this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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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.
Well I think you're assessing good and evil based on your own moral compass rather than how RPGs base them on. Someone who is apathetic is neutral because they could go either way, it makes no difference. It's the definition of neutral. Evil is going out of your way to cause harm, Good is going out of your way to help. Why would a neutral person kill a village of people? They'd need a reason. Soldiers have slaughtered towns and villages on orders but each soldier didn't have an active desire to be part of that. They aren't inherently evil, maybe they think their cause is just. They were told to and had no resistance to it. You can do evil acts without being evil.
Neutral is the absence of compulsion either direction. It's killing a guy because they had it coming one day and feeding orphaned children the next. It's a mix of good and evil to where you are conflicted to call them either a hero or a villain. Something from Fallout: New Vegas does a good job of explaining it.
I would argue that for game purposes, having an E on your character sheet means "I like inter-party conflict so much I am willing to instigate it" whereas having an unaccompanied N on your sheet means "I just want to have fun with my party". Tasha is, as far as I know, a team player like 75% of the time, so I would accept her being true neutral as long as she does not inflict her sadism on things that affect the party negatively
I am also perfectly down with having people with a G on their character sheet do horrifying things "for the greater good". They have indicated they want to be a hero by writing that G on their character sheet, so as long as the other people at the table think their actions are heroic then there is no issue.
"Stupid Evil" is not a valid alignment anymore than "Lawful Stupid" Paladins. Decent players can role play a party with both Good and Evil characters in it without it constantly descending into bickering and threats of violence.
I think you are confusing "inter-party conflict" with the players at the table getting mad at each other. For example, last session, my LE artificer and the CG rogue were experiencing some conflict regarding him making a pact with my warlock patron, which in-game devolved into my artificer threatening to kill his adopted son while he threatens to kill me. Out of game, we had a quick conversation that went something like this:
Then we went right back to RPing our characters threatening to stab each other's loved ones. Thats what I mean by inter-party conflict. If you can't be civil at the table, you're either being a bully or you're going to be kicked out of the table.
That all sounds reasonable, but you don't have to have Evil in your alignment for inter-party conflict. Some of the best story telling happens when different characters are trying to do the right thing, but disagree as to what that is.
I think what you are proposing sounds similar to what I said at the end of my first comment.
Example: most people I've talked to about Goblin Slayer peg his alignment as Lawful Good, but I'm fairly certain if you decided to do ethnic cleansing in your game the other players might take issue with that.
I think the strongest counterargument would be something similar to playing as a sort of Monster Rights activist in a more traditional sword & sorcery setting, trying to get kobolds and goblins standing in civilized society so people cant just kill them for fun. You'd be facing a lot of opposition from the world, and your goals likely run perpendicular to those of the other players, but that seems like the same kind of fun as what I am doing in my campaign. However, based on my argument earlier, this would be a Lawful Evil character lmao