Lawful Neutral Help

Quote from SunIsGettingRealLow96589 >>

 

Tldr: Badly managed alignment is the death of nuance.

Fixed that for you. Alignment- particularly for humanoids or other "meant to exist in a way roughly analogous to people IRL" creatures is a general trend, not an absolute boundary. Small, singular acts don't invalidate an alignment, but going back to the example above, hardcore sadism isn't just "oh, they're a nuanced character"; torture for personal gratification- as implied by "genuine sadist"- is a defining character trait/act. Nuance is "the Good character gives his word to let a bad guy go free in exchange for important info, then goes 'I lied, you're still facing justice' after"; although it can be worth expanding on the implications for future interactions if the character's integrity was considered significant and people learn what they pulled, it's not something that most DMs would say redefines them as Neutral.

If a table can't handle "the first sign of disagreement"; then there's some much larger problems than alignment that are gonna bring it crashing down.

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Fixed that for you. 

No, the original is more accurate. Trying to fit all moral behavior patterns into nine bins most certainly lacks nuance, and if you add enough detail so you aren't doing that, you're also adding enough detail that you don't need the alignment in the first place.

Respectfully, the GM's definition of alignment is what matters for a table.  That was one of the things that made paladins so unplayable in older editions: a tendency for GMs to insist that they had to be Lawful Stupid.

I think there is one other place where alignment can play a role for the good of the game, and that's with players who are actually new to the idea of "role playing", but actually want to do it. There is nothing wrong with a player asking themselves if this action is something their character would do. Those that want to play as someone else, but have a tendency to simply play themselves (with magic, sometimes) can use alignment to guide their actions and decisions.

I do agree, however, that outside imposed alignment is often more harmful than not. That said, I've integrated a third axis to my world, so I guess I'm a hypocrite...

Is the D&D alignment system useful for a discourse on IRL philosophies? No, much like how one won't find much of use for how the body copes with trauma in the HP system, and so on and so forth. Is it useful for implementing classic narrative tropes such as "Good vs Evil" and "this powerful being has supernatural awareness that allows it to promptly evaluate someone's moral character"? Yes, very much so.

At the end of the day, if you want your system as a whole to be able to engage with PC characterization without being wholly dependent on the GM to figure out how from scratch, you need to make some labels and draw some lines. Obviously you can't perfectly describe a "real" or "plausible" or whatever set of parameters in a text of... well probably any length, but definitely not something practical for a gaming manual. Thus the DM adjudicating. Will DMs' interpretations not play well with the table sometimes? Yes. Kinda like how DMs might make a ruling the table isn't happy with for pretty much any other facet of the game. The abstract "but it might happen" isn't a useful talking point, because this is not some unique failure point of alignment. It's part and parcel of the system, and the actual breaking point is if the table can't reconcile their disagreement, which comes down to fundamental table dynamics more than poor design. Especially in 5e where alignment is more descriptive/informative than anything else.

Also, quite frankly, if someone refuses to pick one segment of the alignment chart to generally define their approach or insists on a "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" caveat at creation, that's a flag for me that this could be someone who's operating on the "no real consequences, so just do whatever I feel like in the moment" mentality. Which is not inherently a Wrong Way to Play, but is something a person should be open about and ideally find a table who are all looking to just stomp around in the sandbox rather than try to play the "well it's what my character would do" card for it.

Ace, It sounds a little like you are the "Badly managed Alignment is the death of nuance." that you 'corrected' Sunisgettingreallow's statement to if you see someone trying to be Nuanced with alignment as a red flag.  
Not everyone who does that is trying to pull a "No consequences for my actions" they just as easily, and in my experience, often are, saying 'here is an avenue for interpersonal conflict to drive roleplay.'
People can " pick one segment of the alignment chart to generally define their approach" and "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" at the same time, those are not mutual exclusive. They are in fact coherent together. Someone who tries to be good but has flaws that make them do or be tempted to do things considered outside of their general alignment is still "generally defining their approach."

D&D literature is full of characters struggling with their morality, and even questioning the moral assumptions and perceptions of the world. "Dark Mirror" By RA, Salvatore was released in 1993. It is a piece of fiction that is older than some D&D players. 

 "but they're really nuanced, so they might do lots of other stuff" is the attitude that leads why we have Orcs as a player race, and the game is a damn sight better for it than it was in the 90's. If you think that is a stretch, then look at Obould I Many-Arrows, who while still pretty evil through most of his appearances, wanted to make a kingdom of Orcs who could have a homeland and need not be raiding brutes to survive. 
(Forgive any inconsistent bits i read these a long time ago.) 

Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality or making a point of disclaiming that they are actually going to follow it is, because that reads to me like a table might get something like your own earlier example of a character that swings between far extremes to the point it makes other players uncomfortable or dissatisfied. It might not be their deliberate intent, but personal experience says that people- including myself when I was getting started- can be really bad at judging the difference between "nuance" and "it sounded fun at the time".

We have orcs as a player race because a) Warcraft, b) the general desire of the player base as a whole to have more options and c) the acknowledgement that classifying fundamentally human-analogous beings as categorically Evil has a lot of bad implications, especially with all the secondary coding to orcs.

And "they did this in a novel and it worked" is a limited talking point for what makes for good player characterization in a D&D game. A novel typically has a single guiding hand that knows everything that's going on and stage manages all the actions, responses, and consequences, and at the very least has the ability to go back and edit where needed before publication. A campaign has neither option, which is why a number of classic tropes that play well in novels like lone-wolfing or extensive antagonism between party members are generally considered to be bad play- as noted in the DMG.

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Being nuanced is not a flag. A player being unwilling to commit to a general categorization of a character's personality..

A player being unwilling to commit to a description of their personality is certainly a flag. A player who describes their character's personality but does not want to assign an alignment because it doesn't cleanly fit into any of the alignments is not a flag.