Evil doesn't necessarily mean ax-crazy evil ala Joker tho. There is evil like Mr Freeze, or Talia al Ghul,
I agree, and I did not say anything in my post to suggest otherwise.
For anyone truly role-playing a good-aligned PC ...
Characters who are a vampire or a Sharan priestess are indisputably evil. There is no possible counterargument. You can try to spin these two characters this way or that, but you cannot escape the fact that they are evil. In the Forgotten Realms setting, there is no such things as a "good" vampire spawn or a "good" priestess of Shar.
Quite the contrary, WoTC is purposefully moving away from identifying any faction/race/class as indisputably good or evil.
That's why they pressed Larian about not making alignment a thing in the game, to begin with.
But we are not talking about a faction, race or class. We are talking about characters. And 5e does have alignment for characters. And the Forgotten Realms setting does have "good" and "evil" as very real things. Shar is an "evil" deity, for example. There is no question about this.
Yes good and evil exist on a metaphysical level in FR, but that doesn't mean that a good character can't be thrown into a situation where they might have to work with evil people in order to survive.
Sure. Absolutely. But that argument goes only so far. It cannot be the basis for party composition and companion interactions for the whole game, or even for a good chunk of the game. For example, I can see this argument at play for the short bit at the beginning when the PC is stranded in Hell and facing some potentially very dangerous conditions. But the moment the PC returns to Faerun that situation *should* end. And if the game then, somehow, continues to insist that the PC has to stick with companions they despise because of "survival," that would clearly be railroading the player.
