Alignments

So one of my players wanted to play a "LOL SO RANDUMB" Chaotic Neutral Rogue. After a short argument that was completely pointless and kicking the player out, I think me and my players came up with good (but probably not accurate) definitions of what each alignment is.
>Lawful Good: Works with in the law for the good of the people.
>Neutral Good: Does the right thing for everyone no matter what.
>Chaotic Good: Fights for everyone's freedom and positive change.
>Lawful Neutral: Adheres to laws above all things including morality.
>True Neutral: Concerned for what's good for himself only, but has limits on how far he's willing to go and only wants enough to survive.
>Chaotic Neutral: Fights for change of anysort, be it positive or negative. Hates stagnation.
>Lawful Evil: Twists and takes advantage of the law inorder to benefit himself.
>Neutral Evil: Does what's best for him with no constraints, especially moral ones. Driven by greed.
>Chaotic Evil: Concerned for only his (most likely immoral) personal freedoms and negative change.
But the thing we realized that's the most important is:
>Alignments are cancer

Other urls found in this thread:

d20pfsrd.com/alignment-description/additional-rules
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Actually, those suck.

Well Fuck I tried out of ten.

"Lawful" implies that you work with some law. The 'some' part is important here. It could be the law of the land, it could be the law of your god, or it could be a personal law you have which you don't back down on, no matter what.

Thus, Batman is lawful good. He breaks the law of Gotham city (He does many unlawful things, such as breaking and entering, vigilantism, resisting arrest) but he is still lawful good. This is because Batman operates under his own law, which he never breaks. His law is that he doesn't kill people, and as long as he continues to abide that one law, he will always be lawful. If he breaks it, he may be chaotic good or true good.

Those are pretty accurate, actually.

LN doesn't necessarily adhere to laws. Sometimes it can be a code of conduct, hence why there are LN characters who break laws and always follow their own code.

TN is (contrary to popular belief) the most versatile alignment. It could be a character concerned with balance above all else, a random civilian bystander, a mindless animal, or a guy who just does his thing without concerning himself with good/evil-law/chaos. In a sense, they're not much different from CN.

NE isn't necessarily driven by greed.

>"Lawful" implies that you work with some law.
It implies that to many, but it doesn't mean that.

lawfulness is about wanting everyone to follow a common set of rules. lawful characters don't have to agree on what those rules should be, hence why you have lawful good, lawful neutral and lawful evil. but they all agree there should be a common set of rules, that people should follow them. hence they tend to respect law, social mores and authority in principle, if not always in practice.

or at least, that's what it originally meant.

Marvel Loki and Myth Loki are both essentially pretty chaotic. It's what they do. They might have better long term planning and thinking skills than Carnage, but they exist to cause trouble "for the Evulz" or "The Lolz". Loki killed Baldur, who EVERYONE liked, you know, because. To make everyone unhappy. Maybe because he was jealous. There was not a calculated plan there. It was fucking evil and disruptive. The trickery serves no real purpose other than malice and petty entertainment, or simply as a factor of compulsive basic nature. It would not be particularly wrong to depict Loki as a chronic liar of the worst sort. He would probably lie constantly, at great length, and very eloquently. But also about completely petty things and for no good reason.

I'm trying to find quotes which most accurately describe each alignment.

Any ideas? I made this so far but it's pretty bad.

Anyone have the alignment grid where the bottom right three are all "Mom said you have to let me play too"?

First off, your quote from Ecclesiasties is out of context. Put that shit in Neutral Good or True Neutral.
The ends justify the means is only evil if you're Kant. Otherwise, put that into Lawful Good because consequentialism is what makes the world go round. Besides, medical triage is how you save lives.

Only alignment chart that matters.

>Put that shit in Neutral Good or True Neutral.
I don't understand why. Isn't that quote, even when put back in its context, essentially about the enjoyment of life?
>consequentialism
Right, but LG characters aren't really about that.
Wouldn't it belong in LE, rather?

Do you have other suggestions? Thanks for your help

Those fucking tvtropes alignments are retarded. Don't post that shit here.

>Punisher
>Lawful Neutral
What the fuck

Revolutionaries are actually lawful good.

Post more alignment charts.

On the subject of defining alignment, I hate the idea of True Neutral as a sort of balancing act. i.e; I did something good, so I balance it out with something evil to balance it out. I've run into a lot of people that interpret neutral this way and it never fails to piss me off.

"BALANCE" in this context is not an alignment, it is a belief system.

Here's my take on it:

>LG: Uses the Law as a tool to fight for Good.
>NG: Uses whatever is best to fight for Good.
>CG: Uses Chaos as a tool to fight for Good.

>LN: Obeys the Law.
>TN: Obeys what is most useful.
>CN: Obeys their selves.

>LE: Uses the Law as a tool for Evil.
>NE: Uses whatever is best to fight for Evil.
>CE: Uses Chaos as a tool for Evil.

What do you think Veeky Forums?

Too dependent on the entity knowing the concept of good and evil.

The alignment system itself is retarded, and only retards take it seriously, you retard.

What the fuck is true neutral anyway? People say it's broad (see 's pic) but I don't see it. It seems very limiting. It's either people who lack motivation or "muh balance" assholes.

Let me rephrase good as 'what they believe to be good' and evil as 'selfish needs'. How about that?

>It's either people who lack motivation or "muh balance" assholes.

Also anything that isn't smart enough to actually have motivation, like animals.

Yeah that's my point. There's no way to create an interesting and compelling TN character. It's either a mook, an animal or some fruity druid.

Probably easier to simply look at it in terms of "constructive", "preservative" and "destructive".

>>Chaotic Neutral: Fights for change of anysort, be it positive or negative. Hates stagnation.
CN is more "Very selfish and only cares about what he wants, but doesn't directly harm innocents to get it"

They're more accurate than what Veeky Forums thinks of alignments.

I have a question Veeky Forums.

Is this image more an example of Chaotic Neutral or Lawful Evil? Or neither?

It was named Chaotic Neutral when I was posted, but I'm not so sure.

I'd say it's more Neutral Evil.

Uh, yeah, I meant Neutral Evil not Lawful Evil. My bad.

Also, thanks.

...

Anytime, dude.

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Could also be someone horribly depressed to the point of not caring about anything anymore. Although that doesn't really make for interesting PCs. Maybe an NPC if the DM is well-versed on the subject of clinical depression.

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CE Eddie: Yeah until you found out he's the most loyal kind of not-dog just waiting for his master to come back.
Lands him squarely in lawful as fuck.

I guess, but that still sucks.

Would the lone traveler archetype work with TN? A guy with a clear goal who doesn't concern himself with the setting's various actors, unless it can help him reach that goal?

Or maybe a bounty hunter who just wants his paycheck?

Those were suggested in a previous alignment thread and seem to make sense.

Misato is lawful good.

Shinji is true neutral. Angels should all be true neutral as well, by definition (mindless)

SEELE is closer to lawful neutral, in my opinion

Those could work, but I'd recommend only starting them on TN. Give them some character development over the course of the campaign and try to get them to shift alignment to whatever you think would work best with the character you've written and played.

Why? Is it impossible to have character development without changing the character's alignment? I'd like to play TN from start to finish. They can grow a bit closer to good and become less selfish over the course of the campaign for example, but would I need to make drastic changes?

> It's an Alignment thread

You don't have to if you don't want to. It's just the way you were complaining about True Neutral motivations, I thought you might not want to stay TN through the whole campaign. If you want to stay TN, sure, then you can have slower, less drastic changes in personality.

Well, I've played every alignment so far except TN because despite the fact that I like the idea of that alignment, I could never figure out how to make a TN character interesting. So that's my goal now.

I like this chart.

You are wrong on a few points:
Neutral Good - does the right thing when able to but weighs the bennefits first and may back away from trouble

Lawfull neutral - adheres to the law because it suits him and keeps out of trouble while doing what he wants within the constraints of the law.

True neutral - only ever reacts to things that affect him and does what he wants.

Neutral evil - as above but will actively ignore any 'decent' option when there's a shortcut leading through stabbing someone in the back.

Chaothic evil - does what they want in an egocentric way without concern for others and will actively harm others.

Chaotic neutral - do what they want when they want it.

Chaothic good - as above but with good intentions.

A lot of people link "The ends justify the means" with chaotic good.
For example, John McClane from Die Hard is often called chaotic good because he is fighting for good at the end of the day but achieves his goals not through the proper channels but by his own means.

I disagree with the evaluation of LE here but yeah they're pretty stupid and only serve to limit a characters growth.

Triage is a really bad example because you're hurting one person to benefit that person overall (ultimately saving them) whereas in the classic few vs many scenario you're actually killing a small group to save a large one which in no way benefits that group (unless they are morally obligated to die but that's another arguement entirely). Even the one vs many scenario isn't the most brutal example of this though; maybe that thought process should be discarded entirely when looking at classifications of morality like this.

Couldn't Gendo be lawful evil because everything he does is for one singular purpose? He's lawful to his own conviction.

lawful good - self righteous cunts
neutral good - nice people
chaotic good - idealistic college kids
lawful neutral - autists
true neutral - decent people
chaotic neutral - nutjobs and "so random xD"
lawful evil - lovable villains for the most part
neutral evil - cowards
chaotic evil - solipsists and nihilists

did I get it right?

This is what I tell my players:
"You can play any alignment so long as you can logically explain to me why you are that alignment. But if you start doing decidedly evil actions and are not an evil character, you have 5 chances (depending on the severity of the action) before I forcibly change your alignment. The same goes for decidedly good actions. Play you fucking alignment."

>Alignment Abuse.

The key words that everyone ignores when discussing alignments.

Good = Selflessness
Evil = Selfishness

Lawful = Holds conduct in high regard
Chaotic = Apathetic to any form of code or conduct

Neutral just means they don't fall too strongly on either side. For example:-
>You could hold your own conduct in high regard but not other people's.
>You'd risk your life to save your friends and family but wouldn't do so for strangers.

>Alignments are cancer
/thread

No. No! NO! Stop treating the LawfulChaotic axis as "follows laws". That becomes stupid the moment a character crosses a border and suddenly slavery stops being legal.

I think this shows a big problem I have with alignments.

Instead of characters changing slowly over time its a switch from one to another at a specific moment. Like instead of the trials of being a hero wearing down a characters sense of rightousness over the campaign, he just snaps and suddenly changes his entire personality in a second.

This is actually the best and most concise definition I've read.

Alignments should help define a character, not define the character in its entirety.

You slap an alignment onto your character AFTER you've finished fleshing out his personality, in order to give a general indicator of how he might behave.

That's how I see it, at least.

>dark purple text on a black background
How fucking stupid do you have to be

If anything, I'd go with
Selfishselfless
Principledunprincipled

Pretty much. Was there any alignment-based restriction to make it an issue post 3e, anyway?

There's three kinds of TN characters;

1) people who seek balance
2) people doing what's natural
3) people who are too complicated to fit neatly into any other alignment

The third option is the most compelling (to me) to make a character out of. Imagine, for example, a man leading the revolution to overthrow a despotic empire. His ultimate goal is to set up a fair and just system of law: LG. To do that, he arms a bunch of dissatisfied citizens and convinces them to fight for him: CG. Some war criminals who were imprisoned by the empire escape and offer their assistance to the ailing rebel force, our leader accepts their much needed help even though he knows these men have committed horrendous atrocities: NE.

TN characters are the shit because they're no just good, and not just evil. They're just them, which is what most people are.

That looks pretty LG or at worst LN to me. Depending on how the deal with the war criminals went.

Chaotic Neutral leaning Evil. It's not being actively malicious, but it is selfish enough to push the alignment a bit south.

My go-to example for TN is exactly that.

>ESL

The best characters are always True Neutral.

>Best
>Not Gayest

Isn't Roland closer to lawful neutral?

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Most of the true neutral PCs I've encountered haven't been all that complicated or given a runny shit about balance.

They're simply people with no strong principles one way or the other, and therefore simply do what seems like a good idea at the time.

They're not malicious enough to be evil but they don't have the moral fortitude to be good, and expedience is more important to them than following or breaking the rules.

This is part of why I consider TN the cop-out alignment, but I'm aware there are good arguments to the contrary.

This.

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LG: Does good always within the law
TG: 'Tries' to do good within the law
CG: Does what he thinks is good, no matter the law
LN: Enforces the law, good or bad
TN: -Blank Spot-
CN: Just an oddball with his own moralities and little care for laws
LE: Bends the law in his favor
TE: Cares only about himself with disregard for the lives of others
CE: This is your gibbering madmen or mindless, rabid wild animal

Shit chart.
Dany is lawful good.
Including Hodor and the sand snek bitch is stupid, they're completely irrelevant. Replace them with any of those: Varys/Bronn/Daario/Jaqen Hgar and Arya/Sandor/Oberyn/Drogo, respectively.
Littlefinger isn't really evil.
Tywin is lawful neutral.

Hell, you should make a character's beliefs, personality and goals before you stick them on the chart anyways.

>He's lawful to his own conviction.
That's retarded.

>TG: 'Tries' to do good within the law
No, NG just does good, period

It's more accurate than the shitty ass descriptions people have "officially" given the alignments.

Just because Veeky Forums is retarded doesn't mean the original definition of alignments are.

The definition of CN, NE, and CE are all essentially the same fucking thing, psychopath!

Yet you're telling me that the original definitions aren't retarded.

>CN
I do what I want when I want, I answer to no one but myself
>NE
I do whatever benefits me regardless of how morally wrong it is, I answer to whomever can help me further my goals
>CE
I do what I want when I want, I answer to no one but myself, also I'm a huge asshole

So...psychopath.

No seriously, all three of those descriptions could apply to fucking Deadpool (guess) or Mr. Hyde (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) or Jayne (firefly) or any other psycho for hire.

You're pretty shit at this mate.

>also I'm a huge asshole
you can append that addendum to any PC

>psychopath
You don't know what that word means. Look up APD.

I was highlighting the similarity between CN and CE. CE is fundamentally the same as CN except they're defined by the belief that might makes right, and, like NE, are entirely focused on themselves.

>Tywin
>Lawful Neutral

He had children murdered and brought their pulped corpses into court as a sign of his loyalty.

>reading the books

Missing the point entirely.

All three of those descriptors could apply to the same character at the same time, which raises the question of why they're even there when they could easily just be combined into one alignment.

Missing the point entirely.

Alignments are there in order to place a character on two axes: good-evil and law-chaos. Based on those axes you can more or less figure out how the character behaves. That's it.

But is it really an axis when 1/3 of the options can be slotted into one option without changing anything?

I mean, I understand the concept perfectly but the way it's executed is just poorly thought out and explained. If I'm presented with nine options, I expect them all to be unique enough to really affect my play, rather than just being there to fill in three arbitrary slots.

It does change things.
Chaotic means disregard for "laws" in the broadest sense, while neutral means indifferent as long as it benefits one's goal. NE will follow laws if it suits them, CE and CN probably won't.
Evil means pure selfishness, neutrality means indifference towards the good-evil axis and therefore a tendency to perform both altruistic and selfish acts. Therefore, CE will most likely be much more destructive and self-centered in their actions than CN.

Nigga go back and give me another 1000 hours of ms paint, because half your fucking text is unreadable.

Spider-man is neutral good but more Chaotic good while Cap is more Lawful good

>APD
APD isn't necessarily psychopathy. And psycho- and sociopath are mostly colloquial words anyway, so giving them narrow definitions for everyone to agree on is an exercise in futility.

You're not listening to me mate.

Take a look at your own descriptions here All three of these descriptions basically describe the exact same person, an asshole who doesn't give a fuck about anyone or anything but themselves and their own devices.

I could disregard the laws or I could ignore the laws, but at the end of the day I'm still not following them.

I could perform a crime or I could let a crime occur, but at the end of the day I'm still allowing someone to suffer from a crime (whether it's theft, murder, rape, or any other crime) when I could've prevented it from happening.

You know that one quote where it basically says "evil wins when good men do nothing," well with that in mind, is there really a difference between disregard, indifference, and selfishness?

Yeah, he's missing some nuances there.

Chaotic Neutral is basically Chaotic Evil without the complete disregard for others' will-being.

Neutral Evil is basically Chaotic Evil without the utter contempt for rules and regulations.

Although all the Chaotic alignments are retarded imo. Lawful Evil is best alignment.

NE is driven by passion, CE by instinct.

NE desires money or power, but it could also be knowledge or simply to be the best candlemaker in town burning down the shack of the competitors.

CE is mostly only acting on impulse on whim, and is exactly where the "lol random" players should have their alignment but most write CN down because they know no one is allowing CE.

Your CN isn't bad at all, because "desire" is sort of at the heart. Move forward, always getting bigger and better, always be a consumer. The big issue is retarded writers dumping madness into CN when it should be CE.

Even if it's not complete disregard or contempt, it's still a degree of disregard/contempt for the law and authority.

It's not like there's a sliding scale to how much of an apathetic psycho you can be, and it's only really an issue between these three alignments because of how similar their descriptions are.

d20pfsrd.com/alignment-description/additional-rules

>A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn't strive to protect others' freedom.
>A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple.
>A chaotic evil character does what his greed, hatred, and lust for destruction drive him to do.

Or simply, they do what they want and give no shits if someone else suffers because of it.

The specific reasons don't matter because at the end of the day, they're all characters who will leave you to rot if it ever comes down to your life and theirs.

>Littlefinger isn't really evil
>Tywin is lawful neutral
>Dany is lawful good

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

SKREEONK!!!!!