Talk:Morality/@comment-5449478-20171022221730

Essentially, the D&D system judges a character's alignment based on two axes rather than the traditonal one: order-chaos, and good-evil.

The law-chaos axis (y-axis) is as follows:

A 'lawful' character hates chaos and seeks to follow the law of the land, or at least, claims so.

A 'neutral' character has no compulsion to either side.

A 'chaotic' character holds their freedom above everything else.

The good-evil axis (x-axis) is as follows:

A 'good' character emphasises we, or the collective, working for the good of others.

A 'neutral' character emphasises us, or the circle/in-group, putting themselves and their immediates first.

An 'evil' character emphasises me, or they themselves first/only.

Under this logic, you can determine how a character can be expected to behave within a given situation. Alignment is generally an observation rather than a category, but there are some basic guidelines for behaviour within these scenarios. A chaotic good character, for example, will steal from a rich family to feed a poor one. A lawful good character will never do this. A neutral good character will judge things on a case-by-case basis.

On the other hand, a lawful evil character may exploit the family. He may approach the man of the house, offering him a job at his company, only to lock him into a contract. A neutral evil character might steal from the poor family to feed themselves. A chaotic evil character would torture them for pure sadistic pleasure.

Neutral characters fall in-between these alignments, but may also be lawful, chaotic or further neutral (this is known as true neutrality, where a character is neither good/evil nor lawful/chaotic).

Now that we know all this, we can apply it to a real-life situation. Let's use this wiki for example. The Psyches of the EMPATH: The Luckiest Smurf story series could be considered lawful neutral characters, as they maintain order and balance while having no clear incentive towards good/evil. This changes if you have a negative view of Psychelia; in Empath's mind, the Psyche Master may be a lawful evil character who uses the system to enrich himself at the expense of everyone else, and by extension, his Psyches are also lawful evil. The Mirror Universe Smurfs, on the other hand, could be considered evil, but in varying forms - Papa Smurf and his son Empath would be lawful evil, whereas Jokey, through his sadistic forms of comic torture, could be seen as chaotic evil.