I don't get lawful evil. Could someone explain to me?

>Lawful Evil, "Dominator"
>A Lawful Evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He is comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He condemns others according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank. He is loath to break laws or promises. This reluctance comes partly from his nature and partly because he depends on on order to protect himself from those who oppose him on moral grounds. Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to arm (if it can be helped). They imagine that these compunctions put them above unprincipled villains. The scheming baron who expands his power and exploits his people is lawful evil.

t. 3.5 PHB
Later editions strip down and essentially remove Alignments, which is ultimately a good thing. Never forget that Chaos and Law, Good and Evil, are cosmic forces within the D&D setting. There is in fact an objective and non-abstract Good, unlike in real-life. This is why alignment bickering occurs, because nothing philosophers have to say on the matter is relevant within the D&D-verse.
Knowledge is not the only Good.

Personally I describe Lawful Evil characters as someone does evil, but not wanton evil. A kidnapped princess does not need to worry about being raped by a Lawful Evil abductor. See: "loath to break laws"

Off the top of my head, Lex Luthor, most if not all Sith post-Darth Bane, i.e. everyone who appears in the movies, is Lawful Evil, because of their utmost respect for the traditional Rule of Two. Dooku, Vader, and the Emperor are the best examples.

What is your question exactly? Otherwise I'm going to sit here typing a whole lot trying to get what you're after.

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>I don't get lawful evil. Could someone explain to me?
Yes, clearly we could.
What exactly don't you get about it?

Or were you planning on actually having an engaging thread?

I disagree with the stance on True Neutral (dedicated.) Maintaining a balance between forces is more than just exploiting that balance for evil, and both good and bad guys have had it as their motivation. consider Jen from The Dark Crystal or maybe the heroes of some later Dragonlance novels as dedicated TN protagonists, or the Reapers from Mass Effect as dedicated TN antagonists.

You can also totally have unaligned characters as both protagonists and antagonists, especially as antagonists. Lavos from Chrono Trigger springs to mind, as he's basically just a giant animal with little or no understanding of what he's doing. I'd say that some of the less anthropomorphized animal protagonists are unaligned, like Milo & Otis. Godzilla is sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain, and always unaligned.

>Maintaining a balance between forces is more than just exploiting that balance for evil

See, I'm trying to read what you're saying, but all I can see is "I honestly believe that if I save a child one day, I have to kill some other child the next day." The original guide to Baldur's Gate gave an example of True Neutral as a druid who helps a local lord fight gnolls until he actually starts *winning*, at which point the druid switches sides to help the gnolls.

That's retarded, plain and simple. No one thinks like this, except for people who are actually just looking for an excuse to kill people and are using the "cosmic balance" as a justification.

>Unaligned protag/antag

No. If you have animal intelligence, you can't make meaningful choices. If you can't make meaningful choices, you can't be a protagonist or an antagonist. You're just a force of nature wrapped in flesh.

"The world sucks so I'm gonna make it suck more for some people so it sucks less for others (like myself).

Honor among thieves. You're a bad guy, but you keep your word.

> You're a bad guy, but you keep your word.

>I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further.

>Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Alignment is the result of the totality of your actions, not any one given action. And it's the sum of those actions, not the source.

A Lawful Evil guy can do a Chaotic thing and still overall be Lawful Evil if the rest of his actions more match up to that.

Megabyte from Reboot is Lawful Evil. (He as a code and rules. Manipulates the system in his favor)
Gigabyte is Neutral Evil. (Has a goal and gets there with whatever opportunities present themselves.)
Hexadecimal is Chaotic Evil. (Pretty much explains itself)

Google Lee Raymond, Exxon. Lawful evil means doing horrible things without ever technically breaking the law. The man laughed at the Exxon senate hearing because nobody could do anything to him.

Damn I wish more players had this approach to alignment and morality.

>Maintaining a balance between forces is more than just exploiting that balance for evil, and both good and bad guys have had it as their motivation.
If you rape and pillage occasionally, it's still rape and pillage.

Can I get a name on pic, OP?

You pulled those definitions out of your ass. A protagonist is anyone the audience is rooting for, and the antagonist is anyone in the protagonist's way. Neither need to be intelligent, and in fact the dumber they are the more people often connect with them.

>Vader
>Evil
>Not upholding Law and Order in a tumultuous time against terrorists and dissidents.

Next thing you'll tell me is that the droids during the Clone Wars were "just following orders", you revisionist.

>No one thinks like this, except for people who are actually just looking for an excuse to kill people and are using the "cosmic balance" as a justification.

I can keep citing more counterexamples, but I guess it won't matter if you keep ignoring them and reiterating your previous argument without adding to it. In a lot of settings it really is important for there to be a balance between cosmic forces and there really are terrible consequences if any one force wins out over the other. In addition to The Dark Crystal and Dragonlance, the Avatar from the Ultima series, the Naphalem from Diablo III, also all fight to keep the forces of "good" from getting so powerful that they make life unlivable for ordinary people.

"Maintain balance" TN:
A druid who helps the good guys against he BBEG who plans to do [evil thing].
Once the threat has passed he no longer helps them, at least until another threat of the same level arrives.
He might help the destroyers if it seems that the original "good guys" are starting to become tyranical.
He is the kind of person who would help against an alien invasion because it would mean that humanity as a whole would be destroyed but wouldn't even care about a child starving in the streets because it is an individual. Won't go out of his way to kill said child because of "balance", tho'
It is not an archetype i expect most people to be able to play well. More suited for an AI type of character than a living one.
An actual force of nature instead of a character, if you will

Finally, if you want a more mundane example, think about am automatic water heater. You think once the water is at the correct temperature it will keep switching on and off intermitently while trying to mantain it? No, no it won't.
What it happens instead is that it waits for the water temperature to go under a ceirtain level before it starts heating again.

Basically the Greybeards from Skyrim would be an example of the "maintain the balance" archetype. They are not evil by any means, but they won't step in to help outside of exceptional circumstances.

The Lawful alignments look very similar from the outside. In fact, most actions they take might be construed as Good. However, anyone with a LE alignment wouldn't take these actions because they're the right thing to do, but because it makes their life easier.

Party accused of crimes they didn't commit? Get them off the hook because you need them.

The village you rule is hit by a plague? Hire clerics of a god like Kelemvor so they get back to work.

Flat tax rates across the board? Sure, it cuts down on rebellion and still puts a decent amount of money into your coffers.

Animals are just forces of nature wrapped in flesh. The only difference between them and a rainstorm is biological process. There's no free will, no choice, no motivation beyond "eat, breed, sleep, repeat".

I guess some people can find a protagonist or antagonist in that, if they squint, but I can't. Regardless, that's not really my point. Rather, my point is that you can't be a thinking being and also be True Neutral (Unaligned). Unaligned specifically means that you're not capable of forming abstract thoughts or opinions. Any being with the capacity to do so will fall into one of the nine alignments.

Fine, let's play.

>The Dark Crystal

Jen's motivation in that movie is to put a shard into a rock so that the Skeksis will not be able to rule Thra forever. Don't mistake my oversimplification for apathy: I love this movie. However, Jen is not trying to restore "balance" i the sense of balancing evil with good, since if he was then he would be shown to be as diametrically opposed to the urRu as he is to the Skeksis. Instead, he is shown specifically opposing the Skeksis. That completing the crystal causes the urRu and the Skeksis to become the more morally neutral urSkek once again does not change that Jen's motiviation isn't about "balance", it's specifically about opposing Evil in the form of the Skeksis.

>Dragonlance

Dragonlance has the specific excuse of if the forces of Evil or Good ever get too powerful, Chaos wakes up and eats everything. So I will grant that in this specific case, enforcing a balance between Evil and Good is viable. Even then it's only because the setting bends over backwards to attempt to justify it; more to the point it glosses over the fact that when "Good" gets too powerful within that setting, it starts acting like what modern D&D would just describe as Evil.

> lawful evil
Anti-punk.
Think of a cyberpunk setting.
Lawful Evil are the ones who oppose the punks.

Once again, you're assigning a private definition to something and expecting everyone else to go along with it. You're an idiot. A lot of antagonists are not thinking beings, and so are a few protagonists. Forces of nature are our oldest enemies, after all. It bears repeating: you're an idiot.

You are an asshole constrained by a code of conduct - yours, society's, your employer's, doesn't matter.

Oh, I haven't played Ultima or Diablo so I can't comment on those.

>Once the threat has passed he no longer helps them, at least until another threat of the same level arrives.

Ah, but that was not what I was speaking against. I was specifically calling out the versions of True Neutral that honestly attempt to "maintain balance" by committing acts of beneficence one day and acts of malevolence the next out of some retarded sense of balance; what you're describing is the "apathetic" version: they help until they no longer have anything personal invested in it.

But, the druid who helps the good guys agaisnt the BBEG who plans to do [evil thing] but then immediately switches sides to the BBEG once the good guys start winning. That's the version of TN that is actually just NE trying to justify itself. Or the gnoll example I sited above.

Basically the True Neutral that wants status quo in perpetuity, which sounds okay on paper until you realize that it's essentially what the Party in 1984 wanted.

>and expecting everyone else to go along with it.

No, I'm expecting everyone to go along with what I said was my main point: you can't be a thinking being and lie outside the alignment chart altogether at the same time.

>You'll never play an adventure as a group of animals trying to survive the apocalyse and trying to make sense of it with their limited minds

Also, many nature documentaries try to "humanize" the animals they are filming while still not asigning them morality, especially when they are following a single "animal protagonist" or it's whole family

God I hate this man, he only fits under lawful evil because he simply changes the laws to fit his needs across the world whenever it suits him, he's legitimately a real life bond viplain. Except he's winning.

*villain, Fucking autocorrect.

These two seem completely at odds with one another. In the first one, for example, Civil War Captain America would be Lawful Good, whereas in the Second one he would be Chaotic Good.

no one understands Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic

They are relative to the situation and contradictory

Use the much superior axis system : Selfish/Selfless and Utilitarian/Epicurean

Think about my water heater example.
The "druid" is not killing a kid for every one it saves.
It is saving kids now because many are dying, but once they are saved they are on their own.
He might come later to "cull the herd" if, once the threat has passed, there are now way too many children.
He might be apathetic to people, but not to the "balance"

But i agree with you my example might have been all over the place, i think i also stepped on the toes of LN while writing it.

I'd say Darth Maul in Clone Wars and Rebels is the most like a Lawful Evil, he's the one who seems obsessed with the legacy of the Sith and the teachings thereof for their own sake.

Too many people think of "alignment" as "morality" or "ethics." It roughly CORRESPONDS to those things, but it REFERS to the forces with which you align yourself, both in terms of deities and in terms of fundamental forces which make up the multiverse.

The forces of law work in the direction of order and rigidity. The forces of chaos work in the direction of spontaneity and randomness. In the original D&D, this was the sole alignment axis, and most characters, from the biggest hardass to the most ridiculously impulsive kleptomaniac, were neutral, as they took no side in this conflict.

At that point, it had no direct connection to right and wrong itself, except insofar as those two approaches may lead you to do a good or evil thing.

This is why druids had to be neutral: They strove for a balance in which the universe could continue to exist, and worshiped nature as an example of the interplay between order and chaos (consider that absolute order and stillness is nothingness, and absolute chaos is white noise without meaning or content).

When good and evil were added, I think that originally they were meant to add a moral component (to differentiate the paladin from the tyrant, since despite their shared alignment they were prone to conflict).

Only later did they come to both be seen as the same KIND of thing, as a weird sort of shorthand for a personality.

One could be extremely impulsive on a personal level and an absolute proponent of Law, seeing one's impulsiveness as a personal flaw or as irrelevant, or slavishly and tirelessly work toward the goals of Chaos.

I prefer to stick with the original one-axis system, thinking in terms of Lawful (and good/neutral/evil as a person) and Chaotic (and good/neutral/evil as a person), with most people being Neutral (unaligned... and good/evil as a person).

Well, he's not a D&D character, so that's not surprising: most writers don't, and shouldn't, write characters with specific alignments in mind.

Personally I'd say that the obvious thing to do in that situation is split the difference and call Captain America a Neutral Good character.

This is the most simple and clear to understand alignment guide there is. I have always and will always use this as my standard.

Now if only D&D separated Cosmic alignment from Mortal alignment. I would prefer all mortals to be TN in the eyes of cosmic alignment, and then the "real" B&W morality is reserved for creatures made from the purest forms of that alignment.

You might find this interesting:

>He might come later to "cull the herd" if, once the threat has passed, there are now way too many children.

That's Evil. No exceptions.

I think your confusion, OP, is coming from the assumption that Law=good. First off, that is not always the case.

Second, lawful doesn't really mean legal, but instead refers to order. A more accurate description of the law/chaos axis would be order/chaos.

As previously stated, the good/evil axis could be more accurately described as altruism/selfishness, although I do maintain that selfishness is not an inherently bad thing. The rising tide lifts all boats, as it were. Maybe that makes me lawful evil?

Those of the lawful alignment value order, method, and consistency over spontaneity. If they are immoral, then they are not the shooting up schools and bombing shopping malls sort of evil, they are the systemic oppression, methodical extermination, and rampant corruption variety. The Empire from Star Wars, North Korea, Nazi Germany, etc. It's often large organizations like corporations and governments that are in this alignment because the characters' desire for control naturally motivates them to create large bureaucratic organizations to more efficiently be evil through.

Another example for you, the Aedra and the Daedra in TES. The Aedra are typically considered to be good, while the Daedra are treated as evil, but in truth both are largely without morals of any kind, or at least are of a blue/orange morality. In actuality, the Aedra represent stasis, stability, and consistency, while the Daedra represent change. That's partly why not ALL of the daedra are considered evil. Change isn't always bad, but it's often inconvenient.

Fair enough

What do you think of the druid described in , as created when alignment was just Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic?

Evil is specifically selfishness to the point of utterly not caring about others without being given some concrete compensation for doing so.

Like, Evil isn't just taking the last slice of pizza. It's denying that anyone else deserves to have any slices of pizza, even if they helped pay for it.

>A protagonist is anyone the audience is rooting for,
No, the protagonist is the leading character. Where is this "root for" autism even coming from? It comes up every time someone mentions protagonists who are anything but moralfags.

>Gygax says "psionics were a mistake"
>neckbeard legions eat it up as a gospel
>Gygax says "Good and Evil as alignments were a mistake"
>neckbeard legions trip over themselves to defend their sacred cow

Not that user, but I think it's kind of ridiculous to say that evil characters have to be utterly unconcerned with ANYONE else.

That means that you literally cannot have an evil couple who genuinely love each other but enjoy torturing babies together, because no matter how fucked they are, the fact that they care for another soul whatsoever puts them in neutral territory at worst.

I don't think psionics was a mistake, though.

Wait, maybe. What did he mean by "mistake"? As in the system wasn't very good, or as in they fundamentally should not have been in D&D?

Because I'll agree with the first point, but not the second. D&D's elder days had a module where the players invaded a crashed UFO and fought robots. It is canonical fact that Halaster in Undermountain records everything, hops in his Spelljammer, goes to Earth, and sells the video footage to Hollywood.

D&D has never been Medieval fantasy.

EVIL is utterly unconcerned with anyone else. Evil CHARACTERS can be. Again, Alignment is the SUM of your actions, not the source, and it is the result of ALL your actions, not any one given action.

You can totally have an evil character who is genuinely in love, as long as they are otherwise overall Evil.

I like psionics (as a concept, anyway) and hate good and evil as alignments, and OD&D is my favorite edition.

>As in the system wasn't very good, or as in they fundamentally should not have been in D&D?

It was a little bit of both. Apparently Psionics were some guy's houserules that Gygax just decided to throw in.

Well, I don't mind psionics as a concept. Their implementation in AD&D wasn't very good, but that applies to a lot of AD&D.

You like law. And you also like evil.

GRIFFITH DID NO WRONG!

I'm perfectly okay with psionics. People who hold Gygax's word as god are ridiculous, especially considering his uh, interesting?? ideas of morality.
He was an cool dude besides that though.

The protagonist is the character who is the story arch is focused on. In every godzilla movie there's some human who learns about them self by watching Godzilla lazer breath some other giant animal.
Milo & Otis are described by the narrator of having conscious thought who actively seek to help each other just because they don't directly speak doesn't mean the movie is literally watching a regular cat and a dog for 50 min

Think of a business by the letter of the contract or order without compromise.

miyaura_sanshio

OBLIGATORY GOOD AND EVIL AND LAWFUL AND CHAOTIC AND ALL THE COMBINATIONS ARE A SETTING SPECIFIC MECHANIC MEANT TO WORK SPECIFICALLY WITH D&D'S SPECIFIED PANTHEON AND MORAL SYSTEMS IT IS NOT A GENERIC METER STICK MEANT FOR MEASURING EVERY CHARACTER IN EVER SETTING EVER CREATED

WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE SO RETARDED

Good and evil shouldn't be part of alignment. D&D has multiple settings with different pantheons.

All major developer backed settings are built specifically to work with it though.

I've only watched the first season of TCW and none of Rebels. I was sticking to movies because they're undisputed canon. Purely from that, the only real argument for Maul being LE was him essentially being built out of the monk class, but that's a flimsy argument that makes all Jedi and Sith Lawful for arbitrary game reasons.

>Dark Sun has no gods
>it is presented as a brutal, morally-ambiguous world
>Nine-point alignment still exists

[CAN'T WAKE UP]

I know you're just mucking about, but Vader was party to the destruction of Alderaan. You can uphold law and order, but still be Evil. That's what every successful tyrant does, although ignoring law rather than twisting it to his means pushes him more into NE territory.

Also,
>droids
>having enough Int to make moral choices

Come on. At least argue that Storm Troopers are generally LN, and the ewoks are CE because they attacked first without casus belli, and are clearly intelligent enough to be responsible for their actions, as evidenced by their trap-making and music.
never mind that the storm troopers probably shot first for reasons, you'll have to find EU lore sources to prove that, which is non-canon :^)

>Damn I wish more players had this approach to alignment and morality.
That's more or less how the PHB explains alignments, just with less formulaic prose. The problem is that most players are chucklefucks who don't read the rulebook

Good post.

>>droids
>>having enough Int to make moral choices

They're shown repeatedly to be for the most part as smart as humans. Even the B-1 battle droids hold conversations with each other while on patrols. They're also built to feel pain, as judged by Jabba's droid torture room

>wizards on both law and chaos lists
this is true and accurate. even in OD&D they knew.

>heroes
>SUPER heroes
fucking kek

>Gygax was a mistake

he was right about good/evil, to an extent.

given the more exploration, dungeon, and settlement oriented focus of older school D&D, the forces of law and chaos are an important distinction.

law represents civilization building and stability in a medieval style wilderness.

chaos is disorder, every man for himself style savagery.

adding good and evil in made people start thinking about alignment as far more representative of the personal day to day actions of a character, instead of their broad allegiance with or against humanoid society.

I'd argue that he was lawful good or neutral, honestly.
What he did was brutal and horrible, but he did it not because helped him or out of personal enjoyment over seeing these brutal actions taken, but for the greater good and for the sake of his religion.
He even took great personal sacrifices for this.

>No exceptions.
Is it even in the case that not culling will lead to a large-scale economic collapse because of overpopulation and exhaustive resource consumption that will lead to even more deaths and sacrifices in the long run?

>No. If you have animal intelligence, you can't make meaningful choices. If you can't make meaningful choices, you can't be a protagonist or an antagonist. You're just a force of nature wrapped in flesh.
White Fang begs to differ.

I think there's still part of the debate open.
The druid who moves more dangerous beasts into the area to reduce the number of hunters, or who diverts or dries up parts of the local water supply to reduce crop yield, is essentially acting as a personified force of nature. He's adjusting the environment to prevent a species from overpopulating and becoming too dominant.

I see the argument that this could be NE, since reducing the harvest of the farmers is causing harm, but there's a possible argument that he's not causing direct harm (he's not actually killing anyone, just making the farmers hesitant to sire more offsprings), and is in fact preserving the local ecosystems, since more plowed fields means less concealment for predators, and more food for the deer.

The important assumption is that, at a cosmic level, all lives are proportionally equal. One fly is not equal to one human, but enough flies are.

Really though, this still isn't someone who makes a good PC. You could possible make them an antagonist, where they're a personified aspect of nature, but Dryads and the like already exist for that.

White Fang is not a valid source of information

Lawful Evil = exploiting the rules for your own benefit, even if it hurts someone else.

Darth Vader

This can be simplified down to "you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet," which is well into the slippery-slope "I'm not evil, this is for the good of you all!" type character.

Within the D&D-verse, the planar forces would still probably define this as an evil act. Even if it's for a good reason, the cosmic forces of Good would not submit to how you intend to use them, in the sense that force giving power to a Cleric's god, who then gives his spells power, would be opposed to this action.

You have successfully entered the gray-area of why Alignments as cosmic forces are a troublesome subject however. We're talking about a subject with no equivalent in our world, that doesn't have a very well-defined set of rules it operates around.

Since you mentioned
>not causing direct harm
would you consider how people try to play off batman killing people in BvS as "not killing" since he's not actively trying to kill them?
Is manslaughter still wrong morally?

A good guide is "the sort of villain in an American film who has a deep voice with an upper-class British accent".

Especially Disney.

>Scar
>Jafar
>Duke of Weselton
Off the top of my head.

I didn't watch BvS. How do you mean?

Regardless, I'm fairly sure that the TN druid who changes the environment would have a fairly strong defense against Manslaughter.
>I dropped an avalanche into the mountain path months before the army arrived. It's not my fault they weren't expecting the pass to be closed and were counting on pillaging the fertile river valley beyond, which is exactly what I was trying to stop. It's their fault for starving to death because they didn't bring enough supplies!

I don't think that's quite a fair comparison. As the user mentioned, the druid in question is acting on nature's behalf to preserve the natural ecosystem from artificial interference. When things come to this, then the idea that the druid is to be judged by classical D&D values becomes somewhat absurd, considering that a druid like that might not even consider himself to be of the same species as other humans and thus have about as much empathy for them as humans have for foxes that are stealing their hens.

more like
"The world sucks so I'm gonna make it suck suck less for me , if that includes making it suck more for other then that's just how its going to be "
and that can still be neutral or chaotic evil

I wasn't counting the druid as manslaughter, but raising the question, since it's been a topic a lot of people have been making to me lately, because
batman causes plenty of cars to blow up with goons inside, and generally blew up a ton of goons without care, and I thought that was a reflection of his more jaded character in that universe,
but people have been arguing to me that it was the goons faults for being there and that batman just didn't try to not kill them, not that he tried to kill them, so he's still a more good aligned character

Let's say you were playing a character that is good aligned, and were raiding a bandit camp, and you set off an explosive barrel near a wall as a distraction knowing it might kill several unsuspecting bandits
Is that an appropriate action?

I'm this guy.

Another point I want to add, lawful evil characters can often fall into the "well-intentioned extremist" archetype. For example, a powerful arch wizard who rules the kingdom with an iron fist because he doesn't trust people to run their own lives. In this case you have a character who's methods and, to a lesser extent, his intentions, make him lawful, but his actions make him evil.

Hillary Clinton

Just read the fucking book

The Punisher

I think that's a silly and convoluted excuse. Like, it's a kindergarten-tier.
As for the actual idea behind the question, it's really dependant on moral context. From a modern-day perspective, killing goons and bandits just like that is pretty evil not because you're killing goons, but because you're showing that you can mercilessly commit manslaughter against those you consider deserving of it and that's enough to label you as dangerous to society. Regardless of whether you intended to kill, the fact that you knew there was a high likelihood of fatalities and ignored it will label you as dangerous all the same.

In any classical fantasy or medieval society, nobody is really going to give a shit about you killing a bunch of goons/bandits either way, so the excuse is fairly meaningless.

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Read this