I’d figure Chaotic neutral because to be evil you have to actively do things with malice. If it’s for personal gain according to their personal morality, it’s neutral because they could fall in line with the law by coincidence.
Doing evil because it’s fun and doing evil because it’s profitable are both evil. An evil alignment doesn’t require you to relish the screams of your victims - you just have to decide “those lives are not as important as what I want.”
Then there’s no difference between apathy and evil according to you guys. Not caring if someone dies from your actions is the same as gleefully killing them. Makes total sense.
That’s the idea. Evil is apathy. Peter Singer is willing to make personal sacrifices to help others, and tries to figure out how to help people as much as possible with limited resources. There’s no Evil Peter Singer that makes personal sacrifices to hurt others and tries to figure out how to hurt them as much as possible with limited resources. Evil people are people who just don’t care, and harm others whenever it benefits them.
But maybe in something like D&D where there’s demons, they actually care about causing suffering and the people we think of as evil are merely neutral.
To be Neutral is to be able to do not only good things, bad things, but to also abstain from both. Neutral is ‘boring’ because it doesn’t lock your character into an alignment. You aren’t forced to help people, you aren’t forced to harm people, your character does what would make sense for your character to do, even if it means doing nothing.
Good aligned characters aren’t “forced” to help people if they have a reason not to. Nor are they “forbidden” from stealing. A single act does not determine an alignment and alignment isn’t a cage restricting player autonomy.
Not caring if someone dies from your actions is the same as gleefully killing them.
Giving 100 gold to a beggar and donating your time and 10 000 gold to an orphanage are not the same thing, but the existence of the 2nd option doesn’t make the first option neutral.
Okay then what’s the difference between someone who’s apathetic and someone who actively likes hurting people? Nothing? Those are the same alignment? I don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
If you’re apathetic because it’s none of your business or you’re afraid for your family, that’s neutral. If you’re apathetic to their pleas for mercy as you evict them into the snow so you can make more money, that’s evil.
The core question is: are you willing to hurt others to benefit yourself?
It‘s dependent on context. If you live in an oppressive regime that commits atrocities in front of your eyes, you may let them happen because you fear for your own safety if you intervene. That‘s the neutral way. A good person would join a resistance group, even if it means putting yourself in danger. An evil person would apply as a henchman to the evil overlord, not because they‘re a sadist that craves harming other people, but because it‘s an easy job and it pays well.
I feel like the actions matter less than the intent for matters of morality. If your character wants to save a village overrun by monsters, but the monsters were actually people who had an illusion spell cast on them, your character isn’t evil for slaughtering a village because their desire was purely noble. Neutral is having both good and evil desires, usually for personal reasons that make sense for the character. A rogue is going to steal from a town guard as readily as they’ll steal from a goblin, they want the gold, they don’t care about the morality behind it. Evil is wanting to slaughter the village just to see what adjacent towns would say, it’s doing something bad for the sake of it.
Slaughtering a village for the evulz and just to see what happens is murder hobo alignment, not evil.
You‘re putting examples against each other that cannot be compared. Let‘s take the village overrun with monsters and present it to three different characters of each alignment. The good one fights the monsters to free the village. The neutral character assesses the risk and if they don‘t fight, they at least inform the next village they pass through. The evil chatacter doesn‘t bother because they don‘t care.
Yeah you just don’t get it. Characters can do different things regardless of their alignment, you just think they’d do something different so you disregard what I’m saying.
Nah. Evil is where the harm your actions do to other people doesn’t stop you from doing it. Neutral is where you wouldn’t put yourself especially at risk or especially out of your way to help others, but you wouldn’t hurt them either, even if it benefited you. Obviously there’s a spectrum there, most neutral people would do harm to others if they had a gun to their head. Enjoying the harm you do unto others is sadism, which is separate from alignment. A good or neutral person can be a sadist, but their morality will prevent them from hurting others even if they enjoy it. In short, sadism provides a motive (of which there are many others), alignment provides the restriction or lack thereof.
Tl;dr if order a village slaughtered to take all their stuff, I don’t care how dispassionate or purely self-interested you are, you’re evil. If you murder people because you’re paid to, and don’t much care about the details, you’re evil.
Well I think you’re assessing good and evil based on your own moral compass rather than how RPGs base them on. Someone who is apathetic is neutral because they could go either way, it makes no difference. It’s the definition of neutral. Evil is going out of your way to cause harm, Good is going out of your way to help. Why would a neutral person kill a village of people? They’d need a reason. Soldiers have slaughtered towns and villages on orders but each soldier didn’t have an active desire to be part of that. They aren’t inherently evil, maybe they think their cause is just. They were told to and had no resistance to it. You can do evil acts without being evil.
Neutral is the absence of compulsion either direction. It’s killing a guy because they had it coming one day and feeding orphaned children the next. It’s a mix of good and evil to where you are conflicted to call them either a hero or a villain. Something from Fallout: New Vegas does a good job of explaining it.
I would argue that for game purposes, having an E on your character sheet means “I like inter-party conflict so much I am willing to instigate it” whereas having an unaccompanied N on your sheet means “I just want to have fun with my party”. Tasha is, as far as I know, a team player like 75% of the time, so I would accept her being true neutral as long as she does not inflict her sadism on things that affect the party negatively
I am also perfectly down with having people with a G on their character sheet do horrifying things “for the greater good”. They have indicated they want to be a hero by writing that G on their character sheet, so as long as the other people at the table think their actions are heroic then there is no issue.
I would argue that for game purposes, having an E on your character sheet means “I like inter-party conflict so much I am willing to instigate it”
“Stupid Evil” is not a valid alignment anymore than “Lawful Stupid” Paladins. Decent players can role play a party with both Good and Evil characters in it without it constantly descending into bickering and threats of violence.
I think you are confusing “inter-party conflict” with the players at the table getting mad at each other. For example, last session, my LE artificer and the CG rogue were experiencing some conflict regarding him making a pact with my warlock patron, which in-game devolved into my artificer threatening to kill his adopted son while he threatens to kill me. Out of game, we had a quick conversation that went something like this:
Me: I don’t really want this character to die, but just so you know I have this bugbear Rogue I’ve been dying to play for years, so don’t feel bad about stabbing Artificer to death.
Friend: I don’t want to do PvP right now either. But I am really attached to Son and I might not be able to forgive you OOG for killing him
Me: Fair enough, I promise that I won’t go through with it.
Then we went right back to RPing our characters threatening to stab each other’s loved ones. Thats what I mean by inter-party conflict. If you can’t be civil at the table, you’re either being a bully or you’re going to be kicked out of the table.
That all sounds reasonable, but you don’t have to have Evil in your alignment for inter-party conflict. Some of the best story telling happens when different characters are trying to do the right thing, but disagree as to what that is.
I think what you are proposing sounds similar to what I said at the end of my first comment.
Example: most people I’ve talked to about Goblin Slayer peg his alignment as Lawful Good, but I’m fairly certain if you decided to do ethnic cleansing in your game the other players might take issue with that.
I think the strongest counterargument would be something similar to playing as a sort of Monster Rights activist in a more traditional sword & sorcery setting, trying to get kobolds and goblins standing in civilized society so people cant just kill them for fun. You’d be facing a lot of opposition from the world, and your goals likely run perpendicular to those of the other players, but that seems like the same kind of fun as what I am doing in my campaign. However, based on my argument earlier, this would be a Lawful Evil character lmao
No. Their behavior is self interested. That’s Evil. Didn’t matter how they envision it or whether they have a personal code. If their personal code places the needs of others and the general welfare in a place of high importance then they are Good. Chaotic - Lawful merely describes the methods they’re willing to pursue to achieve those goals.
Self-interest is not evil. Self-interest is a core trait to surviving. Egocentrism is abrasive but also isn’t in itself, evil. An egotistical hero is still a hero even if they save people only for the sake of getting credit for it.
Listen. You need to go out and touch some grass. No one is making a moral argument here. We’re debating a game’s alignment system and how to understand it. In terms of the game’s systems, self-interest is evil. Devils are extremely self-interested and do nothing for the greater good or general welfare.
Yes and I think you have no idea what you’re talking about so take that grass touching advice for yourself and stop replying to my comments with the dumbest shit I’ve heard on this site. “Self-interest is inherently evil!” the fuck it is.
Look, I’m an atheist so I don’t believe in evil. That being said I’m not 13 so I also don’t have a hard-on for Ayn Rand to the point where I get enraged when other people talk about self interest.
I never said anything about it being “inherently evil”. You’re putting words in my mouth. You’d realize that if you actually took some time to cool off.
In the context of D&D, how self-interested a character is determines their moral alignment. It’s a loose description of a mechanic.
I’d figure Chaotic neutral because to be evil you have to actively do things with malice. If it’s for personal gain according to their personal morality, it’s neutral because they could fall in line with the law by coincidence.
Doing evil because it’s fun and doing evil because it’s profitable are both evil. An evil alignment doesn’t require you to relish the screams of your victims - you just have to decide “those lives are not as important as what I want.”
Then there’s no difference between apathy and evil according to you guys. Not caring if someone dies from your actions is the same as gleefully killing them. Makes total sense.
“Not caring if someone dies from your actions” is basically the definition of negligent homicide.
That’s the idea. Evil is apathy. Peter Singer is willing to make personal sacrifices to help others, and tries to figure out how to help people as much as possible with limited resources. There’s no Evil Peter Singer that makes personal sacrifices to hurt others and tries to figure out how to hurt them as much as possible with limited resources. Evil people are people who just don’t care, and harm others whenever it benefits them.
But maybe in something like D&D where there’s demons, they actually care about causing suffering and the people we think of as evil are merely neutral.
Yep, this is basically the “Evil is the Absence of Good” argument, and you could do way worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absence_of_good
To be Neutral is to be able to do not only good things, bad things, but to also abstain from both. Neutral is ‘boring’ because it doesn’t lock your character into an alignment. You aren’t forced to help people, you aren’t forced to harm people, your character does what would make sense for your character to do, even if it means doing nothing.
Good aligned characters aren’t “forced” to help people if they have a reason not to. Nor are they “forbidden” from stealing. A single act does not determine an alignment and alignment isn’t a cage restricting player autonomy.
Giving 100 gold to a beggar and donating your time and 10 000 gold to an orphanage are not the same thing, but the existence of the 2nd option doesn’t make the first option neutral.
If your personal morality allows you to do anything, as long as you profit from it in some way, you don‘t have any morality at all. You‘re evil.
Okay then what’s the difference between someone who’s apathetic and someone who actively likes hurting people? Nothing? Those are the same alignment? I don’t get why this is so hard to understand.
If you’re apathetic because it’s none of your business or you’re afraid for your family, that’s neutral. If you’re apathetic to their pleas for mercy as you evict them into the snow so you can make more money, that’s evil.
The core question is: are you willing to hurt others to benefit yourself?
It‘s dependent on context. If you live in an oppressive regime that commits atrocities in front of your eyes, you may let them happen because you fear for your own safety if you intervene. That‘s the neutral way. A good person would join a resistance group, even if it means putting yourself in danger. An evil person would apply as a henchman to the evil overlord, not because they‘re a sadist that craves harming other people, but because it‘s an easy job and it pays well.
I feel like the actions matter less than the intent for matters of morality. If your character wants to save a village overrun by monsters, but the monsters were actually people who had an illusion spell cast on them, your character isn’t evil for slaughtering a village because their desire was purely noble. Neutral is having both good and evil desires, usually for personal reasons that make sense for the character. A rogue is going to steal from a town guard as readily as they’ll steal from a goblin, they want the gold, they don’t care about the morality behind it. Evil is wanting to slaughter the village just to see what adjacent towns would say, it’s doing something bad for the sake of it.
Slaughtering a village for the evulz and just to see what happens is murder hobo alignment, not evil.
You‘re putting examples against each other that cannot be compared. Let‘s take the village overrun with monsters and present it to three different characters of each alignment. The good one fights the monsters to free the village. The neutral character assesses the risk and if they don‘t fight, they at least inform the next village they pass through. The evil chatacter doesn‘t bother because they don‘t care.
Yeah you just don’t get it. Characters can do different things regardless of their alignment, you just think they’d do something different so you disregard what I’m saying.
Well, that‘s ok. You obviously didn‘t read my posts anyway.
Nah. Evil is where the harm your actions do to other people doesn’t stop you from doing it. Neutral is where you wouldn’t put yourself especially at risk or especially out of your way to help others, but you wouldn’t hurt them either, even if it benefited you. Obviously there’s a spectrum there, most neutral people would do harm to others if they had a gun to their head. Enjoying the harm you do unto others is sadism, which is separate from alignment. A good or neutral person can be a sadist, but their morality will prevent them from hurting others even if they enjoy it. In short, sadism provides a motive (of which there are many others), alignment provides the restriction or lack thereof.
Tl;dr if order a village slaughtered to take all their stuff, I don’t care how dispassionate or purely self-interested you are, you’re evil. If you murder people because you’re paid to, and don’t much care about the details, you’re evil.
Well I think you’re assessing good and evil based on your own moral compass rather than how RPGs base them on. Someone who is apathetic is neutral because they could go either way, it makes no difference. It’s the definition of neutral. Evil is going out of your way to cause harm, Good is going out of your way to help. Why would a neutral person kill a village of people? They’d need a reason. Soldiers have slaughtered towns and villages on orders but each soldier didn’t have an active desire to be part of that. They aren’t inherently evil, maybe they think their cause is just. They were told to and had no resistance to it. You can do evil acts without being evil.
Neutral is the absence of compulsion either direction. It’s killing a guy because they had it coming one day and feeding orphaned children the next. It’s a mix of good and evil to where you are conflicted to call them either a hero or a villain. Something from Fallout: New Vegas does a good job of explaining it.
I would argue that for game purposes, having an E on your character sheet means “I like inter-party conflict so much I am willing to instigate it” whereas having an unaccompanied N on your sheet means “I just want to have fun with my party”. Tasha is, as far as I know, a team player like 75% of the time, so I would accept her being true neutral as long as she does not inflict her sadism on things that affect the party negatively
I am also perfectly down with having people with a G on their character sheet do horrifying things “for the greater good”. They have indicated they want to be a hero by writing that G on their character sheet, so as long as the other people at the table think their actions are heroic then there is no issue.
“Stupid Evil” is not a valid alignment anymore than “Lawful Stupid” Paladins. Decent players can role play a party with both Good and Evil characters in it without it constantly descending into bickering and threats of violence.
I think you are confusing “inter-party conflict” with the players at the table getting mad at each other. For example, last session, my LE artificer and the CG rogue were experiencing some conflict regarding him making a pact with my warlock patron, which in-game devolved into my artificer threatening to kill his adopted son while he threatens to kill me. Out of game, we had a quick conversation that went something like this:
Then we went right back to RPing our characters threatening to stab each other’s loved ones. Thats what I mean by inter-party conflict. If you can’t be civil at the table, you’re either being a bully or you’re going to be kicked out of the table.
That all sounds reasonable, but you don’t have to have Evil in your alignment for inter-party conflict. Some of the best story telling happens when different characters are trying to do the right thing, but disagree as to what that is.
I think what you are proposing sounds similar to what I said at the end of my first comment.
Example: most people I’ve talked to about Goblin Slayer peg his alignment as Lawful Good, but I’m fairly certain if you decided to do ethnic cleansing in your game the other players might take issue with that.
I think the strongest counterargument would be something similar to playing as a sort of Monster Rights activist in a more traditional sword & sorcery setting, trying to get kobolds and goblins standing in civilized society so people cant just kill them for fun. You’d be facing a lot of opposition from the world, and your goals likely run perpendicular to those of the other players, but that seems like the same kind of fun as what I am doing in my campaign. However, based on my argument earlier, this would be a Lawful Evil character lmao
No. Their behavior is self interested. That’s Evil. Didn’t matter how they envision it or whether they have a personal code. If their personal code places the needs of others and the general welfare in a place of high importance then they are Good. Chaotic - Lawful merely describes the methods they’re willing to pursue to achieve those goals.
Self-interest is not evil. Self-interest is a core trait to surviving. Egocentrism is abrasive but also isn’t in itself, evil. An egotistical hero is still a hero even if they save people only for the sake of getting credit for it.
Listen. You need to go out and touch some grass. No one is making a moral argument here. We’re debating a game’s alignment system and how to understand it. In terms of the game’s systems, self-interest is evil. Devils are extremely self-interested and do nothing for the greater good or general welfare.
Yes and I think you have no idea what you’re talking about so take that grass touching advice for yourself and stop replying to my comments with the dumbest shit I’ve heard on this site. “Self-interest is inherently evil!” the fuck it is.
Look, I’m an atheist so I don’t believe in evil. That being said I’m not 13 so I also don’t have a hard-on for Ayn Rand to the point where I get enraged when other people talk about self interest.
I never said anything about it being “inherently evil”. You’re putting words in my mouth. You’d realize that if you actually took some time to cool off.
In the context of D&D, how self-interested a character is determines their moral alignment. It’s a loose description of a mechanic.
No one is making claims about the real world.