alignment is bad and you should feel bad

[hamishspence]

If you're a Kantian, then taking action to kill, especially outside of a self-defense situation, is wrong, and you will not pull the lever. While the situation is horrible, it's not one of your making. The *ACT* of killing an innocent is wrong, and so you judge based on that.

It is a defence situation - but not defence of self - defence of others - the larger group of people the train is heading toward.

The intent is not specifically "kill the innocent" the intent is to "deflect the train away from innocents" - it just so happens, that there's no trajectory the train can head on that won't kill anyone.

I think even a Kantian, at the wheel of a crashing plane heading for a city, would direct it away from the city, knowing that it would still kill people in the suburb of that city - because killing people is an unavoidable side effect - it's not the goal.

[Max_Killjoy]

As often is the case in arguments, we actually agree on mostly everything. Our only difference is that I see alignment as a tool that can be used for good or ill, and you consider only the bad uses, or think the bad uses are so widespread that they outweight whatever little good is gained from the good uses.
So, can we just agree that alignment is but a tool, and that some people can use it for good and others use it disfunctionally?
We can then agree to disagree on the number of those who use it well and of those who use it wrong.

As for the fact that it is not needed, well of course one can make a roleplaying game without alignments, as one can make a roleplaying games without grappling rules or without a distinction between divine and arcane magic. It's just one of many elements, take it or leave it.


One should not need a gaming manual to tell him what is good and what is evil.
Although, truth to tell, judging by those debates gamers actually have a lot of experience with it and would be pretty well qualified.

No, someone shouldn't need a gaming manual to tell them. But for some reason the gaming manual version of "good vs evil" seems to cause a lot of arguments and confusion on that front, with a lot of "this is what good and evil are in this world even if it's not the same as our world" juxtaposed with "good and evil are objective, universal, and cosmic".

[kyoryu]

Thousands of years of philosophers have yet to agree on what is good and evil.

I don't expect gamers to do much better at finding a universally acceptable answer.

The only reasonable paths are:

1) Don't use "good" and "evil".

2) Define how the game is using the terms, regardless of whether people agree with the objective value of that usage.

[Max_Killjoy]

Thousands of years of philosophers have yet to agree on what is good and evil.

I don't expect gamers to do much better at finding a universally acceptable answer.

The only reasonable paths are:

1) Don't use "good" and "evil".

2) Define how the game is using the terms, regardless of whether people agree with the objective value of that usage.

3) Don't include cosmic and/or objective "good" and "evil" as part of the setting, and leave it a matter for philosophers and priests to discuss, for fathers to argue about with their sons, etc.

If your setting has deities or other fantastic entities of that ilk, don't try to line them up as "good" or "evil" either, line them up along their purported areas of focus and interest, and concentrate on how those areas align and/or conflict with the interests of a character, a society, or a people. A deity's priest might promote and assert those things that their deity "says" are good, and denounce those things that their deity "says" are bad, but they'll disagree with other priests of other sects or deities, and that's no more guaranteed to be "good" or "evil" than what a wise mortal might declare to his/her followers.

(Maybe that's a subset of 1 or 2, not sure...)

[kyoryu]

3) Don't include cosmic and/or objective "good" and "evil" as part of the setting, and leave it a matter for philosophers and priests to discuss, for fathers to argue about with their sons, etc.

(Maybe that's a subset of 1 or 2, not sure...)

That's #1.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's #1.

I wasn't sure exactly how you meant "don't use 'good' and 'evil'".

It's not like we need objective cosmic-powered good and evil, and associated color-coding, for people or characters to explore questions of morality -- to wonder and worry and even agonize over, what is good or evil, what is right or wrong, what is ethical or unethical, what is proper or improper. That happens in real life all the time.

[Tinkerer]

Thousands of years of philosophers have yet to agree on what is good and evil.

I don't expect gamers to do much better at finding a universally acceptable answer.

The only reasonable paths are:

1) Don't use "good" and "evil".

2) Define how the game is using the terms, regardless of whether people agree with the objective value of that usage.

I both agree and disagree with this. I went with #2 myself as I felt it opened up the most interesting possibilities however I don't necessarily think the default of some ambiguity is quite as bad as you say. When not playing a game it certainly starts endless debates however for in game actions I would put it as less problematic than grappling rules based on my experience. Then again that could be because I know entirely too many people who specialize IRL grappling and they keep trying to apply that to D&D.

[hamishspence]

Regarding #2: I once compiled a big list of 3.0-3.5 alignment related sourcebook statements:


http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...ements-summary

Phrased as "might be" rather than "must" - they're useful as a starting point, even if not the be-all and end-all.

[Tinkerer]

Regarding #2: I once compiled a big list of 3.0-3.5 alignment related sourcebook statements:


http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showt...ements-summary

Phrased as "might be" rather than "must" - they're useful as a starting point, even if not the be-all and end-all.

That is an awesome resource! I might even need to grab my notes from back in the day and go through it to see if there are any examples which I would have included if I had thought of them.

[hamishspence]

If I had to do it again I'd probably include Corrupt and Obesiant acts from Fiendish Codex 2.

[Bohandas]

You do realize that there is only one game system that uses alignment?

What about Pathfinder?

[Bohandas]

Regarding infanticide, pretty much no humanoid, monstrous humanoid, or giant race has the "always evil" alignment, and none of them have the [EVIL] subtype; killing them is wrong, even under D&D's morality, because they haven;t done anything wrong (yet). They're neutral until they do something. And even a 5e orc isn't going to be able to do much harm as a baby even if they are taking instructions from Grummish. Always Evil is generally reserved for fiends, aberrations, and the undead. Contrast the harmless orc or gnoll baby with baby mind flayers or ekolids, which start out with eating people and only get worse from there

[Bohandas]

D&D might benefit from the addition of "ungood" acts; things that will drop you from good to neutral, but will never move you from neutral to evil or from evil to neutral. Plus corresponding deed types for the other alignments.

[kyoryu]

Why do Discordian avatars have four squares, while triple posts come in groups of 3?

[Tanarii]

Contrast the harmless orc or gnoll baby with baby mind flayers or ekolids, which start out with eating people and only get worse from there

5e Lore post-Volo's there are no Gnoll babies. They are spawned directly from Hyenas by Yeenoghu.

Orc whelps get a combination of nature and nurture, the whisper of Gruumsh and the training of the followers of Luthic. Or, if you prefer, that might be considered divine nurture and mortal nurture. It's worth noting that half-orcs hear the whispers of Gruumsh too. They don't always grow up evil, although it's noted they usually are if they grow up with the Orc tribes.

[Bohandas]

Why do Discordian avatars have four squares, while triple posts come in groups of 3?

1.) it's an alignment chart from page 63 of the Principia Discordia

2.) It's a pain to edit new stuff in from my cellphone. I have a habit of copying the wrong thing and thus having to rewrite segments, grab quotes again, etc.

[kyoryu]

1.) it's an alignment chart from page 63 of the Principia Discordia

2.) It's a pain to edit new stuff in from my cellphone. I have a habit of copying the wrong thing and thus having to rewrite segments, grab quotes again, etc.

I'm QUITE aware of what it's from.

I was riffing on "why do hot dogs come in packages of 8, but hot dog buns in packages of 6."

I now suspect you are an agent of Greyface, and will perform the Turkey Curse on you.

GOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGO BBLEGOBBLEGOBBLE

[Frozen_Feet]

I'm still talking about perception rather than reality. Lets say the person that is laughing at the dying frail seniors has seen this happen multiple times, and is laughing because he is desensitized and because he finds it amusing to see the other members of the audience being so utterly shocked... You can argue that there isn't anything morally unhealthy about his laughing. But the other members of the audience will still look at him like he is a sociopath.

And I'm saying you shouldn't give undue weight to perceptions of people who don't know better. Concluding "this thing ought to not be in games!" from "this shocked people!" is nonsense.

I don't deny the perception, I deny its implications.

And I don't know anybody who plays the game like that who claims that they are playing a "good guy". They know they are playing a criminal. They might think they are playing a "bad ass" character or something like that, but they are in no way thinking that they are playing a "virtuous" character.

And if you don't know anybody like that, you didn't look very hard. I could just switch to even more on-point examples of Metroid and Aliens again: show me who loses their sleep over Samus Aran genociding metroids or Ellen Ripley scorching xenomorph eggs.

Both characters are widely seen as heroes in the context of their adventures. This doesn't mean people are unaware of how inapplicable their actions are to real world: see 1001 jokes about Samus Aran, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS, etc.. Notice the accompanying lack of people seriously wishing for Samus to stop murderizing innocent wildlife.

The thing that gets people upset about these debates isn't that someone shouldn't do ____ while playing D&D. It is that doing _____ shouldn't qualify as "good" on the alignment spectrum.

Wrong. When talking about the specific sort of argument you are trying to make, these are one and the same, because the follow-up to "this can't be in-game good because people might mistake it for real-world good" is "player characters aren't allowed to do in-game evil because someone might mistake it for real-world evil".

This is NOT HYPOTHETICAL, because banning Evil alignment and hence evil acts is common as dirt.

Again, remember that a lot of the debaters found their argument on in-game or in-setting rules, which is entirely different ball game. I don't take issue with arguments that start with "act X is Evil because rule boom Y calls it out as such".

I wasn't taking about mainstream... I was basing that comment on threads like this that I have read. Personally I can see that in game when there are creatures that are innately born evil that monster infanticide would be acceptable behaviour for a character to still qualify as "good". BUT when I read these thread, I see numerous people arguing against that point, which leads me to believe that if not "most people", then "many people" have a big problem with this.

And I flat out told you that I don't consider people in these threads to be representative of anything. I literally don't design or hold games to people in these threads, so I won't use them as a standard for how games ought to be. Why should you?

I think ir is relevant. If we posted a thread asking "can someone with good alignment casually slaughter human babies?", the answers would be very different than "can someone with a good alignment casually slaughter demon babies."

Of course, because demon babies are fictional constructs judged by fictional rules, and human babies are real objects which aren't treated the same even by those fictional rules. That's the point and that is why I disagree with you. I have no reason to use real standards for fictional beings because of someone's mistaken perceptions.

I don't think I have ever met a "moral alarmist"... maybe if I had to deal with them, I would be more annoyed about this line of discussion than I currently am. I have never in my 30 years of gaming come across anyone who thinks playing D&D is "evil" or "dangerous" or anything like that... just "nerdy" or "pathetic", so my bitterness is more directed towards people looking down on me, rather than fearing me or trying to "save" me.

So you somehow missed the entire Satanic panic as applied to roleplaying games, heavy metal and fantasy literature during 80s and 90s, the entire moral panic surrounding violence in videogames during 90s and early 2000s, and the entire leftwing moral panic over misogyny/racism/etc. across all of media right now?

[Florian]

Good morning, fine folks. Just got up, had my cup of tea, got me a seal cub and used that to club some random babies to death. No loot, sadly.

So you somehow missed the entire Satanic panic as applied to roleplaying games, heavy metal and fantasy literature during 80s and 90s, the entire moral panic surrounding violence in videogames during 90s and early 2000s, and the entire leftwing moral panic over misogyny/racism/etc. across all of media right now?

Going by some arguments that have been made in this thread alone, like equating the wish to keep the game simple and free of morality, because that comes in the way of an adventure game (kick in door, kill pie, kiss orc...) and doing so by introducing a very simple us vs. them that should work as buffer when questions come up, with a certain very dark time in recent history, then no, it seem that once you're in the in-group, you tend to not perceive yourself as being in the in-group...

[Frozen_Feet]

@Florian: I'm not sure I parsed your sentence right.

Are you saying that there are morally alarmist roleplayers who, because they are roleplayers, somehow don't realize their arguments are equivalent to non-roleplaying moral alarmists?

[Florian]

@Florian: I'm not sure I parsed your sentence right.

Are you saying that there are morally alarmist roleplayers who, because they are roleplayers, somehow don't realize their arguments are equivalent to non-roleplaying moral alarmists?

Ok, more elaborate this time.

Question is whether a RPG system is about violence or just makes use of violence.

(3E) D&D is about "Enter the dungeon, slay the dragon, loot the hoard, rinse and repeat", the content being combat. The objective morality tied to the alignments system plays into that, by declaring some things to be "Evil" and the core rules being clear on not playing "Evil" (ie. No Murder, no raping, no torture). This should inform you about things that are not wanted, like having a "24"-style discussion whether torture for the good cause is acceptable.

We can contrast that to game systems / non-core variants of D&D that have "violence" (as keyed to moral decisions) as their content instead of simple "Combat".

The moral alarmist makes the error of equating "combat" with "violence" and goes from there, ignoring the fundamental difference between those modes to approach the game, as, incidentally, does the moral relativist in understanding how the first example works.

[Frozen_Feet]

Ok. Straightforward enough. I'm still confused by the "once you're in the ingroup, you tend to not perceive yourself as being in the ingroup" part, as I can't quite relate that part to your clarification. Which ingroup did you mean? The moral ingroup of player characters?

[hamishspence]

(3E) D&D is about "Enter the dungeon, slay the dragon, loot the hoard, rinse and repeat", the content being combat. The objective morality tied to the alignments system plays into that, by declaring some things to be "Evil" and the core rules being clear on not playing "Evil" (ie. No Murder, no raping, no torture). This should inform you about things that are not wanted, like having a "24"-style discussion whether torture for the good cause is acceptable.

Actually the "no torture" thing is not specifically called out in 3.0-3.5 core - only in splatbooks.

Early D&D (Moldvay Basic Edition) did give as examples of "behaviour inappropriate to their alignment" "A Good character who murders or tortures a prisoner" - but I'm not sure if 1st ed AD&D or 2nd ed AD&D had the same.

[Frozen_Feet]

IIRC 1st Edition AD&D does call it out, but it also does not prohibit Evil characters. The idea that the player characters must be Good was introduced by 2nd Edition, partially as a response to one of the aforementioned moral panics. (TSR had in-company guidelines for content during the same era, now findable on the net. Your opinions may vary on how well they ever followed them.)

[Max_Killjoy]

Not sure it's really fair to equate qualms about an "Us vs Them" setup that uses "good vs evil" labels... with engaging in alarmism or "satanic panic".

[Florian]

Not sure it's really fair to equate qualms about an "Us vs Them" setup that uses "good vs evil" labels... with engaging in alarmism or "satanic panic".

It´s fair. Using objective morality (aka alignments) basically means that moral questions are not part of the game, as in they already have been answered, don't engage in discussions, don't suspect any ill intend. Good/Law = Defenders of society, Evil/Chaos = Attack society. Nothing more, no deeper meaning, no "All Paladins represent the white race, all orcs are negros"... or something like that.

[Frozen_Feet]

The actual ideas I am equating to such are "in-game morality necessarily reflects the players' real life morality!" and "in-game morality must be so-and-so because I don't want other people to mistake in-game morality for my real morality!"

The specific forms these take vary, but are at the root of all moral alarmism.

Examples:

"The characters in a D&D game worship pagan gods and devils, so the players must be Anti-Christian!"

"I don't want to be seen as Anti-Christian, so lets remove all real gods and demons from the game!"

"Video games are violent, so the players must think violence against other humans is acceptable!"

"I don't want to be seen as a violent person, let's remove all violence from video games!"

"D&D distinquishes characters based on class, race and sex, so the players must be classist, sexist and racist!"

"I don't want to be seen as classist, racist or sexist, so lets remove classes and make all races and sexes equal!"

"This movie has women, homosexuals and black people in lead roles, so the creators must be deplorable cucks!"

"I don't want to be seen as a deplorable cuck, so lets have more movies with straight white men in the lead!"

"This game has swastikas, NAZIS! NAZIS EVERYWHERE!"

"I want nothing to do with nazis, lets remove all swastikas and symbols that even roughly look like it from everything ever, including the Jainist flag."

So on and so forth.

None of the examples are hypothetical.

So, remind me... what sort of qualms did you have again?

Was it "alignment uses good versus evil for us versus them, so people who use alignment are endorsing tribalism"?

Or "I don't want to be seen as a tribalist, so lets remove alignment from games"?

I don't think it was.

[Arbane]

I'm QUITE aware of what it's from.

I was riffing on "why do hot dogs come in packages of 8, but hot dog buns in packages of 6."

I now suspect you are an agent of Greyface, and will perform the Turkey Curse on you.

GOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGO BBLEGOBBLEGOBBLE

Guys, we're not supposed to mention real-world religions on this forum.

[Max_Killjoy]

It´s fair. Using objective morality (aka alignments) basically means that moral questions are not part of the game, as in they already have been answered, don't engage in discussions, don't suspect any ill intend.

The only way to remove moral questions from the game is to remove morality. As soon as you add morality -- "objective" or not -- you add moral questions. Using "good" and "evil" as your Team Us and Team Them names immediately makes the division one of (at least supposed) morality.

Good/Law = Defenders of society, Evil/Chaos = Attack society.

Which is in and of itself a moral claim about the nature of the society.

Nothing more, no deeper meaning, no "All Paladins represent the white race, all orcs are negros"... or something like that.

Has anyone on this thread even gone into such ridiculous territory? If so, I missed it.

[Aliquid]

And I'm saying you shouldn't give undue weight to perceptions of people who don't know better. Concluding "this thing ought to not be in games!" from "this shocked people!" is nonsense.

I don't deny the perception, I deny its implications.

I haven't and am not arguing that "this ought not to be in games". I'm not against it at all. I'm just avoiding arguing in support of it. I'm backing off and knowing that sometimes it is best not to strongly argue my opinions when those opinions appear to go against the values of the audience I am communicating with.

Unless of course my personal values state that my opinion is correct, and theirs are damaging to society or whatever... then I will enter the debate. But with this debate, I believe I am right, but don't care if others disagree. If someone things killing monster babies is evil... that doesn't pose a threat to my values at all.

And if you don't know anybody like that, you didn't look very hard.

If someone is playing GTA and going on a killing spree... and thinks they are playing the "good guy", I will be scared of that person in the real world. If that person knows they are playing a "bad guy", and just playing to get away from the real world and let off steam, then that's a totally different story.

I could just switch to even more on-point examples of Metroid and Aliens again: show me who loses their sleep over Samus Aran genociding metroids or Ellen Ripley scorching xenomorph eggs.

Killing eggs is very different than babies. People don't have the same emotional response. The less the creature looks and acts human, the less people will respond as if it were human.

Wrong. When talking about the specific sort of argument you are trying to make, these are one and the same, because the follow-up to "this can't be in-game good because people might mistake it for real-world good" is "player characters aren't allowed to do in-game evil because someone might mistake it for real-world evil".

Those are entirely different things. I don't agree that they are the same at all

The banning of evil characters in gaming groups is mostly because a good portion of people who want to play "evil" characters are idiots and horrible team players. Only a minority of people can play an evil character intelligently.

And I flat out told you that I don't consider people in these threads to be representative of anything. I literally don't design or hold games to people in these threads, so I won't use them as a standard for how games ought to be. Why should you?

Because these are the people I am currently communicating with, and these are the only people who are actually reading this thread... so their perception of this conversation is the only perception that matters.

Of course, because demon babies are fictional constructs judged by fictional rules, and human babies are real objects which aren't treated the same even by those fictional rules. That's the point and that is why I disagree with you. I have no reason to use real standards for fictional beings because of someone's mistaken perceptions.

When it comes to values, most people don't like the concept of fictional rules. They take their real world values and import them into the game, and then either get confused when encountering things that don't exist in the real world... or have a good imagination and think "if that existed in the real world, how would I assess the morality of it?"

So you somehow missed the entire Satanic panic as applied to roleplaying games, heavy metal and fantasy literature during 80s and 90s

I didn't miss it, it didn't exist in my part of the world. I can't go into real world politics/religion without messing with board rules... so to keep it vague: think of the demographic that pushed that panic. That demographic is a very small minority where I live, and if they were to express such opinion people would just laugh at them.

the entire moral panic surrounding violence in videogames during 90s and early 2000s

Yeah, I saw that. But it was more of an "in the news" thing than something I saw first hand.

and the entire leftwing moral panic over misogyny/racism/etc. across all of media right now?

I can't comment without breaking forum rules.