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P.S.note: If your first reaction is to completely disagree with this post, don't waste too much time trying to debate me, as I'm mostly expressing opinion here. This may not even be debatable, as we wouldn't have the common ground to do so, but even if it is I'm not going to spend the time on it.

Been reading this thread occasionally as its developed and wanted to reply to specific points and say some things in general... but never really cared enough to budget [the time for] what would probably take twice as long as I even planned going into it... so I'll just make the general comments.

Certainly there are a range of actions that would be LG-appropriate in a given situation, and different people would make different choices or have different styles. I agree there could be disagreement between people who are ultimately trying to solve the same situation.

Actions don't have alignment, they have morality. They simply *are* Good, Lawful, Evil, or Chaotic. They can be both Good and Lawful, but that doesn't make them "Lawful Good" actions.

I think this is one of the strongest reasons why people have alignment... uhm... discussions. A fundamentally different way of looking at alignments and the "alignment" of specific acts.

Basically, I don't view actions as having an alignment *like* a person does (ie. Chaotic Good). The reason being that the alignments aren't *specific* while (I believe) Good and Evil are (should be). Two people with the same alignment can and will act radically different and see things in a different way, and still be well within their own alignment. Further that two characters could perform the same deed and it could be more or less Evil/Chaotic. To sum that up, alignment is somewhat vague from an individual persons perspective, so you can't look at actions from that or any individuals perspective, else Evil looses meaning. Certainly a persons outlook on the matter should influence the final morality of the deed, but I believe that should be taken into account *after* you quantify the morality of the act, and then almost only as a mitigating factor.

I don't believe that any act could be Evil if one person does it, but Good if someone else does. I also don't believe that any act can *be* Neutral, it can only be unaligned. So a specific act can only be Good, Lawful, Evil, or Chaotic. After quantifying the base morality of an exploit, specific character driven factors, motivations, or beliefs, can be a mitigating factor removing some of the weight or stigma of the act.

A (fairly) clear example of this at work is the act of ending a life (what I would probably deem the most evil act possible). That is Evil. It can *never* be Good. Factors that can be taken into account include the beings intelligence, its worth to other beings, its alignment, and especially what other choices the perpetrator of the act had (ie. none.) IMO for this act to be mitigated *completely* to unaligned, the being must have no worth and be harming others. So while I would say that killing a LE human actively involved in slavery still carries some Evil taint, it wouldn't be enough to ever add up to anything. It could never be called Good, and if you say that freeing slaves is Good, well that is a different act.

I believe that a very significant portion of all the actions any individual takes in their life are unaligned. One of the more prevalent of mitigating factors being that *nobody cares* (or the act affects nobody). So if you really want to track players alignments, are worried about a shift, it's going to be the heavy deeds that stand out that do that. It's also *alot* easier to do evil acts that register as noteworthy than good ones. The good ones seeming contrived if done purposefully to outweigh bad deeds so valued less. A DM that "feels" a player is shifting towards Evil is then *more* prone to see the bad in things, so it can be a slippery slope that the player can't fight against.

I'm sad to say that most (if not all) the DM mandated alignment shifts I've ever seen or experienced were based more on fleeting moments of a characters life, and a DM's whim, than on careful evaluation of a characters every action. IMC it takes 3 significant acts of morality to change a LGCE into a N, and 5 to turn a N into a LGCE. I've had more evil characters risk becoming neutral than any other shift.

I mostly left Law/Chaos out of this as it's something that can be based on more things, like "law of the land" which can change depending on where you stand... or "order vs. messy"... OCD and lawbreaking are very different things but fall under L/C. Now if I can just hit the post button before I write 3 more pages.