Unless you are someone who truly knows all the weak spots of your target (i.e. you are assassin/rogue like), then a dagger in your hands is more to inflict a slow and painful death, and hence by your reasoning torture. If you want someone dead, then you should really only use a "real" weapon. Staffs? Definitely falling into the same category (slowly crushing every bone in your opponents body?). And because of this light definition of torture, you have really dropped a lot of people into the category of evil (torture is with no doubt an evil act).
The dark elf was obviously not "torturing" anyone. She was after killing one of them for the disobidience. As simple as that.
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If one is to warrant good and evil points, then let it at least be for OPENLY evil and good acts.
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Um... no?
That's as though saying "a PC should never die unless the player wants the PC to die" or "a quest should never fail unless the participants actively request that the quest should fail".
Open acts are okay, but they shouldn't be the sole factor to define a character's alignment, if not for the fact that it would be far too "cheap", then for the fact that many of the LE characters would be auto-turned into good ones. The whole point of many shady characters is that they do not OPENLY perform evil acts.
I see that you are still of the thinking that "if you are not good, then you are evil". But as I said earlier, that's not the case. Nor is it the case that most characters are good. In fact, the majority of the population is neither good nor evil, but rather
neutral. Strong signs of self preservation... oh... isn't that one of those clear signs of being of a neutral alignment? Or perhaps even an evil one?
General tendencies for a neutral character seem to be leaning towards good, when it is not a too much danger to be so. Seeing someone trip on the street? Sure, why not give them a hand to come back up? Perhaps someone else in the future would do just the same if the helper was the one tripping? That is how a good society looks like, but a good society does not mean that its inhabitants are an exclusive bunch of a good aligned flower-lovers.
Someone smacks you on the cheek and you walk forth to embrace them? The act of "showing compassion to your enemies"? That's what I would consider an undisputable act of good... stupid and crazy, certainily. But good nonless. Likely not anything that warrants a shift, but then, the situation is so trivial so whatever you do (unless outright killing the offender) would not really warrant shifts of any kind.
The lone act of "defending those you love"? Good action? Erh... no? Defending those that you care about is something that happens all across all the alignments and hence the act itself is really an alignment-free action (note: neutral != alignment-free).
Circumstances is of course what's ultimately deciding for which side has the heavier weight. No risk and you, as a good character, performs some small act of good? That's expected of you. Huge risk and you as a good character performs some act of good? That might even be justifeable to warrant a good point award.
A thief with a knife is rushing towards your family and you happen to have a gun in your hand? That sounds like a circumstance that would not really change your alignment.
A thief with a gun is rushing towards your family and you happen to be unarmed? Hmmm... now we are talking... but because it's your family that's threatened, only a minor shift would be in order, I think. Must really have more info before one can decide.
A thief with a gun is rushing towards some strangers and you happen to be unarmed? Aaah... now, that sounds like a heavily unselfish and strongly good act, if you were to intervene.
Dark elven societies are evil-based ones and it was already clearly said outright that going in might change things. In fact, that's likely why there were so many who choosed to stay behind like Grohin; they recognised the "spiritual danger" they would put themselves into.
More than ample of opportunities were given to change the neutral shift towards a "no shift". From what I saw, there was only two reasons for why things happened as they did (or didn't happen):
1. The affected players did not recognise the alignment danger they were in and therefore did nothing to prevent it.
2. The affected players did recognise the alignment danger they were in but choosed to do nothing to prevent it.
3. Either of the above but also added that they perhaps did not think alignment shifts would ever be handed out for these sort of things.
Once again, in the end, it is a judgement call. In this case, it was simply decided that all the events leading up to this and the reactions afterwards did not warrant a dismissal of not handing out a single point of neutral, as watching someone take minutes or even an hour to bleed to death without any sort of reactions, regardless if the victim is a dark elf or not, is just something not in the spirit of being good.
Not much reaction was needed, and neither did the reactions have to be obvious for the bypassers. Angela's actions were more than enough to "deflect" the alignment shift, but ironically, she was not touched by the neutral shift anyway (due to her already neutral alignment on the good/evil axis).
Edit: Oh, and... another extraordinary important aspect. Alignments are not defined by what others think about you, or what you think of yourself. While being an IC matter, alignments are defined in an OOC fashion. No "you are not my friend, and therefore you are evil" or "because I don't know of all the acrocities you have done, you are evil in my eyes".