D&D General The Problem with Evil or what if we don't use alignments?

[Crimson Longinus]

If it's an NPC or monster? Yes it tells me a lot about what they will do to achieve their goals. For my own PCs? I like to play different alignments because it helps me put myself in different people's shoes and try to think outside my own mental box.

I'm not LN, but if I play a LN PC I'll try to understand how someone with that mindset would think and respond to different situations. It's just an RP aid.

You're not LN in the real life because alignment doesn't exist in the real life. And I still do not understand what you ned alignment for. Of course you can play or write a character who has personality and morality different to yours, people do that all the time without alignment!

 

[Vaalingrade]

Just because you think people overuse reference to fallacy, which I'd agree with, doesnt mean this isn't a valid place to deploy it, which it is.

There is no place to deploy it outside of a psychology classroom. Shouting out fallacies is solely the domain of people on the internet who have no actual argument but want to score points in their own mind.

 

[Oofta]

Except that murdering the competition doesn't actually make you a great artisan, let alone "of them all" because "of them all" implies both alive and dead.

There are two obvious questions:

1. "The greatest" in whose eyes?
   1. Popular acclaim?
   2. The guild itself?
   3. A wider circle of experts?
2. The greatest how?
   1. Winning a set competition?
   2. Creating something legendary?
   3. Making them irrelevant through invention (e.g. bringing steam hammers to craft armour)?
   4. Driving them out of business and having them work in my shop?

So the evil character in your example doesn't actually believe their bond. They will show them and crush them, but it's not about being the greatest artisan. And both the lawful and the chaotic one need to first define what they mean by "the greatest artisan of them all". Chaotic is more likely to want popular acclaim - but this is about as far as I can see it goes.

If I want to win a competition, one way to do it is to eliminate viable competitors. I may be the best artisan because I'm the only one left, but it's hardly a novel concept in fiction. But that was just one quick example. An evil character might be willing to make human sacrifices to some dark god and so on.

But ... again with the nit-picking to avoid the concept and general idea.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What makes clerics in your world any different than wizards with a club membership, different spell list, and being a bit in combat?

A lot. They're priests, they perform holy rites, they pray to the their god and they promote the agenda of said god. This just hasn't much to do with 'good and evil'. Khalit Kamada, the Red Maiden of War doesn't really care whether you're nice. Granted, she might object you becoming a pacifist.

 

[Oofta]

You're not LN in the real life because alignment doesn't exist in the real life. And I still do not understand what you ned alignment for. Of course you can play or write a character who has personality and morality different to yours, people do that all the time without alignment!

Everybody views the world through a specific framework and from a specific point of view. It's implemented in part as alignment in D&D.

 

[Cadence]

Except that murdering the competition doesn't actually make you a great artisan, let alone "of them all" because "of them all" implies both alive and dead.

There are two obvious questions:

1. "The greatest" in whose eyes?
   1. Popular acclaim?
   2. The guild itself?
   3. A wider circle of experts?
2. The greatest how?
   1. Winning a set competition?
   2. Creating something legendary?
   3. Making them irrelevant through invention (e.g. bringing steam hammers to craft armour)?
   4. Driving them out of business and having them work in my shop?

So the evil character in your example doesn't actually believe their bond. They will show them and crush them, but it's not about being the greatest artisan. And both the lawful and the chaotic one need to first define what they mean by "the greatest artisan of them all". Chaotic is more likely to want popular acclaim - but this is about as far as I can see it goes.

I had never thought of whether "of them all" and "of all time" were different things. In any case, changing it to simply "best" feels like it would let one answer the question he was aiming for.

In that case, it feels like knocking off the best of your competition so you can be the best is a trope.

Crippling the Competition - TV Tropes

Sometimes someone is just too good at something. There is no way you can beat them at it. Or they have humiliated you once too often in their field of expertise. You decide to fix it so they can never beat you ever again. Crippling the …

tvtropes.org

Removing the Rival - TV Tropes

A character (usually a Prima Donna-type) is in direct competition with another for some sort of goal, and resorts to nefarious methods in order to somehow dispose of the competition, whether it be through physical violence, some form of trickery …

tvtropes.org

 

[Maxperson]

Or other way around. Considering that there are far more pictures of orcs than there are exact verbal descriptions of their appearance, I'd trust the pictures.

It can't be the other way around. The description comes first and represents the designers vision for the race. The artwork is made for that. You can trust the secondary source and secondary vision if you want to, but I'm going to trust the correct, primary vision

 

[Cadence]

A lot. They're priests, they perform holy rites, they pray to the their god and they promote the agenda of said god. This just hasn't much to do with 'good and evil'. Khalit Kamada, the Red Maiden of War doesn't really care whether you're nice. Granted, she might object you becoming a pacifist.

Do your PCs have to perform holy rites? Do you require them to have a god instead of just an ideal? Do they get penalized in any way if they don't promote the agenda? Requiring the later two of those anyway seem to go against some of the other posters on here.

 

[Neonchameleon]

The real world doesn't seem to have the equivalent of a 1 minute casting time commune or 1 action casting time zone of truth. It feels like those would make a difference in both theological debates and deciding schisms.

That depends how active the gods were - and the relationship of the gods to their flock. There's at least one Jewish midrach where logic trumps G-d in the real world despite G-d making their opinion known through miracles.

On the other hand, there are cases where the sacraments might be invalidated because of the status of the priest. In the news last year was one in Detroit who found out he wasn't baptized with the correct formula, invalidating his baptism, confirmation, and ordination, and invalidating the marriages and other sacraments he had performed

I'd be curious here as to which church and what exactly happened.

But that, if it was the Catholics wasn't about the status of the priest. It was about the actual sacrament. The limit case here is that St. Athanasius as a kid managed to carry out real baptisms that were recognised by the Roman Catholic Church when he and his friends were playing pretend. Now it's possible to mess up the baptism by messing up the forms (although you have to go considerably further than "creator, sanctifier, and redeemer" in your Trinitarian blessings to do so).

Who said "perfection"?

You did. Literally. ("they are said they get to do them because of their exemplary faith or perfection")

It feels like there is a big difference between needing to be perfect to needing to not be evil in a good church. The later certainly has been disqualifying. And it feels like some deities demanding even more than rough alignment adherence has been a thing.

A lot depends on how active the deities are. In Eberron the deities may not even exist. In the Realms it seems Mystra manifests every ten minutes or so.

But seriously, I'm kind of used to the PC clerics getting occasional dreams or visions from their gods even if it isn't in the rules. Is that meddlesome? Would it not happen in worlds where the gods were hands off about major schisms and heresies and the like?

It depends what the God is and what their relationship to their worshippers and to their church is. And who actually sends the visions.

 

[Maxperson]

And this is probably the entire reason why the two sides are disagreeing.

Yep. My side is going by how alignment works in D&D, and the other side is trying to apply relative morality to something that isn't relative.