Editing Stupid Neutral (section)

===Active Neutrality===
This is where Neutral gets really stupid... 

WANNABE True Neutral players are making a stance on neutrality, as if the cosmos needs to keep good and evil in a state of balance and that neither is better than the other. But if you think a mystic balance needs to be enforced to the point of anal retention, then congratulations: you've just become Lawful Neutral, since all you're doing is [[Just as Planned|imposing or restoring the Universal order]].

This holds especially true if the player is the sort of obsessive narc who tells his compatriots to stop being so good or lawful because the universe is keeping score and needs the balance tipped carefully in the other direction - [[Stupid Evil|perils of checklisting your morality aside]], if you're so intent on see-sawing back and forward on the alignment axis that you eventually start beating up Angels because [[Derp|"the universe needs balancing out"]], then that's pretty much evil in itself. A mass majority of those Angels weren't going to go out of their way to do ''you'' any harm unless you did something REALLY bad to piss them off - like say, [[Fail|declaring]] [[Mordenkainen|''yourself'']] [[Fail|the arbiter of balance and deigning to attack '''''celestial beings''''' for not doing so the way ''you'' wanted.]]

Anyone demonstrating the willingness to even consider this angle is basically Neutral Evil with a wig on, because not only is such an act blatantly evil, there's few ways to make it anything other than destructively self-serving besides some Mr. Fantastic-tier mental gymnastics. On a similar note: players who kick a puppy just to counter-balance their "good mojo" and force themselves back to neutrality are Chaotic plain and simple and can just fuck off.

It's pretty well established that sparing the bad guy makes you the either the good guy or the lawful guy (or both), but ''don't even think'' about arguing about saving the BBEG's lieutenant or son or whatever, so that the threat of their possible return will keep the forces of Good on their toes in future and not become incompetent from having nothing to fight! In this situation you're committing an evil act by rescuing someone that you <u>intend</u> to go on and hurt people in the future and give the forces of good something to fight against, or you're committing an act of good that's so convoluted that it falls squarely into the realm of [[Stupid Good]]. Either way, if you have to plan years in advance for something that doesn't directly affect you, chances are it's not a Neutral action. The best case scenario in this situation is to walk away - but that's hardly "actively" promoting neutrality now, isn't it?

Basically, what we're saying is that trying to hardline True Neutral alignment in the above manners ''without'' completely and utterly fucking up the entire campaign would require one to be either:

#An actual animal who has no understanding of morality or law whatsoever, or
#A person who has no actual grasp of either.
#Someone who spends their life having no impact on anyone or anything whatsoever.

Notable for being an unfortunate component of ''D&D'' history, both because of the aforeshade-thrown Mordenkainen's high and enlightened philosophy of the Balance, the [[Dragonlance]] campaign setting's being built around the idea that Good just turns Evil if it actually wins, and the [[druid]] class pre-third edition theoretically being required to ensure neutrality triumphs if Good is too strong. All of these are corruptions of ''actual'' philosophical and religious notions of moral balance in the universe (most notably, in Taoism neither of the vital forces of yin and yang are "evil" and "evil" is really an imbalance ''within'' the universe to be corrected) and in practice are just clumsy excuses for why high-level NPCs aren't sorting shit out instead of you and/or why the setting keeps getting fucked up despite the good guys racking up wins.