Imaro
Legend
Because it's obvious you're trying to get information. Then again, I have spent time chatting with actively hallucinating schizhophrenia patients...
Dude how about you cool it with the backhanded insults.
3E explicitly made good/evil alignments relative to one's culture or code. LG following a particular code, for example. The law/chaos was downplayed
What does this have to do with anything I've said... And as many have said before all the tools necessary for any particular DM to make the Law/Chaos conflict primary are there in the game (and I'd argue Planescape as a setting does bring the Law/Chaos conflict just as center as good and evil)... but ultimately good and evil are easier for most people to relate to, and thus sell better.
AD&D1E made them external per the rules. The D&D cosmology is built with that inherent sense of "there is a universal good and a universal evil", and the AD&D 1E DMG makes it quite clear that causing suffering is evil, as is killing for fun; by the same token, reducing suffering is good. Promoting organizational structures and/or laws is lawful. Promoting decentralization, individuality, and anarchy is chaotic.
There are still a ton of grays between all these things you are listing and thus again an alignment encompases a multitude of behaviors, personalities, codes, etc... You haven't dis-proven what I stated... just danced around it.
Quick question... How is a vengeance killing evaluated? Is it a good act? An evil act? What if I derive satisfaction from it as opposed to fun? what if you have fun but it saves countless lives? I mean if these things are defined in the rigidly absolute ways you claimed earlier these should be pretty easy questions to answer and not only should you be able to cite from the book to back the answer up... but if alignment is how you claim it is... I'm at a loss as to why people had so many alignment arguments, it should have been pretty clear right??
Note that the tracking was optional, but a recurrent theme in AD&D as played. It's advised to do so in the DMG, but the actual mechanics for doing so don't appear until supplements (Greyhawk Adventures, Dragonlance Adventures).
Wait what? So you're citing an optional piece of advice to track alignment in the DMG... but it didn't give you the rules to do so which were later found in campaign supplements (which the majority of groups don't use)? I don't understand this at all... You presented this like it was an actual rule in 1e... was it or wasn't it?
The "Great Wheel" appears in rectangular form in the AD&D 1E PHB; as a wheel in Deities and Demigods, Manual of the Planes, and at least one other location in AD&D 1E. It's always been such that the outer planes are tied to the alignments... the 8 circumferential alignments (LG, LN, LE, NE, CE, CN, CG, NG) and the 8 transition points (LG/LN, LN/LE, LE/NE, NE/CE, CE/CN, CN/CG, CG/NG, NG/LG)
I'm really trying to find your point here but I'm not seeing it... what is your point in referencing this? If anything the fact that there are "transition points" would work against rigidly defined alignments... transition points speak to grey areas.
Once you get to the cosmological stage, the relativism of 3E becomes a failure. You can't epitomize Lawful Good if Fred's Lawful Good is based upon "smashing orc skulls to prevent orcs from eating real people in their cities", while Joe's is based upon "Saving all thinking beings from disorder and suffering." The two would expect very different eternal rewards, and per the mechanics of AD&D and the D&D-wide definitions of the outer planes, they are the places of "eternal reward"...
You're still missing my point... LG is not an absolute it is varying shades within boundaries..which is my point. As I said earlier LG actions fall under very broad and very general guidelines but they are nothing like the inflexible, rigidly defined boxes that you seemed to claim they were in your earlier post...
I fail to see how it becomes a failure if it epitomizes LG and LG, being a broad category, encompasses a multitude of behaviors, attitudes, personality types, methods, etc that are all found upon the plane (in some capacity)... then what is the failure here? there is room on an infinite plane for those who believe that evil must be violently (if necessary) and within the letter of the law (because they are lawful) defeated... and those who want to stop suffering and disorder (see if he wasn't focused on stopping disorder (lawful alignment) he could devote some more of that energy to vanquishing evil)... I'm just not getting where the failure kicks in...
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