All things being equal, and assuming you don't have to worry about coups, would you prefer the Grand Treasurer of the fantasy kingdom you live in to be LE or NG?
Keep in mind they'll have lots of power over financial policy. One wrong choice and you could have all sorts of poor people. Not even the useful kind.
...
A NG can be tempered into a LG with some effort; hell, it's not uncommon for Paladins to go from LG to NG and back over the course of a year.
A LE character is bound to do all sorts of shady things that will bite him and whomever his client nation is in the rear somewhere down the line; dealing with devils, doing dubiously legal yet immoral things that will catch flak later on; even if he's not being a despot, sooner or later someone is going to hire muderhobos to make him disappear, simply because being LE long term while controlling a non-LE entity isn't cosmically viable.
So, while the LE might look more secure from a basic standpoint, the more time that passes, the more likely they're going to do something that they're going to regret.
Overall though, rather than alignment, I want to see these peoples' SKILL qualifications.
Wait a minute, I just realized.
These kids have a dragon.
Why the fuck are they begging?
Valid points. I'm asking mostly because I'm trying to worldbuild an empire, and this is he closest to the question I actually want to ask without throwing a tl;dr about my super special setting at you. I will say that you don't have to worry about 'cosmic viability' or murderhobos coming in to assassinate him, an equal number of murderhobos would be after the NG dude.
Elf girl clearly escaped from some sort of captivity, and perhaps the babbydragon isn't effective in the winter cold. Also, feeding a dragon sounds like it'd cost a lot.
>LE
So you want russian economics system?
This depends on a lot of factors, though. What's our social status in this hypothetical? That likely changes our answer greatly. Are we middle class peasant off the street? Alright, do we have a sustainable income? And all that aside, Lawful Evil can go any number of points from "Actively Malicious" to "Fuck you, I got mine". What kind is he? Neither of them are particularly good, but one is probably better than the other. What intelligence and wisdom score are we assuming here?
There are too many factors that go into this. The answer is quite plainly NG because that's the safest option with all these unknowns. We can at least expect the NG guy to not actively dick us over because he's a dickhead and wants more money.
Go into the tl;dr, in other words.
Lawful neutral
>What's our social status in this hypothetical? That likely changes our answer greatly. Are we middle class peasant off the street? Alright, do we have a sustainable income?
Well, I asked 'you' because I'm looking for your gut feeling, or your intellectual impression without bringing too much roleplaying into it. I guess assume you're a freeman in a city, possibly a 'poor' merchant. The kind of person who sees five gold as a nice score instead of 'HOLY SHIT I CAN BUY A NEW COW AND GET MY DAUGHTER MARRIED!".
>There are too many factors that go into this. The answer is quite plainly NG because that's the safest option with all these unknowns. We can at least expect the NG guy to not actively dick us over because he's a dickhead and wants more money.
Hrm. Fair point. I guess this might boil down to whether or not I think someone likely to spend money on charity is necessarily less fiscally responsible. Even evil is likely to have pet projects, and there's no garentee they'll be cheaper than the ones proposed by Urist Mcorphanagebuilder.
>Go into the tl;dr, in other words.
I'm worldbuilding a setting where I think I may have solved the problem of the 'lawful-chaotic' axis being meaningless or just an alternate good/bad thing, and I'm trying to decide which responsibilities an LN god of Law would delegate to the good and evil halves of a duel monarchy he's holding in direct submission to his church. Both rulers are more or less being blackmailed into not betraying the empire as a whole, and this is a lasting policy decision so individual stats don't really figure into it.
Yeah it's complex. I'm pulling a LOT of inspiration from Babylonian, Sumerian and Byzantine cultures here. The god wants both good and evil monarchs because the empire has large numbers of 'good' and 'evil' people in it. The church is wedged firmly between them to keep everything orderly.
Man. Must suck to be the evil king.
>Think you're harsh, but fair
>Sure, you take a little off the top for yourself, but fuck it, you od a lot of work running this country, right?
>And yeah, you do Prima Nocta. So did your dad. That's how you were born! What's so evil about it?
>God comes along
>Tells you that you are, in fact, /objectively/ evil.
I guess at that point you might as well go full ham.
NG
That way you know that he will have the best interest of all people at heart
>One wrong choice and you could have all sorts of poor people. Not even the useful kind.
Neutral good. Someone is going to help them, so who cares?
Why would a God even want to have a part good and a part evil empire? It's not like the evil people will stay in only one side of the country, right? The good people are way too much easy pickings for them not to take advantage of the situation and go steal, rape and murder. With some arson on the side for fireworks.
Why would a LN even want to let an evil person be in their country?
TBF being evil in a setting where it is an objective fact of life that evil exists, can be detected by paladins, and is considered important for 'the balance' sounds like it's really different from evil as we understand it.
I'm aware that 90% of d&d settings don't have the balance part mentioned, but since I'm making a new setting and I'm actually trying to tackle objective morality in an interesting way, I think I am allowed that leeway.
>That way you know that he will have the best interest of all people at heart
See, Id be worried he has the best interests of those people in that kingdom /next to you/ at heart too. An effective treasurer should be willing to wield economic policy as a weapon when required. I'm just not sure if tat balances out the BS an evil treasurer might do.
Alright, let me correct my statement
>he hast the best interest for his own people at heart first and foremost
>anyone else is secondary
>Why would a God even want to have a part good and a part evil empire? It's not like the evil people will stay in only one side of the country, right? The good people are way too much easy pickings for them not to take advantage of the situation and go steal, rape and murder. With some arson on the side for fireworks.
Because the empire is more or less THE civilizing force in the world, and it contains over 70% of the entire population of the setting. It's large enough that it's main problem is 'stability' since if there isn't enough law, places will break off and try to do their own thing.
Lawgod is effectively looking at 'Go anarchy and try to kill people who are dicks so I /might/ be able to get a better world out of this, if I can even approach this level of power again' or 'keep the giant empire that worships me as a supreme being as stable as possible over the long term.' He's going for the second one.
You can't guarantee you're going to get that kind of dude most of the time, though. What if you get a touchy feely type who loves all creatures equally?
That said, you also can't guarantee you'll get an evil guy who realizes that boosting the empire is the most effective way to boost his own prosperity. So I guess it balances out.
>boosting the empire is the most effective way to boost his own prosperity.
That's not entirely true. He could also boost his own prosperity immensely by say, accepting bribes to make seemingly balanced trade deals that actually favor a rival power.
Or by focusing on the elimination of a middle class, and putting himself squarely in the upper class as a result.
Or, if a large number of holdings are controlled by the state, that gives him a lot of economic power if everyone is working on the states farms instead of their own.
Yeah, it seeds unhappiness and discontent...
But he only needs things to be good for the royal treasurer during his life time. If he lives til he's 75, dies, and the country collapses the very next day, no skin off of his back, unless he particularly cares whether or not his corpse is defiled.
LE is how you get the horrifying implosion of 2008. You do not want LE people in charge of your money.
Because it amuses him? That's reason enough for most deities. Alternatively, it's an experiment to see how such a society would function FOR SCIENCE, or to prove a point to the other deities who wrote such laws in the first place.
Neither.
LN is the best choice.
This whole theoretical seems based off the idea that somehow a Lawful Evil guy would have some reason for being better for the state than a Neutral Good guy. There's honestly no reason to support that conclusion, since it really comes down to simple wisdom and money skill.
Even if a Neutral Good guy loves everyone equally whatever kingdom or no, that does not necessarily mean he will drop all of his countries matters to help them if his mental stats are high enough to know that this would harm both countries in the long run, or significantly harm his in the short run. Good is fully capable of restraint.
At the same time, there is no reason to assume that just because a Lawful Evil guy is entirely focused on what he wants, that what he wants will necessarily square with the idea of "Making his country prosperous", even if he's the smartest bastard on the plane. Evil is fully capable of excess.
It basically comes down to a question of individual skill, knowledge, and sense, and with that in mind, there is honestly no real reason to not pick the Neutral Good guy, because that removes much of the risk of active Malice from the equation.
>would you prefer the Grand Treasurer of the fantasy kingdom you live in to be LE or NG?
So basically Hillary vs Bernie all over again?
LE as long as I can make perfectly clear to them that the kingdom's interests are the same as theirs.