What would your alignment be? « Gaming Outpost Discussions

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What would your alignment be?

(26 posts) (8 voices)

Started 2 years ago by M. J. Young
Latest reply from WilliamTWodium

Tags:

alignment

M. J. Young
Moderator
I hadn't thought of my alignment quiz for quite a while, but I was reminded of it by the slavery discussion that arose in connection with the thread about characters to whom our characters are attracted. So I took it again, this time (as I have done before) as myself, the guy that I am, who is still pretty close to the guy I play in the online game, I think.

So I'm interested in how anyone else comes out on this. If you, yourself, were a D&D character, what would your alignment be? Read the instructions carefully, whether you take the hand-scored version, the Javascript one, or the German CGI version.

I scored:

alignment is: Neutral Good

With 2 points towards Lawful
and 20 points towards Good

Total Scores
Good 41
Evil 21
Lawful 30
Chaotic 28

If I am remembering and calculating correctly, the minimum score you can get in an area is 14 and the maximum 48, and you can't get the minimum or the maximum in more than one score.

Remember, in brief:
- Good means wanting the greatest benefit for the greatest number;
- Law means viewing society and order as more important than individuals;
- Chaos means viewing individual rights as more important than societal structures; and
- Evil means putting yourself above everyone else.
In that sense, it is not a judgment. Being "evil" does not mean you are a bad person. As one of my best articles put it, Adam Smith's economic philosophy known as Capitalism is the definitive concept of evil: everyone really is pursuing his own individual selfish interest, and this results in the best possible world for everyone.

--M. J. Young
Thu Jan 21 2010 11:58 pm #
johnosevens
Member

Harry's alignment is: Chaotic Neutral

With 12 points towards Chaotic
and 6 points towards Good

Total Scores
Good 32
Evil 26
Lawful 25
Chaotic 37

... Wow. Considering I generally think of myself as Lawful Evil, I'm shocked by this on so many levels.

Fri Jan 22 2010 12:31 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

John's alignment is: Chaotic Evil

With 9 points towards Chaotic
and 17 points towards Evil

Total Scores
Good 22
Evil 39
Lawful 25
Chaotic 34

Chaos, anarchy, confusion? My work here is done.

Fri Jan 22 2010 12:43 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Harry--you don't see yourself running around performing random kindnesses and acts of senseless beauty?

Well, you're not listed as chaotic good, despite the tendency indicated, but I think well of you on that count.

John--yeah, I would have loved to see your individual answers; I wonder if they would have surprised me.

--M. J. Young

Fri Jan 22 2010 1:35 am #
Brock
Member

You made that quiz? I've used it before, my friend CJ handed it to me once. Never knew where he got it.

As expected, I am true neutral. 6 points towards Chaotic (more than expected), 2 towards evil.

Fri Jan 22 2010 2:15 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

# Chaos means viewing individual rights as more important than societal structures; and
# Evil means putting yourself above everyone else.

Was it necessary to use the words "Chaotic" and "Evil"? That makes me feel like a homicidal madman. Couldn't you have said "Free thinking" and "Self-serving"? Saying I'm chaotic and evil is mean. Saying I'm a self-serving free thinker is more on point, and not nearly as mean.

Fri Jan 22 2010 3:59 am #
johnosevens
Member

A1Nut - Like I said, I identify as 'evil' too. Like MJ said, it doesn't mean you're a bad person.

Fri Jan 22 2010 5:22 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

I know, it's semantics. Still though, I think different and better terminology could have been used, that's all.

(Doing Therapy)

Fri Jan 22 2010 5:27 am #
Brock
Member

Not for that. It's purpose is to give a rough idea of a player character's alignment at a glance. It uses the alignments detailed in their rulebooks.

I know John is chaotic, but I thought he was more neutral with evil leanings than evil. I'm sure he didn't say he'd kill all his party members and take all the loot :P

Breakdown-this is from half remembered passages in some D and D books, with my own thoughts thrown in-

Lawful good-"Crusader"-champions of justice, paragons. They seek what is right in all things, both on an individual and a societal level. They are determinedly good.

Lawful neutral-"Judge"-someone who has no particular inclination towards good or evil, but will not abide the law of the realm being compromised. Order in all things, everything has it's place. Refuses to be swayed from the order they serve, be it a personal code, a government, whatever.

Lawful evil-"Dominator""Exploiter"-They seek personal betterment by using order, the system, to their own advantage. A good example is Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. His schemes got him appointed the Emperor and given supreme power, all thanks to 'emergency wartime powers'.

Neutral Good-"Benefactor"-Does the best that a good person can do. Charitable people with no particular inclination towards order or chaos. A priest that spends his days healing the sick simply because they need it is a good example.

Neutral-"Undecided""True Neutral"-several types-confused people. People with a marked lack of conviction one way or another on either scale. and those who are dedicated to neutrality itself on a philosophical level.

Neutral evil-"Malefactor"-Completely out for themselves. Holds no love of order, but neither do they shun it. They will do whatever is necessary for their own advancement. This does not mean they cannot form friendships or attachments, it just means they always look out for themselves first.

Chaotic Good-"Rebel"-Acts as their conscience directs them with little regard for the expectations of others. Does as goodness directs, but has little regard for law. Classic example is Robin Hood.

Chaotic neutral-"Free Spirit"-Individualists to the core. Avoids authority, challenges traditions, values their own liberty but does not seek to defend the liberty of others (that would be Good). Often unpredictable, sometimes dangerously so. The insane are usually of this alignment, or of chaotic evil.

Chaotic Evil-"Destroyer"-A chaotic evil person does whatever greed, or lust, or hatred drives him to do. Entirely unpredictable, violent, brutal. True villains. They only care about themselves.

A person often only matches an alignment to a 'T' if they scored every point they could towards it on both scales. For example, John's score shows he he is fairly chaotic and pretty evil. Looking at just that, one could say he greatly cares about himself, perhaps those close to him too, but not much about other people beyond that (evil), and has a problem with authority, being a strong individualist (chaotic). That matches the alignment without being insane (which is how the books portray that alignment). Whether or not it is accurate is subject to argument, of course. One example of such a person might prefer to live in tight-knit family groups with little contact from outsiders other than to gain something, such as by bartering. They might also be slow to trust-ever.

Fri Jan 22 2010 8:40 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

I know John is chaotic, but I thought he was more neutral with evil leanings than evil. I'm sure he didn't say he'd kill all his party members and take all the loot :P

You'll never know (Maniacal Laughter)

A person often only matches an alignment to a 'T' if they scored every point they could towards it on both scales. For example, John's score shows he he is fairly chaotic and pretty evil. Looking at just that, one could say he greatly cares about himself, perhaps those close to him too, but not much about other people beyond that (evil), and has a problem with authority, being a strong individualist (chaotic).

I'd say that's pretty accurate. If we lived in another time, I'd probably be a hermit out staking a gold claim in the middle of nowhere for years, and be perfectly happy. I wouldn't help the princesses (complete strangers) but I am currently risking life and limb for Lauren Hastings. (not a complete stranger) People close to me, yeah. Everybody else? Not really.

(Doing Therapy)

Fri Jan 22 2010 8:49 am #
Brock
Member

I myself follow a philosophy of personal development, mostly mental and spiritual. I have little time for the concerns of order and chaos, good and evil. I just do what I think prudent. Which is a chaotic attitude, actually. hence my leaning towards it.

Fri Jan 22 2010 9:08 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Was it necessary to use the words "Chaotic" and "Evil"? That makes me feel like a homicidal madman. Couldn't you have said "Free thinking" and "Self-serving"? Saying I'm chaotic and evil is mean. Saying I'm a self-serving free thinker is more on point, and not nearly as mean.

Yes, Brock, I wrote it; it, and the page on alignment on my OAD&D Character Creation site were the only to D&D related pages Gary Gygax linked from his Lejendary Journeys-era web site.

However, John, I did not choose the terms. "Lawful" and "Chaotic" were chosen by Gary (Gygax) and Dave Arneson in creating the Original Dungeons & Dragons game, and "Good" and "Evil" were added by Gary in creating original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The quiz is specific to that game system's definitions of those terms.

Brock, I've seen those analogies before, and although they're helpful I think they're flaws. I remember having a discussion with E. R. Jones in which I maintained that many forms of insanity are far more lawful most lawful characters can be--look at Adrian Monk's OCD and tell me that there's something chaotic about the structures imposed upon him by his condition. There are also conditions in which a person is supremely unaware of his own personhood in the midst of the world, which eliminates the possibility that such a person could be selfish.

I devised the quiz largely because players seemed to have very wrong ideas concerning what their alignments really met, and I wanted to get everyone on the same page. I think it's been helpful for a lot of people beyond my gaming group, and again, I just find it incredibly fun to take both in character and as myself.

Of course, I'm also the guy who got a kick out of taking the Myers-Briggs personality profiles as characters I'd created in my novels. It was really interesting to note where they were similar and where they were different, both from each other and from me.

--M. J. Young

Sat Jan 23 2010 3:33 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

look at Adrian Monk's OCD and tell me that there's something chaotic about the structures imposed upon him by his condition.

I hated that show, but speaking as someone with an OCD, I can say it was an accurate portrayal of one.

Sat Jan 23 2010 4:00 am #
Nikolaj
Member

Nikolaj's alignment is: Good

With 0 points towards Neutral
and 24 points towards Good

Total Scores
Good 42
Evil 18
Lawful 30
Chaotic 30

Heh, yesterday, when I tried it, I had one point towards neutral. I always expected me to be firmly on the lawful side though. It seems I am more of a free spirit then I thought. Thank you art school. The good doesn't surprise me. :)

Sat Jan 23 2010 11:28 am #
WilliamTWodium
Member

Pope William T Wodium's alignment is: Neutral Good

With 4 points towards Chaotic
and 20 points towards Good

Total Scores
Good 41
Evil 21
Lawful 27
Chaotic 31

Several of my specific answers have changed since I first started using this quiz almost a decade ago, but I'm still* Neutral Good.

Still, I disagree with using the results of this quiz to predict a mundane person's alignment withing the context of the D&D universes. Responses to thought-provoking questions are all well and good, but there comes a point where one's actions take over in the process of determining one's character. If I were to step through a wardrobe into Greyhawk, I do not believe that I am so benevolent that I could withstand a Holy Word unscathed. Alignments like Good and Evil are the province of heroes and rogues, people who have demonstrated their character through deeds. The vast majority, I think, should be considered neutral until proven otherwise.

_____
* I think?

Sat Jan 23 2010 11:53 pm #
M. J. Young
Moderator
I think that cuts both ways, Scott.

I often say (in other contexts) "Theology is everything." What I mean by that is that what you actually fundamentally believe will ultimately control what you really do. If your actions are inconsistent with your stated beliefs, then there is a weakness in your beliefs--either you don't really believe what you think you believe, or you have doubts sufficient to check your actions.

For some reason Thomas Jefferson comes to mind, a man who wrote that all men are created equal and yet who kept slaves. We must ask where the disconnect is. Possibilities include:
- Jefferson did not believe that blacks were human--a common enough belief in his age, in which Africans were thought to be an advanced animal that could be taught to act appropriately in a human environment.
- Jefferson did not believe that equality necessarily meant that the economic institution of slavery was precluded. After all, we who are still in the umbra of his ideas do not believe that our employers or our governors are greater than us, only that they have positions of authority within the structure of society which are necessary for society to function. He might have thought that his slaves were created equal to himself, but that their relative positions in society made him the master.
- Jefferson did not really believe that "all" men were created equal, but felt that this was a dramatic way of stating that the king and the lords in England were not masters over the propertied gentlemen of colonies. What he really believed was that he and his peers were equal to the Peers of the Realm, but that all of the upper class men were better than anyone who was not in that group. "All men" to him literally meant "all propertied gentlemen", even if he never allowed himself to recognize that limitation in his own thinking.
- Jefferson's belief that black men were as good as white men was tempered by his belief that he was inadequate to end that tyranny, and that attempting to do so would cost him the greater battle. He thus made the choice, the compromise, the trade-off, to sacrifice the rights of a very substantial number of other men in order to establish the rights of those in his own socio-economic group, knowing that he could not do both and choosing what was the more important to himself. It might be in this connection that he simply believed that the rights of the other group could not be established without first establishing the rights of his own group--a not unreasonable belief, given that Magna Carta established only the rights of the leading noblemen as against King John, yet was the touchstone of American Democracy half a millennium later. Without having power himself, Jefferson could not give power to the slaves; thus he would reasonably have believed that he could not oppose the slavery which he believed was wrong until he opposed the monarchy which he believed was more wrong.
There might be other possibilities, but in each case we have a disconnect between "all men are created equal" and "I am justified in owning slaves". The question is, where does the disconnect lie?

As an example, I as leader of a very unstable character party encountered on the road in wild territory a slaver caravan. I was lawful good, and I recognized immediately that I had a problem. As a lawful character I could not oppose the lawful business of licensed slavers, even though as a good character I had serious concerns about the treatment of the slaves (which did not look terribly good in that group). On the other hand, there were several chaotic good and at least one chaotic neutral characters in my party, who I knew would not tolerate this affront to their beliefs, and my position as leader required that I maintain order, but also that I hold the loyalty of the group by allowing them the freedom to defend their own beliefs.

I wound up stopping the caravan and asking to see their license, which they refused to show, which freed me from my obligation to respect lawfully conducted slave trading and allowed me to support those who opposed the caravan. It was a fascinating social and moral problem that helped everyone in the party clarify their beliefs significantly.

The point of mentioning it here is that the alignment quiz gives you the opportunity to consider what your character would do in those perfect circumstances in which he has the power to make a difference and there are no conflicting interests. In actual play what he does will not always be consistent with these answers, because he does not always have the power, and there are always conflicting values.

--M. J. Young
Mon Jan 25 2010 12:20 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

Jefferson did not believe that blacks were human--a common enough belief in his age, in which Africans were thought to be an advanced animal that could be taught to act appropriately in a human environment.

That explains quite a bit about the slave trade.

Mon Jan 25 2010 1:12 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Indeed it does--and why Orc Rising is so interesting a world.

--M. J. Young

Mon Jan 25 2010 3:42 am #
JohnA1nut
Member

Do you know if the same was thought of the American Indians?

Mon Jan 25 2010 3:48 am #
M. J. Young
Moderator

Of course, part of the question is by whom and when. There was a period in which the native Americans were "the noble savage", a sort of exalted natural man (there were some philosophical notions about the innate goodness of man, particularly connected with The Enlightenment). There were always groups in every race who believed that their own race was the true humanity, better than everyone else. Sometimes (e.g., Hitler) it takes the form of one race being pure and all the others having deteriorated to inferior creatures (or not having risen to the same evolutionary heights). Other times (American slavery) it is the belief that some group is not really human.

Interestingly, the English Evangelist George Whitefield was the first person to preach the Christian gospel to slaves, but he defended slavery slavery in Georgia as an economic necessity, because he believed the system would collapse without the free labor. So for him the blacks really were people, but their position as slaves was their lot in life.

It should also be noted that Europeans and Americans in the main did not hunt slaves in Africa. They bought them from East Africans. This is particularly ironic, because most of the slaves were West Africans (from the area denoted "North Africa" on your Risk board), enslaved by the East Africans and then sold, and most of the cultural trappings that American Blacks are "recovering" are actually East African, including notably the Swahili language. Thus there is this cultural revolt in which American Blacks are rejecting the culture of their ancestral slave owners in favor of that of their ancestral captors. Kwanzaa is an example of this culture confusion, as most of its trappings are East African.

Which has nothing to do with your American Indian question, so I probably should have said "I don't know" and left it at that.

M. J. Young

Tue Jan 26 2010 7:11 am #
Nikolaj
Member

Interestingly, the English Evangelist George Whitefield was the first person to preach the Christian gospel to slaves, but he defended slavery slavery in Georgia as an economic necessity, because he believed the system would collapse without the free labor. So for him the blacks really were people, but their position as slaves was their lot in life.

In contrast to one of my personal hero's; William Wilberforce. Known mainly (I think), from the recent film entitled "Amazing Grace". (Which is, together with "The Mission", my favorite 'christian movie'.)

Tue Jan 26 2010 9:47 pm #
kyler
Member

Well, unlike many of us, I'd say that Kyler and I have changed significantly since we parted ways. I know how he thinks better than anyone, though, so if you really wanted to put it into words,

Kyler's alignment is: Chaotic Evil

With 20 points towards Chaotic
and 12 points towards Evil

Total Scores
Good 20
Evil 32
Lawful 24
Chaotic 44

Evil is just a nice way of saying that indigs don't really matter because they'll be gone soon.

Trying to remember how many times I've versed out. Electric, magic fire, spider venom, sucked out of a plane which I had no choice but to go on (thank you, Her Majesty's Gov't), volcanic eruption, shot to death by samurai police, and shot to death by American police. 3/7 were caused directly or indirectly by authority figures. Structured society tries to kill me. Chaotic by far, not for other people but for my own survival from experience.

So chaotic evil was really the only choice.

Whether or not he's out of touch... is really a debate for a different board.

Ky

Mon Feb 1 2010 3:30 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Hey Kyler, read through the thread marked Daywalkers. I'd love to have your input on that. It's a zombie apocalypse world that I came up with whilst having a psychotic episode.

Mon Feb 1 2010 10:00 pm #
JohnA1nut
Member

Jefferson did not believe that blacks were human--a common enough belief in his age, in which Africans were thought to be an advanced animal that could be taught to act appropriately in a human environment.

This has been stuck in my head for a while. It is rumored that Thomas Jefferson had a long-standing affair with one of his slaves. I think we all know that the slaves weren't just kept for working in the fields. Wouldn't that sort of mean that Thomas Jefferson and anyone else who held that belief was, in a way committing bestiality? I thought "civilized" men didn't do that, either.

Thu Mar 11 2010 4:20 am #
Tadeusz
Member

I wrote a darkly comic novel based upon Darwinian thought. The Orientals had been exterminated. Blacks were semi-intelligent apes that were being hunted down for bounty and fun. American Indians were on reservations and were slightly better than blacks because they had the evolutionary pressure of being closer to the the Master Race.

Hitler was still alive at 120 years old or something.

It was an alternate reality story.

You can look it up on Lulu.com if you like.

Thu Mar 11 2010 4:17 pm #
WilliamTWodium
Member

Tad, I really wish you wouldn't attach Darwin's name to that . . .

*struggles to find something polite, fails*

. . . sort of thing.

Thu Mar 11 2010 6:26 pm #

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