Honestly, treating ‘Evil’ as just self-interested to the point of being willing to place your own desires above the wellbeing of others is actually one of my favourite takes on it, because
A) It makes it legitimately challenging but also very rewarding to be Good (I mean, what NPC isn’t going to like someone that actually successfully respects their wishes and needs when helping them?)
B) It opens up Evil as a legitimate option for party members that isn’t an instant dealbreaker
C) It allows you to run creatures meant to be ‘inherently evil’ (devils and chromatic dragons in particular) as assholes but not completely unthinking and unreasonable, which makes them a LOT scarier- these are intelligent creatures that should be just as witty and dangerous to hold a conversation with as they are to fight. A dragon that’s undeniably a selfish bastard but can make compelling cases to try and out-RP the players and get them to fall into traps or hesitate to fight them, or a Devil that knows just how to play the role of a corruptor, someone who tempts the party and plays to win the big game.
Yeah. Unpopular opinion, I know, but I really like alignment. It’s pretty easy to say “puts self above others” = evil and “puts others before self” = good.
My quick version of law v chaos is “puts societal structure above individual freedom” = law and “puts individual freedom above societal structure”.
Feels like a framework closer to how people actually behave and doesn’t invite in-party conflict.
Yeah I generally run any non-neutral alignment as “Willing to go out of your way to perform acts of [help/harm], with the alignment being determined by why you did it and whether you feel satisfied by the outcome, and you intentionally do those acts in a [principled/unpredictable] manner.”
As a result, most creatures are generally neutral - They may lean in one direction or the other, but a paladin’s divine sense will only reveal evil if someone would actively make choices to harm others, feeling no remorse. Any good deeds are an extension of selfishness, done for the purpose of some kind of gain (lawful: gain is calculated or for an existing purpose, chaotic: gain is for whatever they wanted at the time)
A good alignment for a paladin sense means you’re willing to make active choices to sacrifice things important to you (or perhaps for your survival) for the purpose of helping others. That can be as simple as giving up something you wanted or as heavy as charging into a burning building to rescue the occupants. (Lawful: does it because it’s the right thing to do, chaotic: does it because it felt right at the time)
I disagree with that interpretation. Evil shouldn’t be going out of your way to cause harm, it should be willingly causing harm to get your way. The harm is the method, not the goal.
Like, a good person driving down the road will swerve and crash their car to avoid hitting a dog. A neutral person would stop the car and see if they can move the dog, or at least drive around it. An evil person wouldn’t even slow down. Why should they have to be a minute late because some idiot dog decided to stand in the wrong place?
Meanwhile, if the evil person swerved and crashed their car to hit a dog who wasn’t even on the road, their car would be wrecked and their journey would be totally ruined. They’d be just as foolish as the good person. If you’re going to have your actions bound by the same restrictive moral guidelines as good people in a new coat of paint, you might as well be good.
So evil civilizations would suddenly become good? Upholding evil laws and customs isn’t necessarily selfish but it is perfectly evil in my book.
I prefer having actual evil in the game. Selfishness is neutral in my mind because you’re neither doing good nor evil for the sake of it.
no extra steps, that’s exactly what chaotic evil is
Except she follows the law, she just finds loopholes that you could throw a nuke through. She announced her attack on the factory, and didn’t attack the town. She also wrote a dissertation on how to shell a town legally.
I’d say lawful evil, trending towards neutral evil
I’d figure Chaotic neutral because to be evil you have to actively do things with malice. If it’s for personal gain according to their personal morality, it’s neutral because they could fall in line with the law by coincidence.
Doing evil because it’s fun and doing evil because it’s profitable are both evil. An evil alignment doesn’t require you to relish the screams of your victims - you just have to decide “those lives are not as important as what I want.”
If your personal morality allows you to do anything, as long as you profit from it in some way, you don‘t have any morality at all. You‘re evil.
Nah. Evil is where the harm your actions do to other people doesn’t stop you from doing it. Neutral is where you wouldn’t put yourself especially at risk or especially out of your way to help others, but you wouldn’t hurt them either, even if it benefited you. Obviously there’s a spectrum there, most neutral people would do harm to others if they had a gun to their head. Enjoying the harm you do unto others is sadism, which is separate from alignment. A good or neutral person can be a sadist, but their morality will prevent them from hurting others even if they enjoy it. In short, sadism provides a motive (of which there are many others), alignment provides the restriction or lack thereof.
Tl;dr if order a village slaughtered to take all their stuff, I don’t care how dispassionate or purely self-interested you are, you’re evil. If you murder people because you’re paid to, and don’t much care about the details, you’re evil.
No. Their behavior is self interested. That’s Evil. Didn’t matter how they envision it or whether they have a personal code. If their personal code places the needs of others and the general welfare in a place of high importance then they are Good. Chaotic - Lawful merely describes the methods they’re willing to pursue to achieve those goals.
Following “the law” doesn’t make you lawful. Robin Hood is clearly very lawful good, he has a strict moral code he follows, and that happens to involve breaking laws he considers evil. If you follow laws to get your way but don’t really care about the spirit of them then I think that makes you pretty chaotic.
Isn’t acting purely in self interest the general definition of chaotic neutral?
If while acting in your own self-interest you knowingly, through action or inaction, allow others to come to harm, even indirectly, that is evil. In the same way that a character knowingly doing something that benefits others would arguably make them good. A chaotic neutral person may act on a whim or in self-interest the majority of the time, but I doubt they’d let their actions cause actual harm to others.
But trying to pigeonhole human behavior into a rigid matrix of alignments is inherently flawed, people are much more complex than that. Fortunately, DND allows the DM free reign to define that or allow it to be a grey area - in reality, “alignment” will always be fluid.
I think this is a little over-broad. As written, the only way to be good is to stop all evil everywhere. Or am I missing something?
No, it still requires something the person does or doesn’t do (within reason) to influence or allow the evil act. If you see someone being mugged and you ignore it and keep walking when you have the power to help, even if just calling the police and walking away, then yes, that inaction makes you a bad person, IMO. But if a bad guy starts a war on the other side of the planet, you’re not evil if you don’t enlist and go fight the evil regime.
But like I said, it’s all a grey area, there is no black and white good and evil in reality. It’s rarely as simple as just “this is good, and this is evil” in real life.
If while acting in your own self-interest you knowingly, through action or inaction, allow others to come to harm, even indirectly, that is evil.
I think most Americans buy products made via unethical labor practices, and which damage the environment, harming everyone.
Are you really making the argument that the vast majority of Americans are evil?
By that description, the vast majority of people are evil. Well, both evil and good, since most people at least occasionally do things that aren’t in their self-interest to help others. But primarily evil, thanks to the inaction clause on the evil side and nothing comparable on the good side.
They’re also more evil the more educated they are, since they’re more aware of ways that people are suffering harm that they could potentially abate.
For example, if you are not homeless and you are aware that some people are homeless and a storm is coming, if you don’t help them all find shelter - to the extent of bringing them into your own home even if it means you end up not having a place to sleep - by your definition, you’re evil.
I’m not a fan of that definition, either for D&D or anything else, but if it works for your table, great!
An “evil” act does not make a person evil necessarily. We all do bad shit sometimes. My point was it’s a grey area that can’t be defined with 9 alignments outside of the structure of a game, but knowingly allowing your actions to cause harm to others is an evil act.
That being said, the idea of good and evil is entirely the result of fiction. I don’t believe there’s a black and white “good and evil” in reality. Human actions and motivations can’t be defined so broadly IMO.
No. Neutral only cares about the cosmic or universal good. The welfare of others or ones self doesn’t factor into it. Many druids are Neutral because the balance of nature (the natural order) is the motivation behind their actions.
Neutral druids don’t care about the welfare of others? Not even the other druids in their circle?
I prefer to think of good vs evil as altrusim vs egoism. LG is “the laws should protect everyone” and LE is “the laws should protect me”. CG is “everyone should be free to live as they please” and CE is “I should be free to live as I please”. Acting in pure self-interest with no regard for ideals would be CE, or maybe NE depending on how it’s done.
I disagree. Lawful or Chaotic describes ones adherence to rules; either those of society or their own moral code. Chaotic would describe one who does not adhere to any rules or guidelines; nothing is off limits except that which would violate their alignment on the Good-Evil axis. Neutral would mean that one would bend those rules to achieve a particular outcome. Lawful is going to stick to the book; they’re very conservative.
Yeah, at best it’s chaotic neutral. It’s not evil. Evil is a desire to harm others. Self interest isn’t evil, just not good. I would say true neutral because it’s not acting in a desire to rebel against laws either, but I could see an argument for chaotic neutral.
For reference for people familiar with BG3, the dead three are evil gods. They actively want to cause harm/death. Evil isn’t just someone who doesn’t care. Evil is someone who cares and wants to harm.
Evil isn’t the desire to harm others. Devils don’t desire to claim people’s souls for the lulz, they do it for power. Everything they do is to gain power, for their own benefit. They don’t care if the souls will become lemures or a snack, they just try to convince people and scheme for their own benefit anyway.
Demons are way more brutal, they don’t really gain pleasure from pain per-se, they also want power, but their approach is way more direct. If they can gain power by killing all those people and bathing in their blood, thay will forcefully do it, not by deceiving the human through a shitty contract, but by forcing their power.
Devils are LE, demons are CE. All in all, evil is the disregard of moral consequences when finding ways to benefit yourself.
Deceiving someone to sign a shitty contract so they now must slave away for you? LE.
Kidnapping someone and forcing them to do stuff to your benefit? CE.
Reaching a fair accord so that you allow people in need to work for you for a fair price, where both parties give a bit so no one is really getting taken advantage off? Either LG or LN depending on the context.
Offering to kill the bad monster that is terrorising the town for free, and disregarding the lucrative offers from it because it’s the right thing to do? Any good alignment.
Any of those people could have desires of harm, it’s how they channel their wants that puts them in different places in the alignment chart.
Not all evil is just about personal gain. That’s way oversimplified. Sure, some is and that can be part of it, but sometimes it isn’t.
Bhaal is the lord of murder, and not usually doing it to gain anything. “Bhaal only lived to hunt and kill, the presence of the living instilling in him an overpowering desire for death and destruction. He was at all times a cruel, violent and hateful being, though his behavior could vary from cold and calculating ruthlessness to a savage thirst for blood.”
Evil is basically desire to do harm or to have power over others (which I’d argue is the same thing). Tyranny is evil because it removes others ability to do what they want, which is harmful. It’s about a desire. A desire to have power over someone, or to harm someone, or to kill someone, etc. Gaining power over someone isn’t the disregard for consequences, it is regarding them and choosing tyranny.
However, good actions also often do this. You kill bad people, imprison criminals, etc. It’s good because you were trying to help/protect someone. Not good would be anything else, which both neutral and evil have to fit in there somewhere. Neutral must be without regard, and evil must be with regard and intent to do the opposite. If not, what is neutral or evil if it’s not those?
This is the classic theological definition of evil. Evil isn’t the anti-good, it’s the absence of good. Good is typically regarded as some kind of selflessness or care for other, so evil is basically selfishness. There’s nuance, but I wanted to support the challenge to dualistic world view.
A “theological” definition doesn’t really work in a world where there are actual gods and some of them actively want to cause suffering. The theology of D&D (and most other fantasy settings) is not the theology of Earth Christianity of the 21st century.
Of course. But at the same time alignment is under the domain of gods and it’s part of the cosmological structure itself. I wouldn’t think one can simply declare to be outside the purview of morality.
Of course it isn’t out of the purview of morality. It is morality. Alignment is just a simplified way of stating the morals and ethics of a character without going into detail. I’m just saying the theology we have in our world is not the theology of D&D. Evil is not necessarily describing the same thing it may in our world.
No idea who the char is here, but self interest with no regards to morality sounds more chaotic neutral than CE to me.
It’s chaotic evil. But many make the same mistake you do. Evil is not defined by cruelty.
Evil in the context of modern d&d is selfishness, putting your own interests above others
If you’re neutral, that means that you observe tenets that mitigate all benefit to others and harm to others from your actions. To act selfishly without thought of morality will inevitably lead someone down a road of evil. No one ever stays neutral or good if they’re acting wantonly selfish.
