Evil

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I'm a 13th level government bureaucrat and I think that my class alone requires me to be lawful evil.

 

I just love this item description from IWD2:

"How To Be An Adventurer"​

Face It, You're Actually "Neutral Evil"... Does an insatiable love for XP, gold and magic items make someone evil? That is the question.

 

no, how you go about acquiring those things will determine whether your are evil or not.

 

Exactly and we come back to some points that were made at the beginning of this thread.

Do you think that pillaging tombs and robbing graves is a decent living? Looting corpses for some coin? I can't see a pally type rummaging through the possessions of a dead orc unless there was a good reason for doing so. Breaking and entering? Killing a mage and plundering his house? Killing a strange warrior to get his katana?

Nevertheless, even if a character was honest and law abiding he could be a miser as well. This might not be that bad but if that character let people starve when he could help them, would he be evil? Think about Nalia, she's a decent person but she is a clueless pampered child because she doesn't know what life is really about for a commoner. She pretends to help (and she does to a certain extent) but she is a prisoner of the values of her social class. I believe she is meant to embody a good natured altruistic sort of people who by helping others don't realize that at the same time they keep them in a subdued status as inferior citizens. They help but they don't want society to change and they don't want to solve the problems that cause so much poverty and social inequality.

Although it is quite another game and another setting, I liked the sort of alignment system in Jade Empire. They established two paths: the Way of the Open Palm and the Way of the Closed Fist. These could be equated to good and evil but they went beyond that. The Way of the Closed Fist taught self reliance to people. If you didn't help a weakling he would have to fend out for himself and thus if he succeeded he would have grown whereas a follower of the Open Palm by helping people would make them depend on him thus precluding any growth for others.

In the BG setting, someone with plenty of money (like a successful adventurer) would feel compelled to help those who are in dire need of the basic necessities of life.

Still, for instance, giving money to the children in the slavers compound might look like a good action. But what is going to happen to a child running around in the slums with 100 GP in his hands? My bet is that he won't reach the safety of the temple of Ilmater.

 

I always found it amusing that the player character would give the beggar 1gp out of his 100,000 or whatever.

 

if the mage was evil, would it not be the pally's duty to slay him? if not, then probably not. breaking an entering no, as for the strange warrior, same as the mage.