Realignment: True Neutral

     The final alignment to look at would be Neutral. It used to be called True Neutral (the term I still prefer), because it incorporate Neutrality from both the Law-Chaos axis and the Good-Evil axis.

     This another one of those alignments that has an "obvious" way to play it. True neutral was traditionally the alignment of druids or people who sought balance. The rationale was that only somebody who was trying to maintain some kind of cosmic equilibrium would be capable of true neutrality. Otherwise, some kind of bend would show up in one of the directions, leading the character towards one of the other alignments.

     Don't get me wrong, the balance option is just fine as a character option. But I think it is a lot harder to play than it really sounds like. For starters, if you have such a rigid stance on the idea of balance, that pushes you more towards Lawfulness. I mean, you would have to has such slavish devotion to equality that you perform an evil deed for every good one, and we've already covered how that kind of OCD quality is a characteristic of a Lawful character. A person seeking true balance would thus have to do things to create chaos in order to counteract the inherent lawfulness. Not to mention, by what criteria do you judge balance? Who's to say what is an equivalent evil or good act? Do you have to kill a person for every one you save? There are more questions than answers to how you honestly play somebody who seeks balance.

     Another option for neutrality is that the character doesn't care about issues of "right" and "wrong." Like an animal (anything with an Int of 2 or less) isn't capable of making moral judgment and thus is always neutral, this character may simply lack the introspection necessary to make ethical decisions. They just do what it seems like they should do at the time. In a lot of ways, this sounds like an evil character, but I think the difference is that an evil character makes conscious choices to hurt others for personal gain (or similar evil acts). But for this type of neutral character, their intent is not malicious. They simply don't think through the ramifications of their actions. It is more a matter of impulse-control than design (for example, they’re hungry and see an apple cart in the market, so they take the apple and eat it, not considering that this is stealing and stealing could be considered wrong). 

     Of course, like Chaotic Neutral, players can manage to misinterpret this alignment and come up with a character that seems more evil than anything. I have played a game where a person (the rogue, not surprisingly) was True Neutral because they thought that meant they could do whatever they wanted. Now, I think we could all generally agree that this is wrong, but that's not the point. The point is that "whatever they wanted," in this case, meant being a bastard to everybody in the party. He played closer to Chaotic Evil than he did True Neutral. He did not understand that not caring about being good was not the essence of neutrality, but is closer to evil. The absence of Good (or Evil, or Law, or Chaos) is not neutrality.

     Like everything that we've been saying for this series, what is important is coming up with a reason to make the alignment fit. If you're True Neutral, why is that? Why is your character unconcerned with good or evil? Why don't they want to choose between Law and Chaos. This is made much more difficult because you really need a reason for both. If you really want a challenge for you next character, I might suggest trying it. I'd like to see a True Neutral character who is very clearly not leaning in any of the other four directions.