Dealing With Alignment In Dungeons & Dragonlance

[Neurosis]

I think the most explicit version you see is the stupid-ass 'balance' deal where you try to beat on whichever of the other teams is strongest for nonsense reasons.

I think it's tough to have a 'team Neutral' that means anything.

Well this does mean SOMETHING, it's just something you think is dumb for the reasons you said, which I'm not currently arguing against.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Actually, I can see a version where the playing-both-sides Neutrals aren't too stupid. If you have the situation where either of the other sides getting too strong means they start the end times when they're sure to win, and you don't want to live in whatever the world would look like when they were done (or just fear change), that might be passable. You'd still have trouble working with either of the other teams, though.

[Fwib]

I think what makes a man turn neutral is a lust for cuckoo clocks and fondue.

[Mechalich]

The most common justification for the 'balance' perspective is that the ultimate triumph of absolute good would leave a world empty of everything. Basically that without struggle development is impossible and therefore the ultimate triumph of good represents effective assimilation into a Borg-like collective of constant unchanging celestial bliss - it's eternally happy but eternally pointless.

This is a fairly common viewpoint in modern fantasy, not just in D&D, and from a philosophical perspective there's something to it. Of course the balance that you actually want is more like 99-1 Good to Evil, not 50-50.

People who actually part of the balance faction of neutrality probably should be considered untrustworthy by most others. The classic balance-oriented archetype in D&D is the Druid, who's supposed to be a creepy bugger who disassociates from society and gets their inscrutable mojo on in the wilderness. The true neutral D&D outsiders are the Rilmani, who are inscrutable weirdos that form no alliances and show up seemingly at random to generally fuckover people seemingly at random.

[Prak]

I was thinking about alignment in the shower yesterday, and I'm really leaning towards doubling down on the way I described alignments the last time I ran- Basically, Good is Selfless, Evil Selfish, Law Orthodox, and Chaos Heterodox.

But instead of saying "Good means that you are selfless, that you put others before yourself," just fucking scratch out good and replace it with Selfless. This sort of helps alignment restrictions, because when you say that Paladins must be Selfless and Orthodox, that immediately tells you how you're supposed to act.

Of course, Barbarian, and to lesser extents, Druids and Monks need to not have alignment restrictions, even under this idea. You *could* say that druids have to be Heterodox, with their philosophy being based on niches and ecosystems, but there's no real reason you can't have a druid who espouses the orthodox idea that everyone should live in harmony with nature.

Spells get screwed up with this, but honestly, mostly that comes down to Detect Evil and such, which can be solved with a very minor writing task of defining what different gods consider antithetical and framing it as "Detect Antithesis"

[deaddmwalking]

For neutrality, think Treebeard in LotR movies:

"I am on nobody's side because nobody is on my side, little orc."

Anybody who takes a 'side' that doesn't represent 'society' but isn't directly against them can fall into neutrality. But just like evil isn't monolithic or cooperative, neutral shouldn't be, either.

[Neurosis]

I actually like the way that LotFP handles alignment, FWIW.

[maglag]

For neutrality, think Treebeard in LotR movies:

"I am on nobody's side because nobody is on my side, little orc."

Anybody who takes a 'side' that doesn't represent 'society' but isn't directly against them can fall into neutrality. But just like evil isn't monolithic or cooperative, neutral shouldn't be, either.

I believe that the parabole of the good samaritan is a fitting standard of the good-evil axis.

You're walking in the road and meet somebody else, there's nobody else around.

Evil: shiv the other guy, loot him and leave them bleeding.
Neutral: just walk past them, not my problem.
Good: Check if the other guy looks like they could use help, if yes offer support without expecting anything in return.

So I would say that yes, good should be cooperative. If you see somebody bleeding in the wilderness and just walk past them without giving a single fuck, by exactly what standard can you still call yourself good?

[Chamomile]

Okay, so we're not talking about Neutral in D&D in general here, but Neutral in Dragonlance. This makes untangling the problem much harder, because Dragonlance is thoroughly and simultaneously committed to an epic struggle between good and evil in which the triumph of the good guys is supposed to be genuinely good, but also a world where good and evil must be balanced against each other. Basically, a collision between western and eastern philosophical buzzwords in which neither was properly understood. In most D&D settings, Neutral can be a grab-bag for various Third Way philosophies who are unified, if at all, only by the fact that all of them are individually too small to stand up to the other two factions on their own. If you're going to retcon the Neutral gods as being Third Way in Dragonlance, you're making a significant enough retcon to a subject that doesn't cause controversy the way the behavior and attitudes of Good and Evil do, so you're probably going to displease a lot of fans. If you don't care about what Dragonlance fans think, why are you using Krynn in the first place? For purposes of fixing Dragonlance, my firm recommendation is to ignore Team Neutral as much as possible. The main story already does this anyway.

[Voss]

Whatever you're trying to say here, it's full of shit. There aren't any buzzwords or philosophy in Dragonlance- nothing resembling thought at all.

Neutral in Dragonlance comes in one of three flavors.

A) placeholder.
Basically Raistlin. At some point you end up on team evil or team good, but until then you are nominally neutral, but mostly you'll kill goblins but not townsfolk.

B) ardent supporters of Team Good.
Basically, most of the neutral gods (except the head neutral God, see below) especially if Paladine is deciding to nuke or abandon the world. Doubly so for Reorx, God of dwarves. (Who is likely the last of the four gods (out of the 21) whose name you actually remember)

This how team good gets anything done against team evil on the divine scale. They basically just double up on them and win 2 to 1

Also Tasselhof, Kender, and gnomes in general, the latter despite giving no shits and being completely irrational breaks from reality, are functionally lackeys to the Knights.
Magius, the red robe from ancient times (Huma's little buddy) also definitely fits

C) fuck off, I'm observing history here.
Astinus of Palanthus, the avatar of the head neutral god, (whose name is probably not gilneas, because it's a Warcraft nation, but close enough). He will not engage in anything but observing and recording, even up to and including the end of the world.
The sea elves also fall into this category, more or less. They won't actually watch you die, but you have to push them really hard to go beyond basic food and shelter. They simply give no shits- they avoid evil and fuck around as Dolphins.

[Chamomile]

This is the Wikipedia summary of the Dragonlance Neutral gods. For your convenience, I have highlighted all of the buzzwords and philosophical statements.

The Gods of Neutrality believe that mortals should exist in harmony with the world and make their own moral and faith related decisions. That makes them both a distant group of gods and an involved one at the same time. They promote elemental and conceptual truths as principles alone rather than tools towards an end. They have a strong presence in their particular domains, and keep the world from being in a constant state of conflict between Good and Evil.[16] The Gods of Neutrality reside in the Hidden Vale, with the exception of Lunitari, who resides in the red moon of Krynn to be closer to her wizards. It is a place of both shadow and light which meld together in perfection.

If you think only carefully thought out settings ever have buzzwords or philosophies, then you do not know what buzzwords and philosophies are. Philosophies and especially buzzwords are not necessarily coherent and indeed Dragonlance's are not, since the Neutral gods are treated as balancing Good and Evil even though the Good gods are simultaneously portrayed as being sincerely and capably devoted to the well-being of the world. It is entirely unclear why the Neutral gods don't just side with Team Paladine and bring peace to Krynn by eliminating one side of the conflict altogether, but that is definitely not something they do, because the one time we actually see all the gods get together to discuss something, it's on the eve of the Chaos War, when the currently ascendant Team Evil demands Team Good surrender in the current Good/Evil conflict in order to fight Chaos (the god named Chaos, not the alignment Chaos) together. The Neutral gods support Team Evil in this and Paladine whines about it, but is outvoted.

When Neutral does side with Good, it's usually because Evil has launched unprovoked invasions of multiple Neutral nations. This was the case in the War of the Lance.

[Mechalich]

Neutral forces in Dragonlance are already weaker than they are in many other campaign settings. For one thing, there are no gem dragons or really neutral dragons of any kind (though a couple of oddities have cropped up in the fiction at one point or another). Krynn's limited access to extra-planar forces means none of those neutrals are around. The long history of conflict also means that various entities that might wish to be neutral have been co-opted to one side or the other (like the lizardfolk in the setting).

So while the neutral gods may have a philosophical space that is equal to the other alignment-factions, their supply of active servants is far more limited and many of those are strictly non-interventionist.

It can pretty much come down to just that. Much like during the Cold War, the constant conflict between Good and Evil over Krynn has forced existing powers to chose sides, squeezing the various neutral parties out. Though I suppose the Cataclysm allowed them to grow stronger for a time, which is one of the reasons why the early sages of the War of the Lance were so messy.

[Neurosis]

I have no arguments against any of Chamomile's points.

Slightly related: Does anyone know where I can find some reasonable 3.X stats for Takihisis? It came up.

B) ardent supporters of Team Good.
Basically, most of the neutral gods (except the head neutral God, see below) especially if Paladine is deciding to nuke or abandon the world. Doubly so for Reorx, God of dwarves. (Who is likely the last of the four gods (out of the 21) whose name you actually remember)

You STRONGLY underestimate my love for dwarves. I believe that I ALREADY mentioned Reorx in this thread.

I love the observation that "Team Neutral" in Draygunlance is essentially the second-stringers for Team Good as long as Team Evil is in play (i.e. during the war of the lance). That seems totally right to me.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I love the observation that "Team Neutral" in Draygunlance is essentially the second-stringers for Team Good as long as Team Evil is in play (i.e. during the war of the lance). That seems totally right to me.

It's way less coherent than that. Paladine himself comes out as being in favor of the Balance - that's right, the head of the Good pantheon doesn't want Good to win (which may have something to with why they're always losing). If anything, that makes Team Good a shadow division of Team Neutral.

[Starmaker]

If you don't care about what Dragonlance fans think, why are you using Krynn in the first place?

Riding dragons, leading dragon armies, fighting a world war, and improving a world than not once in history has been pleasant. Setting right an established world is a more satisfying prospect than a homebrew world; the latter feels arbitrary, the former feels like an actual achievement. Dragonlance is unique among published settings because you can actualy pull it off during the course of a campaign.

"Fans" does not necessarily mean "rabid dumbfucks". Look, I'm a Dragonlance fan, and I hate everything after the War of the Lance except the two SSI games. Which doesn't mean I unconditionally love everything else, either.

Steel money has to go, I die a little inside every time it's brought up. Instead, everything is in gold / silver / copper at your preferred scale but prices vary wildly, because it's wartime and people either try to make money off shortages or try to liquidate their less portable assets and flee to relative safety, and because the best way to get people to assist you in the reconquest is to lead said reconquest and requisition stuff.

The whole dragon egg business is annoying; I'd rather not hear anything about the draconic reproductive system, but I wasn't able to come up with anything better. Dragon souls are more stupid than dragon eggs, and dragon hearts or whatever are vastly squickier. Draconians are intelligent and irredeemably evil, and killing them is morally okay.

Most of the gods must go. I'd keep Takhisis (evil god of tyranny), Gilean (in-your-face neutral and metagamey), Reorx (good god of dwarves and craftsmanship; evil dwarves worship evil gods) and maybe Paladine (good god of democracy). Morgion (god of plague), Hiddukel (god of greed) and Sargonnas (racist minotaur god, think Gruumsh except privileged) can stay on as lesser gods on Team Evil (kinda like demon princes), Mishakal (restoration and healing) can stay on Team Good so there'd be a girl on it. Mishakal opposes Morgion, Reorx opposes Hiddukel. Also, Hiddukel is a selfish traitor and Morgion is a selfish apocalyptic fucknut, so you might find common ground with the forces of Takhisis flushing their cults out.

Turnip gods not related to aspects of the game (fire, sea, sex, agriculture, animals) get cut. Undeath and Knighthood are on the other hand too important to answer to individual gods with an agenda; undead are creepy exactly because they don't have a single punchable face behind them, and knights should play politics instead of praying to the god of knights for HR consulting. Lord Soth is a prominent undead warlord with an undead army, but there are also individual necromancers, vampire covens, etc. Solamnic Knights honor Huma Lightbringer.

The gods are at war: they don't play chess and don't squabble like neighbors in a communal apartment. There's no High God.

Neutrality in a consmic conflict as "promotion of abstract concepts" is even more incoherent than religion in general; you can't really promote fire or sea in the same way as restoration or tyranny. A spirit of fire whom you make sacrifices to in exchange for fire magic isn't the same kind of conscious being than more sapient gods. A neutral asshole sea god who taxes your ships in exchange for not sinking them is too powerful, overreaching, and overshadows the whole cosmic conflict. Every nominally neutral Dragonlance god except Gilean and his shitty carbon copy Zivilyn are in cahoots with the gods of Good, because things like song and dance and consensual sex and wilderness preservation flourish in peace and prosperity. (Okay, I guess wilderness preservation would be served if humanity is gone, but I'd rather neither fight evil skeeters and evil bears nor consider the implication of winning a war to the death against the abstract concept of nature.) So unless you want to blow up the pantheon and disrupt the disbalance of forces with a host of "neutral" humanist gods of civilization, they need to be cut and their aspects wrapped into the main 2.5.

[Grek]

Team Neutral could be a feasible faction that someone might support if you make them Team Disarmament. Both the White Robes and the Black Robes want to have a final epic showdown where their side wins completely and the other guys are destroyed forever, and are willing to accept tremendous amounts of collateral damage to make this happen. The Red Robes are all about trying to talk down the nuclear powers and get them to sit at a diplomacy table without setting it on fire.

[Starmaker]

Team Neutral could be a feasible faction that someone might support if you make them Team Disarmament. Both the White Robes and the Black Robes want to have a final epic showdown where their side wins completely and the other guys are destroyed forever, and are willing to accept tremendous amounts of collateral damage to make this happen. The Red Robes are all about trying to talk down the nuclear powers and get them to sit at a diplomacy table without setting it on fire.

As a faction, sure, but not as a cosmic philosophical concept. If Team Good goes for the nuclear option, they are no longer remotely Good; and that thing where the authors insist absolute cosmic Good equals genocide and slavery is what sane people hate about Dragonlance.

If the Solamnic Knights decide that the best way to get rid of the dragonarmies is to blow up the world, and you sit Derek Crownguard and Duulket Ariakas at a table and tell them to knock it off, you're Good and they're both Evil. If you're a Dragon Highlord who wants to e.g. conquer the racist slaver elves and force them to abolish slavery at swordpoint, you might be Neutral or even Good, and if you're a cleric of Morgion who wants to infect everyone with the plague and make them choose between servitude to Morgion and death, you're Evil AND Takhisis is your enemy.

As Voss (mostly) correctly observed, Neutrality comes in three varieties:

1) a moderately selfish and moderately squeamish citizen of the world who's uncommitted for practical reasons; the dragonarmies might take half your food, but they also don't let the ogres eat you and might be preferable to Solamnics who'd kill dragonarmy soldiers, then inevitably retreat and leave you defenseless.

3) An unconcerned observer out of this world: Gilean, as a stand-in for the reader or the writer, who's okay with the war because more war means more story.

2) The gods of the various minute aspects of civilization, the majority of whom are on Team Good regardless of how they light up on the radar. Where I disagree with Voss is his suggestion that this numerical advantage is how Team Good wins -- quite the opposite, the aspects never do anything, Takhisis starts at a yuuge advantage and only loses by author fiat (also true in the metafictional sense, as "neutral-me" historian Gilean/Astinus rescues Raistlin). Go ahead and count how many times Shinare orders traders to stop supplying the dragonarmies or Chislev lets heroes through a forest but blocks an evil army's passage with thorns and thickets.

[Neurosis]

If you don't care about what Dragonlance fans think, why are you using Krynn in the first place?

I know this probably wasn't aimed at me, but my answer would just be: BECAUSE YOU RIDE FUCKING DRAGONS.

That said, I do care what Dragonlance fans think, except the ones that don't realize that Kender are a hate crime.

dwarfpower SERIOUSLY DON'T READ THE FOLLOWING

One thing I figured out recently is that in my campaign Fizban is secretly Lunitari instead of secretly Paladine. One thing this means is that Fizban rather than being a hilarious bumbling idiot that occasionally makes Team Good win against impossible odds is a hilarious bumbling idiot that did just that right up until they found the dragonlances, and now that "THE BALANCE" is shifting, spends most of his time non-chaotic-stupid time ominously lurking around and concern trolling D'Argent about Breaking her fucking Oath. Because, you know, TEAM NEUTRAL.

Also I am pretty sure that D'Argent and Sturm are going to wind up together in my campaign (it wouldn't be Dragonlance if EVERYONE DIDN'T GET PAIRED OFF WITH EVERYONE, and Tika and Gilthanas are already dead, so rather than being one of the few to die during the war of the lance, Sturm might be one of the few to survive, dice permitting, and having his girlfriend be a Very Old Silver Dragon probably will help). Yes I am talking about NPCs in my campaign and you have my permission and consent to give no shits.

[Chamomile]

If you don't care about what Dragonlance fans think, why are you using Krynn in the first place?

Riding dragons, leading dragon armies, fighting a world war, and improving a world than not once in history has been pleasant. Setting right an established world is a more satisfying prospect than a homebrew world; the latter feels arbitrary, the former feels like an actual achievement.

The latter feels kind of irrational, but so is my own attachment to the Dragonlance setting, so fair enough. Certainly Dragonlance has plenty of good things to recommend to it, but you can port all of those into a setting of your own making and have a lot more room to work with, and that's the course of action I would generally recommend if you want an epic struggle of good versus evil but you don't want to have to deal with Dragonlance's baggage.

That said, Schwarzkopf is coming at this from not just the perspective of an individual GM but also the perspective of a guy who is hoping to maybe publish some stuff for Dragonlance in 5e, and I'm hoping to get in on that and this is the perspective from which my half of the conversation is coming. You'll also note that I said retconning the Neutral gods significantly would displease a lot of Dragonlance fans, not every single one of them. I can probably be counted as a Dragonlance fan, but that hardly means I am unaware of the issues Dragonlance's Team Neutral has, and unlike my stance on things like kender and gully dwarves, I am very much in the minority in disliking the cosmic balance of Krynn. This means that retcons eliminating large numbers of gods (even gods nobody can name off the top of their head nor cares to ever have a character worship) are dangerous in a way that retcons to kender and gully dwarves are not, but ignoring Team Neutral is already a Dragonlance tradition.

[sendaz]

If you don't care about what Dragonlance fans think, why are you using Krynn in the first place?

I know this probably wasn't aimed at me, but my answer would just be: BECAUSE YOU RIDE FUCKING DRAGONS.

Which of course leads to this eventually.