You said that this...
...Chaos would be people taking matters into their own hands and taking care of problems without any intervention by any arbiter of due process (in a legal framework or otherwise)....is evil...
ugh... no, that.. that'd be evil.Going by your response, any act of taking matters into one's own hands above and beyond the law without intervention by an arbiter of due process is evil. I find it very difficult to believe that random Frenchmen kept an impartial judicial system in their pocket along with a pilfered Luger, so they are probably going to be evil, as a direct result of your stance.
Reductio ad absurdum is fun.
ugh no, Any act that involves making someone "pay" without any outside weight is evil. It's inherently selfish, AKA evil. no outside weight, meaning it's simply something between you 2, and only for your benefit. A Partisan, is fighting for their homeland, not themself. This does not make them good or neutral mind you, or any other alignment. they can still be lawful evil and be a Partisan, just as much as they can be chaotic good. To be clear, in such cases the occupying force is a threat to the person's ideals, and so actions carried out by a partisan against the occupying force is self defense. Now, if you're the foreign body, then yes, you are in fact being evil, because you're being inherently selfish by imposing your ideals on others, something inherently anti-chaos I might add, prothletising is almost always done by a very structured and hence lawful society.
I do not know what exactly you're talking about(Random frenchman? is impartial judicial system an item?), but I assume you mean the case of say a "wild-west" encounter. Defending yourself is fine, executing someone when you have proper capability to properly deal with them is evil. Reference, if during WW2 a platoon was incapable of taking prisoner's of war with them, it is okay to then execute them.
REMEMBER, legality, is not inherently lawful.
a legal action can be chaotic if it favors the individual. due process does.
I think you might be talkign about a French Partisan? if so clarify this, because as I mentioned earlier, A good aligned individual does not need to follow the rules set out my an evil society, and can oppose them for being evil. however, if they are specifically taking law into their own hands for their own gain, it's simply evil.
@Patrick C - I don't completely disagree with your assessment, but I also don't see why Chaos being basically bad and Law being basically good was a particularly bad system compared to 9 shades of alignment which it seems people can rarely agree on. However, I was mostly just commemorating the influence of the Stormbringer stories since I've been reading them lately.
There is more variation in trying to handle the 9 different alignments instead of basically 2.
Neutral Evil is the most evil, because itsn't polluted by notions of law and chaos. It is literally pure evil.
Neutral Evil is the most evil, because itsn't polluted by notions of law and chaos. It is literally pure evil.
That seems to be a common opinion on here. Do you think neutral good is the most good as well?
Definitely - pure honest to goodness.
Interesting. I think the designers of Pathfinder intended for the three evil alignments to be more or less equally evil. Likewise all lawful alignments equally lawful etc.
Or the daemons find that destroying existence is impossible and that the attempt destroys themselves instead. Regardless how their quest plays out, the result is less evil in existence, not more.
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It's also less of anything. It's the same as a stereotypical supervillain wanting to blow up the world, despite living on it. Except, on a multiverse-wide scale.
Neutral Evil is the most evil, because itsn't polluted by notions of law and chaos. It is literally pure evil.That seems to be a common opinion on here. Do you think neutral good is the most good as well?
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Interesting. I think the designers of Pathfinder intended for the three evil alignments to be more or less equally evil. Likewise all lawful alignments equally lawful etc.
I wouldn't characterize the alignment graph as a square or rectangle (all Evil equally Evil), but not as a circle or simple oval either (Neutral Evil unarguably ahead of the other Evils in depravity) -- more as a square or rectangle with rounded corners and somewhat bowed out sides -- so Neutral Evil would tend to get ahead of Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil in depravity, but either of the latter at it could catch up and get into the lead with only a moderate amount of extra effort. Same thing for Neutral Good, mirror-flipped, and same thing for Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral, rotated 90`.
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Well if Demons or Devils take over the world, there is still hope of some sort of resistance movement taking everything back.
But if Daemons win, the world stops existing so there is no hope of improvement.
however the "win" for daemons is significantly harder to pull off, and less likely to happen.
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^That depends upon what weaspons they manage to get their hands on. If the Daemons manage to get their hands on enough nuclear weapons, they've got it made . . . You'd think that the Daemons would be working hard at infiltrating Numeria for this very reason . . . .
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^That depends upon what weaspons they manage to get their hands on. If the Daemons manage to get their hands on enough nuclear weapons, they've got it made . . . You'd think that the Daemons would be working hard at infiltrating Numeria for this very reason . . . .
a radioactive universe is still a universe that exists...
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^Yes, but if nothing can live in it, the Dameons would probably call it good -- uh, I mean, evil.
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There's probably some forms of life that either don't care about radiation, or even thrive on it.
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Correct, there is a fungus that derives energy from radioactive decay. I believe it was first discovered at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Look up radiotrophic fungus if you are interested.
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True enough, but single-celled fungi are probably beneath the Daemons' notice for now, except to the extent that they may be useful to the Daemons as disease organisms. If, after unleashing armageddon, a Daemon traveled forward in time by hundreds of millions of years, they might be surprised and dismayed to find that the descendants of the gunk growing on the blasted rocks had evolved into sentient multicellular organisms . . . .
Wait -- what if this has already happened? That sounds like a plausible origin of the Mi-Go . . . .
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True enough, but single-celled fungi are probably beneath the Daemons' notice for now, except to the extent that they may be useful to the Daemons as disease organisms. If, after unleashing armageddon, a Daemon traveled forward in time by hundreds of millions of years, they might be surprised and dismayed to find that the descendants of the gunk growing on the blasted rocks had evolved into sentient multicellular organisms . . . .
Wait -- what if this has already happened? That sounds like a plausible origin of the Mi-Go . . . .
see i'm pretty sure they want to kill everything, even the planes with all the dead people, so killing stuff isn't enough.
^They could have tried before and almost succeeded, but botched the job . . . .
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It's possible; heck, it's even possible that it was done in a previous iteration of the universe (we know these exist thanks to the Manasaputras).
Along with those lousy manasaputras, the biggest problem with the deamons fulfilling their eons-long desires by simply being patient is the aberrations.
Yes, yes, other outsiders or whatever, but that's no real biggie.
See, mortals being who and what they are, and free will existing means souls will always come and new bad things will arise, and demons and devils and celestials will fight each other - not in a Bloodwar (as there's no such thing in PF), but in enough of an eternal conflict that it doesn't really matter. They'll wipe each other out eventually.
No, the real problem is the dag-gummed aberrations. Not all of 'em, of course. Most of them will perish with the inevitable heat death of the universe. But those daggum worthless no-good survivors: those are the problem.
They don't need light (in fact do better without it), heat, air, or really anything else. They'll just happily keep moving through the ultimate entropy of dead rocks in space and just keep on breeding and producing more daggumed souls.
I suspect that no few daemons have attempted to find ways to wipe out these hardy horrific monstrosities. I wonder if they've succeeded in the small scale.
I mean, the other problem, of course, is chaos. The daemons have experienced this once, already. Oops made some demons.
Oh well, it's not like fully-fledged entities just spring up from chaos planes on... their... oh. Hm.
Yeah, they've got some work to do.
Okay, so, as someone who almost exclusive plays evil (as gm and player) I have some thoughts. Chaotic Evils are almost always short lived, and almost always have small effects. Yes this merchant is murdered here, that knight there, this priest found assassinated and placed in an odd area. But the merchant's son inherits, the knight is replaced by a hopeful squire, and the churches gears churn out another priest, and a paladin hunts down and slays the serial killer CE man. Neutral evil is more careful, and lasts longer, he works out how to inherit the shop and enslave the son, the knight is replaced by a squire he promotes, the priest is never attacked for fear of backlash, but his power dwindles as the paladin slowly closes in, and the NE crime mogul eventually slips, or is betrayed, and then imprisoned. Lawful Evil hires the merchant, or drives him out of business and replaces him with a slave, or just buys him out before hiking prices on goods, He blackmails the knight and slowly corrupts the minds of his squires, he outlaws the priests church through long political procedures, and has the Paladin arrested for threats on his person. Lawful Evil is a tree that grows in the concrete crack of society, and shatters it by spreading, incapable of being stopped unless a figure outside of the law steps in, and breaks the layers of deceit and intrigue to actually find the real despot behind a thousand nobles made into puppets.
That's just my opinion though, and only works in high medieval and more complex societies, while NE works best in feudal and CE is nigh on unstoppable in an anarchy
yeah, terrorists and Violent Revolutionaries are chaotic evil, they definitely don't have long term or huge consequences...
a chaotic evil character would start to gather crowds exploiting their weakness and lack of wealth and turn the town against the merchants and nobility, destroying them entirely. Getting all the wealth for him and his followers.
you have a very narrow concept of...
I didn't say they didn't have consequences, it's just the difference between a particularly violent bandit and the Roman Empire. And while that character may end that town, his career becomes increasingly short, as paladins actively search for this gang leader. And just because my three quick examples didn't suit your view doesn't mean my view of evil is narrow. That particular bit was an Ad Hominem, a logical fallacy where you attack the person, not the argument.
More likely he's suffering from the kind of dementia you get from having lived so long and being so bitter that he simply can't relate to a society that's changed so much from the days of Good Old Ancient Egypt.Ras Al Ghul is not CE, I would argue him being Lawful Evil, as he works as an organization following a codified set of beliefs, rules, and laws, with a true purpose to his evil.The organisation however, is modeled on his beliefs and dedicated to his personal nihlistic crusade, which in turn is his personal revenge against the world for the death of his wife. The League of Shadows is nothing more than an extension of Ras Al Ghul's rage and will. He isn't a member because he follows a larger ideal. (many of his members MAY well be lawful because they follow an ideal that's larger than themselves. Ras is clearly the opposite.I disagree based on the fact that Ras Al Ghul has a purpose in mind, that goes far beyond vengeance. He seeks world peace, and has long term plans to do so, and in fact, such long term plans that he has been struggling to complete them for 600+ years. He seeks the destruction of human race, not for joy or vengeance but because he believes it is right.
He didn't live in ancient Egypt
I don't think there is a "most evil", although I would definitely label LE as the most dangerous of the three. CE is usually made up of individually-powerful creatures that don't work well together (with one big exception in the demons of the Worldwound), and although their casual disregard for order, codes, and laws makes them loose cannons they tend to be unfocused and lack the direction necessary to truly cause damage. NE types will compromise on rules and personal freedom to serve their own ends at others' expense, and thus embody selfishness to the extreme, but this same selfishness means they aren't likely to follow through with any evil plots if they personally gain little or nothing from doing so.
LE is different. LE abuses order for personal gain in ways that are hard to pick up on and expose. LE is the politician who sneaks a loophole into a bill that is later abused to obtain slave labor legally. LE is the police chief who covers up his criminal dealings by writing false reports implicating other unsavory individuals. LE is the king who bargains their citizens' lives with devils for access to an artifact they can use to bring their enemies low. Since LE types tend to work within the system their influence extends further than what a single person's actions could accomplish. LE types also work together more easily than the others, and this cooperation makes them especially dangerous.
Purity of alignment does not mean power of alignment.
Neutrality makes you weaker since you have less conviction.
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Purity of alignment does not mean power of alignment.
Neutrality makes you weaker since you have less conviction.
You have less (no) conviction on the law-chaos axis. Leaving all you convictions to focus on the Evil aspect of your alignment, which you do care about.
In essence you don't care about the methods, you just care about Evil.
Most powerful isn't a the question that's being asked - it is which is the most Evil!
stuffI didn't say they didn't have consequences, it's just the difference between a particularly violent bandit and the Roman Empire. And while that character may end that town, his career becomes increasingly short, as paladins actively search for this gang leader. And just because my three quick examples didn't suit your view doesn't mean my view of evil is narrow. That particular bit was an Ad Hominem, a logical fallacy where you attack the person, not the argument.
as has been noted, due to a despot leading on whim alone, they're more chaotic than lawful. Roman rule under the Ceasars would have been ruled by chaotic neutral to chaotic evil emperors(most were probably neutral though), though rome itself is probably true neutral in alignment. Ordered(Wealth > Citizen > slave), but with a few freedoms and a slight lean towards men of ability over rank and station (generals were promoted from the legion).
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It's possible; heck, it's even possible that it was done in a previous iteration of the universe (we know these exist thanks to the Manasaputras).
{. . .}
No, the real problem is the dag-gummed aberrations. Not all of 'em, of course. Most of them will perish with the inevitable heat death of the universe. But those daggum worthless no-good survivors: those are the problem.
{. . .}
Now you've reminded me that I need to go back to this thread to add Aberrations to the list of potential political candidates . . . .