LogFAQs > #896549472

(cont)

When you're looking at the "moral" axis (Good/Evil), intent is literally all that matters. Why you are doing something matters far more than what you're actually doing. If you commit an "evil" act but with "good" intentions, you're Good. Conversely, you can be the most charitable and heroic motherfucker on the planet, but if your motives are entirely sinister, you're "Evil". The easiest way of breaking it down is to generally associate "Good" with "selfless", "Neutral" with "selfish", and "Evil" with "sadistic" - if a PC hears about a kidnapped maiden being held for ransom, the Good character will go out of their way to rescue her because it's the right thing to do, the Neutral character might rescue her if they thought the odds were in their favor and they could parley it into a reward, and the Evil character might rescue her with the intent to ransom her off himself. Or just because he gets off on killing, and likes the idea of being able to kill a bunch of bandit kidnappers without having to fear legal repercussions afterward.

With the "ethical" axis (Law/Chaos), intent doesn't really matter as much as methodology. Yes, that can map to the more common "I WILL UPHOLD THE LAW"/"SCREW THE MAN, I DO WHAT I WANT!" attitudes that stereotypical players may simplistically stick to, but ultimately, it's more a question of whether or not you're willing to "play by the rules" or "do your own thing". A Lawful character in a kingdom with an oppressive tyrant will try to rally the people to fight back (or somehow legally remove the tyrant from power), while the Chaotic character will sneak into his bedroom at night and stab him in the neck. In that sense, Law and Chaos map much better to a moral system like Mass Effect's Paragon/Renegade far better than Good/Evil does.

Another way to break it down might be, the "moral" axis asks whether or not you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, while the "ethical" axis asks whether you're doing that thing the right way or the easy way.



shadowsword87 posted...

You don't know the correct answer, and nobody else really does. Everyone just keeps arguing point after point until nobody cares.

To be fair, you'd absolutely know the answer in an RPG where every person is a fictional construct being puppeted by omniscient overlords. It's really only real life where it becomes troublesome to map Alignment to personality, but that's fine because Alignment was never meant for real life anyway, in the same way that the Zodiac and Astrology really shouldn't be used as a means of determining a person's station in life (and also why the pseudoscientific MyersBriggs test sucks so very, very hard).

But much like when people would spam their Livejournal with MyersBriggs test results or casually talk about their birth sign, people dicking around on the Internet and taking "Alignment quizzes" or trying to playfully figure out what Alignment Batman is literally all of them is mostly just harmless fun for people with too much time on their hands who've gotten sick of watching cat videos.

(And as I've said in the past, something like 90% of people in real life would just be True Neutral anyway, since that's basically the default point in the spectrum most normal people would fall into. The more extreme ends of the Alignment spectrum are more the purview of the truly exceptional individuals and who stand out simply BECAUSE they're not common. They're the saints and sinners of their given setting, the Mother Theresas and the Stalins, the patriots and the terrorists, etc. As much as would-be Internet Iconoclasts love to paint themselves as Chaotic Good, they're just as Neutral as the rest of us).


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