D&D General Which type of True Neutral are you?

[Celebrim]

Like if you're a super organised anarchist or something.

Organized is a personality trait. It has absolutely nothing to do with alignment. Any of the nine alignments could be organized, short tempered, lustful, courageous, etc. Yes, you could have a personality that tends to make living up to your deeply held beliefs more difficult, in which case you might be conflicted, but again being conflicted has absolutely nothing to do with alignment.

Basically, if you are trying to map personality to alignment, you don't understand either alignment or personality. Alignment is not a personality description system, and as such it's a bit of a strawman to try to debunk it with claims that it produces contradictions based on personality.

One of the best description of simplified personality in D&D is the "Seven Sentence NPC Article". In it I believe it gives three example NPCs with as much or more reified personality than will appear in most literary characters, and yet not only is none of them given an alignment, but we can assign probably any of the 9 alignments to each example character and by doing so learn new things about the character which are sometimes surprising and interesting.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

In personality there are not that many factors that are consistent. Look at some analyses and be surprised! Even cross culturally.

But each person with a profile is unique…

So for me, alignment is not a straitjacket at all. If you have interacted with one lawful neutral person, you have interacted with one lawful neutral person.

What are people generally like? Most of us don’t mess with strangers or seriously harm
People for gain.

Most of us are not giving greatly of ourselves to people we don’t know. We might do generally nice things here or there but not at a big cost.

And these same people might lose their temper and hit back or be moved by a plea for an animal shelter before going back to our normal self and family focused selves.

Neutral.

These folks are not going to suddenly participate in a scheme to defraud old people nor donate all of their free time to helping the same folks.

It’s just shorthand—-but two LG are going to look the same either. Never had a problem with alignment but then I was never rigid about it either.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Organized is a personality trait. It has absolutely nothing to do with alignment. Any of the nine alignments could be organized, short tempered, lustful, courageous, etc. Yes, you could have a personality that tends to make living up to your deeply held beliefs more difficult, in which case you might be conflicted, but again being conflicted has absolutely nothing to do with alignment.

Basically, if you are trying to map personality to alignment, you don't understand either alignment or personality. Alignment is not a personality description system, and as such it's a bit of a strawman to try to debunk it with claims that it produces contradictions based on personality.

It is not me who is confused, it is the writers of the game. They have historically often mixed personality with the alignment.

 

[Celebrim]

Never had a problem with alignment but then I was never rigid about it either.

I think people that run into problems with alignment are the ones that try to assume that each alignment describes a single character and all characters of that alignment have the same collection of personality traits. Along with this comes the idea that alignment is some sort of comprehensive description of a person's personality. So they start taking personality traits and start trying to assign them to alignments, and that's just not what alignment is trying to describe.

You seem to concur with my analysis that True Neutral is the dominate human alignment. Most people try to be a little bit good but are also ok with being a little bit evil. They may even see small evils - "little white lies" - as morally virtuous as long as and because they are not extreme.

But along with your analysis, I don't think most people have personality like literary characters either. Most people don't have particularly strong and consistent personality traits. Strong and consistent personality traits would tend to draw people toward extreme behaviors, and socially and personally most people would see this as undesirable. So most people to the extent that they are conflicted are trying to downplay their natural inclinations. They are maybe trying not to indulge say gluttonous or lustful habits, not because they see gluttony or lust as inherently bad, but because they what to avoid an uncomfortable extreme they might be judged for or which might unbalance their life. Likewise, brave or generous is seen as a good thing, just so long as you don't overdo it. Heck, even intelligent is like that, where people will reflexively downplay their intelligence or reflexively express discomfort with intellectual topics in public so that they aren't thought of as being too brainy.

If you think about your friends the number of adjectives that you could attach to their personality in a concrete way is probably pretty small, because most people are trying not to have distinctive features. Most people just try to avoid being easily categorized. This means that realistic figures rarely make for good literary characters. The interesting characters in a story are the ones that tend to have some easy labels that you can attach to them and who behave pretty predictably. This is true of your reading Tolstoy or writing comic books or playing characters in an RPG. Which to me is why the "Seven Sentence NPC" is such a valuable essay. You don't need a lot of complexity to describe a memorable character. Heck, you're not going to have the chance usually to create a complex layered tapestry of personality in most play. What you are going for is something memorable - "That guy with the great mustache", "That guy with the funny way of talking", etc.

 

[Celebrim]

It is not me who is confused, it is the writers of the game. They have historically often mixed personality with the alignment.

Sometimes. Sometimes I read some writer's take on what Alignment means and I just groan because it's clear they don't know what they are talking about. Third edition D&D was particularly bad at it. I fully grant that the confusion is not yours alone and that the more you read disparate published sources the less clear you are likely to become.

 

[payn]

I think people that run into problems with alignment are the ones that try to assume that each alignment describes a single character and all characters of that alignment have the same collection of personality traits. Along with this comes the idea that alignment is some sort of comprehensive description of a person's personality. So they start taking personality traits and start trying to assign them to alignments, and that's just not what alignment is trying to describe.

You seem to concur with my analysis that True Neutral is the dominate human alignment. Most people try to be a little bit good but are also ok with being a little bit evil. They may even see small evils - "little white lies" - as morally virtuous as long as and because they are not extreme.

But along with your analysis, I don't think most people have personality like literary characters either. Most people don't have particularly strong and consistent personality traits. Strong and consistent personality traits would tend to draw people toward extreme behaviors, and socially and personally most people would see this as undesirable. So most people to the extent that they are conflicted are trying to downplay their natural inclinations. They are maybe trying not to indulge say gluttonous or lustful habits, not because they see gluttony or lust as inherently bad, but because they what to avoid an uncomfortable extreme they might be judged for or which might unbalance their life. Likewise, brave or generous is seen as a good thing, just so long as you don't overdo it. Heck, even intelligent is like that, where people will reflexively downplay their intelligence or reflexively express discomfort with intellectual topics in public so that they aren't thought of as being too brainy.

If you think about your friends the number of adjectives that you could attach to their personality in a concrete way is probably pretty small, because most people are trying not to have distinctive features. Most people just try to avoid being easily categorized. This means that realistic figures rarely make for good literary characters. The interesting characters in a story are the ones that tend to have some easy labels that you can attach to them and who behave pretty predictably. This is true of your reading Tolstoy or writing comic books or playing characters in an RPG. Which to me is why the "Seven Sentence NPC" is such a valuable essay. You don't need a lot of complexity to describe a memorable character. Heck, you're not going to have the chance usually to create a complex layered tapestry of personality in most play. What you are going for is something memorable - "That guy with the great mustache", "That guy with the funny way of talking", etc.

I've taken to calling this charicaturization. It happens when folks see a framework, any will do, BIFTs for example, but particularly with alignment, and believe it suggests a straitjacket approach to role playing.

 

[Umbran]

(and I'd argue Moorcock isn't entirely successful in this either).

For Moorcock, they kind of elide into Evil and "So structured as to be destructively stifling", so yeah.

 

[Mind of tempest]

True Neutral as balance-keeper is like, the dumbest thing on the planet.

It only really works in single-axis alignment system where Good and Evil aren't an axis, and both Lawful and Chaotic are powerful forces which essentially seek the destruction of the world, and even then it's kind of laughable (hence the wonderful joke

4E got a lot wrong about alignment (let's not even start) but it did one think spectacularly right - it put in a valid alignment of "Unaligned" - i.e. you weren't pushing any specific Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos, you just were nice to people you cared about and like, and maybe mean or uncaring to people who you didn't like. Which, realistically, is like how about 60% of adventurers actually act - the rest who don't are exceptional.

Druids as True Neutral was particularly dumb, because the associations between "Chaos" and nature in mythology and fiction are infinitely stronger than those between Law and nature. And they should have been disregarding Good and Evil, not trying to achieve a balance - it just never made any sense at all for their ethos. They should have been a whole different kind of CN or something - like "protect nature = primary directive". This is assuming you go with D&D's nature-focused Druids, which are very much a D&D invention.


Also anarchism is not necessarily Chaotic - a lot of anarchistic thought actually promotes quite rigid standards of expected behaviour in order to make anarchism work. It's about destroying hierarchy rather than destroying order. You can have extremely elaborate hierarchies that are very disorderly and chaotic in their real function.

One of the big problems with Law/Chaos though is that it doesn't map as well as one might think from literary fiction and mythology to actually working in games, let alone mapping to how people think (rather than to characters in novels). For my English A-Level, I wrote a lot about Law & Chaos and how they've been expressed in different forms of literature through the ages - I compared Moorcock to Bronte's Wuthering Heights for example, and both to classical Greek ideas of Nomos and Physis - and I think there's a connection that Moorcock kind of overlooks but Bronte doesn't between Chaos/Physis (the classical Greek more literal word "Khaos" is a very different thing/being more similar to "nothingness") and nature. But it interested me that Moorcock and Bronte used a lot of similar fire/brass/darkness imagery re: Moorcock's literal forces of Chaos and the dwelling of the Earnshaws, and likewise there's similarity with the imagery around the Lintons.

Anyway, I'm getting off-track - point is - Chaos and Order are difficult to make terribly compelling in the very abstract way they're used by most games (and I'd argue Moorcock isn't entirely successful in this either).

I want to see more of your point about chaos.

For Moorcock, they kind of elide into Evil and "So structured as to be destructively stifling", so yeah.

I think it works if both sides would generate a situation so antithetical to what we want out of life as to be equally undesirable thus by keeping them in balance you create a good situation to be in

 

[Celebrim]

I think it works if both sides would generate a situation so antithetical to what we want out of life as to be equally undesirable thus by keeping them in balance you create a good situation to be in

It works just fine to see neutrality is the life affirming balance point if you have a universe in tension between a static infinite crystal of order and the formless soup of randomly moving incoherent particles that is chaos, because life requires "complexity" that neither perfected force of the natural world would allow. And if you have entities embodying the two extremes that are working toward the two ends, then sure being an agent of balance makes sense.

But it stops making any sense when you bring in a second axis that is life versus anti-life or creation and growth versus destruction and contraction. You can't really have 3 poles representing anti-life and one poll representing life and then have some sort of balance point in the middle that is life affirming but not allied with the actual life affirming pole. You have to modify somewhat chaos and law represent from the sort of primal destructive forces of Moorcock into something more like Ying and Yang.

 

[Umbran]

I think it works if both sides would generate a situation so antithetical to what we want out of life as to be equally undesirable thus by keeping them in balance you create a good situation to be in

So, I never got the idea that Moorcock was worried about being philosophically deep on Order and Chaos, and he certainly wasn't setting up a system for others to work in. He simply wanted powerful antagonists and complications for his characters. Yes, either of them "winning" would be bad for mortals. But neither of them winning isn't really a good situation, either, because then they keep using people as proxies in their conflicts, making life unpleasant that way.