Neutral/Evil alignment

[kyoryu]

Well shucks. I think I actually agree with pretty much everthing you just said.

Doubly so on the distinction between "acts" and "people". People have alignment, which is (in theory anyway) their kinda base personality, positions, ideals, etc. Their actions *should* reflect this. When their actions dont is when there may be a conflict and need to adjust the actual alignment to match reality rather than what the player wrote on the character sheet. But it's usually the collective acts that matter, and rarely a single one.

Absolutely. That's where the nuance/grey area is. Especially with good/neutral.

I think maybe another notable difference between neutral and good, is that while they often will use the same criteria when deciding to harm another, a good person will feel a need to atone (whether via spell or actions), while a neutral person is more likely to be like "well, that was mean of me, but they got what was coming to them" and move on. A good person would feel bad about killing someone, even if it was necessary, and would feel the need to do something to make up for it (cause, you know... good). A neutral person less so.

Not just killing, but in general, yeah.

Note the Paladin spell in many editions "Atonement". These thoughts are kinda baked in. Even the idea that good characters can do evil acts... not being able to do any evil acts is specifically pointed out as a Paladin thing, so the "exception makes the rule" implies that other good characters can, to at least some extent. (You can actually look at hte Paladin restrictions as a list of what Good characters normally can do, at least to some extent, since they're called out explicitly)