Time for questionable D&D morality and ethics.
Because neutral is closer to evil on the great cosmic alignment axis, we can assume it is more evil than good. At least, its evil content is greater than zero. It must be, because when a mortal man who is good commits evil he shifts toward neutral. Therefore neutral is a stepping stone of evil, assuming a downward moral trajectory.
So, it can be agreed that neutral has at least some evil content, most likely 50%. Therefore detect evil should indicate neutral characters as half-evil. Or at least indicate them fifty percent of the time. Spells like smite evil should do half damage to neutral characters, by all logic. A neutral character who passes through a circle of protection against evil should become good while in the circle, or, in extreme cases, split into two separate characters, one evil and one good.
Animals and plants, which are always neutral, are therefore half-evil. Nature itself is evil fifty percent of the time and therefore people of extreme alignment (ie, no neutral component) are unnatural. Under this rule, both good and evil of lawful or chaotic variations should have their creature type changed to Abberation.
These are the absolute laws of the universe.
We can assume that if a table is covered in milk, that means the table is 50% milk. Being in proximity to spilt milk is simply a stepping stone to becoming spilt milk.
Maybe instead of neutral being that moment before a sword goes towards an evil person's chest or a good person's chest, neutral is the sword in its sheath on the ground, or over the mantle, or benign and having absolutely no morality to assign to it because it isn't being used for any purpose.
A flower is neutral. It grows, it blooms, it dies. A squirrel is neutral. It gathers nuts, it avoids predators. It is. A rock is neutral.
You can use flowers, squirrels and rocks for evil, but that doesn't make them evil. The same as you can do great evil in the name of or in the cause of good.
Evil and good are closer in the great horseshoe of morality than neutral, as good and evil are constructs of thinking beings that can choose to do right or wrong based on a lack of respect and consideration for one another. Neutral is the natural state of all things. To depart from it is to be good or evil.
Neutral isn't more evil than good, it's less good than good.
The number 3 is closer to negative numbers than the number 200, but we don't consider 3 "more negative" than 200.
Are you retarded? Neutral isn't any closer to evil than it is to good. It's fucking neutral. That's literally what the word means.
>>46067834
Exactly.
To be neutral is to simply be.
Most people who have ever existed have been neutral, led by their base necessities and the entropy of the social machine.
Only when one takes (or is taken by) a passionate cause will he shift towards either Good or Evil.
>>46067834
>>46067866
>>46067930
>>46068007
It's like you people never read the AD&D manuals or even the Dragonlance campaign setting. What your spouting is informed by reality not glorious fantasy.
Read the books; there are literal graphs and scales indicating the positions of good and evil. A good man never becomes evil. He has to become neutral first. It is a core rule. There is a scale to track the course of moral change. It's all there in black and white.
Pic related.
How do I become neutral? Not by acting neutrally. By acting evil. Good plus evil = neutral.
200 plus -197 = 3
>>46067744
Counterpoint: Why not the other way? Why wouldn't neutral also be the stepping stone for good? Why wouldn't it also detect you as half-good? etc. etc.
>>46068103
AD&D was shit.
>>46068186
Well you'd have to cast detect good for that, but yes the principle is exactly the same. Neutral is a stepping stone for good, its all a question of the subject's moral trajectory.
>>46067834
By that logic a good or evil being that simply "is" in its natural state is neutral.
Look we're circling the drain here; we have take these ultimate laws and apply them more interestingly.
Like, if its dark sun and you're desperate for water you can become chaotic evil involuntarily. Is this really an 'instantaneous' or must a good person, however briefly, pass through neutral?
Twice, really because his alignment will return.
If yes, this has interesting implications becasue not only is a neutral character half evil they are half chaotic-evil specifically; or at least an eighth CE, just waiting to spring out.
Someone who is neutral is also half-chaotic (and half-lawful), so if you layer circles of protection against good/evil/law etc can you split a man into four or more individuals?
Or, more interestingly, can you protect him from all alignments and create a being of no alignment?
Is a being of no alignment neutral?
If yes, then not having an alignment is half-evil, and therefore subject to smite and further circles of protection etc.
How can we make a true alignment-less being? Is it an evil act to do so?
>>46067744
Nice try padawan. No. Neutral doesn't detect as "Half-Evil" because as you can see by your chart, it is NOT evil. Simple. You are trying to complicate it for retard autistic reasons, that I can't fathom. As they are so far into the realm of pure stupid that the light of logic cannot reach them. You have gone beyond the moron event horizon and not even reason can escape anymore.
Slit your throat and save the human race the embarrassment.
>>46068350
Iirc animals (really low int) in 5E aren't even True Neutral. So anything that has low enough int and isn't made of that alignment can be alignmentless
>>46068378
Actually he has a point, he is just mistaken about what Detect Evil actually detects.
Let's say we have an evil scale from 0 to 100. If you are nearing the 0 edge, you are Good. If you near 100, you are evil. Neutral is the middle.
Detect Evil will not ping until you are in the bare minimum of the Evil side of the spectrum. Say, 66-100. So if a neutral person at 50, or even a very evil neutral person at 60-65, he will not ping Detect Evil because he does not have enough "evil in him" to register as evil. Saying neutral people do not have evil in them or commit evil acts is incorrect. This is the entire reason they are neutral rather than good.
Neutral isn't some wholly separate faction (for lack of better words) from good and evil. It CAN be, in the case of things like animals or true neutrality, but it also pertains to those who are neither good nor evil, but are a bit of both, or who lean one way or the other without wholly entering that alignment.
Good is not simply the lack of evil. A man does not become good simply by failing to be evil, nor vice versa. A neutral man is one who is neither good nor evil, at least not significantly.
See, the problem is, you're trying to categorize all possible things as either good or evil, but this simply isn't the case.
Imagine you are walking down the road and meet another person. He is shirtless and it is getting cold. A good action would be to give him your coat, or even your own shirt. A neutral action would be to simply walk past him, not paying much attention to whether he needs a shirt or not. An evil action would be to pin him to the ground and steal his pants.
>>46068447
FROM MY POINT OF VIEW, THE SHIRTLESS ARE EVIL!
>>46068406
5E wouldn't know the correct application of alignment if the ghost of Gygax came down and dictated it in person.
Still that's an interesting point. I assume plants qualify as alignment-less under those rules. If so, then druids, having the alignment of true neutral and there fore half evil- no
They can't be half evil, only 1/3rd evil because only 1/3rd of the alignment chart is evil. Unless we count the neutral parts as themselves being 1/3rd evil, and then those thirds and so on... good and evil are bottomless.
But if those are present in true neutral then so to must every other alignment. Neutral is part-every other specific alignment at once; it must be or it wouldn't be neutral!
Look, in any case, druids are abberations too under these rules and are thus against nature (which under 5ths questionable ruling is alignment-less) and therefore druids lose all powers and abilities at level 1.
No, before level 1. They actually lose it before creation. The instant true neutral is selected they cease to be druids. And to be druids true neutral MUST be selected!
What on earth is going on? How can this even be a thing? I have to assume the druids are some kind of sham cult; a collection of clerics or mages that pretend to be druids while at once having alignments of their choosing. The only alternative is that a collection of druids, all created at once in a dense enough gathering causes a vacuum of powers and abilities so vast that only cataclysm can result.
Maybe that's how Dark Sun started?
Or black holes.
In D&D certainly. In non retarded verses Neutral is pure darkness aka the absence of light. Good and Evil are just different colors of light on a spherical spectrum, if anything Good and Evil are closer to eachother than either are to Neutral.
If you ever had to paint in school and you mixed colors then that's a little like what real alignment is like, you have your blood reds and your sky blues, world Neutral is that dark mucky color you get when you mix too many colors together at the same time, true true neutral is the absence of any paint altogether.
>>46068103
That applies only if you start out as good and move towards evil, passing through neutral first. A character who starts out as neutral is not 50% good and 50% evil, he is simply neutral.
>>46068485
>>46068406
Unaligned applies only to things incapable of understanding morality, and it is separate simply because otherwise a true neutral rat could, if it just kept attacking things without reason, technically become evil, despite not understanding morality at all. By sticking it in unaligned, it can freely do as much good or evil as it does without affecting its alignment, because it has no alignment since it cannot understand morality.
>>46068103
>It is a core rule
Nope. You're a liar. It is an EXTREMELY variant rule from an obscure, out of print sourcebook.
SOME sources have alignment be a shifting through intermediates type thing, some don't.
>>46068230
>lets judge AD&D off a crazily variant subsystem of it
>>46067744
Neutral is just a normal person. If you're living in a grimderp fantasyland like 40K or GoT it'll be evillish, but if you're living in anything resembling reality, the average person will be more good than not and will make the "good" choice whenever it's easy, but will be willing to compromise their morals for convenience and will put themselves and their families before others if forced into a bind.
>>46068578
REEEEEEEE! Exactly!
>>46068521
I dispute that.
For an evil character to become good he must traverse the entire chart. For a neutral character to become good, he must traverse only half of it.
Neutral is halfway there; ie. it is halfway good. It is half good by definition. And half evil. And half chaos and half law, on the ethical plane.
Look, never mind that, I want to continue this thought: >>46068485
It seems to me that to successfuly create a druid - a TRUE druid - we must succeed at creating the alignment-less being proposed here: >>46068350
Not even gods are free from alignment. Gods of nature? Hah, they are abberations evident in thier neutrality. We must make a true druid: a true god!
How could this be achieved? There is a spell called Know Alignment. Can this be reversed as many spells can? 'Obliviate alignment', would it be? 'Un-know alignmnet'?
If a man was to cast Un-know Alignment on himself, thus forgetting his alignment, could he be free of alignment altogether? Must he know his alignment to act on it or is it natural?
No! It cannot be 'natural' because as we have established nature is free of alignment (assuming its intelligence is low enough, according to the dictates of the new era, which I question).
>>46068350
Easy to make an alignmentless setting, just don't have cosmic forces of good vs evil. Bam, no alignments.
Alignment isn't personality, therefore in a setting without objective morality there is by definition
Note that objective morality in certain editions has absolutely fuck all to do with the real world concept of moral absolutism;
>>46068571
Wrong, pic related informs players that the DM -will- keep a graph of alignment change. Core rulebook. You have no idea what you're talking about as evidenced by your seeming assertion that a book being out of print renders it invalid.
1. The only good D&D books ever printed are out of print
2. your 'some' sources are core sources and likely penned by Gygax.
>>46068485
There's no particular reason to think druids and animals must be of the same alignment. The passions and motives of a druid are nearly nothing like those of an animal.
An animal cares about the whole survival/propogation mechanism it is instilled with. Am I to believe most druids are engines
of mating/survival/instincts first and foremost like animals are, or are they primarily defenders of nature etc? You can't have it both ways.
>>46068660
>>46068571
PIC RELATED, I said
>>46068660
>Core rulebook.
You are lying. It is from Dragonlance Adventures, an only so-so book and HIGHLY VARIANT. It even clearly uses the Dragonlance Adventures font.
>as evidenced by your seeming assertion that a book being out of print renders it invalid.
Core AD&D 1e and 2e are still in print, but that's not what makes me consider Dragonlance Adventures invalid.
>>46068670
No you aren't to believe that.
As established earlier, druids CANNOT be true to nature because of their abberation status enforced by the evility (and goodness) of neutral.
Indeed, recent posts have proven that there are no druids due to the inability to create one without having them lose all powers and abilities before or during creation.
Not only can druids not have it both ways, they can't have it ANY way.
>>46068685
Why are you lying?
Alignment change is SERIOUS FUCKING BUSINESS outside of Dragonlance Adventures in 1e. 1e alignment is very expansive by the DMG definitions.
>>46068718
>As established earlier, druids CANNOT be true to nature because of their abberation status enforced by the evility (and goodness) of neutral.
I'm sorry, when was this ever established? Was it by your chart that clearly shows Neutral as separate from and independent of Good and Evil?
>>46068718
A human acting like an animal is not inherently being "true to his nature."
Likewise, druids VERY often do acts that are similar to good or evil, and in their initial conception in D&D did perform human sacrifice etc.
Your post overall makes no sense.
>>46068740
No one ever claimed that wasn't the dragonlance chart. But if you are telling me that the players handbook pictured >>46068685
here doesn't tell players that the DM (or referee as it calls it) will use a graph to chart alignment then you haven't read it.
>>46068746
it was established here >>46068485
>>46068766
Isn't the AD&D that pretty much anyone plays anymore a shambling zombie of fixes, rehauls, and other such additions and changes that if you compare it to the traditional product it might as well be a different system?
>>46067744
This is the dumbest shit about alignments I have ever read on this board. That's saying quite a bit.
>>46068766
Mmm, no. 1e PHB says that alignment change is very, very difficult, and doesn't particularly involve crossing through intermediate alignments first.
1e DMG, which goes into further detail on alignments, has a character playing his alignment well rewarding him for training times. Playing your alignment poorly is more likely to make training more annoying, but its not necessarily likely to make you turn neutral.
In particular, alignments are very flexible (lawful good means that you believe in the greatest good for the greatest number and the least woe for the rest, and a setting can have any number of mutually hostile factions and organizations that believe this while remaining blood enemies, etc.).
>>46068777
You saying "this is true" doesn't establish something as a fact. You're claiming that neutral means "infinitely good and infinitely evil simultaneously" without bothering with a single argument to back it up.
>>46068801
While the Dragonlance Adventures shit is obviously retarded, 1e, even its initiative system, works pretty well. I find its initiative system a lot quicker than individual inits systems, for example.
>>46068847
Are you claiming that neutral isn't 1/3rd evil; being chaotic evil, neutral evil, and lawful evil at once?
It must be becasue it is in the centre of the alignment chart and has therefore only to make half the journey to any alignment from any other alignment. Neutral is born halfway to every other alignment and is therefore on a trajectory toward every alignment simultaneously. Neutral is the balance of all forces.
Because true neutral contains alignments that are themselves neautral (eg, neutral good) then the neutral component of that alignment is also composed of all forces.. no wait I am wrong.
THAT component is ethical only. SO the neutral good part of true neutral is simultaneously lawful and chaotic, and 0 parts evil or good.
That might be the key to creating an alignment-free being! A being whose alignment is at once ethically neutral (and there for neither good or evil) and morally neutral (and therefore neither chaotic or lawful).
You're brilliant! Thank you so much for that insight!
>>46068766
>>46068827
Eh, I suppose the DMG does endorse tracking PC alignment. I don't find this very useful especially since it could result in a DM with a bizarre interpretation of alignments suddenly level draining a PC from surprise. Either way, we do know that both the DMG's interpretation of alignments, and Gygax's interpretations of alignments, are vastly broader than, say, 3e's interpretations.
>>46068910
Thankfully, Dragonlance has provided us with a handy chart.
>>46068908
>SO the neutral good part of true neutral is simultaneously lawful and chaotic, and 0 parts evil or good.
I refer to the neutral half of the neutral good part of true neutral, obviously.
And this is why Neutral should be enforced as militant neutral.
It is not the path between the two, but the wall that protects against the schemes of those that would pervert the world to their own ends.
Is the material plane not inherently neutral? Are the planes of good, evil, law, and chaos not dangerous simply to be in?
No, balance must be maintained.
To me, neutral doesn't mean
>Hmm I've done a good thing just now, better do an evil thing to even it out
but rather not going out of your way to do good things, yet feeling enough guilt and remorse to keep from doing anything really evil.
If a neutral character was in a position to easily do a good deed would they do it? Yes.
If it were really difficult, resource consuming, or had no obvious effect would they still do it? No.
Furthermore, if they were presented with something obviously evil, they would avoid it.
But the little things, like lies of convenience, ignoring beggars, taking shortcuts across the grass... these are all things a neutral character would be very tempted to do and feel little remorse about.
DM's who present tons of opportunities where a character would be compelled to do good things and then claim the character's alignment is drifting don't really get it.
>Neutral is halfway there; ie. it is halfway good. It is half good by definition.
No, neutral is neither good nor evil by definition. It is only "half good" or "half evil" if your're only there as a transitional stage on the way from one end of the spectrum to the other, and even then that's really just a debatable technicality.
>>46068986 was meant for >>46068602
>It must be, because when a mortal man who is good commits evil he shifts toward neutral.
No, a mortal who is good committing evil shifts towards evil, not neutral. A mortal who no longer does good shifts towards neutral. Nature is neutral because it doesn't give a damn about you.
So your basic premise is false from the start, as usual.
>>46068978
This wishy-washy modern era tripe is why neutral is in the state its in where no one knows what the hell neutral means any more.
As established in >>46068908 and in Dragonlance, and other key books of AD&D including significant core volumes neutrality is balance and therefore the equal application of all forces. Do evil? Do good. Do good? Do evil.
Chaos, law, good, evil, all in balance in neutral. At least that's the theory, because if the paraphanalia of 5th edition is to be believed, you can escape alignment altogether if you are dense enough.
The true question is, which is more neutral: true neutral of the complete absence of alignment altogether?
I am leaning toward 5th edition being wrong because lack of alignment is simply the negative value of the presence of all alignments. So, in my quest for the alignment-less being I feel I might actually be in quest of a new, hitherto unknown alignment:
Negative Neutral.
one of my favorite villains from any media was one I would absolutely consider chaotic evil
selfish, impulsive, with a twisted sense of right and wrong, but gets bored easily and is very easily manipulated
>>46068986
We have gone past halves and are now onto thirds.
But you raise an interesting point, becasue trajectory along the chart of alignment is important, what can be said about true neutral? It cannot exist without some force applied to it and the assumption is all forces at once, ie all trajectories.
But what if we are wrong? What if the trajecotry of true neutral is more of a sinkhole, pulling us THROUGH the alignment matrix altogether and free of conventional alignments at all.
I feel this sinkhole might be the key to achieving the alignment of Negative Neutral.
>Are you claiming that neutral isn't 1/3rd evil; being chaotic evil, neutral evil, and lawful evil at once? It must be becasue it is in the center of the alignment chart and has therefore only to make half the journey to any alignment from any other alignment
No, that's fucking stupid.
Imagine there are three citiess connected by a single straight road, equidistant from each other. Westerton on the west, Eastingburg on the east, and in the middle, Cleveland.
Residents of Westerton must go through Cleveland to get to Eastingburg, and vice versa. Residents of Cleveland only have to travel half the distand and pass through to other cities to get to either of the other two cities. However, this does not make Cleveland half Eastingburg and half Westerton. It's just Cleveland.
>>46069054
So....you can't feed a homeless guy without a baby getting raped somewhere because that would 'upset the balance'?
That's stupid. Ridiculously stupid. Insanely stupid.
If we've gone away from that, it's only made roleplaying better.
D&D alignment has too much baggage attached to it.
Good is relative to society, usually the society outside of the game and not what the denizens of the game world consider good.
Lawful is too often confused with law-abiding.
Chaotic is usually portrayed as lolrandum
Neutral involves accounting to ensure there is the correct balance in everything
Evil alignments are usually very shallow and used to justify the PCs murdering people
>>46068908
Are you claiming that green isn't 1/3rd red; being red LEDs, red paint, and red translucent film at once?
It must be becasue it is in the centre of the visible spectrum chart and has therefore only to make half the journey to any color from any other color. Green is born halfway to every other color and is therefore on a trajectory toward every color simultaneously. Green is the balance of all electromagnetic forces.
Regarding Negative Neutral
Negative neutral is the inverse of alignment. Because True Neutral contains all alignments at once, and is, theoretically, pulled toward the trajectories of all alignments be they moral or ethical, its negative counterpart must represent the inverse.
Negative Neutral contains no alignments and presents no moral or ethical forces and travels along no trajectories.
That said, it could be that its trajectories are instead propelled inward where they join at a kind of black hols of alignment: all moral and ethical forces crushed together, perhaps infinitely, by the inward bound trajectories of each.
Perhaps alignment cannot be compressed infinitely? Perhaps it pushed through this sinkhole effect, all the way into the positive plane? We can already see the effects of this: the outward trajectories of all alignments springing from true neutral.
Therefore, I suggest that Negative Neutral is not quite the absence of (and freedom from) alignment but may in fact be the very source of alignment itself.
This shit right here is why I always handwave the alignment system out of existence.
>>46069089
So Cleveland is more Eastingburg than Westerton. If you're going to agree with the premise of the thread, just say so.
>>46068908
You're trying to say that any given player's alignment covers an infinitely wide range of alignments. If Good is 1-33 and Neutral is 34-66 and Evil is 67-99, you're claiming that a Neutral character's alignment is represented by the range negative infinity to infinity. Because your range is infinitely wide, it doesn't matter how far skewed to one side it is, it's always going to be half Good and half Evil.
Basically, you're trying to do some sort of relativism bullshit and failing as hard as George Lucas ("From my point of view, people that try to stop me from murdering defenseless children are evil!").
>discussing alignment without following D&D definition
what's the fucking point. If we want talk about things being stuck to alignments it's obvious we should stick to D&D definitions because no other game uses that shit.
>but I hate alignments and I hate D&D
why the fuck are you even in a thread talking about alignments then
>>46068718
So you're just completely ignoring the fact that the only reason animals and plants are classed as unaligned is because their intelligence is too low to comprehend morality? Are you going to further extrapolate that nothing that can comprehend morality can be natural?
I mean, I know you're just being a faggot on purpose, but I want to see how you'll twist the logic for this.
>>46069203
No, fuck, stop being retarded. Cleveland is neither Eastingburg nor Westerton. Try not pretending the post said something that agreed with you and read instead what it actually said.
>>46069291
No. There is not an infinite range of alignments; there are nine.
Well, eight if you allow that true neutral is a combination of every other alignment. Is true neutral only distinct in its indistinctness?
And it will only be half good and half evil if you separate out the ethical alignments. If they are allowed to remain on the same plane then the alignment plane itself can only even be 1/4 good, evil, lawful and chaotic.
I would like not not that Dragonlance was one of the wisest setting for laying out that the morality of its world was dictated by its gods, preventing the kind of sniveling, hand-wringing, 'well from a certain perspective...' trash expressed in >>46069132
No. No subjective experience and exist in the alignment spectrum. It is an error to take it and apply it to how you feel because YOU are irrelevant to the alignments in every sense.
Actually, that's it...
The real world exists in the realm of negative alignments. Instead of absolutes and certainty, we are plagued with the exact opposite. If we, in reality, have alignments, they are negative variations. Negative Lawful Good, Negative Chaotic Neutral, etc.
That is to say, we don;t have alignments but we are aware of them, constantly trying to grasp and define them without the benefit of their actual existence. So what we end up doing is pouring them right through the Negative Neutral sinkhole defined in >>46069163
So alignments gain substance only in a realm on un-reality. They can't exist here, among us. We are alignment-less - or of negative alignment since alignment is always being drawn from us through the sinkhole. That is, we are in a constant alignment debt.
Only in fictive terms do alignments actually gain any traction. Negative reality = positive alignments!
Alignments are unrealistic!
What a breakthrough!
>>46069407
So....so you're saying that, yes, the gods of Krynn are all assholes that make no sense.
Just making sure.
>>46069465
dragonlance is a shitty setting and the novels go to shit after the first trilogy
>>46069070
>continued
Honestly as terrible as that show was, this character really made me rethink chaotic characters in general, but especially chaotic evil villains. Impulsive, bored easily, and easily manipulated is a lot more interesting than just doing things thoughtlessly.
I never really considered that the possibility of a villains with traits like that before. CE villains were always just mustache twirling "before I kill you mister bond" type villains with no real rhyme or reason to to anything they do, other than that they are really incompetent.
Shame every other character in that show was total trash, especially the two dreadfully boring characters who sacrificed themselves pointlessly.
Wow, I've been here since 2009, and this is probably the second most genuinely autistic OP I've ever seen.
Well I suppose that wraps it up unless there are any outstanding issues.
I would like to thank everyone in this thread for helping me work through some thorny issues and tricky questions. I will be sure to mention you when I present my findings formally.
This thread really has been invaluable because not only have we asserted that alignments have no bearing on reality we have actually PROVEN it to be true.
All of the information in this thread will be collected and presented in a seminar entitled 'Alignments are Unrealistic'.
You are all welcome to attend.
>>46069568
Isn't this conclusion beating a dead horse?
>>46069628
The horse has always been hypothetical. Now we know for certain it is dead.
Or negative alive.
>>46069628
And has this whole thread just been one guy shouting his premises, conclusions, and supporting statements into the ether, mostly ignoring what everyone around was saying?
>>46069644
don't get negative alive confused with unlife, or for that matter, inverse undeath
>>46069198
I think that's exactly what OP just did.
>>46069681
Inverse undeath is fascinating. Taking something that was never born and giving it life is a cornerstone of wizardry. The negative dead become negative alive, are killed, then reanimated with anti-negative energy.
The end result is golems that can be turned by clerics.
>>46069568
>>46069398
fffffffffffffffffaggot
Wow, this thread is disturbingly close to a discussion I once had in middle school with some kid who tried to convert me when he found out I was a (nonmilitant) atheist.
>Why don't you believe in God? After all, he created you
>We know he created everyone because it said so in the Bible
>The Bible is the word of God, it says so in the Bible
>>46069715
The dead are brought in the undead through necromancy and anti-resurrected into the realm of the unliving. Anti-necromancy is then used to turn the unliving back into the living.
>>46069398
You're assuming that morality depends on the subject, which I think is a fatal flaw of editions of recent decades.
You don;t have to comprehend morality to be part of it. Which is why animals and plants are neutral in true editions of D&D. They are, as should be obvious by now, comprised of shaos/law/good/evil and all attendant forces and trajectories.
I suggest you read a bestiary sometime. A real one not an RPG one. IN those animals are view not through naturalism but how thier actions and 'natures' offer moral or ethical examples for beings that CAN comprehend them. Medieval scholars, whatever their faults, had a clearer comprehension of the morality of animals than you and they didn't have the advantage of rules books laying it all out.
As has been expounded, in fictive worlds of D&D - where alignments become a positive force, indeed the very fabric of the universe, everything has its place on the great alignment scale.
>>46069757
I am very sorry I missed your post and disappointed you.
>>46069768
The bible too is negative reality where his idea of alignment has power but, sadly for him, not the world he lives in.
If you see him, link him to this thread so I can learn how alignment is unrealistic.
>ITT: people trying to argue and understand what is good and what is evil through complicated words and long, boring posts.
Because that worked out really fucking well for the nazis in 1939. Or for the spanish under dictatorship in the same time period. Or for the aztecs while they were still murdering themselves for their gods.
>>46069827
Actually, this gets me thinking.
What if the characters from, say, Dragonlance or any setting that has a dietetic understanding of the alignment system played a role playing game?
Would their game feature feature alignment simply because it is such a fundamental part of their collective reality or would they make an 'unrealisic' system allowing them to fantasize about being free from the moral dictates of thier gods?
If the former, would the alignment system they use go through a similar reversal of polarity to ours? I have to assume it won't. In the fictive worlds created by fictional characters, positive alignments would likely reverberate.
I actually think the second scenario is more likely, maybe even inevitable. In order for an alignment-positive dimension to generate its own fictional continuum, it would have to put that fiction in an alignment-negative context.
In other words, if the characters of Dragonlance played a roleplaying game, thier characters would be real people in the actual sense and thus would have negative alignments in the manner described above.
This is how a fictional character can engage in escapism via contact with unreality. Alignment is the perfect tool for traversing this dimension. If alignment is negative, then the setting is reality. If alignment is positive, then its fiction.
In other words, if you live in a world where gods (even just one) are real and morality is dictated in hard and fast rules, then you aren't living in reality.
>>46069906
>didn't read the thread to see that it is just one guy arguing with himself and some random other posts by some weebs about their waifu and/or an undead horse
>>46069942
Yeah, this is just the diary of a crazy person with some run-by commentary.
...I didn't say stop.
>>46069906
This fellow exemplifies the point in >>46069936
He thinks good and evil, concepts that have been under philosophical discourse since time immemorial, are easy and if you approach them as if they are complicated then you are a nazi, under a dictatorship, or under the thumb of a god.
In other words, he doesn't live in reality.
>>46069963
I promise, when discussing the matter of, say, time-travelling to kill baby Hitler, nobody has ever brought the concept of 'Negative Neutrality' into the discussion.
There's philosophical discourse, and then there's just sophist wankery.
>>46069978
Of course they didn't. What bearing do Dungeons and Dragons mechanics have on a discussion like that?
>>46069987
...I walked into that one.
>>46069963
Not really. I think that people are inherently evil and cannot really grasp the difference between good and evil.
>>46070008
I am glad you mention inherent evil.
If we exist in a plane of negative alignment then the possibility raised in >>46068350 suddenly takes on new meaning.
Is it an evil act, in the D&D context, to create an alignment-less being. Bear in mind that for D&D worlds alignment is the very fabric of the universe and to create something that was inherently severed from such a 'natural' order might be evil.
If so, you or I being born was an evil act. Because we are born into a world of negative alignment - evident because we fantasize alignment instead of living it - then we are severed from that fundamental system and us, our universe and our world is evil.
At least, it is evil from the point of view of Dragonlance characters for example.
To reference>>46069936 again, ours is just the kind of world that might give a Krynn native pleasure and excitement to imagine. How sublime and terrifying our wold might seem to a being for who good and evil are no just easy to define but pre-defined; instantly within arm's reach and as evident as our own concept of gravity.
For such a world, I think it likely they would imagine a place of impossible morality that seems exactly as severed from what they know from lived experience as our world is from theirs.
After all, more than once I have seen people characterize the absolute moralities of Krynn as 'evil'.
>>46070065
Do not attribute to malevolence that which can be blamed on incompetence.
As such, I wouldn't call the absolute moralities of Krynn 'evil'.
I would call them 'terrible writing.'
>>46070083
I wouldn't call them evil either, but people are often surprised that, from the Krynnian perspective, the police state and persecution of thought crimes are evidence of an overabundance of good.
Dragonlance overall is an interesting D&D reams to examine because of its application of alignments. It is almost uniquely unafraid to express an opinion - indeed, a rule - on what is good and evil.
The quality of the writing matters less than the state of the writer. Do the creators of Dragonlance themselves live in an unrealistic state of dictated morals and living gods? The answer, at least for Hickman, is yes as he is a devout Mormon.
This makes earlier ideas regarding unreal characters creating real worlds interesting. One option was for positive alignment to reverberate, that is to reproduce itself repeatedly as fictional characters create fictions that reflect the world they know. Hickman himself is already divorced from actuality. It is little surprise that a dictated moral system is present in dragonlance with little evidence of an ethical one.
The dragonlance books interestingly shy away from the law-chaos dichotomy of D&D. Perhaps ethics make absolute moralists uncomfortable?
More likely though, is that Hickmans lived experience is full of uncertainty regarding morality and so he vested himself in a world where the alignment chart could handily be applied to release him from the burden of morality in our world; at least in his fantasies.
I wonder if he is aware that his own ideal world considers him evil as discussed in >>46070065 ?
Perhaps he settles for the status of abberation?
>>46067744
So a person who's 90% good should ping 10% evil?
>>46070212
Why not? Detect Evil can be a geiger counter instead of a smite/no smite switch.
>>46070212
Dungeons and Dragons dosen't deal in 'percents'.
Even a chart like the one posted >>46068740
here is not interested in how good or evil you are, only which category you are in, absolutely.
Its track dosent measure how evil or good you are, only that you are (or are not) on a trajectory. Note that even in the transitional stages, your alignment has not yet changed. When you leave that stage you instantly jump to the middle mark of the alignment you just entered. In other words you can't be 'just this side of evil' unless you are on your way out of evil. And when you leave evil, you will be smack bang in the very middle of neutral. That's what neutral is. Evil + Good. Especially as far as that Dragonlance chart is concerned.
The earliest ideas in this thread can be dismissed. Neutral isn't half-evil, but a combination of good and evil, propelling away from each other. In a sense it is the rejection of both. In the case of true neutral, it is all specific alignments on such outward trajectories.
Hm.
If the trajectories are always away from neutral that might indicate a rejection of other (extreme) alignments but if you'll note the discovery of negative alignments elsewhere in this thread we find that Neutral (esp. Negative Neutral) does not repel other alignments but is the source of them.
>>46070295
>Dungeons and Dragons dosen't deal in 'percents'.
Alignment-wise i mean, obviously. D&D is FULL of percentages for all sorts of other things.
>>46070241
The 'Geiger counter' idea is erroneous, I think. If detect evil can give you a result of 'kinda evil', then what does Know Alignment give you? 'Kinda neutral evil'?
It goes have a Geiger-like effect in that it lets you know the power of the evil at hand. Ie a Vampire is a really powerful evil thing but it might not be more evil than then the party thief.
>>46068301
There are beings that are simply inherently good and evil. The bible even uses such reference to god. Natural things simply start neutral, astral start good and demons are spawned evil.
>>46069198
This shit is why I use it more as guidelines than actual rules.
Morality is not something that is easily quantifiable or judged. Ergo, it is not meant for mathematics and rules to be used to accurately define and quantify it.
>>46070241
Is Skeletor more evil than Evil-Lyn? He's in charge bu she has Evil IN HER NAME, goddammit, and I want someone to acknowledge that!
>>46067744
>if I use enough words my argument will seem plausible
>>46067744
>Is neutral more evil than good
If you were to give good and evil numerical values, A character with 10 good and 0 evil would be good. Likewise, a character with 10 good and 10 evil would be neutral, and a character with 0 good and 0 evil would also be neutral. What neutrality means for a person depends on the character.
>>46069198
It literally doesn't matter unless you play a paladin or cleric
I don't understand how so many fags can get so autistically butthurt over a rule that doesn't even matter for 90% of the mechanics. But then again I am on /tg
Detect evil and good is actually the Detect extraplanar entity/Ayylmao spell.
Bow you can stop shitpoating and spreging out because your players didn't take your shitty plot hook.
I am going to thank everyone again for their help in extrapolating some of these ideas. I know I have been rambling extensively but it made a nice change from the usual dire simplicity of typical alignment discussion evident in posts such as >>46070454.
Alignment is not realistic. Everybody knows it. It seems simple. So does gravity: what goes up must come down.
Explaining why it is so matters. Early Ideas have been discarded and replaced with better ones. Alignments don't feel right to us becasue not only do we not have them in real live, we have negative alignments. Not just a lack of the certainty of alignments but a debt of certainty. It is pulled right through the sinkhole of Negative Neutral to a point where alignment becomes a positive, actual force in un-actual worlds. The fabric of universes.
Thank you, /tg/.
>>46068103
Remind me, where do Kender fall on that chart?
>>46070473
For some classes, it does matter, though not necessarily for good or evil. A barbarian can't be lawful, and neither can a bard. Monks can't be chaotic.
>>46067744
If we treat good and evil like two seperate things rather than eachothers negatives and let neutral be a state where both values are roughly equal you can either be neutral by being half-evil half-good and therefore ping on detect evil and such, or by simply not being evil or good.
>>46067744
>These are the absolute laws of the universe
I was pretty sure this was gonna be shit.
Thanks for confirming.
>>46070393
>>46067744
I remember a while back some anon made a thread saying that a good character who spares an evil character shifts towards evil alignment because he knows he's allowing evil to continue existing.
That makes far more sense than what you're fucking spouting, OP.
>>46067744
I have discussed this with my friends for hours.
Our conclusion is:
no
>>46067744
It's not more evil, but it's closer to evil. Asking if neutral is more evil than good is like asking if Kansas City is more in California than New York City is.
>>46069088
>That glorious eighties hair
>>46068350
>MFW the party member with the highest charisma turns CE, while we have several half-giants in the party
>>46071757
Time for questionable USA geography.
Because Kansas City is closer to California on the great cosmic alignment axis, we can assume it is more in California than in New York. At least, its California content is greater than zero. It must be, because when a New Yorker moves to California he goes west. Therefore Kansas City is a stepping stone of California, assuming a westward trajectory.
So, it can be agreed that Kansas City has at least some California content, most likely 50%. People who live there should pay at least half of California state taxes, by all logic.
The Kansas City Chiefs, who always represent Kansas City, are therefore half-Californian. America itself is Californian fifty percent of the time and therefore people who live on the coasts (i.e., no flyover country component) are unnatural. Under this rule, Americans who don't live within sight of a cornfield should have their citizenship changed to Canadian.
These are the absolute laws of 'Murrica.
>>46067744
This is retarded, every human being that ever lived is neutral. Hitler through Gandhi, all neutral. They vary in chaos (referred to in the positive as freedom) and law (referred to in the negative as authoritarianism), but in order for a human to be 'good' they have to literally distinguish themselves as something above human. Possibly one could call a saint or prophet of some kind 'good-leaning'. But the fact is that at the end of the day we're all wed to human function and mannerisms. We eat animals, or we destroy plants and use them for conveniences. So we cannot be called 'good' as it is in our nature to do harm.
HOWEVER, as it is in our nature, nor can this behavior be called 'evil' as it is no more evil than a wolf eating a rabbit, it's simply how we function.
An alignment requires an objective observation of what the extremes of the alignment scale are, but we humans are functionally incapable of processing just what legitimate evil (evil for evil's sake) and legitimate good (good for goodness's sake) are, leaving us in a relatively agentless and childlike state of freedom from responsibility and moral burden. We have simply scaled down good and evil to give us a sense of power and to justify our actions when really the world's most 'evil' people were those that got swept up in doing what was 'good' at the time.
>>46071812
How on earth did you get several half giants?
Rolling even one is rare. Did you use custom creation rules?
