A Land Far Away

OK..i've been thinking about this alot while working on NPCs......maybe this is merely philosophical, but perhaps there are actual canon resources that comment on this topic, so I figured I'd post here......


The question:

What percentage of people (humans particularly) are evil?




Is alignment a broad bellcurve centered at 50% neutral, with an equal distribution of people on both sides of the curve? Or is evil more of an aberration, with most folk tending toward goodness unless they have that certain "mutation" or whatnot that alters them away from norm? Or is it something inbetween?

Anything actually written about this?

As many as your campaign requires, is the answer.

Champions of Ruin has some pretty good info on philosophies of evil and describes different types of mindsets for evil characters.

Nothing about the amount of them in the Realms, though, but interesting read anyway.

There's no canon on this that I'm aware of, but I would expect it to be a standard bell curve centered on neutral as you said.

I've seen some debate about what is the "default" alignment, usually if it's TN or NG. I personally think it's TN (in the "who cares, I'm just trying to live" variety, not the "warrior of balance" one), but again, I'm not aware of any canon on the topic.

The Bell curve would be the most likely situation in a TN hamlet that really doesn't give a shite. But if your society has an alignment of its own, likely the opposite extremists would be leaving or driven out. It's hard to be CE in a town that leans towards LG and vice versa. Also, the local customs, traditions and rules would mold most non-extremists into conformity.

So I'd start with a Bell, then shave off the extremes and push the main bulge towards the "general" alignment. Sort of.

Grand Fromage wrote:There's no canon on this that I'm aware of, but I would expect it to be a standard bell curve centered on neutral......

Aye aye, we don't need Godswar II with the children of AO ramming the Concordant Oppostion up everyone's backside

Actually...there is a bit of canon information in the FRCS, though it's quite limited and refers to the regional alignment tendencies...not in % or numbers though, and I'm not going to make a bell curve based off of what they do mention.

For example the Sword Coast North (pg. 176) and Waterdeep (pg. 176) have all alignments, whereas The Great Dale (pg. 201) has N, NG and CG given as regional alignment tendencies. Does this mean only those alignments are available? No, of course not. Those are mere regional tendencies made to assist in character generation and to get a general feel for the area.

You won't find any percentages on evil or good just like we can't truly give a % of people in RL that are evil or good. My personal opinion on that is that every single person has evil in them and what determines the individual being good or evil is how that person goes about dealing with his/her inner evil tendencies. My tattoo is a permanent reminder of that for me...not to mention also a depiction of my nickname of now 21 years.

McJoker wrote:.......refers to the regional alignment tendencies...not in % or numbers though, and I'm not going to make a bell curve based off of what they do mention......

*Booos ceasesly*
We could use a snap shot and a peek at what Ed's little people are up to.

This is an old forum post, but reminded me of reading the AD&D Monster Manual v1 long long long ago that listed Humans as Lawful Good, so based on that wouldn't it be safe to say a bell curve with it's peak over Lawful Good?

No.

While no society will label themselves "evil" their customs and beliefs would be, by other cultures. The Spaniards labeled the Meso Americans as evil for their practices of human sacrifice. The government of the United States labeled the Confederate States as being evil for their reliance on the labor of slaves. The Romans labeled everyone else as evil barbarians. The Catholic Church labeled all other religions as evil during their inquisitions.

I don't think that real people fit into the alignment system of the game. Fictional people follow whatever demographic the author chooses to create.

Alignment is essentially a broken feature in D&D. The harder you look at it, the less sense it makes. But it's integral to the game, so you're stuck with it.

In Gygax's gameworld of Greyhawk, humans were indeed largely aligned with good, as were elves and dwarves, while half-orcs and other humanoids were *always* evil, etc. It was very Tolkienesque in that sense. Ed seemed to follow that pattern for the earliest version of FR, after all it was based on the same source books which listed half-orcs as always evil, but over time FR has become such a quagmire of source material and the game itself has evolved enough that you can legitimately make or do just about anything, at which point it's probably safe to say that a bellcurve centered on neutral makes at least as much sense as any other approach.