Concerning Alignments

[Maxus]

Fuck Law and Chaos.

Aww, but I enjoyed writing this! And you're hating on it... sadface

You misunderstand. I just can't see any coherent, universal way to handle Law and Chaos. When I first read the Tome of Fiends, I thought no, that can't be right.

Until I discussed it with the gaming buddies and I realized that Frank and Keith are dead right. Everyone has their own idea how it works, if they try to treat them seriously as valid and understandable parts of the game.

A series of half-fuzzed recollections and general gists of the viewpoints

"Lawful Good is the worst alignment because it's so intolerant. Paladins all suck. They're all intolerant hatemongering fanatics who don't forgive. That's how everyone who's ever played one, has played one."

From the same guy:

"I can see Druids [his absolute favorite class. He probably wanked over his Chaotic Good druid females who were always right] being any alignment except Lawful Good or Lawful Evil. No fucking way."

And on the other side...

"Lawful Neutral is the most fascinating alignment to me. I mean, the ways they would arrive at conclusions is something I'm enjoying working out..."

"I'd honestly rather live in a Lawful Evil society than a Chaotic Good one. At least the place would function."

Or, once on the Wiki, someone put forth the idea that "Chaos is spontaneous and good at reacting, but Law is better at long-range planning" like it was the definitive truth and got flummoxed when someone said, "So you mean Chaotic characters should have higher Initiative scores than Lawful characters?"

I, therefore, ignore Law and Chaos at any sort of moral force in my games and make this clear at the outset.

I instead sketch in the Order/Chaos yin-yang to them and make it clear that order and chaos are concepts which affect things. Matter, objects, creatures (that are made of matter), as well as large-scale things like the rise and fall of civilizations.

Good and evil are concepts and forces which apply to sentient beings and souls.

[For Valor]

One thing that bothers is me is your assertion that alternating extremes of good/evil behavior somehow cancel itself out to "neutral".

In modern sensiblities, It usually doesn't - if you go around randomly murdering some hobos and giving money to others, you're still evil.

Well, no duh. But how about killing hobos, and then saving the universe? I'd say if you did that, you'd be in the "Good" camp, even IF you killed a couple homeless people.

However, what if you kicked every homeless person you saw, AND THEN gave them ten bucks? Or maybe five bucks... whatever. When your Good/Evil actions are of equal level, then you level out to being neutral.

Random House 2010 Dictionary -- "a state of society without government or law." Go ahead and disagree, but I'm standing by what I wrote. You change the word if you don't like it.

I'm using the literal greek translation. For utter bedlam use the word Anomie in place of Anarchy.

Edit: Also I personally have combined Knowledge (Local/history/geography/nobility and royalty) into a skill called Civics (Int)

The Ancient Greeks are dead and long gone.

I am not going for bedlam--anarchic characters can still have leaders and people they respect. Read the description.

And I like your combination of Skills... Civics (Int) or Knowledge (Civics) (Int) would be a nice combination of things. I shall take this into consideration.

[CatharzGodfoot]

But how about killing hobos, and then saving the universe? I'd say if you did that, you'd be in the "Good" camp, even IF you killed a couple homeless people.

Yeah? Well I say 'Fuck you'. You have to live in this goddamn' universe just like everyone else. So what if you save it? All that means is you like having cigars to smoke, beer to drink, prostitutes to kill, and a place to live.

[Leress]

Saving the universe doesn't erase the fact that you killed hobos. It's not some slider.

[Rejakor]

The problem is that a lot of people think that you can build an alignment system without intent. And you really can't.

But then you get deranged paladins who kill people while chanting 'Good for the Good God!' and then you're back to Start again.

Personally (and that means shit all, but i'll still share it), I just handle them as substances. Good exists. So does Evil, and Law, and Chaos. If you act in certain ways, you get little bits of Good or Law or Chaos or Evil in your soul. This stuff has built in actions or intents or opinions that it gets drawn to, and that's how it finds you and gets stuck in the toffee treacle of your soul. When you die, the attraction between the bits of alignment in your soul and the afterlife planes linked to that alignment pull you to them.

Spells like Detect Evil simply detect if you have more evil than good, and enough more to qualify as 'evil' and not 'neutral'. So an evil babykilling cultist could work as a charity worker and genuinely enjoy helping people and detect as neutral or good even if he was sacrificing people to Set every thursday night (although he'd have to be doing a shitton of good to offset the murderin').

[Username17]

More generally, if your total net contribution to society is actually zero, you are not neutral.

Goodness can't be achieved simply by doing your work on time and never molesting any children. That's neutrality. That's the state of your life being no more or less valuable than any random dude off the street. For Goodness to mean anything at all, it has to mean going above and beyond to actually accomplish something good.

-Username17

[Count Geiger]

More generally, if your total net contribution to society is actually zero, you are not neutral.

Goodness can't be achieved simply by doing your work on time and never molesting any children. That's neutrality. That's the state of your life being no more or less valuable than any random dude off the street. For Goodness to mean anything at all, it has to mean going above and beyond to actually accomplish something good.

-Username17

The only way you can ovoid making no contribution to society at all is if you are 100% self sufficient and that is neigh impossible. You'd have to live on an island somewhere and it's very likely you'd go nuts. Though being completely isolated would remove you from moral consequence and thus you would be neutral unless you like to torture dolphins of corse.

Also contribute to society=/=good/evil.
It's very easy to do things for the "good of society" and still commit evil acts.

[Quantumboost]

The only way you can ovoid making no contribution to society at all is if you are 100% self sufficient and that is neigh impossible.

Not even close to true.

The entire point of society is that a large quantity of people working towards vaguely common goals are usually able to accomplish more than those people working individually. And that means that, on average, each person is contributing more to society overall than they are taking from society.

There are exceptions, of course - mooching is the obvious case - but seriously, the average person does this every day. By doing a job, you are specifically performing a function which has a net benefit to society over the value ascribed to what you are given in exchange (usually money). That's why that job *exists* - because the value of what you provide is better than the value of what you are being given to do it. Or you fooled people and are a mooch, but that's where the average comes in.

Human society is *not* a zero-sum game. That's just stupid.

[For Valor]

But how about killing hobos, and then saving the universe? I'd say if you did that, you'd be in the "Good" camp, even IF you killed a couple homeless people.

Yeah? Well I say 'Fuck you'. You have to live in this goddamn' universe just like everyone else. So what if you save it? All that means is you like having cigars to smoke, beer to drink, prostitutes to kill, and a place to live.

Um.. if I had the power to save the universe, I probably also had the power to plane-jump. I could just run away and save myself (I'm assuming that a "Universe" is one of the planes where people live. If I didn't give a damn, I'd let them die. But since I wanted people to live, I'd save them). I could "live in this goddamn' universe" OR any other one, but I was nice and decided to save an entire plane. That qualifies me, whether you like it or not, as a good person. Even if I killed a couple hobos on the prime, if I SAVED the whole thing, then I think it's OK.

Saving the universe doesn't erase the fact that you killed hobos. It's not some slider.

No, but it overwhelms the fact that I killed hobos. Like how Abraham Lincoln jailed opposition in the Union (violating their basic rights), while also socially and politically leading the USA to defeat the CSA. His achievements overwhelm his problems, so people call him good.

[Count Geiger]

No, but it overwhelms the fact that I killed hobos. Like how Abraham Lincoln jailed opposition in the Union (violating their basic rights), while also socially and politically leading the USA to defeat the CSA. His achievements overwhelm his problems, so people call him good.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbOE4Ip7In0

[CatharzGodfoot]

But how about killing hobos, and then saving the universe? I'd say if you did that, you'd be in the "Good" camp, even IF you killed a couple homeless people.

Yeah? Well I say 'Fuck you'. You have to live in this goddamn' universe just like everyone else. So what if you save it? All that means is you like having cigars to smoke, beer to drink, prostitutes to kill, and a place to live.

Um.. if I had the power to save the universe, I probably also had the power to plane-jump. I could just run away and save myself (I'm assuming that a "Universe" is one of the planes where people live. If I didn't give a damn, I'd let them die. But since I wanted people to live, I'd save them). I could "live in this goddamn' universe" OR any other one, but I was nice and decided to save an entire plane. That qualifies me, whether you like it or not, as a good person. Even if I killed a couple hobos on the prime, if I SAVED the whole thing, then I think it's OK.

Saving Reno so that you can keep killing hobos does not make you a good person, even if you had the option of moving to Toronto. It makes you the kind of person that good people will temporarily ally with until the universeReno is saved.

[Starmaker]

No, but it overwhelms the fact that I killed hobos.

lurk moar It's time you familiarized yourself with the classics.

FrankTrollman[/url]]I'm sorry, but you are not a Good person. You go through your life, you don't stab anyone in the face, you don't break any laws, you don't take pictures of naked children, and… so what? You want a medal for that? Shut up.

The sad fact of the matter is that if you aren't exerting yourself for a cause, if you aren't exerting yourself for something, you aren't Good. You probably aren't Evil, but seriously: get over yourself. Before you can really get into the mind of a Good character you honestly have to come to terms with the fact that you, as a person, are probably Neutral. Your character is a much better person than you are.

FrankTrollman[/url]]Let's make a wild and crazy assumption about Good: being Good means that you're making the world a nicer place. People live longer, have more fun, are less afraid, enjoy their surroundings, and their company a little more. That's Good. Sounds like a pretty valid assumption, neh? It's unprovable, and that's why it's an assumption, but as assumptions go it isn't bad.

FrankTrollman[/url]]Most importantly, the inverse of Evil is not Good. It really takes a lot less harm to be Evil than it takes aid to be Good. If you fix twenty people's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat your neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal – and no additional carpentry assistance will change that. This is why the Book of Exalted Deeds is such an unsatisfying read… you can't just take the material in the Book of Vile Darkness and multiply by negative one to get Good.

Now, if you click Frank's name in my post (the links lead to the original posts), you might notice I have likely been intellectually dishonest by omitting this:

FrankTrollman[/url]]Here's where things get unpopular: You know how when you're driving a car you can choose to turn right, you can choose to turn left, and you can choose to go straight? What do you do to the steering wheel to go straight? Nothing. And if you hit someone by not turning the car, that's an action on your part, right? Doing nothing is a choice, and it's an action, and the consequences of that action are on your conscience. And here's where things get even more unpopular: There are people getting mutilated and starved by a genocidal regime in Sudan right now, and you aren't doing anything about it. That's right, you could drop what you're doing, go to Sudan, and smuggle in food and weaponry so that the Black Africans could cling to life, but you aren't doing that. And because of your choice to watch a rerun of ER instead, people are going to die.

But the thing is, you can be a Good person in spite of that. You don't bear sole responsibility for the genocide in Darfur, and you may not have the training or equipment necessary to do anything about it anyway. Heck, if you left, a hurricane could easily come to your home and kill people while you're gone. There's no guaranty that going away and helping some people is going to help more people than staying where you are. In fact, since travel is expensive and time consuming, you have to weigh carefully the potential benefit you can bestow by going anywhere to accomplish Good ends.

Further, you have to sleep. Also you have to relax sometimes. If you run yourself ragged all the time, then you won't be any good when we really need you. The ambulance doesn't just drive around, it sits in one place until it is called upon and then drives to where it is needed. So doing the best you can still involves you personally taking some time off to go surfing and hiking and talking with your friends and drinking some fair trade coffee and looking at pretty girls. Really, in order to do the most good, you'll still have to do some of that other stuff.

So being Good doesn't mean that you solve all the problems, it means that you actively solve more problems than you cause by a substantial margin. That you don't shrink back from doing Good for others, that you take some responsibility for making the world a better place.

But I haven't. There is a difference between seeing a movie for fun (while people half a world away die) and killing hobos for fun.

Also: fame, glory and love are not exclusively heroic privileges. There are homicidal maniacs that care for their families. For crazy high level quests, boredom is an excellent motivation: if you can save worlds and jump worlds, life doesn't present a lot of challenges on slower days.

Also x2: if someone has the sauce on "Destroy the world? But that's where I keep all my stuff!", please link.

[For Valor]

lurk moar It's time you familiarized yourself with the classics.

I've read 'em. See below for response to all

Saving Reno so that you can keep killing hobos does not make you a good person, even if you had the option of moving to Toronto. It makes you the kind of person that good people will temporarily ally with until the universeReno is saved.

I'm not saving Reno so I could kill hobos. I've just had a couple times where I got pissed, shot a hobo, and moved on. A homeless-person-killing-spree is very differenent from what we alluded to above (do respond to things in the following of how a conversation is worded, please). I killed a couple guys, then saved a plane... I think killing a couple guys is pardonable.

And Count Geiger, I would love to argue with you about the Civil War (and about this 2008 Republican candidate's opinion on it), but that's not for this thread.

IMO Reboot is probably the best show to pull off alignment.
Megabyte: LE
Hexadecimal: CE

I never noticed this before. It makes me laugh now.