which alignment do you most identify with?
jesterdesu
Member Posts: 373
- which alignment do you most identify with?91 votes
- lawful good12.09%
- neutral good25.27%
- chaotic good15.38%
- lawful neutral13.19%
- true neutral10.99%
- chaotic neutral10.99%
- lawful evil6.59%
- neutral evil1.10%
- chaotic evil1.10%
- i can't decide3.30%
7
Comments
I don't know what the player who rolled the character that is me has to say about my alignment, much less anything the DM might have said about it, I just get RP'd by some cruel being out there who thought it would be fun to play a character with a single digit statline and RP a long line of bad choices for them to deal with.
http://easydamus.com/alignment.html
imagine being bullied, having your friends back you up and then you decide to change sides and stand for your bully because he's outnumbered. nobody ever did this.
if you pick that one you lie to yourself.
Basically alignments aren't strait jackets, and within one alignment there are many different ways to role play what that means to that character, both of which contradict the way you seem to conceive of the alignment system.
A player in a game I DM'd reflavoured the rogue's mechanical abilities so that they stemmed from a university education that their noble family paid for. Mechanically everything was the same, but advanced biology classes on the various types of creatures were what lent them sneak attack damage (knowing where vital organs were and so on), a locksmithing course taught them all they needed to know about picking locks, etc, etc.
You can do the same thing with alignments, and try to look at what the alignment represents for your character rather than a simplistic look at it. That's sort of the point of a role playing game, you create an inventive, unique role to play and build the mechanical components of it out of what the game has on offer. Some people work backwards from that, making the mechanics take precedence, and that's not wrong either. But you can still start from LG and try and figure out which Laws of the kingdom you're in create a moral/ethical conflict in your character. How you resolve those conflicts can vary from LG character to LG character, some siding more on the Law side and some more on the Good side.
Diversity of expression of the rules is how RPGs have worked since the start, so tl;dr answer to your question is that the point of it all is the versatility.
If you work for money, and never volunteer for anything - you are not good. You are neutral, perhaps even evil. Good would be the person that goes to work and goes above and beyond the call of duty when helping customers, for no reason other than "its the right thing to do". Evil would be the same person that does the same only to gain a commission on their sales. Through my experiences as of yet, the bulk of humanity is neutral with good and evil being the far ends of the spectrum such as fascism vs communism for politics(not that either of those is good). For example with the above situation. I was once a price checker at a superstore in my home town. I always worked as hard as I could and helped all the customers to the best of my ability even though I wasn't being paid more than anybody else. I had two reasons to do such, merely helping the customers because they needed it, and perks such as employee of the month or recognition from managers locally and nationally.
Another example of this is that I'm a member of the Lions. I help around the community and raise money for charity for again, two reasons. The first reason is because it is the right thing to do, as there are families out there that for example cannot pay for the specially trained dog guides or in my province the tests needed for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The other reason is that I get to meet people I never normally would get to meet. An example of this is I'm now friends with a man who has won the Grey Cup twice and lives down in the states.
On the other hand, I haven't met a Good or Neutral fascist in my life, and as a militant antifascist I've met more than your average person's share of them face to face at counter-protests to their hateful gatherings. They are, to a one, genuinely scummy people. On the internet you encounter the odd teenager proclaiming themselves fascist but clearly having a distorted point of view of what that entails in their head, but I've never met one of those people face to face.
But perhaps politics are best left to a thread on politics.
More on point to this thread though, re: your point about working for pay, a peasant who has no other choice but serve and work for and benefit a LE tyrant in a D&D game is not, by virtue of working to survive under an evil regime, themselves an Evil person. Same goes for money. We exist in a society that centers an abstraction based off an abstraction of gold's value (the value of any given mineral itself also an abstraction), and if that abstraction is Neutral, or Evil as some might contest, it doesn't make people who work for that abstraction to put food on the table the alignment of that abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction any more than the more direct connection between peasants who work for a LE tyrant king and directly benefit him and all his schemes by doing so.
Edit: Also, I believe you are a tiny bit biased about it, while I'm looking at it objectively. Fascism is bad yes, but communism is not flawless and I was speaking communism, not socialism which are entirely different things. You by the sounds of it are a socialist, not a communist. Those "Authoritarians" that you consider evil, ARE communists. Think of it like this generally:
Communism -> Socialism/Liberalism -> Centrism -> Conservativism -> Fascism
Evil -> Neutral -> Good -> Neutral -> Evil
I call centrism "good" as it does its best to balance equality and hierarchy, which means that Centrists try to both make everyone equal while letting people better themselves through their own work. Communism is a form of evil due to its authoritarian aspect, where the state forces people to be equal. Fascism is the same but opposite, where the state forces a form of a hierarchy.
As I said before, if a person only does what is required, they are neither good or evil, just neutral.
But seriously, alignment system works only as gameplay device, where forces shaping morality exist as specific beings.
Tried different of the tests online. Always fun.
And I guess most people land within the neutral and good. Well more a hope really. The world doesn't need too many CE people.
Good:
-"I work for an evil king and I will only work the minimum I need to in order to survive to deprive them of greater benefit."
-"I work for an evil king and I will work my butt off because despite being Good I am extremely fearful for my family's lives if I underperform and am noticed."
-"I work for a good king and I will only work the minimum I need to in order to survive because despite being Good I am lazy."
-"I work for a good king and I will work my butt off because I want the kingdom and my community to see a greater benefit."
Evil:
-"I work for an evil king and I will work as hard as possible because I constantly rat out underperformers who are heavily penalized and need to watch my own back."
-"I work for an evil king and I will only work the minimum I need to in order to survive to fool my good co-workers who do the same into trusting me as one of them so I can later betray them all if I'm ever caught slacking."
-"I work for a good king and I will only work the minimum I need to in order to survive because he is a weak fool and neither he nor his kingdom deserves my effort."
-"I work for a good king and I will work my butt off to gain power within the fool's kingdom as I gain attention and rise up through 'merit' or whatever these do-gooders think should make right...I'll show them my might is what makes right once I'm powerful enough no one can stop me!"
Lawful:
-"I work for a king of any alignment and I will work as hard as possible because the spirit of the Law dictates that I do, no matter how distasteful I may find working for this king."
-"I work for a king of any alignment and I work the minimum I need to in order to survive because there is a minimum by the letter of the Law and I will abide by it."
Chaotic:
-"I work for a king of any alignment and I will reject the authority of the king and work as little as possible to thumb my nose at this system of things, heck I might not work at all!"
-"I work for a king of any alignment and I will work my butt off because I see people around my like Lawful Lazy over there just doing the bare minimum proscribed by the Law, and I'm so tired of these boring stick-in-the-mud types dragging their heels just because the Law says they can!"
I mean I could literally go on and on listing examples, but basically the things you get paid to do don't necessarily make you any one alignment, nor who you work for, nor the effort your expend whether low or high. Every profession has people of every alignment in it, there are even monarchs of every alignment so you could make this even more elaborate by having Lawful characters recognize that their Chaotic monarch was not good for the Law of the realm like their father was before them, and so on.
You can argue just about any motivation for just about any activity, which is why DMs can place NPCs of any alignment in front of you doing any job in the kingdom and why you as a player can invent a character who has their own way of seeing the world around them and their place in it. Alignment is meant to be something without much relativity in the standard cosmology, but there are still diverse personalities and motivations among the souls that end up on any Planar destination after death such that you could find people who were truly Evil but thought they were Good their whole life and vice versa (Gene Wolfe's Severian and Patera Silk protagonists are good examples of that mirror image in the Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun novels).
There's nothing wrong with having a bias, of course. There is something wrong with trying to present your personal bias as objectivity.
What I was meaning there was the last line in the second post. If you only do what is required, you are not "good" as defined by the definition in alignments you are actually neutral. If you only help people because you benefit, you are not being "good" by alignment you are actually being "evil". "Good" as an alignment is altruism. That basically means that you help those that need help because it is just something you do, or that you actually care about the other person even if you don't know them. I'll talk about a specific example by alignment.
Lets say you were working in a customer service job like I was, running all the way throughout the store. There is a customer that looks lost in the candy aisle that is looking for Dad's cookies. Why do you help them? Do you actually care that they can't find the cookies? Performing a good act would be to care about the person's dilemma, and you would use your best ability to find the cookies for the customer, even searching through the back to see if there are any on pallets. A neutral act would be to try to find the cookies simply because it was your job. An evil act would be to either walk past the customer or only haphazardly look in the front of the store, and then go to the back to lose the customer. This is considering that the employee gets no extra benefits for helping customers.
I used to work in a call center and the best thing was helping people resolve their problems. I genuinely liked making sure people got their cable repaired or their bills up to date etc. It was one of my favorite jobs because I could take a very hostile customer and turn them around to gratitude for fixing their problem. The hard part was not taking the hostility seriously, because it can just grind you down.
I don't think someone doing things only for their benefit makes them evil, either, there are selfish monarchs of Good alignment in literally every single D&D setting who don't want to share power with their citizenry after all, even though they could. I think you're confusing your definition of alignments with the alignments as they appear in D&D, which is an easy confusion to have since your stance is included within understanding alignments in D&D but your stance isn't the whole picture. Good and Neutral aligned people can both care about others even if they don't know them, and try to help them even if they don't know them. And they can also be selfish, selfish isn't a trait restricted only to the Evil in D&D, plenty of selfish Good aligned people abound in the Realms, even Gods!
Edit: I'm basically just saying the same thing in different ways throughout these posts, I just looked at my first post and I had specifically stated when helping customers.
I have no problem with whichever way the conversation is going and still also feel it is somewhat close to the original topic. Though thanks for your concern regardless @GenderNihilismGirdle
For me to be frank, the poll is the thing I am watching the most
But on a strictly intellectual level, I feel that laws are merely tools to promote the general good, and have no intrinsic value by themselves. If somebody breaks a minor rule, I wouldn't join in, but I also wouldn't scold them for it. So, Neutral Good.
Good alignments are fun. People like you when you do nice things, and it feels good when people like you.
I've never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue
Lawful Neutral