Quote Originally Posted by Zeful View Post
So you'd rather the default game essentially call out every player as horrible hypocrites who are literally the worst things in the setting because they're freebooters?

Yeah see, your entire closing bit can be turned 180 degrees and used as a completely valid argument against that kind of crap. You want to play a depressing grey-on-gray world in which everything you do is morally ambiguous, you still can if you want to, you'll just have to ignore their fluff and insert your own. My problem is insisting that as the default.
But ignoring fluff that supports ambiguity is KNOWN to be trivial to do.

Look at 3.x where killing orcs indiscriminately is unambigously, clearly, and unquestionably EVIL. Seriously, orcs are an often alignment, an outright majority are not CE and there's NOTHING in the rules that says that the rest of them are overwhelmingly likely to be evil.

Moreover in 3.x racial prejudice is EXPLICITELY a characteristic of LE.

Additionally in 3.x simply being evil is CLEARLY not enough to justify death. Consider that humans show no tendancy toward or away from any particular alignment, so about 1/3rd of your average city's population is evil. Callus disregard for the welfare of others is defined to be evil, and doesn't require that you ever commit any crime at all, much less a capital one.

So the 3.x rules are everything the poster who doesn't like team jersey play wants. If you actually read those rules it's totally clear that killing orcs because they are orcs is EVIL. Doesn't change a thing about the way most people play. I regularly see people on the internet using orcs as an EXAMPLE of an always CE race you're allowed to kill. Those are the orcs with a often (not usually or always) alignment in the game that says racial prejudice is evil. The rules that encourage ambiguity are so easy to ignore that people never even noticed them when they're plainly put in the rules.

So since we know that almost everyone will ignore rules that encourage ambiguity you may as well write the rules that way. People who like team jersey play are fine with 3.x even though the rules don't actually allow that style at all.