Honestly, treating ‘Evil’ as just self-interested to the point of being willing to place your own desires above the wellbeing of others is actually one of my favourite takes on it, because
A) It makes it legitimately challenging but also very rewarding to be Good (I mean, what NPC isn’t going to like someone that actually successfully respects their wishes and needs when helping them?)
B) It opens up Evil as a legitimate option for party members that isn’t an instant dealbreaker
C) It allows you to run creatures meant to be ‘inherently evil’ (devils and chromatic dragons in particular) as assholes but not completely unthinking and unreasonable, which makes them a LOT scarier- these are intelligent creatures that should be just as witty and dangerous to hold a conversation with as they are to fight. A dragon that’s undeniably a selfish bastard but can make compelling cases to try and out-RP the players and get them to fall into traps or hesitate to fight them, or a Devil that knows just how to play the role of a corruptor, someone who tempts the party and plays to win the big game.
Yeah. Unpopular opinion, I know, but I really like alignment. It’s pretty easy to say “puts self above others” = evil and “puts others before self” = good.
My quick version of law v chaos is “puts societal structure above individual freedom” = law and “puts individual freedom above societal structure”.
Feels like a framework closer to how people actually behave and doesn’t invite in-party conflict.
so the whole alignment thing is just a political compass?
Always has been
Yeah I generally run any non-neutral alignment as “Willing to go out of your way to perform acts of [help/harm], with the alignment being determined by why you did it and whether you feel satisfied by the outcome, and you intentionally do those acts in a [principled/unpredictable] manner.”
As a result, most creatures are generally neutral - They may lean in one direction or the other, but a paladin’s divine sense will only reveal evil if someone would actively make choices to harm others, feeling no remorse. Any good deeds are an extension of selfishness, done for the purpose of some kind of gain (lawful: gain is calculated or for an existing purpose, chaotic: gain is for whatever they wanted at the time)
A good alignment for a paladin sense means you’re willing to make active choices to sacrifice things important to you (or perhaps for your survival) for the purpose of helping others. That can be as simple as giving up something you wanted or as heavy as charging into a burning building to rescue the occupants. (Lawful: does it because it’s the right thing to do, chaotic: does it because it felt right at the time)
I disagree with that interpretation. Evil shouldn’t be going out of your way to cause harm, it should be willingly causing harm to get your way. The harm is the method, not the goal.
Like, a good person driving down the road will swerve and crash their car to avoid hitting a dog. A neutral person would stop the car and see if they can move the dog, or at least drive around it. An evil person wouldn’t even slow down. Why should they have to be a minute late because some idiot dog decided to stand in the wrong place?
Meanwhile, if the evil person swerved and crashed their car to hit a dog who wasn’t even on the road, their car would be wrecked and their journey would be totally ruined. They’d be just as foolish as the good person. If you’re going to have your actions bound by the same restrictive moral guidelines as good people in a new coat of paint, you might as well be good.
You’ve got some fair points, and in agree with you - I was just still waking up when I wrote my original comment and misrepresented what I meant a bit. Will edit and update my comment later.
So evil civilizations would suddenly become good? Upholding evil laws and customs isn’t necessarily selfish but it is perfectly evil in my book.
I prefer having actual evil in the game. Selfishness is neutral in my mind because you’re neither doing good nor evil for the sake of it.
I prefer having actual evil in the game.
You can do that too, it just requires more thought than “alignment says Evil.”
no extra steps, that’s exactly what chaotic evil is
Except she follows the law, she just finds loopholes that you could throw a nuke through. She announced her attack on the factory, and didn’t attack the town. She also wrote a dissertation on how to shell a town legally.
I’d say lawful evil, trending towards neutral evil
That sounds like chaotic lawful to me.
That will complement my Good Evil character nicely.
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.
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.
Yep, this is basically the “Evil is the Absence of Good” argument, and you could do way worse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Following “the law” doesn’t make you lawful. Robin Hood is clearly very lawful good, he has a strict moral code he follows, and that happens to involve breaking laws he considers evil. If you follow laws to get your way but don’t really care about the spirit of them then I think that makes you pretty chaotic.
Isn’t acting purely in self interest the general definition of chaotic neutral?
If while acting in your own self-interest you knowingly, through action or inaction, allow others to come to harm, even indirectly, that is evil. In the same way that a character knowingly doing something that benefits others would arguably make them good. A chaotic neutral person may act on a whim or in self-interest the majority of the time, but I doubt they’d let their actions cause actual harm to others.
But trying to pigeonhole human behavior into a rigid matrix of alignments is inherently flawed, people are much more complex than that. Fortunately, DND allows the DM free reign to define that or allow it to be a grey area - in reality, “alignment” will always be fluid.
I think this is a little over-broad. As written, the only way to be good is to stop all evil everywhere. Or am I missing something?
No, it still requires something the person does or doesn’t do (within reason) to influence or allow the evil act. If you see someone being mugged and you ignore it and keep walking when you have the power to help, even if just calling the police and walking away, then yes, that inaction makes you a bad person, IMO. But if a bad guy starts a war on the other side of the planet, you’re not evil if you don’t enlist and go fight the evil regime.
But like I said, it’s all a grey area, there is no black and white good and evil in reality. It’s rarely as simple as just “this is good, and this is evil” in real life.
If while acting in your own self-interest you knowingly, through action or inaction, allow others to come to harm, even indirectly, that is evil.
I think most Americans buy products made via unethical labor practices, and which damage the environment, harming everyone.
Are you really making the argument that the vast majority of Americans are evil?
As an American, I’m not not making that argument.
Why not? It’s not a moral argument.
There‘s also the distinction between allowing evil practices for your personal gain and allowing them to avoid harming yourself. The latter would be a neutral alignment.
Are you really making the argument that the vast majority of Americans are evil?
With regards to the D&D alignment chart? Sure. I don’t know what kind of weird moral gotcha you’re attempting here but there’s not one to be found.
By that description, the vast majority of people are evil. Well, both evil and good, since most people at least occasionally do things that aren’t in their self-interest to help others. But primarily evil, thanks to the inaction clause on the evil side and nothing comparable on the good side.
They’re also more evil the more educated they are, since they’re more aware of ways that people are suffering harm that they could potentially abate.
For example, if you are not homeless and you are aware that some people are homeless and a storm is coming, if you don’t help them all find shelter - to the extent of bringing them into your own home even if it means you end up not having a place to sleep - by your definition, you’re evil.
I’m not a fan of that definition, either for D&D or anything else, but if it works for your table, great!
An “evil” act does not make a person evil necessarily. We all do bad shit sometimes. My point was it’s a grey area that can’t be defined with 9 alignments outside of the structure of a game, but knowingly allowing your actions to cause harm to others is an evil act.
That being said, the idea of good and evil is entirely the result of fiction. I don’t believe there’s a black and white “good and evil” in reality. Human actions and motivations can’t be defined so broadly IMO.
No. Neutral only cares about the cosmic or universal good. The welfare of others or ones self doesn’t factor into it. Many druids are Neutral because the balance of nature (the natural order) is the motivation behind their actions.
Neutral druids don’t care about the welfare of others? Not even the other druids in their circle?
If given a choice between upsetting the balance and saving a druid they’ll maintain the balance. Healing a wound or something isn’t moral decision.
I prefer to think of good vs evil as altrusim vs egoism. LG is “the laws should protect everyone” and LE is “the laws should protect me”. CG is “everyone should be free to live as they please” and CE is “I should be free to live as I please”. Acting in pure self-interest with no regard for ideals would be CE, or maybe NE depending on how it’s done.
I like your take, you said it better than I did.
I disagree. Lawful or Chaotic describes ones adherence to rules; either those of society or their own moral code. Chaotic would describe one who does not adhere to any rules or guidelines; nothing is off limits except that which would violate their alignment on the Good-Evil axis. Neutral would mean that one would bend those rules to achieve a particular outcome. Lawful is going to stick to the book; they’re very conservative.
Yeah, at best it’s chaotic neutral. It’s not evil. Evil is a desire to harm others. Self interest isn’t evil, just not good. I would say true neutral because it’s not acting in a desire to rebel against laws either, but I could see an argument for chaotic neutral.
For reference for people familiar with BG3, the dead three are evil gods. They actively want to cause harm/death. Evil isn’t just someone who doesn’t care. Evil is someone who cares and wants to harm.
Evil isn’t the desire to harm others. Devils don’t desire to claim people’s souls for the lulz, they do it for power. Everything they do is to gain power, for their own benefit. They don’t care if the souls will become lemures or a snack, they just try to convince people and scheme for their own benefit anyway.
Demons are way more brutal, they don’t really gain pleasure from pain per-se, they also want power, but their approach is way more direct. If they can gain power by killing all those people and bathing in their blood, thay will forcefully do it, not by deceiving the human through a shitty contract, but by forcing their power.
Devils are LE, demons are CE. All in all, evil is the disregard of moral consequences when finding ways to benefit yourself.
Deceiving someone to sign a shitty contract so they now must slave away for you? LE.
Kidnapping someone and forcing them to do stuff to your benefit? CE.
Reaching a fair accord so that you allow people in need to work for you for a fair price, where both parties give a bit so no one is really getting taken advantage off? Either LG or LN depending on the context.
Offering to kill the bad monster that is terrorising the town for free, and disregarding the lucrative offers from it because it’s the right thing to do? Any good alignment.
Any of those people could have desires of harm, it’s how they channel their wants that puts them in different places in the alignment chart.
Not all evil is just about personal gain. That’s way oversimplified. Sure, some is and that can be part of it, but sometimes it isn’t.
Bhaal is the lord of murder, and not usually doing it to gain anything. “Bhaal only lived to hunt and kill, the presence of the living instilling in him an overpowering desire for death and destruction. He was at all times a cruel, violent and hateful being, though his behavior could vary from cold and calculating ruthlessness to a savage thirst for blood.”
Evil is basically desire to do harm or to have power over others (which I’d argue is the same thing). Tyranny is evil because it removes others ability to do what they want, which is harmful. It’s about a desire. A desire to have power over someone, or to harm someone, or to kill someone, etc. Gaining power over someone isn’t the disregard for consequences, it is regarding them and choosing tyranny.
However, good actions also often do this. You kill bad people, imprison criminals, etc. It’s good because you were trying to help/protect someone. Not good would be anything else, which both neutral and evil have to fit in there somewhere. Neutral must be without regard, and evil must be with regard and intent to do the opposite. If not, what is neutral or evil if it’s not those?
Nope. Neutral would be a tendency to act in the interests of the cosmic or universal order. Neither ones self nor the general welfare of others is given priority.
This is the classic theological definition of evil. Evil isn’t the anti-good, it’s the absence of good. Good is typically regarded as some kind of selflessness or care for other, so evil is basically selfishness. There’s nuance, but I wanted to support the challenge to dualistic world view.
A “theological” definition doesn’t really work in a world where there are actual gods and some of them actively want to cause suffering. The theology of D&D (and most other fantasy settings) is not the theology of Earth Christianity of the 21st century.
Of course. But at the same time alignment is under the domain of gods and it’s part of the cosmological structure itself. I wouldn’t think one can simply declare to be outside the purview of morality.
Of course it isn’t out of the purview of morality. It is morality. Alignment is just a simplified way of stating the morals and ethics of a character without going into detail. I’m just saying the theology we have in our world is not the theology of D&D. Evil is not necessarily describing the same thing it may in our world.
Theology isn’t limited to Christianity. But hey, if you like your villains cartoony, go with the dualism!
No idea who the char is here, but self interest with no regards to morality sounds more chaotic neutral than CE to me.
It’s chaotic evil. But many make the same mistake you do. Evil is not defined by cruelty.
Agreed. The scale of good to evil has always been along the lines of self interest. The more self interested you act the more evil you are.
Would you care to give a correct definition?
Evil in the context of modern d&d is selfishness, putting your own interests above others
Keeping in mind I working with old 2E books, but the classic variety of C/N I’ve always read in was the person person who doesn’t care about the means or the ends, just that the result benefits me or my accomplices. Benefit or harm to random others is an irrelevant side effect.
C/E would be the sort that is exemplified by the social climbing boot licker, others are an expendable resource used to benefit the self and your goals, but beyond that are just pawns.
Benefit or harm to random others is an irrelevant side effect.
This in itself is evil, because it puts the interests of others below your own. The old school characters were ‘neutral’ because they either still cared about someone in the end (even if it was their friends only), because they still drew a line somewhere when exploiting others, but mostly because they existed in the same books as comically evil kill-everyone villains and demons and it was easy say “well they are not as evil as Yeenoghu, so neutral it is”
social climbing boot licker
This one would not necessarily be chaotic, after all a social hierarchy is still a form of order. It would depend on whether they truly believe that they have a “place” in the hierarchy where they belong, or whether they see it just as a means to an end.
Reads pretty close, the old book puts CN as ‘lunatics and madmen’ in part. I’ve usually thought of it as society vs individuality / benevolence vs callousness or cruelty.
C/N I’ve always read in was the person person who doesn’t care about the means or the ends, just that the result benefits me or my accomplices
Neutrality is more like doing what it takes to achieve a cosmic state. It places no value on ones self or welfare of others. What you’re describing is Chaotic Good.
Chaotic Neutral just means that there are no rules for how to achieve this state. One choice is as good as any other. The more rules, the more Lawful.
C/E would be the sort that is exemplified by the social climbing boot licker
This one might be right depending on how you envision this character. There are certain rules to high society and if their actions are constrained by any of them then they can’t be Chaotic. If they only have like… one rule then maybe they’re Neutral.
If you’re neutral, that means that you observe tenets that mitigate all benefit to others and harm to others from your actions. To act selfishly without thought of morality will inevitably lead someone down a road of evil. No one ever stays neutral or good if they’re acting wantonly selfish.
That’s lawful neutral
Isn’t self interest without regard to anything else true neutral? Good would mean helping people, evil would mean hurting people. Lawful means following the laws, chaotic means rebelling against laws. True neutral has no regard for anyone else and no regard for laws.
Lawful doesn’t mean following the laws. A lawful person isn’t obligated to follow the law in the Kingdom of Baby Eating.
Lawful means you obey the rules. However, presumably you have your own set of ethics, as well as probably the belief in a god that also has their own rules. You have to reconcile these. Obviously if your god is about protecting innocent lives and you think the babies being eaten are innocent and deserve protection, you probably aren’t going to obey all the laws in the KoBE.
Isn’t chaos neutral? Chaos is the base state? Chaos is the law of God/Universe? All other man made law is idealism and can be either good or evil?
Aren’t laws an act against God/Universe? They are independent of honest reality? They are created as a mask/detergent/escape from reality/present/God/universe?
Laws are the opposite of faith in God/“God”?
Nah, there’s a whole bunch of Lawful Neutral deities that uphold natural laws, and the Great Balance, like Jergal, Kelemvor, and Mystra. A lot of Good/Lawful Good deities as well, especially when it comes to the natural passage of life and death. Messing with that natural law gets you on the wrong side of like half of any given pantheon. There are even evil gods, like Bane, that are all about law.
No, no, let her cook. Giving up on alignment altogether is a good move
That sounds a lot like chaotic evil to me.
CE specifically goes out of its way to be evil, though. What you described is CN. CE characters would be your standard “mad scientist” from a 90’s cartoon.
It’s only ‘real evil’ if it is done for the sake of evil itself? Thats a pretty hot take.
That’s a pretty hot take
It’s literally what the player handbook (well, 3rd edition at least) describes CE as…
Srd on CE characters:
Chaotic Evil, “Destroyer”
A chaotic evil character does whatever his greed, hatred, and lust for destruction drive him to do. […] If he is simply out for whatever he can get, he is ruthless and brutal.
Evil is not a religion or a life philosophy in third edition anymore. A CE character does not need to commit evil for the sake of evil, they need just to be ‘out for whatever [they] can get’. Think about the typical CE goblins.
They don’t call it Tasha’s Uncontrollable Laughter.
I feel like it’s not clear on whether evil is being willing to hurt people for some minor benefit to you, or if that’s neutral and evil is being willing to make personal sacrifices just to cause harm. The first one is about as evil as you get in real life, but real life doesn’t have demons.
I haven’t heard any stories of demons making personal sacrifices just to cause harm, and demons are definitely evil.
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