There have been plenty of threads on paladins, good and lawful good, well here I want to ask you fellow players how you play neutral, and what were some highly neutral acts/statements that you made through your character in game?
What got me thinking about this was a post by Firaxis in regards to some criticism on their game Colonization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_IV:_Colonization
Variety video games reporter and reviews editor Ben Fritz criticized the concept of the game in his blog because of the injustices that occurred during the colonial time period.
Firaxis has responded to Fritz's blog post with the statement, "the game does not endorse any particular position or strategy - players can and should make their own moral judgments."
So neutral, I loved it.
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For me, neutral isn't good. They won't consider some of the worst acts, but at the same time, they might seriously consider some of the less good acts... like kidnapping a halfling tax collector, stuffing him in a crate, and shipping him to Osirion in response to his attitude and greed. But the guy definitely would not be murdered.
So neutral is creatively disposing of halfling tax collectors? Sounds like a good alignment to me.
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There have been plenty of threads on paladins, good and lawful good, well here I want to ask you fellow players how you play neutral, and what were some highly neutral acts/statements that you made through your character in game?
You know how like 90% of people are? They want to do selfless things like give to charity, stand up for those who can't speak for themselves, and generally make the world a better place. But for many practical and psychological reasons, most of their benevolence gets reserved for their close family and friends. They may be friendly to others, but they'll rarely stick their neck out for anyone outside of their immediate circle. They may be generally dickish to others, but they have a conscience and won't commit regular or serious evils.
Yeah, that's neutral.
Any neutral char experience in game that was rather... vanilla?
Here's how I look at neutrality on the moral axis...
If good is self-sacrificing for the benefit of strangers, and if evil is benefiting yourself at the expense of strangers, then neutral is chiefly looking out for yourself without particular concern or malice for those outside your local circle of family/friends. Hence, I tend to view neutral as the default mindset for most people barring a compelling reason that would nudge them towards good or evil.
That's not to say that they might not care about good or evil actions occurring around them, mind you. A good person trying to run an orphanage in their town might be well-received whereas an overly idealist activist might come across as annoying, but at least those are better than the corrupt sheriff or greedy robber baron who might actually harm their family's livelihood.
As for an RP scenario where this has come up, a common one that I can think of is when the PCs need to spur an NPC Faction to action on a cause that they might not ordinarily care about. This might include getting one kingdom to honor an ancient treaty to aid a neighboring kingdom, or convincing a local trade to adopt a business practice that will be beneficial over the long view but might cause immediate inconvenience.
In terms of the Diplomacy and some spell rules, such actions might be arbitrated by looking at the PCs as trying to persuade NPCs to do something that is outside the scope of their alignment while not against it. i.e. It should be more feasible to convince a group of neutral NPCs to be helpful rather than convincing them to become murderous thieving scoundrels.
A neutral person is primarily concerned about the well-being of himself and of those he personally cares about. While he doesn't necessarily bear any particular malice toward those he doesn't know, he's not inclined to go out of his way or inconvenience himself to help those he doesn't know.
A Neutral person will go out of his way to help his friends. He might help out strangers if there's either little-to-no personal inconvenience, or if there's some kind of reward or other benefit to be gained.
A neutral person isn't going to be swayed by the argument, "But it's the right thing to do!" A Neutral person's response to an argument from morality would probably be, "Why should I care?" or "What's in it for me?"
A neutral person is primarily concerned about the well-being of himself and of those he personally cares about. While he doesn't necessarily bear any particular malice toward those he doesn't know, he's not inclined to go out of his way or inconvenience himself to help those he doesn't know.
Even so, a neutral person might still 'do the right thing' just because he's aware of the social stigma of being a jerk, all the while being annoyed at the personal inconvenience.
The main difference between a good person and a neutral person, I think, is largely how they feel about helping strangers. The difference might never be apparent to onlookers.
In a White Room Scenario, the neutral person would probably be less likely to do 'the right thing', but in the reality of "I have to live with the consequences of this" they probably would often do the right thing, even if it's super annoying that doing the right thing is keeping them from relaxing with a good book like they had been looking forward to all day. Stupid random strangers getting hurt.
That said, there's a big difference between "help those he doesn't know" and "endanger himself for those he doesn't know." A neutral person is probably quite unlikely to do the latter, unless there's a very pressing reason to.
In the Council of Thieves AP, I played a neutral cleric who didn't believe in the gods. There is an interesting dinner scene in one of the books and I discovered that virgin hearts do indeed taste better than trollop hearts. I basically played as a guy just looking out for number one. I joined up with the party because I knew things would be worse if nothing was done.