An example of a personal code might be a fighter who adheres to the strict moral code of a long forgotten order of paladins. The character isn't a Paladin, the order fell long ago and has no current adherents, society in general views them as being foolish, yet here's this fighter who maintains this strict code despite it making encounters more difficult for them and doing so even if it means running afoul of local customs or laws.
i.e. Always telling the truth, never accumulating more wealth than needed to survive from day to day, never breaking any promise regardless of the consequences, endeavoring to restore a disgraced family's honor, never eating meat from creatures with 4 legs, and settling all insults of honor to the death, etc.
A personal code would be a set of articulable rules that the character never violates, regardless of whether the results are seen as Good or Evil. That would be an example of a LN adherence to a personal code.
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Playing D&D since 1982
Have played every version of the game since Basic (original Red Box Set), except that abomination sometimes called 4e.
I played a Nobleman (Cavalier class, Order of the Lion) in Pathfinder 1st ed, and I ran him as Lawful Neutral (good tendencies). He would dip into evil methods to get the job done, but he was a noblesse oblige type. He fought for the good of his kingdom, with a focus on the good of the people in it, but was willing to do some real nasty stuff in order to achieve it.
Im a bit confused on lawful neutral. Could lawful neutral be someone who has rules they want in place and will do what it takes to enforece them with causing as little harm as possible but also not putting being good above all else.
Neutral in itself is considered a problem child. They are typically self engrossed and pedant.
Im a bit confused on lawful neutral. Could lawful neutral be someone who has rules they want in place and will do what it takes to enforece them with causing as little harm as possible but also not putting being good above all else.
Neutral in itself is considered a problem child. They are typically self engrossed and pedant.
that is completely false. and i know that because i am lawful neutral. i only stay on the side of good because if people who live in a nation never helped one another then that nation would fall apart at the seem. lawful neutral people are the only people with firm beliefs who would try to make life better for everyone in the nation they live in. but lawful neutral people would never do evil acts for the sake of keeping rules in place but that would be what lawful evil people would do. lawful neutral people are people who always do good acts and neutral acts because by doing good acts, they believe they are doing what is expected of them in a community or nation. and by doing what is expected of them in a community or nation, they feel they are fulfilling their end goal of making their selfish desire of making the world a utopia for all members of their species, a reality.
Lawful neutral characters routinely do evil things if that's what the law says. If a hero breaks a law while doing his heroic things, a lawful neutral character will try to imprison him and put him on trial, regardless of the fact that that's going to take six months at least and the villain's plan to destroy the sun will happen next week.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Judge Dredd is a better example of Lawful Neutral.
This comes down to whether alignment is defined by belief or action. Judge Dredd believes he's doing the right thing... but he's also a psychopath.
I don't think Dredd fits neatly into an alignment. He's Lawful Apathetic. He only cares about the law and simply does not even consider it's impact on other people. There is only him, and he is the Law.
Less charitably, you could call that evil too.
I know its a necro post, but Dredd is the poster child of lawful neutral. Good and Evil are overly concerned with morality that the ethos is hamstrung by contradictions. Neutral has no illusions to this, as thier ethics are defined in a way thats difficult to challenge. Appealing to Dress’s humanity is like asking the god of Mchanis to break the laws of the universe because people dying is bad.
That said, Dredd isn’t blind. If the word of the law is being twisted to subvert order, he knows who the enemy is. But solving it means the law has to be changed or the subverter caught on conspiracy charges. Either way the law must reinforce itself in the aftermath, and is thus stronger moving forward. No one is above the law, and those who shape it must be held to it. Thats the theory anyway. Without law there is no order. If there is no order, then there is only chaos. And given the Earth Dredd takes place in, and why there are mega cities to begin with, order and law are keeping humanity from extinction. On a meta level the irony is on purpose.
Lawful neutral characters routinely do evil things if that's what the law says.
That's by no means clear; there's an entire spectrum between devilish and angelic, and where neutral actually lies has never been clarified.
They're the ones who uphold the law, regardless of what the law is. That's the point of being neutral. They don't seek oppression but they also won't stop it if the law supports it. If it's what the law states, they'll enable it. The same thing goes for benevolence: they're the people who care what the law states rather than concerning themselves with questions of right or wrong. If they start getting overly concerned about such issues, it means that they're shifting alignment towards LG or LE.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
They're the ones who uphold the law, regardless of what the law is. That's the point of being neutral. They don't seek oppression but they also won't stop it if the law supports it.
There's always been a question whether neutral is "indifferent to good vs evil" or merely "does not actively seek good". There is a pretty wide range of things that are permitted by not required under any model of law.
I think it's probably easier to understand as a position that someone can take (or an alignment that someone can "be") if it's indifference, especially for LN; not taking a stand one way or another, or not considering the "morality" of an action. The other just seems to swing too wildly (sometimes good, sometimes evil) for my tastes and only fits, in my mind, for CN.
I think it's probably easier to understand as a position that someone can take (or an alignment that someone can "be") if it's indifference, especially for LN; not taking a stand one way or another, or not considering the "morality" of an action. The other just seems to swing too wildly (sometimes good, sometimes evil) for my tastes and only fits, in my mind, for CN.
Alignment really only works descriptively; somebody who is neither particularly good nor particularly evil is going to shake out as neutral.
IMO, a perfectly good philosophy for a CN character would be: "And it harms none (more or less), do as you will shall be the whole of the law"
No one is really sure about the Alignment chart. If you really want to know what "Lawful neutral" means, you will have to ask the DM running the session, and if you are that DM you are going to have to make judgment calls.
Back when I played an edgy rouge, they couldn't tell if i was Good, Unaligned, or evil ( this was 4E so simpler chart but idea applies ) because i did a lot of heinous things followed by selfless acts.
DM:"Why did you poison the pirates you hitched a ride with and flay their captain in his bed?"
Me: "Because i wanted their money."
DM: "then why did you free their prisoners and off load all the loot at a fishing village."
me: "Because i wanted their money to give it to the freed slaves."
DM: "and the flaying the captain...."
Me: "oh that was for me. As a treat."
The Party got rid of him by locking him in the basement of the Paladin's home church. Now what would you call a character like that? He did good things, didn't keep the money and made people's lives better but he was a sadist. There are a lot of behaviors that show the alignment charts are full of holes. Did this character count as good but twisted, or did his evil acts of gleeful murder off set the good he did and make him neutral. The DM was even ready to punish the Paladin for not dispacting me and asked "What does your rouge do when he finds he has been abandoned near the paladin's loved ones?" the only reason paladin didn't get punished is i said 'rouge isn't squeamish with corpses so he helps the undertaker until he leaves town.' Then that gets into "Intent vs Results" which is another discussion.
I have even had evil characters who lost levels because I made a decision that would benefit me more in the long run but benefited my serfs in the short term. It really is up to what the DM deems good evil or neutral. I even explained my logic on how it was self-serving, "Collecting no Taxes means the peasants can recover then generate more profits because more survive the winter" but that wasn't Disney evil enough so alignment shift penalty. (Which i am glad are gone.)
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He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player. The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call To rise up in triumph should we all unite The spark for change is yours to ignite." Kalandra - The State of the World
No one is really sure about the Alignment chart. If you really want to know what "Lawful neutral" means, you will have to ask the DM running the session, and if you are that DM you are going to have to make judgment calls.
There's not even a real reason to ask the GM anymore -- alignment has virtually no mechanical weight. (Which is a good thing.) If a character feels LN to you, that ought to be sufficient.
Back when I played an edgy rouge, they couldn't tell if i was Good, Unaligned, or evil ( this was 4E so simpler chart but idea applies ) because i did a lot of heinous things followed by selfless acts.
DM:"Why did you poison the pirates you hitched a ride with and flay their captain in his bed?"
Me: "Because i wanted their money."
DM: "then why did you free their prisoners and off load all the loot at a fishing village."
me: "Because i wanted their money to give it to the freed slaves."
DM: "and the flaying the captain...."
Me: "oh that was for me. As a treat."
The Party got rid of him by locking him in the basement of the Paladin's home church. Now what would you call a character like that? He did good things, didn't keep the money and made people's lives better but he was a sadist. There are a lot of behaviors that show the alignment charts are full of holes.
It is full of holes (too subjective, and also incapable of encompassing all philosophies), but I'd still call that character evil. Cruelty for cruelty's sake is one of relatively few things you're going to get near-universal agreement on.
(The idea that evil characters are going to be bwahahah-evil all the time, and can't have goals, preferences, whims, friends, that lead them to do "good" acts is one of the biggest problems with the historic culture around the alignment system.)
Alignment represents a broad graph of a character's behavior over time. Someone who randomly swaps between doing good things, evil things, orderly things, and random things is just playing chaotic evil. As the old standup punchline goes, nobody complements me on the times I wasn't a cannibal.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Yeah, what’s described above is either Chaotic Evil or just Chaotic Obnoxious- it’s not an accounting table where the values zero out. In conventional D&D terms a Good character is one that is fundamentally opposed to pointless/self-indulgent cruelty because it’s immoral, and even a Neutral character has enough empathy that viciously screwing others over just because you can is beyond the pale.
Yeah, what’s described above is either Chaotic Evil or just Chaotic Obnoxious- it’s not an accounting table where the values zero out.
Well, obnoxious is more a player alignment than a character alignment, though they tend to be attracted to calling themselves CN (which usually actually means CE).
I'm not sure that saying "it's not an accounting table" is entirely correct, particularly on the chaotic side of things (which generally evaluates whether an action is right or wrong based on results, rather than rules) but typically the weighting is not 'one good deed balances one evil deed of similar magnitude'.
I think the best eay to think about alignment is to start with the idea that alignment was invented to allow players to kill npcs without feeling bad about it.
"These goblins are evil, so its ok if you kill them."
Thats lazy world building. But its easy and gets the campaign up and running fast. And its easy for a new dm to run.
The way i dm things, theres no such thing as alignment, and everything has consequences.
There are cultists going around committing murder, and maybe the party wants to stop them. If they do, the locals, the town, the sherriff, the city watch, generallly respect and reward them for it.
If the party starts robbing caravans or merchants, the party will generally end up on wanted posters and the locals, towns, sheriffs, anf city watch will either refuse to help, or actuvely oppose and arrest.
Whats "neutral" even mean in that kind of world?
A pc isnt "good", they have potentially completely different relationships with each npc in their world. They might cheat at cards with the card shark, help the little old lady across the street, go after cultusts threatening town, and maybe get on the wrong side of the city watch with their shenannigans.
To run that kind of world, the dm has to remember how each npc relates to each pc. It can be a lot of work. Or simplify to "alignment" and handwave the complexities away. They are "evil", you are "good", so do whatever you want to them.
When you get to the point of questioning alignment, the path to understanding isnt to better define what each category truly is. The path to understanding alignment is to realize its a super simplification to turn the game into red versus blue instead of a living, breathing, morally complex world with evolving consequences and changing reactions.
I know it isn't going to change the view of my 4E rouge (Who yes was a Shadar-kai, the DM wanted me to play one but that don't help the evil accusations.) My rouge only murdered Pirates, bandits, or people who took hostages, but he was a little TOOOO into it. He never tole from the poor. and he only went nuts on the pirates when he found out they had slaves. He tried to be a good person in most things, he got along with the paladin, that is why the Paladin was able to lock him in a church basement.
Still, he was a genuine sadist. We were trying to play "loose with alignment" i think i just took it too far and no one said anything. They had me make a new character that session.
Again, you are going to have to come to table consensus on alignment.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player. The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call To rise up in triumph should we all unite The spark for change is yours to ignite." Kalandra - The State of the World
My take on LN is that they believe that society depends on the rule of law, without concern to how the law is applied. They would give equal regard to the Galactic Senate as to the Empire in Star Wars for example. Morals can ebb and flow but order must remain. Something like that.
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Also the Mandalorians aren't relevant since they'd be an external code, not a personal one.
An example of a personal code might be a fighter who adheres to the strict moral code of a long forgotten order of paladins. The character isn't a Paladin, the order fell long ago and has no current adherents, society in general views them as being foolish, yet here's this fighter who maintains this strict code despite it making encounters more difficult for them and doing so even if it means running afoul of local customs or laws.
i.e. Always telling the truth, never accumulating more wealth than needed to survive from day to day, never breaking any promise regardless of the consequences, endeavoring to restore a disgraced family's honor, never eating meat from creatures with 4 legs, and settling all insults of honor to the death, etc.
A personal code would be a set of articulable rules that the character never violates, regardless of whether the results are seen as Good or Evil. That would be an example of a LN adherence to a personal code.
Playing D&D since 1982
Have played every version of the game since Basic (original Red Box Set), except that abomination sometimes called 4e.
I played a Nobleman (Cavalier class, Order of the Lion) in Pathfinder 1st ed, and I ran him as Lawful Neutral (good tendencies). He would dip into evil methods to get the job done, but he was a noblesse oblige type. He fought for the good of his kingdom, with a focus on the good of the people in it, but was willing to do some real nasty stuff in order to achieve it.
Neutral in itself is considered a problem child. They are typically self engrossed and pedant.
that is completely false. and i know that because i am lawful neutral. i only stay on the side of good because if people who live in a nation never helped one another then that nation would fall apart at the seem. lawful neutral people are the only people with firm beliefs who would try to make life better for everyone in the nation they live in. but lawful neutral people would never do evil acts for the sake of keeping rules in place but that would be what lawful evil people would do. lawful neutral people are people who always do good acts and neutral acts because by doing good acts, they believe they are doing what is expected of them in a community or nation. and by doing what is expected of them in a community or nation, they feel they are fulfilling their end goal of making their selfish desire of making the world a utopia for all members of their species, a reality.
Enoch Ashton Cox
Lawful neutral characters routinely do evil things if that's what the law says. If a hero breaks a law while doing his heroic things, a lawful neutral character will try to imprison him and put him on trial, regardless of the fact that that's going to take six months at least and the villain's plan to destroy the sun will happen next week.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
That's by no means clear; there's an entire spectrum between devilish and angelic, and where neutral actually lies has never been clarified.
I know its a necro post, but Dredd is the poster child of lawful neutral. Good and Evil are overly concerned with morality that the ethos is hamstrung by contradictions. Neutral has no illusions to this, as thier ethics are defined in a way thats difficult to challenge. Appealing to Dress’s humanity is like asking the god of Mchanis to break the laws of the universe because people dying is bad.
That said, Dredd isn’t blind. If the word of the law is being twisted to subvert order, he knows who the enemy is. But solving it means the law has to be changed or the subverter caught on conspiracy charges. Either way the law must reinforce itself in the aftermath, and is thus stronger moving forward. No one is above the law, and those who shape it must be held to it. Thats the theory anyway. Without law there is no order. If there is no order, then there is only chaos. And given the Earth Dredd takes place in, and why there are mega cities to begin with, order and law are keeping humanity from extinction. On a meta level the irony is on purpose.
They're the ones who uphold the law, regardless of what the law is. That's the point of being neutral. They don't seek oppression but they also won't stop it if the law supports it. If it's what the law states, they'll enable it. The same thing goes for benevolence: they're the people who care what the law states rather than concerning themselves with questions of right or wrong. If they start getting overly concerned about such issues, it means that they're shifting alignment towards LG or LE.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
There's always been a question whether neutral is "indifferent to good vs evil" or merely "does not actively seek good". There is a pretty wide range of things that are permitted by not required under any model of law.
I think it's probably easier to understand as a position that someone can take (or an alignment that someone can "be") if it's indifference, especially for LN; not taking a stand one way or another, or not considering the "morality" of an action. The other just seems to swing too wildly (sometimes good, sometimes evil) for my tastes and only fits, in my mind, for CN.
Alignment really only works descriptively; somebody who is neither particularly good nor particularly evil is going to shake out as neutral.
IMO, a perfectly good philosophy for a CN character would be: "And it harms none (more or less), do as you will shall be the whole of the law"
No one is really sure about the Alignment chart. If you really want to know what "Lawful neutral" means, you will have to ask the DM running the session, and if you are that DM you are going to have to make judgment calls.
Back when I played an edgy rouge, they couldn't tell if i was Good, Unaligned, or evil ( this was 4E so simpler chart but idea applies ) because i did a lot of heinous things followed by selfless acts.
DM:"Why did you poison the pirates you hitched a ride with and flay their captain in his bed?"
Me: "Because i wanted their money."
DM: "then why did you free their prisoners and off load all the loot at a fishing village."
me: "Because i wanted their money to give it to the freed slaves."
DM: "and the flaying the captain...."
Me: "oh that was for me. As a treat."
The Party got rid of him by locking him in the basement of the Paladin's home church.
Now what would you call a character like that? He did good things, didn't keep the money and made people's lives better but he was a sadist. There are a lot of behaviors that show the alignment charts are full of holes.
Did this character count as good but twisted, or did his evil acts of gleeful murder off set the good he did and make him neutral. The DM was even ready to punish the Paladin for not dispacting me and asked "What does your rouge do when he finds he has been abandoned near the paladin's loved ones?" the only reason paladin didn't get punished is i said 'rouge isn't squeamish with corpses so he helps the undertaker until he leaves town.'
Then that gets into "Intent vs Results" which is another discussion.
I have even had evil characters who lost levels because I made a decision that would benefit me more in the long run but benefited my serfs in the short term. It really is up to what the DM deems good evil or neutral. I even explained my logic on how it was self-serving, "Collecting no Taxes means the peasants can recover then generate more profits because more survive the winter" but that wasn't Disney evil enough so alignment shift penalty. (Which i am glad are gone.)
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
There's not even a real reason to ask the GM anymore -- alignment has virtually no mechanical weight. (Which is a good thing.) If a character feels LN to you, that ought to be sufficient.
It is full of holes (too subjective, and also incapable of encompassing all philosophies), but I'd still call that character evil. Cruelty for cruelty's sake is one of relatively few things you're going to get near-universal agreement on.
(The idea that evil characters are going to be bwahahah-evil all the time, and can't have goals, preferences, whims, friends, that lead them to do "good" acts is one of the biggest problems with the historic culture around the alignment system.)
Alignment represents a broad graph of a character's behavior over time. Someone who randomly swaps between doing good things, evil things, orderly things, and random things is just playing chaotic evil. As the old standup punchline goes, nobody complements me on the times I wasn't a cannibal.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Yeah, what’s described above is either Chaotic Evil or just Chaotic Obnoxious- it’s not an accounting table where the values zero out. In conventional D&D terms a Good character is one that is fundamentally opposed to pointless/self-indulgent cruelty because it’s immoral, and even a Neutral character has enough empathy that viciously screwing others over just because you can is beyond the pale.
Well, obnoxious is more a player alignment than a character alignment, though they tend to be attracted to calling themselves CN (which usually actually means CE).
I'm not sure that saying "it's not an accounting table" is entirely correct, particularly on the chaotic side of things (which generally evaluates whether an action is right or wrong based on results, rather than rules) but typically the weighting is not 'one good deed balances one evil deed of similar magnitude'.
I think the best eay to think about alignment is to start with the idea that alignment was invented to allow players to kill npcs without feeling bad about it.
"These goblins are evil, so its ok if you kill them."
Thats lazy world building. But its easy and gets the campaign up and running fast. And its easy for a new dm to run.
The way i dm things, theres no such thing as alignment, and everything has consequences.
There are cultists going around committing murder, and maybe the party wants to stop them. If they do, the locals, the town, the sherriff, the city watch, generallly respect and reward them for it.
If the party starts robbing caravans or merchants, the party will generally end up on wanted posters and the locals, towns, sheriffs, anf city watch will either refuse to help, or actuvely oppose and arrest.
Whats "neutral" even mean in that kind of world?
A pc isnt "good", they have potentially completely different relationships with each npc in their world. They might cheat at cards with the card shark, help the little old lady across the street, go after cultusts threatening town, and maybe get on the wrong side of the city watch with their shenannigans.
To run that kind of world, the dm has to remember how each npc relates to each pc. It can be a lot of work. Or simplify to "alignment" and handwave the complexities away. They are "evil", you are "good", so do whatever you want to them.
When you get to the point of questioning alignment, the path to understanding isnt to better define what each category truly is. The path to understanding alignment is to realize its a super simplification to turn the game into red versus blue instead of a living, breathing, morally complex world with evolving consequences and changing reactions.
Tldr: alignment is the death of nuance.
I know it isn't going to change the view of my 4E rouge (Who yes was a Shadar-kai, the DM wanted me to play one but that don't help the evil accusations.)
My rouge only murdered Pirates, bandits, or people who took hostages, but he was a little TOOOO into it. He never tole from the poor. and he only went nuts on the pirates when he found out they had slaves.
He tried to be a good person in most things, he got along with the paladin, that is why the Paladin was able to lock him in a church basement.
Still, he was a genuine sadist. We were trying to play "loose with alignment" i think i just took it too far and no one said anything. They had me make a new character that session.
Again, you are going to have to come to table consensus on alignment.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
My take on LN is that they believe that society depends on the rule of law, without concern to how the law is applied. They would give equal regard to the Galactic Senate as to the Empire in Star Wars for example. Morals can ebb and flow but order must remain. Something like that.