Many years ago I was running an old familiar module for a Dungeons & Dragons game, and one of the players had some recollection of some of the details of the module–not enough to make it unplayable, but enough that he often had impressions about things based on distant memories, and in particular that he didn’t trust a certain cleric and his acolytes, because without any real information to that effect he believed them to be evil.
The game took an odd turn; war was brewing, and the fort which was the party’s temporary home was readying its defenses. Then, at a dinner held for all the leading figures of the town, someone attempted to assassinate the commander of the local militia, and although his life was saved by quick action on the part of our heroes, it opened many threads of story.
The character run by the player who had vague memories of the module, a neutral good cleric/fighter, immediately took into custody the suspect priest and his two acolytes; working with two other members of the party, he began to interrogate them. Not getting the answers he wanted, he resorted to threats, then torture, eventually killing the two acolytes rather painfully and sending the priest to the dungeons.
When the dust settled, I docked experience points from the participants, particularly from the cleric, for violation of their alignments. The player who led the charge immediately objected. “I could see it if I were lawful good,” he said, “but I’m only neutral good.”
But for what does neutral good stand for, if not good?
This has been my most profitable insight into side alignments. Although it is certainly possible to play up the neutrality, particularly if it is a druidic neutrality (for which check back on the article Moderation), in the main, side alignments are about the part that is not neutral. Having Beneficence as the core of his values, the neutral good puts nothing above the common good of the majority; the neutral evil puts nothing above his Selfish self-interest. The preservation of Societies is the only thing that matters to the lawful neutral, and the Freedom of individuals is the rallying cry of the chaotic neutral. These characters define within themselves the values by which they are identified. They are people of clear vision; they know what they believe, and seldom have trouble finding the path demanded by those Beliefs. They are the fanatics, the people who have bright line tests of truth. Rarely do they meet an issue they cannot reduce to a simple answer. One thing matters only, to them. If that one thing is implicated by the situation, the answer is clear; if it is not, the situation is irrelevant.
My player had failed to grasp this. He had somehow come to believe that being neutral good somehow made you less good than being lawful good. He had failed to see that removing the question of law or chaos from the equation made the goodness aspect immeasurably more important. He could make no excuse for evil. He could not say that this was necessary to preserve order; he could not say that he was protecting freedom. The only question that should have mattered to his character was what is the good thing to do, what is the most beneficent, doing the most good for the people affected?
Could he have argued that torturing the priest would bring the greatest good to the greatest number? I wonder that in retrospect; he did not so argue. For years after that I held the belief that a neutral good character could not justify torture on any basis, but it might be possible to build such a justification on the demands of good reaching beyond the subject tortured. Certainly the inquisitors, as wrong as we think they were, tortured their victims with good intentions (they believed that confession of the sinfulness of their crimes was necessary for them to receive eternal salvation, and so were attempting to encourage their charges to believe this and admit they were wrong–it had little to do with getting information from them). Given the right fact set and the right beliefs, the dedicated fanatical believer in good could do things the rest of us would find appalling. That is a different argument, though, from asserting that the neutral good character is somehow less dedicated to good; it asserts rather that good matters to him more.
Side alignments have this power of fanaticism. They are most easily brought into conflict with views to which they are not inherently opposed. A lawful neutral and a neutral good may seem to us to be in agreement about many things, but they are both uncompromising in those things about which they disagree. Their differences divide them far more than their agreements can overcome. Even those whose views agree in part–what we call the corner alignments–are viewed by them as compromising, lacking vision, wishy-washy.
The picture I have painted here is strident and stark; it is of a type of person most of us would find difficult. It is necessary to understand the side alignments that we see this aspect of them. The persons who hold them can seem reasonable; the presentation of these beliefs can be subdued, soft-pedaled, relaxed. They are the same beliefs. The person who quietly accepts that capitalism is the only economic system and doesn’t say much about it until challenged is just as firm in his beliefs as the one who will start arguments in response to any suggestion that others are not perfectly persuaded of that view, but both are equally immovable in their faith. So, too, there are many characters whose fanaticism is not evident, but whose decisions will always find their basis in one principle, one which never is negotiable. That is the nature of the side alignments, and the issue they bring to play.
That fanaticism will not always express itself the same way. Each fanatic can apply his own nuances to this. In one game, there was a chaotic neutral character who broke ranks, disobeyed party leaders, and engaged a clearly superior opponent because he would not permit a slave caravan to pass even where slaving was a lawful business. That same game hosted a chaotic neutral attorney, whose philosophy was that every citizen had rights that needed to be championed, and any authority who attempted to oppose those rights had to be challenged. He once argued to Dagda (head of the Celtic pantheon) that the druid who had abandoned his calling to become a paladin had not rejected the quest for balance, but had recognized that the balance had been so far tipped toward chaos and evil that only paragons of law and good could offset that. He did so because of a fixed belief that everyone had the right to his own choices, however foolish they might seem to anyone else. Both of those characters were fanaticism in action–exemplars of the values of chaos unsullied by conflict. Each applied it within his own parameters.
Exploiting the issues is in large part up to the players; as situations arise, it is they who must grasp how a person who holds those beliefs would respond. At the same time, it is at these moments when we are most interested in what the character is thinking, why he does what he does. Side alignments in some ways provide the best opportunities for external conflicts, situations in which the character is at odds with the world because of moral and ethical disagreements.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
