Very thought-provoking, but perhaps I can tweak your argument a bit in a way that might prompt at least a degree of consensus. D&D does force those within the gameworld to acknowledge there will be people who perceive synergies between Chaos and Good and therefore occupy the CG alignment square. What it does NOT do is force anyone to acknowledge such people actually end up serving the broader, small-g good. To the extent an LGer, for example, "knows" libertarian principles necessarily undermine Good rather than boosting it, he "understands" that CG is an intellectual fraud no matter how fervently its adherents might believe otherwise and "recognizes" much suffering will be inflicted on innocents if CGers were to have their way with the world. CGers might even come to be seen as a greater threat than Team Evil due to its "fifth column" aspect.
Do alignments improve the gaming experience?
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What do you mean "not really different"?
A wishlist system is no different from letting the player choose, except that it puts the actually timing/context of delivery into the hands of the GM.
But it can be very different from letting the PC choose. From the PC's point of view there may be no choice at all.
First, this strikes me as unrelated to the earlier poison example. It was argued that, in 4e, a paladin has no reason not to use poison. I provided some reasons, namely, that the amount of treasure to which the PC has access (at least in default 4e) is capped within the parcel system, and so the player has no motivation to take his/her parcels in poison form.
Second, your comment seems confused in the same way I diagnosed not very far upthread. The player might assert that his/her paladin is the honourable warrior of an honourable god. But no one else, either in the game or at the table, is bound to believe this. For instance, as I have mentioned multiple times, the players of the two paladins in my game - the paladin of the Raven Queen and the fighter/cleric of Moradin - snipe at one another, and at one another's gods, constantly in game. The paladin of the Raven Queen regards the dwarf as self-deluded, thinking he pursues important matters but in fact unable to see beyond petty concerns to cosmological truth. The "paladin" of Moradin sees the Raven Queen as an evil god and her servant as, at best, amoral. But hardly honourable.
Part of the point of not using an alignment system is to create space at the table for this sort of disagreement about whether characters and gods really live up to their professed ideals. There is no "objective" answer. Whereas you are positing that everyone is bound to agree with the player. That is not how it works at my table, and [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has made it clear it doesn't work like that at his table either.
I didn't attack the examples. I pointed out that vows of poverty have almost always been regarded as superogatory rather than obligatory.
Your comment is puzzling in another way. From the fact that pursuit of material wellbeing is compatible with goodness (assuming that to be so) it doesn't follow that renouncing material wellbeing must be evil. There can be more than one way of living a good life. (And given the role differentiation that has always characterised human life, especially in the contemporary economy, one would want this to be so!)
I'm not sure how I'm meant to comply with both of these at once.
But from the point of view of the game designers, I wouldn't design a game that is founded on a premise that most of my customers and players are evil!
This would be one way of handling it, I guess. I've always taken it for granted that Detect X detects "realities" rather than the targeted being's perceptions/hopes/aspirations. But perhaps I was wrong about that.
Imaro
Legend
[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] ... Are wishlists a "rule" of 4e? Or are they a suggestion for a certain play style? I don't feel like pulling my 4e DMG out at the moment but I could have sworn it was more a suggestion or an option as opposed to the default rules for 4e treasure. Also don't essentials have rules for random generation of treasure? And if so aren't essentials the most current rules, you definitely refer to them as far as SC's are concerned don't you?
I have described wishlists as default 4e. The Essentials Rules Compendium advocates them on p 299 (though for reasons that I personally don't agree with, says that Rare items should be an exception).
The randomness of Essentials treasure is not about item selection but about randomising the number of parcels.
As I have now posted several times, if you play 4e in a more Gygaxian style, in which player choices can vary the amount of treasure PCs receive, then players have an incentive to be expedient in improving their stock of player resources. This is the original context in which mechanical alignment was invented, precisely to force some players not to be expedient in return for other benefits. (The issue in 4e would be that there are no benefits for playing a good PC - it doesn't increase your access to healing or Raise Dead as it does in classic D&D, and paladins are not mechanically stronger than other PCs.)
If that is why you want to use mechanical alignment, go to town! It doesn't change the fact that, for me, mechanical alignment is an impediment to my game experience (given I'm playing default, non-Gygaxian, 4e).
It would also be odd to insist on the necessity for alignment to dissuade player expedience in an otherwise Gygaxian game and yet deny that it is the GM's role to use alignment to place pressure on the players to have their PCs act in certain ways.
Imaro
Legend
EDIT: I know what stance you take, I was asking what the default stance in the game was...
Okay, I looked in my DMG and I see that wishlists are about magic items... we're talking about poison which would be a consumable or a gold piece treasure in another form... I don't think wishlists and tailoring treasure extends to that area... Or is it default in 4e that players can write out what magic items, consumables and what form their monetary treasure takes as well??
Could you please define what you mean when you use the phrase Gygaxian style, I just what to be certain we are on the same page...
I thought we both stated earlier in the thread that neither of us was concerned with or trying to change what the other chose to do with alignment, didn't we? I am approaching this from a stance of theoretical/hypothetical discussion... not of one discussing you personally or trying to convince you personally of anything... this is the stance I believed both of us to be taking at this point...
I'm not sure where I denied this... quote please?
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I mean "not really different". A wishlist can have enough items on it to allow some choice to the wish grantor, or it can be a specific list of which items must be granted when - a shopping list, more than a wish list, if you will. The player can, through what the PC will accept and what he will reject (everything but those specific items which fill his treasure packet quota) define the loot his PC will find. You can decide when, but only within the limits of him finding it rapidly enough to keep pace with his prescribed level of treasure.
Here may lie some of the difference. First, "not good" means just that, and not "evil". One can be between the two. There is LOTS of space there.
Second, I do not need the alignment definitions to tell me I am good. I do not require a pat on the head and a cookie from the game designer for being D&D Good. Maybe I'm Neutral. Really. I get up in the morning, go to work, come home and go to bed. I'm not out there protecting innocent life. I live a pretty good life - I could get by with a lot less, and dedicate my accumulated wealth and/or my time to helping others - meaningful personal sacrifice. I guess I give a few bucks to charity, do some occasional discount or free work, serve on a charity's Board and get involved in my profession. But I'm not missing any meals, I have disposable income for computers, games and other recreation, and I take regular vacations. I'm OK being ordinary, and I'm OK classifying "ordinary" as between Good and Evil.
Third, and this extrapolates from second, I don't even think I WANT to be D&D Good. No, seriously, hear me out. I don't think I'm heroically strong, or agile or hardy - we think of, I think, professional athletes and above for those, at the bottom rung. I'm above average intelligence, but I don't think I'm heroically smart/clever/cunning/wise. We don't have a lot of role models for that, but I'd call Steven Hawkings a Wizard, not a guy who provides tax consultation. When we look for heroic levels of CHA, it's not even the average politician or actor, but the superstars - the Beatles, Hitler, Churchill and Marilyn Monroe - that rank as Heroic.
I want my D&D Good to be Heroic too. That probably means not just what'sobligatory - that's not heroic, just normal. I want larger than life fantasy characters in ability and in their virtue - the ones who go to that superogatory level. Larger than life strength, and larger than life virtue is what I want in my heroic fantasy. I'm life size, thanks (maybe a little pudgier, but overall, about life size), not a Larger Than Life Heroic Fantasy Character. I don't need to be heroically strong, or smart. And I don't need the game to classify me as heroically moral, or ethical, or virtuous either. Keep my larger than life heroes larger than me - that's the way it should be.
The first step is accepting that D&D is not the real world, and need not have real world standards.
Nor would I. But they don't need to be presumed Good either. Certainly not Larger than Life Fantasy Good. If they were, that gaming money would be used to charitable purposes, and so would all those gaming hours. We'd be sacrificing them altruistically helping others, not spending them on our own entertainment. My larger than life Heroic Characters don't spend their evenings playing games!
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
For me not preferring to dwell on fantasy morality has nothing to do with confusing fantasy worlds with the real world. I find value and meaning in fiction of all stripes because it raises questions that are at least somewhat relevant to my daily experience. I just got back from seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier and what I enjoyed most about the movie was how it reflected the struggle between living by our ideals in a world that does not conform to our expectations. I don't expect martial conflicts to be relevant to my day to day existence, but experiencing empathy for the situation the characters found themselves in was important to my experience of the movie.
Stated like this, it's like saying "D&D is not the real world, and need not have real world mathematics". The sentence can be uttered, but what does it mean? What does it mean, for instance, to say that in D&D the square root of 9 is not 3 but 2? Of that if I lie two 10' poles end-to-end, the resulting length is 15' and not 20'.
So if, in the D&D world, humans and other intelligent beings are as close to real-world human beings as the game rules suggest, and if real-world human beings have an interest in being alive that underpins some sort of right to life, that is defeasible in some circumstances (eg self-defence) but not in others (eg "I really don't like the look of you!"), then how would the game-world humans and similar intelligent beings be different?
Nothing in your discussion of any of the hypothetical cases that has come up - eating babies, torturing and killing prisoners, etc - makes me think that you are bringing to bear any standards different from those that are at stake in the real world. And for good reason - the situations are relevantly different.
And the rulebooks bear this out. The 2nd ed AD&D PHB says that good characters "are just that" ie good. Where "good" is clearly being used in its ordinary sense.
The 3.5 SRD says that ""Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others." This sets out a standard for goodness which is obviously grounded in real world standards: other regard, extending to a willingness to make personal sacrifices to help others, is key to ordinary conceptions of morality, and distinguishes moral sensibility from selfishness, amoralism and sociopathy; respect for life and concern for the dignity of sentient beings are key values of enlightenment morality, as expressed (for instance) in the Declaration of Independence and the UDHR.
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Part of what I prefer about spectrum-style L-N-C or 4e alignment is that it makes it easier to understand the motivations of those at the "wrong" end of the spectrum. Why, for instance, do agents of chaos (in 4e, say, that would be primordials and demons) pursue the dissolution of creation without regard for the lives and dignity of those beings whose lives are part of that creation? It's not because they "have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient", nor because they "[kill] for sport" (which is how the 3.5 SRC characterises evil). It's because they think there are other values in play - free expression and creativity, even entropy itself as a value - besides with the interests in life and dignity of sentient beings pale into insignificance. From the standpoint of the typical game participant, and of the typical character in the gameworld, such views might be wrong, even (in a certain sense crazy), but they at least establish a framework within which we can make sense of these beings as (by their own lights) rationally motivated. We can also imagine them as having a certain sort of cognitive bias - because they are so committed to their project of re-creation of the world, they fail to notice the significance of the lives and interests of the sentient beings living in this world here and now. That is a cognitive bias that is familiar to us from the real world, among Soviet planners, National Socialist demographers, imperial bureaucrats, even social security officials and parking inspectors.
Because of this, even if I dispense with the labels as unhelpful (which I do) at least I know how I am meant to envisage a primordial, or a fire giant who serves one, being motivated.
As I was discussing not far upthread with [MENTION=16726]jsaving[/MENTION], one of my problems with 9-point alignment is that it decouples moral concerns of the sort obviously in play with Good and Evil from social theoretic conceptions, in ways that make no sense at all - for instance, I'm supposed to imagine that it can be true that both a person who is committed to dissolution of all social bonds, and a stalwart conservative, can both be equally serving "the dignity of all sentient beings". That makes no sense at all: whoever has the right of it in an imagined debate between (say) Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman about what is the best way to serve the dignity of all sentient beings, they can't both be correct.
jsaving suggested is that perhaps what alignment measure is hopes/convictions rather than realities, but then it seems that a couple of commune spells could settle the issue ("What sorts of economic and political arrangements will best serve the dignity of all sentient beings?") and also it seems that very few people are going to turn out to be evil (most selfish people tend to think that they're serving the interests of others; they're sincere but self-deluded).
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But anyway, I don't see how I'm possibly meant to work any of this out without having regard to the real world. Bracket parts of the real world, sure - I'm happy to run a D&D game in which we ignore all the socio-economic reality that explains why, in a feudal economy, it can be very hard for peasants to life a life of equal dignity - but this is not bracketing the standards by which we measure and understand these morality of these phenomena. With those bracketed, how are we meant to make sense of anything at all?
I mean, how would anyone make sense of the phrase "respect for ilfe" other than by thinking about the real-world meaning of that phrase?
I guess a 4e GM might think that wishlists are great for magic items, but that when it comes to placing poisons, potions, residuum, scrolls etc they would do that without regard to whether members of the party are paladins, ritual casters, multiple leaders, etc.
But I don't see why a GM would do that. It's not like there is some deep and inherent distinction between the relevance of a magic item to some particular PC (whether that be in mechanical terms, story terms or both) and the relevance of a poison, a potion or some ritual component.
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