Existential Comics' "Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers"

[AmerginLiath]

I was catching up on back strips of the Existential Comics webcomic, when I noticed that they've begun doing a semi-regular feature of philosophers playing D&D, to hilarious results. So far, there have been four made in recent months. I'm not sure if anyone else here reads the strip, but I wanted (especially after seeing the fourth one, just posted this week) to link to them for folks here's amusement:

Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers

Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers II: The Analytic Turn

Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers III: Ladies' Night at the Dragon's Den

Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophers IV: The Interdisciplinary Disaster

As a fan of philosophy (especially existentialism), I was cracking up the whole time that I was reading these – as well as practically every other strip in the archive each time I've come back to play catch-up – but I thought that these comics here also gave some wonderful examples of the types of players of D&D in the form of great philosophers too!

 

[Celebrim]

Having philosophy inform D&D is I think well suited to the game and perfectly appropriate within a fantasy story. While I like the humor, I'd like it even better to see some of this played straight. One of my favorite D&D character concepts is Mostin the Metagnostic from the heavily philosophical Tales of Wyre campaign.

 

[Samloyal23]

I have been a lifelong believer in the Sensate creed thanks to playing Planescape in my college years, so I love the idea of adding higher level concepts to the game. The humour is subtle and the notes are interesting...

 

[BigVanVader]

I always thought it would be cool to replace Alignment with Philosophy. It would make for some badass games, I think.

 

[Ranes]

Thanks so much for those. They all made me chuckle but the last one brought tears to my eyes.

 

[pemerton]

I thought the 1st and 3rd were pretty funny. The analytics suffered a bit until Witt turned up (I don't think they got Quine right).

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I loved them all... I can't stop laughing.

 

[Celebrim]

I always thought it would be cool to replace Alignment with Philosophy. It would make for some badass games, I think.

I think you could probably fit philosophies into alignment slots without too much shoe horning. Existentialism for CN, Nihilism for NE, Stoicism for LG, and so forth. Obviously, more than one philosophical tradition might fit in one slot, and particularly broad traditions might overlap into several alignments, but I think you could do it. More to the point, you can use ideas from philosophy to inform what intelligent creatures of a particular alignment believe, and how they rationalize their own actions.

In general, I hold the following relationships true: as intelligence increases in a being, the more philosophical and formalized his alignment beliefs become, and as wisdom increases in a being, the more correctly the being assigns particular actions and beliefs to an alignment and so the more correctly he categorizes himself and lives his life according to his actual beliefs.

A low intelligence high wisdom being would not be able to adequately articulate his beliefs or explain why he did things, but would reliably make good choices anyway. A high intelligence low wisdom being would have an elaborately constructed philosophy, that would not only fail to inform his actual choices, but on close examination might not even correctly describe his motives or beliefs. For example, he might believe that he was being altruistic, when in fact his beliefs and actions were characterized by self-centeredness. He'd claim to be for justice, but would observably be motivated by vengeance and so forth. Alternatively, a high intelligence low wisdom being would hold complex philosophies that ostensibly had one goal in mind, but which in practice consistently delivered the opposite of the desired outcome.

One problem with discussing the intersection of philosophy and alignment is that inevitably it ends up intersecting politics or religion or both with predictable results.

 

[Unwise]

Interesting point about the lack of self-awareness from a low wisdom score. That rings rather true with some would be social theorists and philosophers I have met. Their arguements always ring hollow with me simply because I know their parents and how they were raised. They were near incapable of reaching different conclusions, so their logical constucts were always going to reach the same final conclusion regardless of the paths they took. Having a well expressed arguement amounts to nothing more than a lovely wrapping for a core belief system they were always going to hold regardless.

The interesting thing is, their arguement are indeed well thought out, logical enough and coherent. If they had come from anybody else I would have held those arguements as having much more merit. As such, the fault lays with me I am sure, it's funny how humans work.

The comics rather reminded me of a PC I played that was from a vastly different land. He had never seen orcs etc before and where he came from violence was very rare. It was fun actually having to decide on the course of action at any given time without having the crutch of previous expectation to lean on. He failed to save people from orc raiders and decided it was immoral to risk killing 6 bandits just to hold on to his coins.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Using philosophical theories to inform real life behavior or anything remotely like it produces absurd results. Predictable but kind of funny.