'Not A Villain' Dude's reaction to the fiendi.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 269

The kid didn't quite appreciate the Dude's help.

Comments may be slow in showing up since I'm at the SLC Comic Con!

34 Comments

O.o what happened with their feet in Panel Nr4? You can do waaaay better :/

I still love it, how the dude hits the mobs with that kid <3

Cartoon! Even more simplified “caricature the past mode” of a comic! Give Aneeka some leeway!

(On the other hand, I feel like it’s too well colored and detailed to just be a caricature. You’re confusing the audience here, Aneeka! For shame!)

I wasn’t confused, it works fine for me clearly as a flashback. 🙂

But that’s how you are supposed to use small children and midgets in combat at least that’s how it works in my D&D campaign oh and burning down a tavern and then that the city is a perfectly acceptable way to pay ones bar tab

Well duh! I even managed to find a way to finagle our GM into giving us bonuses for using midgets in combat and children in combat… why wouldn’t you use them then???

And even going beyond that, I’m pretty sure using midgets as projectiles is pretty standard play.

Bwahahahahaha!

This was my first reaction in real life when seeing this page. XD

Dude, you need to up your game!

Seriously, I love the fight scene. XD

Oh l–d, this isn’t going well for the alignment prospects of the group. That’s a very chaotic good bordering on chaotic neutral way of looking at things, Dude…

…For those of you unfamiliar with it, D&D came up with a system of nine moral & ethical alignments based upon a simple grid of two pairs of opposites: Law vs. Order, and Good vs. Evil. From what we saw, the NAV universe uses a 6-alignment system, but since we don’t know yet what that means, I’ll just explain the 9 Alignments…since it’s actually a pretty good way of categorizing a person’s actions.

Lawful Good * Lawful Neutral * Lawful Evil

Neutral Good * True Neutral * Neutral Evil

Chaotic Good * Chaotic Neutral * Chaotic Evil

Lawful Good people would be like Superman (pre Man of Steel movie, that is) or your typical Knight In Shining Armor–they obey the law, and they try to do the right thing for the betterment of all. The running joke is that Lawful Good is Lawful Stupid, but in actuality it isn’t; LG aligned people simply like to give others the benefit of the doubt. They’re still capable of cracking down hard on lawbreakers, but they try to do so fairly and justly. They won’t break their word of honor if they can help it, and thus have to be careful about what they promise, but they’re trustworthy.

Chaotic Good, however, would be like the legends of Robin Hood: stealing from the rich isn’t lawful, but giving the wealth to the poor is a good act because it’s trying to help those who truly need it. They’re also more likely to be free spirits, aka “hippies”–they want to do good things, but they believe individual rights outweight societal needs.

Neutral Good would be someone who wants to help, and prefers to do so in legal ways wherever possible, but will not hesitate to break the law to get something done right. One possible example is how a doctor trying to save a patient might “fudge” information on an insurance form so that the insurance company will pay for the procedure when otherwise they wouldn’t, or might even forbid it despite how necessary and needful that procedure may be.

Lawful Neutral is where the law is paramount and supercedes all other considerations. These are the disciplined souls who follow a very strict code to the letter; if they also follow it to the spirit, it is only after the letter of that law is obeyed. Robots, pedants, computers, and disciplinarians follow the LN alignment. A quote for a LN character would be, “I don’t make the laws, kid; I just enforce them.”

Chaotic Neutral is someone who does whatever they want purely because they want to do it. An example would be strolling through a city park, they choose to secretly pop the balloon of a kid they’re passing because they think it’d be funny, and a minute later offer to buy another kid a replacement ice cream cone because the kid was crying over having dropped the first one accidentally. Rules are nothing more than guidelines at best, and annoyances at worst; they color outside the lines of life with only a passing glimmer of care or consideration for others, for their own wishes and needs are paramount, and all else is an afterthought. Some people called these characters BFDs, for “Big F*****g Deal” but a newer version is the “YOLO” or “You Only Live Once” movement which encourages people to take stupid or thoughtless chances despite sometimes very real risks to themselves and those around them.

True Neutral is the hardest to characterize, as it comes in two varieties: conscious TNs and unconscious TNs. Someone who is consciously True Neutral believes wholeheartedly in balance; they will seek to ensure there isn’t too much law, nor too much chaos in life. They may enact moments of good to balance out moments of evil, or they may stay their hand from helping because there have been too many helping hands, and they believe that the victim of a problem or situation needs to learn from their suffering so that they can gain the strength to stand on their own and stop being a victim. Unconsciously TN individuals are more common, however; they lack conviction in any particular direction. They might prefer to lean somewhat more Lawful Good simply because acts of goodness and common laws create a more comfortable living environment for all, but they don’t go out of their way to try to balance the universe. In fact, they often don’t think about Good versus Evil, or Law versus Chaos.

Lawful Evil would definitely be the Deal With The Devil. Once a bargain is struck, they will stick to it to the letter…but they may twist and warp the spirit of it to their advantage. These are the rules-lawyers, who will try to interpret the rules into anything that will be favorable to themselves, regardless of how that makes things unfavorable to others. In fact, they may even go out of their way to word things so specifically that in the act of “promising” to do something, they can legally get out of doing it because the exact conditions haven’t been met. On the bright side, if you can nail them down, they will fulfil their end of the bargain, but beware what they’ll expect you to do in your half of the bargain.

Chaotic Evil…is an explosion of violence, selfishness, and wanton destruction. “Wreak Havoc” isn’t just a battle-cry, it’s a lifestyle. Anarchy at its extreme, Chaotic Evil doesn’t care about creating, preserving, maintaining, or defining. It is not nearly as dangerous as Lawful Evil, in that a CE character does not hide their evilness behind a mask of civility, but it is the most destructive alignment because Chaotic Evil revels only in brute power, brutal force, seizing whatever you can and clawing out the throats and bellies of all that get in your way. The one saving grace of CE is that it is self-destructive as well as world-destructive; otherwise this alignment would be the most powerful tool of entropy to ever exist. Without the organizational force of law, chaos doesn’t get very far, thankfully.

Neutral Evil revels in evil; much as True Neutral can be a conscious choice, NE is often the same, the conscious decision to ruin everyone else’s day. As with Neutral Good, which may use the laws or bend or break the laws in order to get an objective done, the Neutral Evil person will use or break laws, whatever it takes to get their objectives done. They want to hurt others, they want to destroy things, but they don’t go about it carelessly or impulsively, unlike CE.

In a nutshell, these are the nine alignments. Most people will fall in the range of Lawful Good to Chaotic Good, True (unconscious) Neutral to Lawful Evil. These alignments are not static, either. As a character grows and learns, is affected by experiences and makes certain choices, these viewpoints can change over time.

Though these aren’t the six shaded alignments on the wheel which Aneeka drew and displayed during Sandra’s speech on why the team has to undertake the tutorial, it could be an interesting point of discussion to see where each team member might end up on the D&D grid.

…If nothing else, it’ll give us something to do while waiting for the next page, because I’m enjoying this story so much, the wait is killing me, ergo I’m trying to find ways to kill the intervening time, lol…

Lol. Look at the group

Danni: lawful good
Keyla: chaotic good
The dude: neutral
Bandit: lawful evil
Jane: chaotic evil

I felt Bandit was more chaotic neutral than lawful evil. Hes never really shown himself to be evil, anyway–self-serving, certainly. But his persona seems built more around a “devil may care” outlaw style than an evil one.

Good explanation on alignment system! But RPer beware: different GMs may interpret certain alignments differently.

If you carefully read the official (or paraphrased from official) description given for each alignment (whether on wikipedia or elsewhere), you’ll quickly notice that the line between “evil” and “neutral” is quite blurry; both descriptions at times describe actions that, depending on your POV and the circumstances, might fall into either; for example: an example given for True Neutral was to describe a merchant of death selling weapons to both side, or a farmer only caring about own family/friends.

However, if you read the description for “Neutral Evil”, you can see that both of the examples for “True Neutral” can arguably be categorized as “Neutral Evil” (Believe me when I say I spent too long arguing with a fellow GM once over this). The official description for “Neutral Evil”, paraphrased, includes bits like “Characters of this alignment are typically selfish” and “They have no compunctions about harming others to get what they want, but neither will they go out of their way to cause carnage or mayhem when they see no direct benefit to it.”

I’m sure y’all can see why the farmer or that merchant might be classified as “Neutral Evil”. (merchants selling instruments of death definitely have no compunctions about their activity bringing harm to others, and there are situations in which “only caring about your own” can drive some very morally dubious behavior…

To be honest, in the case of “True Neutral” I prefer the description of either somebody who tries to keep balance between good and evil (helping the underdog on the situations) or somebody who does not side with anybody. I remember there being an example of a wizard that is dedicated to their research and care about only learning more (morality be d**ned, if they have to kidnap people they will), or somebody who lives in a neighborhood and doesn’t care what others do but might help the good guys because it leads to a better life for themselves (which might be applied when you have characters regularly destroy infrastructure of the area or generally negatively affect the True Neutral character).

I do agree with you that the merchant is rather ambiguous, though.

I’ve never been a fan of the D&D alignment system, primarily because “evil” as an abstract doesn’t make much sense to me. “Lawful evil,” in particular, seems rather contrived. To me, the relevant question is, “how big is your in-group”? If you think of yourself only, most people would probably consider that to be evil. But what if you put the interests of your family above all others? Is that more or less “good” than putting the interests of your nation or species above your family? For that matter, why stop at species? What about all living things as an in-group? Would that logically be more “good” than just being pro-human, and if not, why not?

I think the “chaos” vs “order” alignment came from Moorcock’s fiction, but I’m not sure. it could have come from Zelazny. Either way, I see that primarily based on where one derives ones moral code from– if morality is dictated by the rules the group (however large) has agreed on, whether the individual thinks they are for the best or not, that would be “lawful,” but if the individual feels free to ignore the consensus because they assume they know better, that would be “chaotic” (and possibly also fairly arrogant).

With these criteria in mind, a neutral person would be one who tries to balance the needs of the many vs. the needs of the one, and also takes both external morality and internal responsibility into account. Most people are closer to neutral than otherwise.

Bandit is playing up his self interest, and also flouting a (presumed) social convention regarding slavery. Jake (Bandit’s player), on the other hand, works for what passes as the law, is uncomfortable when asked to break rules, and based on his comments about Kleya’s actions, thinks he’s working for some kind of greater good. Jane claims to “have no care,” but covers the eyes of the child– she is portraying herself as someone who doesn’t care about social mores, but may be acting out of some sense of the greater good– depending on whether we’re talking about her Game persona or her offstage behavior, which is still fairly mysterious. Danni has so far acted with a considerable amount of self interest, and an apparent belief that no one else will act in her interest, either, but does seem to care a bit whether she and others are following the “rules,” e.g. When she found out the Twins were AIs. Kleya clearly doesn’t care about the rules, but Kat as a Game character is all about being accepted as a “Hero,” which means caring very much about what other people think of her actions. And Kleya clearly acted in an extremely self-interested way in the past, which she now regrets. At the moment, she has only managed to expand her in-group to the Minelli family and somewhat to Danni.

Actually, Kleya is trying hard to live by the rules now– she has constant temptations to break them, including diverting real food in the real world, and doesn’t take those opportunities. So she’s trying to overcome a “chaotic” disposition, but I think she still hasn’t figured out that she needs to take the well-being of more people into account to truly be a “hero.”

I think Dude/Brandon honestly does not care about anyone other than himself, and does not care what anyone else thinks of him, unless those opinions can directly threaten him. To my mind, he’s the most evil one of the group.

“Evil” as about as much an abstract for me as “Good” is..and for me, neither is that abstract. They’re not black/white 100% concrete, though there is black and there is white at each end of the spectrum; rather, they are a continuum of various shades of gray in between.

By continuum, I mean, if you can imagine the worst possible suffering a human being can endure, then that opens up a continuum of things that are less painful and horrible to endure than the first scenario, and less painful even than the second, and less horrible than the third, and…all the way up through to the things that are wonderful and joyful to experience and endure.

Evil (to me) is the deliberate application of that suffering upon a person or an animal, a ruination and a destruction of a situation. Good is the other end of that continuum, the application of joy and happiness to a person, a group, an animal, or a situation. Neutrality (for it does exist) would contain both suffering and joy, but it would be more mindless/random-chance in nature. Is the cat evil when it kills and eats the rat? To the rat, perhaps, but to the cat, it is simply trying to survive, and cats cannot convert plant-matter into the necessary proteins and amino acids they need to survive, ergo they must eat meat.

Law and Chaos…someone pointed out (I think it was Thunt, the creator of the webcomic “Goblins” via some of his characters) that you don’t have to obey the laws of a land or a kingdom to be considered Lawful. You just had to have a code of conduct which you followed. Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of the Serenity from the t.v. show Firefly, would be Lawful in the sense that “when I shoot you, you will be facing me, you will be awake, and you will be armed” because this is his code of ethics, his code of conduct. He won’t shoot a man unaware and unarmed in his back. He’s not, however the sort to mindlessly obey the government’s laws simply because they’re the law.

Another roleplaying system used 7 alighments (an early incarnation of DC’s Heroes, if I recall correctly, since Principled was Superman and Scrupulous was Batman for the examples given), which has been cribbed for other gaming systems:

Good: Principled, Scrupulous
Selfish: Unprincipled, Anarchist
Evil: Miscreant, Abberant, Devious

As the details are a bit lengthy on each category, the full details are found here: http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/lestat/align.html

We haven’t seen enough of anyone but Kleya to know if they’re Principled (never breaks a law except for only the most desperate of circumstances, etc, etc) nor have we seen enough to know if they’re Scrupulous (may break the law if needed but prefers to work within the system at all times where possible).

Jane may be playing a bit like she’s a Miscreant (may or may not keep her word of honor, will kill an unarmed foe fairly readily, etc, etc), but the way how I see her, she’s angry yes, but much of this is an act, because it’s a game, a virtual simulation, where you cannot actually harm a real person (excepting Danni’s situation, where if she doesn’t prove ‘useful’ by entering and entertaining via the Game, her city will pull the plug on her life support needs). She has some scruples, though, because the way I see it with the kid, she pushed the hat down so that the kid wouldn’t see her…well, presumably attacking and slaying the mother.

The Dude wobbles between the Unprincipled and the Anarchist, because he’s selfish and self-focused, acts on impulse (um, yeah, kid-as-club?), but doesn’t actively, deliberately intend to be a d-waffle. Bandit, by contrast, would either be a Scrupulous sort (holds to a code of honor but is willing to break the rules, and is a good guy) or an Aberrant (evil but has a code of ethics/conduct he follows). Which one, we don’t know, because again we haven’t seen enough. TENka is portrayed as an Evil Corporation, but we’re seeing this through Kleya’s eyes (and a bit of Sandra’s, etc.) so again, we don’t know the full story.

Danni…isn’t Principled, but neither is she Unprincipled; she IS thinking of herself, yes, but almost anyone in her situation would be thinking of themselves in her situation–to have survived The End Of The World, only to be told that as she cannot work in the fields growing food or performing some other manual task, she has zero value to contribute to what’s left of humanity? Even Superman, the most Principled character out there, would be thinking of himself at least somewhat in her situation–“I may not be able to support myself right now because of my injuries, but if I am given time, I’m sure I can heal, or come up with something useful and supportive, even if it’s just training people how to do stuff in virtual life the things I can no longer do in real life,” …but they’re not giving her that kind of long-investment time, unless she can make a success of her entry into the Game.

Kleya…is all over the map, in this alignment system. She was selfish, now she wants to be selfless. She did have some sort of ethical sense, but it wasn’t everyone else’s ethics. She’s been branded as evil, but while her actions and/or their results may have been horrific in outcome, her motivations are most likely not what others want to attribute to her.

Since the 7-aspect system isn’t quite as left-right up-down as the 9-grid of D&D, it’s very hard to place Kleya/Kat on any one square, and very hard to track her progress as she consciously struggles to move from alignment to alignment, trying to improve her inner character. In tracking said movements and shifts/changes, the X,Y axis grid of Law vs. Chaos, Good vs. Evil, works a lot better. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t cover every possible permutation, but it is better for charting progress and change.

…Sandra would be Scrupulous, imho–she’ll try to work within the system wherever possible, but isn’t above gaming it or breaking from it (opposing TENka) wherever she feels necessary in order to get the job done.

oh man this group, has to be a villains lol Kleya is not goin to like this one bit

I swear, the instant I saw it I immediately said “Dude, way to stay neutral.” without thinking on the entire context of that statement.

So he was running away, untill he found a weapon he was able to handle. I wonder what attributs he needed to use the kid as a club.

Being used as a club does tend to lower one’s appreciation to your wielder/rescuer.

Looks like the dude is out of the game

Ok, I get it, they’re all terrible people… but Kleya and Danni are trying, that counts for something, right?

How is Danni terrible?

She is self-righteous and selfish. Well, maybe more overly self assured she is right then self-righteous. She strikes me as being concerned with her own emotions and viewpoints, forgetting sometimes that other people have such as well.

Which only makes her about as bad as your average person. But still, that is not that good a thing.

That. Did not.
Just.
Happen.

Completely off topic. I think Danni is the underdog of this story. She overcame enormous odds, and is in the game. On too of that, it looks like she had her movement slowed to goud Keyla into hacking. I think she’ll make it above the line from sheer empathy from the viewers.

Either it was turned off, or its hard for people who are physically disabled to move through the mist. In which case, she’ll get even more empathy votes as people realize her condition and how far she’s actually come

Or it could be that since this is her first time in the mists, she has no idea what she is doing. Everybody else has been in the mists and so they are comfortable in that environment.

And it doesn’t seem like those who watch the Game are very empathic. The only enjoyment from watching her would be to see a total n00b get pwned.

This is sadly true. People are selfish. That is not in itself a bad thing. But it means that we, people, do not always think of things from the perspective of someone else. Empathy is something that develops because we understand, to some degree, what is going on. One should not believe the general population, who have not ever even gotten to the loading screen of the game I am guessing, would give Danni the benefit of a doubt. They mostly see pro teams, not a true noob trying to figure things out as they go along.

So far Jane and Dude have done enough to get a lot of Watchers to look at them. That should help them with the popularity contest (Not that the Dude needed much help). So far the group seems to be heading in the Notorious direction which is going to make Kleya’s struggle to not be a villain that much harder. Now she has public opinion to deal with – and we all know how well she deals with the public and their opinions.

Jane, definitely. Sad commentary on humanity that she prolly got a big ratings spike. Dude…he is coming across slightly noobish. If he knew what he was doing, he wouldn’t have used a kid as a bludgeon. If his ratings are going up, its cause he is being laughed at.

Don’t assume they are mostly gonna be Villains. We don’t know what the six alignments and what qualifies one to earn those alignments are. So Its possible Bandit is gonna be a hero, but a dark one. Jane is prolly gonna go villain, unless she was just being weird about accepting the quest.

Have Dude’s eyes always been red, or did they just turn red with guilt?

They’ve been red at least as of navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-253 .

They do seem to fit some dungeons and dragons alignment behaviour. Was that on purpose?

Ahh so he was about to wipe on the level 1 fiendi. Good thing his escort was there to beat it up for him, or rather be used to beat it up with!

I would weaponize the everloving crap out of kid NPCs because those dudes are invincible.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 269