Lawful Neutral Icky?

[LightlyFrosted]

This is an idea that a friend of mine tossed about. While I would very much like to see it appear in A game, I realize that the likelihood of this is negligible, and therefore it is presented here for your amusement.

What if there were a third pole for alignment? Good and evil, law and chaos, and spiffy and icky? (For want of better terms.)

The idea centers around the concept that good and evil are not ACTUALLY "Spiffy versus icky". Skeletons, are, after all, neutral - they're just kinda creepy. Giant spiders are neutral as well, but they give a lot of people the heebie-jeebies. And spiders, snakes, and a whole bunch of other creatures are most often associated with evil, despite the fact that in many cases, they don't have intelligence scores sufficiently high to make the moral decisions that alignments entail - and are therefore neutral. These would be on the 'icky side' certainly, but they are no more evil than a particularly non-good and non-evil lump of rock.

Good and evil, upon closer inspection, appear to be terms most often used to denote one's selfishness versus one's charity - thus, a good and evil character could both give money to an orphanage, but the good character would more likely be doing it because it was the Right (TM) thing to do, whereas an evil character would more likely be doing it on the grounds that such charitable donations advance one's status in the town. An evil character who does things which could be considered 'good' is not necessarily good - in fact, his motivations may include a plan for a power coup somewhere down the line - but unless he starts grave robbing, consorting with demons, or sending his spider-shock-troop-minions down main street, he still falls in the realm of 'spiffy'.

Similarly, a grave-digger might well be lawful and good - he does his job, and his motives are his own, but may well be benign - but because of his macabre sense of humour, and the way he usually smells of earth and sweat, and dead things... well, good or not, lawful or otherwise, he may fall into the realm of 'icky'. Comic grave-digger or no.

And, of course, much like the other poles of the alignment axis, people aren't RESTRAINED to their spiffy - icky-ness. These are just likely patterns in which they MAY act.

So what's the point? Well, it's somewhat of a reconciliation. It's how a necromancer specialist can be neutral, instead of evil - or, in some games, even good. Come to that, it's that way for evokers and enchanters too - both of those schools of magic are fairly brutal, when you think of it. A chaotic good evoker - just as an example - can still cast fireball and give his opponent third-degree burns all across his/her body, and not even vaguely be considered evil by his comrades - depending on the nature of the foe, of course - but it's certainly an unpleasant act, one might even call 'icky'.

I don't know. I'm rambling on. Any of this stuff making sense?

[lonnarin]

An interesting concept. Social acceptability and adhesion to conformity are indeed as much of an alignment as moral imperatives for following order and chaos. Despite one's demeanor, obedience or intent of benevolence, it is often the ragged one who showers least and picks their nose in public who suffers most the predjudicial oppression of the masses. The spiffs and the icks war eternally in this culture war of hygiene, soap and dirt lobbed in ferver. Indeed there is a class war element there, with the tidy nobles and surly peasants often at complete odds.

Somebody needs to make an Obsessive Compulsive paladin of Toran named Mr. Bubbles, harkened to his quest of protecting the world from uncleanliness. He shall venture forth into the barbarian lands and demand that all nefarious monstrous savages line up for their holy bathing. His arch enemy could be the grimy half-ogre named Sludge.