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Which type of True Neutral are you?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9311077" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9311077, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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