- any creature that is not an automaton, who has free will, is capable of change. So, that's how I understand the RAW: "Always" just gives me the likelihood for such a change to occur. In my own games, this varies based on how "made of evil" you are, too. A mortal might change their mind with a solid beat down, but pit fiend is less likely to change their mind, given that it would be changing part of what they are.For me, this also means that your appearance, as an outsider, is linked to  your alignment -- if a fiend were to become Good, they would, eventually, turn into an angel. If an angel were to become Evil, they would eventually turn into a fiend. They change who they are.Tieflings, IMC, have wrestled with this most of all, being creatures literally made of evil, but also impure evil, with some diversity stuck in there, and fully capable of making up their own minds about what they are. I've found this has actually added a LOT of interesting moral angles to my games, which are usually painted in big swaths of shades-of-gray despite having an objective alignment system. A big portion of the moral struggles in my games comes from how easy, how logical, and how appealing evil is, even how RIGHTEOUS it can be, and how you can be rewarded, not even punished for it. You just have to know that you're adding to the obliteration of everything if you become it. Still, that might be a totally logical choice. If yo're Good, you're adding to the continuation of everything. Neutral folks don't help or hurt. (Law is about the harmony of everything, while chaos is about the freedom of everything).</blockquote>

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