this feels like a huge blanket statement. sure the mechanics of D&D throw out scientific accuracy for the sake of simplicity, but this flies in the face of anyone who wants to keep regressive ideas in their settings because of "historical accuracy".
Consequences of playing "EVIL" races
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Indeed; and in a game it might change a bit depending on which PC is doing the checking.
However, in the case of a typical RPG, in the end only one person's opinion matters: the GM who makes those determinations. This includes PCs - you can write LG as your alignment on your character sheet but if you play it as CN then CN is what someone's gonna get if they check you.
Now, players - in or out of character - can always disagree with a GM's assessment. I'm currently in this position in the game I play in: the GM has determined that undead of various sorts aren't always evil, but I-as-player disagree (other than rare and exceptional cases). I've also got a couple of PCs in that game who, each for reasons of his own, see undead as a scourge with no redeeming features whatsoever; and I play them as such.
Leads to endless arguments with the party Necromancer...
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Errr...how did you jump from what I said to this? I'm missing a step or two along the way, I think.
Scientific accuracy and historical accuracy aren't really the same thing.
idk I feel like trying to make things accurate to reality is it's own general category imo.
Celebrim
Legend
???
Not only is that not a logical train of thought (how does it "fly in the face"?), but I suspect it is self-contradictory. If you are going to equate "scientific accuracy" with "scientific thinking", and then if you are going to equate "scientific accuracy" with "historical accuracy" (which is specious to begin with), then surely what must be true for "scientific accuracy" and "historical accuracy" must be the same. But the poster you are agreeing with seemed to imply that it morally wrong for a games to encourage "unscientific thinking", so by your "logic" you'd have to assert also that it was morally wrong for games to not have "historical accuracy". Can we condemn a game for "ahistorical thinking"? Is alternative history wrong in and of itself? Are fantastic events in a narrative condemnable merely if they are historically improbable or historically impossible?
What are you trying to prove through that above statement anyway?
Or which edition you are playing.
In 5e... there's no real mechanical impact of alignment. It is a descriptive note, and nothing more. So, yes, whether a thing was good or evil is entirely a matter of opinion.
In other editions, alignment was an actual characteristic of an entity, either gained through their behavior or innate to their being. Magic could interact with this characteristic, so it was a real, if non-material, thing in their world. In these editions, if you have an opinion on what is good or evil... that's too bad. The opinion of the Universe was the only one that mattered.
Celebrim
Legend
This reminds me of the change where they made 'speak with plants' work by giving plants sentience at that moment, rather than allowing communication with something that was already sentient. It avoids the "screaming broccoli" problem and makes things more familiar to the average modern player. They do this though at the cost of making the game not backwards compatible - for example a Libram of Silver Magic.
But this is still not quite true. It's mostly true now, but there are exceptions.
For example, 5e srd: "Alignment is an essential part of the nature of celestials and fiends. A devil does not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn’t tend toward lawful evil, but rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil."
This doesn't imply the devil ceases to be a devil when in its own opinion that isn't lawful evil. A devil might correctly perceive with its supernatural wisdom that it has ceased to be lawful evil, but I don't think the intended implication is that any act is lawful evil or not merely as a matter of opinion. Else, the whole alignment is an essential part of the nature bit wouldn't make sense.
What 5e has tended to do is to make alignment of anything less than an outer planar being not a significant and essential part of their nature. They've tended to rewrite mechanics that interacted with alignment to interact with classes of outer planar beings, and they've tended to turn damage conditional on alignment into named sorts of damage.
Also, I would like to point out that there is a difference between something being a "matter of opinion" and something being a matter of disagreement. That people disagree over something doesn't make it a mere "matter of opinion". There is a categorical difference between the statement, "Chocolate tastes good" and "The Earth is a disk.", even though they are both statements upon which people have differing opinions. The first statement is truly subjective and solely therefore a matter of opinion: everyone is right regarding their own tastes. But the second statement is a statement about objective reality to which everyone is subject. Someone is right or wrong, regardless of their being a disagreement.
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Celebrim
Legend
Ok, you don't seem interested in answering. I feel like you just dropped a grenade in the thread, and then ran off. You threw out an assertion that is in our present society one for which many people believe that they are justified in ruining and destroying other people's lives. You implied that if a game system, or the people that played it, featured alignment labels that that was wrong and racist. And racism is a charge that is consequential in modern society. You don't just throw down that gauntlet and act like you have said nothing. It's like yelling "Fire" in a crowded place. There better be some smoke around to justify it and you better be serious.
Ironically, I also believe in your backtracking from that original bomb assertion, you have inadvertently created an argument that justifies racism and genocide.
You argue that good or evil, right or wrong is subjective and that it changes from one person to another.
You've argued that each person has their own "right" and own "wrong" particular to that person. You even went so far to suggest, "All of the above increases the lions chances of survival. So how can you call them anything but good?"
But if we apply your logic to people, and we can't say what is right or wrong, and we can't call anything wrong if it increases the chances of survival, then everyone is perfectly justified in seeing the world as strictly a competition for resources, survival of the fittest, where winning is passing on your selfish genes to the most offspring that are possible. And, thus many would justify genocide and racial discrimination, with the claims that they are just fighting for their own.
I think we want to be able to say that racism is wrong, and it is not merely a matter of subjective opinion as to whether it is wrong. It is evil, and I think we would like to say that people ought not adopt the lion's view of survival of the fittest and kill everything that doesn't carry their genes. I would call a philosophy of Social Darwinism anything but good.
shawnhcorey
wizard
Games that label whole races as good or evil are racist. That's what racism means: assigning morals based on categories.
Celebrim
Legend
Aside from being wrong, that is an opinion as absurd as labeling the earth flat.
But at least now that you've said it, no one can now accuse me of misconstruing you or attributing to you feelings you did not have.
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