Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
The Multiverse is back....
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6408590" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I guess this is a basic point of disagreement.</p><p></p><p>I think Gygax makes it clear that "good" denotes "contributes to human welfare", and that law and chaos are means to that end.</p><p></p><p>LN, CN and N are valid for <em>play</em>. So is evil (qv assassins). But they are not <em>morally</em> valid. Gygax makes it clear that to be neutral with respect to good and evil is to fail to prioritise human wellbeing (life, relative freedom and the reasonable expectation of happiness). The 3E/d20 system agrees (using the language of "respect" and "dignity" in lieu of the language of rights).</p><p></p><p></p><p>I think that the rulebooks take it for granted that fostering human wellbeing, and treating others in a way that respects and honours their dignity as fellow-creatures, is a better form of life than treating others simply as ends to one's own purposes.</p><p></p><p>Actual arguments to this conclusion are available - and will be no less sound in a fantasy world than the real world - but my sense is that it would be a breach of board rules to run them!</p><p></p><p>Sure. They are flawed value systems (within the framework of D&D's 9-point alignment). Someone who supports freedom as a basis for human life and happiness is CG - s/he is committed to human wellbeing, and believes that social order is a threat to it. Someone who pursues his/her own freedom without regard to the welfare of others, except perhaps in hestitating to kill or destroy those who get in his/her way, is CN. By the lights of 9-point alignment, a morally flawed person.</p><p></p><p>Of course. My main point is that a CG person therefore has no basis for strife with a LG person - it's a dispute over taste and inclination.</p><p></p><p>My other point, to which this quote was a response, was that Gygax implicitly acknowledged that L/C and G/E aren't orthogonal, because he couldn't expound Good without reference to freedom. You can see the same thing in the d20 SRD:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">"Law" implies honor, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability.</p><p></p><p>These aren't orthogonal and independent. For instance, a concern for dignity <em>implies </em>a degree of truth-telling and trustworthiness. After all, lies and betrayal are one of the main ways of treating others as means rather than ends, and you don't have to be a full-blown Kantian to feel the force of this point.</p><p></p><p>***********************</p><p></p><p>OK, if you think it's as easy to remove alignment from the Great Wheel and still have it make sense, as it is to remove alignment from 4e, then more strength to your arm!</p><p></p><p>***********************</p><p></p><p>Why, then, given their vast numbers, have the fiends of the world not succeeded in having the Lower Planes relabelled "good" and the Upper Planes relabelled "evil"?</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I agree with The Shadow that this seems a Nietzschean idea.</p><p></p><p>I probably differe from The Shadow in thinking that there are interesting, even plausible, elements to the Nietzchean idea (it sees development in a range of other modern philosophers: the existentialists; Foucault; Ayer and Russell; Simon Blackburn; etc). But it needs a lot of work - if value commitments are a <em>mere </em>matter of taste, then killing in pursuit of them seems outrageous - it would be killing others simpy to satisfy one's own desire, which in D&D terms is practically the definition of evil. So <em>everyone </em>woud be, in D&D terms, evil!</p><p></p><p>I don't think that D&D has the conceptual resources to easily articulate and make sense of a more sophisticated and plausible Nietzschean approach. And also, certain D&D character classes - especially paladins, monks and samurai - make no sense in the Nietzschean framework. It's no coincidence that fantasy authors whose outlook is closer to Nietzsche (eg REH, Moorcock) don't have paladins or monks in their fiction (in REH, for instance, there are no D&D-style priests, just more-or-less cynical magicians).</p><p></p><p>This language of "shades of grey" is a red-herring.</p><p></p><p>For a "shades of grey" political/espionage novel, I recommend Graham Greene's <em>The Human Factor</em> and <em>The Quiet American</em>. But Greene is not a Nietzschean - he's a Catholic existentialist. Here's a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics" target="_blank">link</a> to an actual play report from my own game, which shows what GMing influenced by Graham Greene might look like. The figher/cleric in that episode found himself in a situation in which he could not realise both honour and justice, and so had to choose. (He chose honour over justice.) That's "shades of grey", but has nothing to do with "good is what you believe it is" - the reason the choice matters, and is hard, is because the character (and the player in playing the character) feels the pull of both values as real and g</p><p></p><p>I think it's actually quite hard to articulate how the PS idea is shades of grey at all - if good is nothing but what I desire, where's the grey? What's the measure by which the greyness of my desires might be judged?</p><p></p><p>This relates back to my comments about wish-fulfillment some way upthread: if good is whatever one wishes, it's a challenge to move beyond wish-fulfillment. And I'm not sure that D&D has the resources to do so.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6408590, member: 42582"] I guess this is a basic point of disagreement. I think Gygax makes it clear that "good" denotes "contributes to human welfare", and that law and chaos are means to that end. LN, CN and N are valid for [I]play[/I]. So is evil (qv assassins). But they are not [I]morally[/I] valid. Gygax makes it clear that to be neutral with respect to good and evil is to fail to prioritise human wellbeing (life, relative freedom and the reasonable expectation of happiness). The 3E/d20 system agrees (using the language of "respect" and "dignity" in lieu of the language of rights). I think that the rulebooks take it for granted that fostering human wellbeing, and treating others in a way that respects and honours their dignity as fellow-creatures, is a better form of life than treating others simply as ends to one's own purposes. Actual arguments to this conclusion are available - and will be no less sound in a fantasy world than the real world - but my sense is that it would be a breach of board rules to run them! Sure. They are flawed value systems (within the framework of D&D's 9-point alignment). Someone who supports freedom as a basis for human life and happiness is CG - s/he is committed to human wellbeing, and believes that social order is a threat to it. Someone who pursues his/her own freedom without regard to the welfare of others, except perhaps in hestitating to kill or destroy those who get in his/her way, is CN. By the lights of 9-point alignment, a morally flawed person. Of course. My main point is that a CG person therefore has no basis for strife with a LG person - it's a dispute over taste and inclination. My other point, to which this quote was a response, was that Gygax implicitly acknowledged that L/C and G/E aren't orthogonal, because he couldn't expound Good without reference to freedom. You can see the same thing in the d20 SRD: [indent]"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others. . . . Lawful characters tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, honor tradition, and judge those who fall short of their duties. . . . "Law" implies honor, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliability.[/indent] These aren't orthogonal and independent. For instance, a concern for dignity [I]implies [/I]a degree of truth-telling and trustworthiness. After all, lies and betrayal are one of the main ways of treating others as means rather than ends, and you don't have to be a full-blown Kantian to feel the force of this point. *********************** OK, if you think it's as easy to remove alignment from the Great Wheel and still have it make sense, as it is to remove alignment from 4e, then more strength to your arm! *********************** Why, then, given their vast numbers, have the fiends of the world not succeeded in having the Lower Planes relabelled "good" and the Upper Planes relabelled "evil"? I agree with The Shadow that this seems a Nietzschean idea. I probably differe from The Shadow in thinking that there are interesting, even plausible, elements to the Nietzchean idea (it sees development in a range of other modern philosophers: the existentialists; Foucault; Ayer and Russell; Simon Blackburn; etc). But it needs a lot of work - if value commitments are a [I]mere [/I]matter of taste, then killing in pursuit of them seems outrageous - it would be killing others simpy to satisfy one's own desire, which in D&D terms is practically the definition of evil. So [I]everyone [/I]woud be, in D&D terms, evil! I don't think that D&D has the conceptual resources to easily articulate and make sense of a more sophisticated and plausible Nietzschean approach. And also, certain D&D character classes - especially paladins, monks and samurai - make no sense in the Nietzschean framework. It's no coincidence that fantasy authors whose outlook is closer to Nietzsche (eg REH, Moorcock) don't have paladins or monks in their fiction (in REH, for instance, there are no D&D-style priests, just more-or-less cynical magicians). This language of "shades of grey" is a red-herring. For a "shades of grey" political/espionage novel, I recommend Graham Greene's [I]The Human Factor[/I] and [I]The Quiet American[/I]. But Greene is not a Nietzschean - he's a Catholic existentialist. Here's a [url=http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics]link[/url] to an actual play report from my own game, which shows what GMing influenced by Graham Greene might look like. The figher/cleric in that episode found himself in a situation in which he could not realise both honour and justice, and so had to choose. (He chose honour over justice.) That's "shades of grey", but has nothing to do with "good is what you believe it is" - the reason the choice matters, and is hard, is because the character (and the player in playing the character) feels the pull of both values as real and g I think it's actually quite hard to articulate how the PS idea is shades of grey at all - if good is nothing but what I desire, where's the grey? What's the measure by which the greyness of my desires might be judged? This relates back to my comments about wish-fulfillment some way upthread: if good is whatever one wishes, it's a challenge to move beyond wish-fulfillment. And I'm not sure that D&D has the resources to do so. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
The Multiverse is back....
Top