I see a lot more of the hospitalers in say the Order of the Radiant Heart than I do Lancelot. Maybe it was a big shift at some point? I know in 3e they just went ahead and made a separate knight class for example to *be* the romantic knight.
I wonder why Paladins are so often written as lawful stupid.
Probably because they're written by people who don't know real lawful good people. When I was in Art school I had a teacher who was tremendously catholic. He was also truly organized and would speak of phylosophy and "goodness" with uncomparable passion. He also tried to see the best in each student , and his behavior was quite consistent (I've seen him daily for 3 years).
"So he must be the kindest guy in the universe". Not really, he was very strict and demanded from us no less than what he demanded from himself, which means that he was a true example of what he believed.
Lawful , certainly. Passionately good. But far from stupid or naive.
If you're talking of true neutral, there seems to be three broad categories, the "philosophical" neutrals who see it was the most valid moral position, the apathetics who don't care about good or evil, law or chaos at all, and things not sentient enough for real moral reasoning.
According to Scott Peck, Evil is one who actively seeks to stop his and other's mental development in order to avoid facing the pain of it. These people cause havoc.
Good would be someone who actively seeks to develop himself and help others develop.
Neutral is someone not interested in mental development, but other, more trivial and selfish gains. However, they don't actively seek to stop others' or their own mental development just to avoid the pain of it or the pain of of facing themselves, although they may passively do so.
In other words, neutral is someone not actively "playing" on the scale on which good is on one end and evil is on another end.
According to heroes of might and magic 3, evil wants to destroy the world, good wants to destroy evil and neutrals just want everything for themselves.
Good is altruistic and self-sacrificing. Doing a selfless act that benefits someone other than yourself even if and especially when it costs you something dear is a good act. Their priority is others, and they try to make everyone's lives better, not just themselves.
Neutral is not apathetic always, neutrals can feel pity and remorse, yet they do not take a stand, they do not want to inconvenience themselves. They try to get by and their priority is themselves, yet they do not want to cause too much inconvenience to others while doing so.
Evil is about harming others, inconveniencing and hurting them, for personal gain or just for pleasure. Their priority is themselves, but also hurting others.
A poor person who sees a struggling, hungry, homeless person and shares his only bread, does a good deed.
A poor person who sees the same person but can't afford to share his bread because of his hungry children at home, is not good, but not evil either, just neutral. He feels bad and sad and wishes the guy well, but he is still neutral because he did not take action to help another.
A violent hooligan that beats up the homeless person for 'dirtying the place' is straight up evil.
Then in D&D there is the druidic true neutralism, a stance that is all about balance and preventing forces of good and evil from overpowering each other. It is more like a religious philosophy.
Adalon the Silver dragon is a fine example - even though she knows that drow are evil and violent she lets them live as long as they don't wreck everything.
When you think about alignments, remember that the nine choices of AD&D, which is what we play in Baldur's Gate (2nd edition), were an attempt to give nuance to the original alignments of D&D - before it became "Advanced." The original alignments were three and assumed the usual social morality of good vs. evil, or law vs. chaos, which is the same thing, because for traditional societies law is considered good, and chaos disruptive. Paladins slaying fiends, that was the model for heroic fantasy in its heyday. But not everyone is as marvelous as a paladin or as terrible as a fiend. Hence the three alignments of D&D: Good, Neutral and Chaotic. Good churches, for example, were what AD&D would call Lawful Good, Neutral cults were harmless or obscure and Chaotic ones were for monsters and demon-worshippers on the outskirts of society. This system made a perfect sense, so long as you firmly believed in it, and it assumed the perspective of the player characters: people and things were good, bad or in-between insofar as they helped or hindered their struggle, which was assumed to be righteous.
With the advent of inclusive individualism around the 1980s culture began to change, fantasy followed suit. The three alignments began to look primitive, and in the Dragon Magazine monster entries started to have alignment details in parentheses, like Neutral (good). This meant not-automatically-friendly-but-leaning- towards-nice. AD&D made a concession to the times and its own growing sophistication and introduced the nine alignments as an "objective" classification, but it was a mistake: actual cases of ethics are a morass. Ninety-nine types would not have been enough to cover all varieties of behavior and motivation. Other role-playing systems took different approaches, but since BG is the game you are stuck with, you have to abide by the 2nd edition AD&D rules - a mish-mash where Neutral may mean without an alignment, like a golem, or crazy or driven, like Captain Brage, or indifferent, or just moderate.
Also in BG the alignments have to fit the rules of the system. Jaheira, for instance, is forcefully Lawful Good, yet she has to be Neutral for the druid class. Finally, there are organizations: she and her husband are Harpers, and that society's agenda has clear-cut "good" objectives, so members of this corporation are tasked idealists, even if they are not, personally, paragons of virtue (Finder Wyvernspur wasn't).
And yes, the character writing of BG is not F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Comments
"So he must be the kindest guy in the universe". Not really, he was very strict and demanded from us no less than what he demanded from himself, which means that he was a true example of what he believed.
Lawful , certainly. Passionately good. But far from stupid or naive.
In the words of Zapp Branigan " Those dirty neutrals"
Good would be someone who actively seeks to develop himself and help others develop.
Neutral is someone not interested in mental development, but other, more trivial and selfish gains. However, they don't actively seek to stop others' or their own mental development just to avoid the pain of it or the pain of of facing themselves, although they may passively do so.
In other words, neutral is someone not actively "playing" on the scale on which good is on one end and evil is on another end.
According to heroes of might and magic 3, evil wants to destroy the world, good wants to destroy evil and neutrals just want everything for themselves.
Neutral is not apathetic always, neutrals can feel pity and remorse, yet they do not take a stand, they do not want to inconvenience themselves. They try to get by and their priority is themselves, yet they do not want to cause too much inconvenience to others while doing so.
Evil is about harming others, inconveniencing and hurting them, for personal gain or just for pleasure. Their priority is themselves, but also hurting others.
A poor person who sees a struggling, hungry, homeless person and shares his only bread, does a good deed.
A poor person who sees the same person but can't afford to share his bread because of his hungry children at home, is not good, but not evil either, just neutral. He feels bad and sad and wishes the guy well, but he is still neutral because he did not take action to help another.
A violent hooligan that beats up the homeless person for 'dirtying the place' is straight up evil.
Then in D&D there is the druidic true neutralism, a stance that is all about balance and preventing forces of good and evil from overpowering each other. It is more like a religious philosophy.
With the advent of inclusive individualism around the 1980s culture began to change, fantasy followed suit. The three alignments began to look primitive, and in the Dragon Magazine monster entries started to have alignment details in parentheses, like Neutral (good). This meant not-automatically-friendly-but-leaning- towards-nice. AD&D made a concession to the times and its own growing sophistication and introduced the nine alignments as an "objective" classification, but it was a mistake: actual cases of ethics are a morass. Ninety-nine types would not have been enough to cover all varieties of behavior and motivation. Other role-playing systems took different approaches, but since BG is the game you are stuck with, you have to abide by the 2nd edition AD&D rules - a mish-mash where Neutral may mean without an alignment, like a golem, or crazy or driven, like Captain Brage, or indifferent, or just moderate.
Also in BG the alignments have to fit the rules of the system. Jaheira, for instance, is forcefully Lawful Good, yet she has to be Neutral for the druid class. Finally, there are organizations: she and her husband are Harpers, and that society's agenda has clear-cut "good" objectives, so members of this corporation are tasked idealists, even if they are not, personally, paragons of virtue (Finder Wyvernspur wasn't).
And yes, the character writing of BG is not F. Scott Fitzgerald.