D&D 3.x Alignment 101, Part I

OK, so I want to write a reasonably short post today. One thing that I have felt like writing about for a while is D&D 3.x alignments. It used to seem to me that every time you frequented a D&D message board, you got the same tired arguments about alignments, many of them based on erroneous understanding of the rules or fallacious arguments. (You seem to have less of these arguments nowadays, probably because alignment isn't as relevant in 4.0.) So, here's the first part in a series for better understanding of the 3.x alignment system. Some of these parts will contain opinions, but this part is pretty much direct from the rules. (If someone wants to argue about it, it would be nice if they actually read the rules before they answer. Thanks in advance.)

Neutral ≠ Mix of Good and Evil

I think that the good/evil is the most interesting axis, not least because it is more important to the paladin than the law/chaos axis is. So let's start with a very short look at what good, neutral and evil means, and in particular what neutral doesn't mean. Quoting from the 3.5 PHB (pg.104):

Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships. A neutral person may sacrifice himself to protect his family or even his homeland, but he would not do so for strangers who are not related to him.

Now, you sometimes see people arguing that their characters can do evil acts to their hearts' content, as long as they do an equal amount of good acts, balancing them as neutral. Wrong! This may have been true in earlier editions (and I'm not going to dig out my 2nd Ed. AD&D or 1st Ed. D&D books to verify it) but it definitely is not true in 3.x.

Neutral does not mean a mix of good and evil. Nothing in its description suggests that you can do equal amounts of good and evil acts and come out as neutral; in fact, the description clearly rules it out. Neutral is its own category, something that is neither good nor evil. Think of good as a white sphere, evil as a black sphere and neutral as a gray sphere. You then split the white and black sphere through the centers and glue one white hemisphere to one black hemisphere. Somehow, the Frankensphere looks quite unlike the gray sphere.

		Saves People
		Yes	No
Kills People	Yes	N/A	Evil
	No	Good	Neutral

Look at the table above. (Understand that the term people is oversimplifying things. For this first part, think of people as strangers to which the character has no emotional attachment. I'll get to the great paradox about good characters killing others in a later part.) We see that good strives to save people and avoid killing people. Evil does not care about saving people, and indeed is ready to kill people whenever convenient. Neutral doesn't care about saving people, but does not kill people, either. Saving people and killing people at the same time is, obviously, a contradiction--you can't strive to save someone at the same time you kill them. (This also means that anyone ready to kill people is evil.)

The PHB does mention neutral as being a balanced view for some characters. And that works fine. As you can see in the table above, neutral does share some traits with both good and evil--just like good, it does not want to kill people, and just like evil, it doesn't care to save people. But neutral still can't share those traits that result in a contradiction, and that's why characters that alternate between good and evil just are evil. Lunatic evil maybe, or a calculated evil meant to let them get away with it, but evil none the less.