I am persuaded that the most difficult alignment in Dungeons & Dragons™ both to understand and to play is neutrality. I understand good as Beneficence, and it’s easy enough to see how its opposite, evil, is ultimately about being Selfish, but where’s the middle ground between doing something for myself and doing something for others? Similarly, I can see how the lawful is most interested in promoting and protecting Societies while the chaotic is solidly behind individual Freedom, but ultimately don’t we all have to put one of these as more important than the other? If I’m neutral, if my alignment is none of these things, then what, really, are my Beliefs? If alignment is the true religion of the game, does the neutral then believe nothing?
I wrestled long with this. Even after running games for most of a decade, I was of the opinion that neutrality was an interesting game fiction with no correlation to reality. I’d never seen anyone play a neutral character as a neutral character. Always these were something else, usually chaotically opposing any law over them while selfishly taking the evil path when they could have done good. No one understood what neutrality was all about, and I didn’t either.
However, I played a couple of characters (remember, for a very long time I was always behind the screens, so my opportunities to address alignment were limited to running non-player characters and passing judgment on the actions of the players), and explored some of the possibilities. I created my alignment quiz and was working on a growing referee aid for character generation that ultimately became my Character Creation web site, so I had to deal with neutrality, and I had to figure out what it was.
What I discovered was that neutrality had at least three faces, one of which itself had two expressions. I named these, so I could explain them. The two forms I saw that were not well expressed in the game text I called oblivious and pragmatic, while leaving the third to bear the name it frequently wore in the game, druidic. It was druidic neutrality that demonstrated two forms, a standard or balanced form, and a cross-principled variant. Each of these approaches neutrality in a distinct fashion, yet each succeeds in being truly neutral.
The pragmatic neutral is simple to understand. He takes the view that the two sides of the coin are not values in themselves, but tools to be used to further the values he holds. So for example the pragmatic neutral good will say that whether by law or by chaos, we will further good; we will make better the lives of as many people as we can, whether we do so by building stronger societies or by breaking them down in the name of freedom. Law and chaos do not matter as such, but are recognized as means, not ends, ways of achieving the goal of good.
Similarly, the pragmatic lawful neutral does not care whether actions are generally good or evil, whether they spread the wealth around or concentrate it in the hands of the few in power. What matters is that society is preserved, order is maintained, and law is established. If that is accomplished by making the lives of others better, then doing so achieves the goal; if it is necessary to torture the innocent and drive the masses into poverty and starvation to maintain order, it’s all the same. Good and evil are just tools; they are not values.
This sort of neutrality has a certain fragility to it. If our lawful neutral comes to the conclusion that good is usually a better tool than evil, he may still be neutral; but if he goes beyond that to realize that good has value inherently, he is no longer neutral but good. The neutrality is maintained only as long as the character can weigh good and evil actions entirely on whether they promote law, without any bias based on whether they are good or evil.
The question arises as to whether someone can be pragmatic neutral neutral, that is, regard all of law, chaos, good, and evil as tools to be used in the pursuit of the true values. It is difficult to imagine such a thing, particularly on the scale of life. After all, if none of these things are values in themselves, what values can they support? Yet I have seen a character, albeit a rather two-dimensional non-player character, for whom this appeared to be his alignment. He was the innkeeper at the most respected inn in a very dangerous city. He had one value in all he did: to run the best and safest inn in town. If that meant giving free food to adventurers down on their luck, he would do it. If it meant hiring an assassin to retrieve a kidnapped guest, the fate of the kidnapper would not be pretty. He cared nothing for law or chaos, good or evil; he only cared that the guests in his care were safe and comfortable, by whatever means he had at his disposal.
This is distinct from the oblivious neutral. This character takes the position that the values touted by others do not exist; that is, to be neutral on the moral axis is to hold that there is no good, no evil. To act in your own self-interest is to make the world better, and so to benefit others; to act in the benefit of others is to make the world better, and so benefit yourself. Good and evil, as argued by those who hold these views, are so much sophistry.
My chaotic neutral attorney was such a character. He believed in freedom. He believed that people in that city had the right to pursue whatever lives they chose, and that as long as they weren’t preventing others from exercising similar rights, no one should stop them from doing what they chose. Arguments about whether their actions were good or evil were, from his perspective, efforts to evade the only issues that mattered: whose freedoms were being impinged, and how could that be corrected?
It is harder for me to imagine a character who holds an oblivious neutrality on both axes. To fail to recognize anything as good, or evil, or lawful, or chaotic; to see no value or meaning to any of these; strikes me as requiring a mindlessness suited only to animals. Yet it is in animals that we find this sort of oblivious neutrality. They do not understand the values we hold. Herd animals in particular act in ways that mix selfish self-preservation with beneficent protection of the herd, shifting between the importance of the group and the importance of the individual without any recognition of the difference. They have no sense of this at all.
More significantly, it is quite possible for someone to be pragmatic or oblivious on one axis, and druidic on the other. Unlike the pragmatic and oblivious neutrals, the druidic neutral values neutrality as a thing in itself. He can therefore pragmatically use neutrality in one dimension as a means of pursuing neutrality on the other. To understand this, though, we must understand druidic neutrality.
The druid believes that there must be balance in all things. He believes that every person must do some good and some evil, every place must mix law with chaos. It would seem that most characters do this. The noblest saint does not starve himself; the wickedest villain finds it necessary to be nice to someone. We saw how societies and individuals were so dependent upon each other that a thorough belief in the primacy of one at times demands support for the other. But the druidic neutral goes beyond that. It is not to say that sometimes the needs of individuals are best promoted by building society; it is saying that at times the needs of society are more important than those of individuals, even if it crushes those individuals. It is to say that stripping some individuals of all their rights so that there will be slave labor to work in the fields is a good thing, and at once to say that conscripting serfs for the armies is an unjust imposition on their freedoms, despite these being two applications of the same concept. It is to say that no value can consistently bring the right answer, and that the right answers are only achieved by constantly changing the values on which the decisions are made, sometimes favoring society and sometimes individuals, sometimes urging charity and sometimes selfishness.
This is why such druidic neutrality is compatible with pragmatic and oblivious counterparts. A character could regard law and chaos mere tools to be used to maintain the balance between good and evil; he could regard good and evil as distractions raised to take the focus off the important balance between law and chaos. It is not the beliefs of the druids, but it is neutral in both dimensions.
It is also why druidic neutrality is so hard in play. How do you maintain the balance? How do you decide when law and when chaos, when good and when evil? If you pass through a leper colony healing the sick, are you then obliged to flame strike a playground? The two common approaches to druidic neutrality have been the extremist and the minimalist. The extremist does great good and great evil, supports oppression one moment and anarchy the next. The minimalist believes that small forces are easier to balance than large, and so opposes any great good or great evil, any strong society or fierce individualism, preferring to have everything stay near the middle ground. The extremist comes across as insane, an erratic man with split personality who will give you bread and gold one day and kill you the next. The minimalist comes across as bland, unwilling to do anything that expresses commitment one way or the other, truly seeking moderation in all things. It is very difficult to play with any range that remains sane.
There is a solution to this, a simpler approach to druidic neutrality, which avoids the erratic extremes while maintaining a strong sense of value. The cross-principled neutral achieves balance through strongly held beliefs that are not, from the perspective of the other alignments, consistent. Such a character compiles a list of key beliefs, and attempts to follow them as well as he is able. Such a list might say that the king must always be obeyed, that slavery must always be opposed, that the sick should be healed at no charge, and that enemies should be tortured into giving information. For each principle of law there is a corresponding principle of freedom, for each good there is an evil–not in direct conflict, but of similar magnitude, and capable of coming into conflict in the right situation. Such a character now has strong beliefs, and can act boldly to defend them, yet finds himself sometimes friend and sometimes enemy of each of the other alignments. He achieves true neutrality in the druidic way, through balance; he achieves balance not by random acts nor by removing all the weights from the scale, but by placing heavy weights on each arm thereof.
Aristotle counseled moderation in all things. In some ways, neutrality would seem to do the same; yet it can be the most immoderate alignment through the very act of seeking moderation, meeting extremes with extremes, even within the same act.
Thus neutrality proves to be the richest and most diverse of the core alignments, having the greatest variation within itself, and some of the most interesting possibilities for character development in play.
There was once a druid character in one of my games. He was a misfit in a party comprised mostly of goods, rarely chaotic. On one occasion, however, the party turned to him for a task for which they considered him particularly suited. In an outpost on the edge of the civilized world, the head of the local government had been poisoned; the party had taken charge, identified the villain, held a fair trial, and sentenced him to be executed. The druid was to be the executioner.
The villain was bound, his head placed on a block, and the druid approached with his scimitar drawn. Reaching the block, however, to the surprise of everyone, he sheathed it. Instead he pulled his staff of withering, and struck the villain on the head with this. It was a dreadful execution, but a just one. The player whose cavalier had exercised the authority in these proceedings commented that this was the perfect neutral act, simultaneously lawful, chaotic, good, and evil, and a wonderful example of balance in action.
I can see it; I can’t explain it, but there it is. For that moment, the character had achieved balance. True neutrality was served.
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.
