Wulf Ratbane said:
The Book of Exalted Deeds does not D&D make. Your quotes from that book make me as happy not to have purchased it as I am not to have purchased its Evil counterpart.
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Oh, please. Violence is not always necessarily a victory for evil, not in the real world, and definitely not in D&D.
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If every act of violence were a de facto victory for evil, there would be no good adventurers.
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The vast bulk of the D&D gaming experience is that violence is a perfectly acceptable solution, in some if not most encounters the characters will face.
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It's preposterous to say, "This is what D&D good is." It's no wonder that philosophy was relegated to an optional product. Frankly I'm surprised you can even find it there. It flies directly in the face of all of the FUN of D&D.
I insist in saying that the whole problem is because everyone pretends to apply his real world belief in the game. If you start doing that, you may find yourself impossibled to play with the others, as Wulf says when talking about his fun with D&D.
In a chess game, there are the whites and the blacks, they are equivalent and they kill each other. Easy. In a D&D game, there are the good and the evil, but it's already more complicated than that. There are evil and there are evil and there are other evil. The game has outsiders which make it simple: here's a devil = evil, period. It also has creatures which are "traditionally" evil such as orcs, but with exceptions. And finally it has creatures which you cannot say, like humans, until you see their actions and/or you are revealed their motivations.
When you play a game, watch a movie, read a book or doing something else which exists only in fantasy, you may want to keep it simple. If you start thinking about fantasy characters in the real world terms, almost none would be "good", and in practice I haven't seen a large difference between the behaviour of good and evil D&D PCs. However, you still cannot make D&D as simple as chess.
If your party really feels like, you can try making the game more complex. Book of Exalted Deeds (and here I totally disagree with Wulf) tries to do that a little, and in fact it is a book for "mature audiences". You need to accept a more difficult way of handling the game if you use this book.
When talking about character's morality, the clash between the DM and the player in question must remain at the game level:
the paladin thought he was doing the right thing, and his god disagreed. Instead of complaining because he lost some abilities, the player should take advantage of the situation as a RP idea. OTOH, the DM could have been more careful of the consequences of screwing up the current idea.
It should have been nice before playing that the whole group agreed about the level of complexity of these issues, and about the DM's rights to put character's morality under test. It is really a matter of a few minutes... when we started the last campaign, I just asked the players if it was ok for them that we did not question these things - the reason was that the game was our 1st in 3.5 and I had to concentrate on learning the rules - so they just kill stuff based on tactics; in previous campaigns we enjoyed deepening the issue more and it works just as well if everyone likes it.
Wulf Ratbane said:
Evil is evil, and it is GOOD to kill it.
Numion said:
The Paladin did not murder anyone. He executed a criminal.
If you are talking in game terms, these are example of legitimate statements. The point is that if everyone agrees not to stress the subject, your characters don't have to all agree with each other about the statement (just as players don't). For a Paladin of another god these statements could be ultimate blasphemy.
But the reason of this troublesome debate is that when someone writes such statements he is still based on his own believes, not his character, which inevitably leads to something unacceptable for example by religious players.
Just to say, I have played with fascists and pacifists at the same table, and it is possible to play together as long as you play and don't preach.
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