Talk:Saurian

1E alignment

Is there anything in 1E that explicitly refutes the existence of saurians that are not N (and don't try to convince me that the Zevgavizeb worshippers detailed in Book of the Damned are actually N instead of CE or something adjacent)? - HTD (talk) 01:14, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello HTD, there is nothing but have a look at the Bestiary preambles and the help for Template:Creature. We follow the Bestiary for infobox stats and take the 'preferred' alignment as per 'The alignments listed for the monsters in this book represent the norm for those monsters...' For consistency, this should be applied and has been applied, I hope, to all monster pages. In this particular case, the 2E bestiary broadens the alignment explicitly and I have made a note to that effect for clarity. The monster is included already in Category: Any alignment creatures, therefore. Furthermore, we have a policy that states, '[Bestiaries] are Tier 1 resources solely for monster statistics, i.e., not for monster text'. I hope that helps. Fleanetha (talk) 13:35, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

That being said, as I have noticed for numerous other creatures (especially intelligent humanoids), the alignment described in bestiaries very much represent the average and not the dominant alignment, so creatures whose alignment can span the entire grid are almost always listed as N. Take two examples (both 1E): merfolk, androids, etc... are described as N in bestiaries, while in practice NPCs of these races, as presented in the various APs, can vary in alignment as human NPCs do; and angels' alignment in statblocks is always NG, but they are also described to be of all good alignments in lore. In both of these cases this wiki is following the lore instead of strictly adhering to the stat block. Furthermore, the 2E alignment extension is part of the description, and not the stat block, and should presumably apply to both editions (there's no conflict either way, unless we want to strictly segregate between 1E and 2E lores or something, which makes very little sense to me). - HTD (talk) 14:40, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Actually, to think about it, this is far from the only creature whose alignment printed in a bestiary only reflects the average and not the totality. This discussion is probably more suited to a forum thread or something like that. - HTD (talk) 12:57, 31 January 2022 (UTC)