D&D General Deleted

[pemerton]

if it is the player's decision the entire time, why does it matter what the rules say? Why would they even need to reference or compare their actions to those rules?

I am talking about playing a paladin in accordance with the rules of AD&D, as found in Gygax's PHB and DMG. These rules tell us what counts as good. It is a capacious conception - roughly, anything that has been treated seriously as valuable in human life counts as good. They tell us that evil people are those who scorn value, and who do not treat value, and the obligations to which it gives rise, as imposing any constraints on their action.

If an individual player doesn't prioritise the beautiful in their conception of the good, I don't think that is likely to do any harm to play. But there is no point, in the play of the game, in contesting the idea that beauty is, on the whole, valuable and hence good. If you want to make that sort of contestation a component of your play, then you need to just drop the alignment system. Because it has no resources to help such contestation, and will actively get in the way.

Likewise for "truth". This is one reason why making truth and honour part of lawfulness rather than goodness generates incoherence: because it creates a situation in which it is supposed to make sense for someone to assert that truth is valuable but not a good. But that doesn't make sense - it's prima facie contradictory, and trying to untangle the apparent contradiction is not going to improve play!

What Gygax's alignment scheme puts into contention is not what is valuable but rather is law or chaos the appropriate means for realising value?

The books very rarely attempt to tell the DM how things must be, for example, nothing in alignment or the paladin in 5e declares that "stealth is a last resort".

I regard it as very telling that you see such an injunction as directed to the GM - who presumably will then use it to tell the player how to play their PC? - rather than as directed to the player.

when the paladin is encouraged to not even lie by omission, and the party in any way shape or form wants to hide information from anyone, then you have a problem coming from how the paladin was presented.

No. You have a problem resulting from the players not knowing how to pursue RPGing with players whose goals and means are opposed.

If you want to play a game in which expedience is rewarded, in which moral trade-offs are encouraged, in which the protagonists never clash over questions of means or of ends, that's obviously your prerogative. It strikes me as obvious that such a game has no room for the paladin ideal, though.

Thankfully there is nothing about FRPGing as such that limits it to the sort of game you seem to be advocating.

 

[CreamCloud0]

This is why I've said that the issue is not the paladin's alignment and code - rather, it's an approach to play in which the GM gets to tell the player whether or not they are playing their character correctly.

i think the other side of the issue is that even now the alignment descriptions are far too open to people trying to 'interpret' them, descriptions that are too subjective, the fundamental cause of the problems that people have with alignment comes from when people have interpreted what would qualify as 'lawful' or 'evil' differently.

 

[Hussar]

i think the other side of the issue is that even now the alignment descriptions are far too open to people trying to 'interpret' them, descriptions that are too subjective, the fundamental cause of the problems that people have with alignment comes from when people have interpreted what would qualify as 'lawful' or 'evil' differently.

I'd say something like this:

is pretty much saying the same thing.

 

[pemerton]

I wouldn't trust someone who gets their bullocks confused with their bollocks!

 

[pemerton]

i think the other side of the issue is that even now the alignment descriptions are far too open to people trying to 'interpret' them, descriptions that are too subjective, the fundamental cause of the problems that people have with alignment comes from when people have interpreted what would qualify as 'lawful' or 'evil' differently.

To me, it seems that, at least in Gygaxian alignment, good and evil are fairly well defined.

Good is rights satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, truth, beauty - all the things that are widely regarded as valuable, worth pursuing in their own right, and establishing moral boundaries that should not be crossed in action.

And there is no attempt to define wrongdoing. Rather, evil is defined as scorning or rejecting value and moral constraint. From the PHB (p 33) and DMG (pp 23-4):

the tenets of good are human rights, or in the case of AD&D, creature rights. Each creature is entitled to life, relative freedom, and the prospect of happiness. Cruelty and suffering are undesirable. Evil, on the other hand, does not concern itself with rights or happiness; purpose is the determinant.

Lawful Evil: Creatures of this alignment are great respecters of laws and strict order, but life, beauty, truth, freedom and the like are held as valueless, or at least scorned. By adhering to stringent discipline, those of lawful evil alignment hope to impose their yoke upon the world.

Lawful evil creatures consider order as the means by which each group is properly placed in the cosmos, from lowest to highest, strongest first, weakest last. Good is seen as an excuse to promote the mediocrity of the whole and suppress the better and more capable, while lawful evilness allows each group to structure itself and fix its place as compared to others, serving the stronger but being served by the weaker.

Chaotic Evil: The major precepts of this alignment are freedom, randomness, and woe. Laws and order, kindness, and good deeds are disdained. Life has no value. By promoting chaos and evil, those of this alignment hope to bring themselves to positions of power, glory, and prestige in a system ruled by individual caprice and their own whims.

The chaotic evil creature holds that individual freedom and choice is important, and that other individuals and their freedoms are unimportant if they cannot be held by the individuals through their own strength and merit. Thus, law and order tends to promote not individuals but groups, and groups suppress individual volition and success.

Neutral Evil: The neutral evil creature views law and chaos as unnecessary considerations, for pure evil is all-in-all. Either might be used, but both are disdained as foolish clutter useless in eventually bringing maximum evilness to the world.

Similar to the neutral good alignment, that of neutral evil holds that neither groups nor individuals hove great meaning. This ethos holds that seeking to promote weal for all actually brings woe to the truly deserving. Natural forces which are meant to cull out the weak and stupid are artificially suppressed by so-called good, and the fittest are wrongfully held back, so whatever means are expedient can be used by the powerful to gain and maintain their dominance, without concern for anything.​

The key idea of evil is that purpose is the determinant - that is, evil creatures do whatever is necessary to achieve their desires without concern for the effect this has on others, and without concern for the value that they undermine or destroy in doing so. If LE, they are convinced that order and organisation is the best way to do this; if CE, they regard individual freedom as the best way. But what all the evil have in common is scorn for life, beauty, truth, etc; and a conviction that morality is really just a tool for suppressing the ability of the "deserving" to get what they want.

I therefore don't think that there is much puzzle in identifying the difference between an evil and a good outlook.

The bigger question is what counts as an evil act? This is not really defined - I believe the phrase appears only in the paladin class description - and is left as an exercise in interpretation. Given that the reference there is to "knowingly and willingly" performing such an act (PHB p 22), my suggestion would be that this means the paladin deliberately chooses to disregard value and moral constraints to pursue their own desire. The paladin choosing to trade off one value against another would not be evil; but the paladin making their own call about this, in defiance of a just instruction or authority or tradition would be chaotic, and hence require confession (to a cleric of at least 7th level) and penance.

Based on what I have read, it seems very common for the "evil act" rule to be imposed by the GM on the player where the GM disagrees with a choice the paladin has made about the trade off between values: that is to say, "evil act" is equated with "wrongdoing" (as judged by the GM). For the reasons given in the previous paragraph, plus the more general principle that I think it is the absolute pits in RPGing for the GM to tell the player how to play their PC, I don't think this is a good way to approach the issue.

 

[pemerton]

Addendum to the above: this is also why I think the "Batman alignment" thing is silly. Batman is sometimes ruthless, but generally does not ignore value or moral requirements in pursuit of his own desires. He is not normally pursuing vengeance for the sake of vengeance.

What Batman doesn't really address is order vs chaos, in the way that alignment is framed. Batman's relationship to the Joker places a question mark over the order/chaos contrast, rather than providing a framework for addressing it.

This doesn't mean that alignment is bollocks, though. It just means that it has narrow utility as a tool for framing conflict. If order vs chaos is not the conflict you want to frame, then alignment is of no use to you.

 

[Neonchameleon]

To me, it seems that, at least in Gygaxian alignment, good and evil are fairly well defined.

Good is rights satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, truth, beauty - all the things that are widely regarded as valuable, worth pursuing in their own right, and establishing moral boundaries that should not be crossed in action.

And there is no attempt to define wrongdoing. Rather, evil is defined as scorning or rejecting value and moral constraint.

A fundamental issue here is that Gygax himself was, on this scale, Lawful Neutral at best and possibly Lawful Evil. Off the top of my head I can think of his scorning or rejecting moral constraints such as:

• Not killing babies (I forget if it was baby orcs or baby kobolds); he quoted the same "Nits make lice" adage of Col. Chivington of the Sand Creek Massacre to justify this as in line with being a paladin. And then pointed out Custer killed "a squaw" for the same reason.
• Not killing surrendered enemies (something he was explicit wasn't a rule of lawful good). In fact he advocated converting them then killing them before they could backslide as being lawful good
• Forgiveness; he advocated An Eye for An Eye as Lawful Good.

(source; Col. Pladoh = Gygax)

And I can make a good argument that the PCs are the bad guys in Keep on the Borderlands.

 

[MoonSong]

The Paladin ideal as a holy warrior fighting for good (or at least the interpretation of good) is pretty well supported. The main contradiction I see is that the historical Paladins were absolutely Christian and strictly monotheistic. The idea that Paladins could worship "Gods" or that more than one God could even exist is the biggest contradiction between the D&D fiction and the historical Paladin IMO

IMO, I prefer the Paladin as a champion for Good (capital Good) and strictly tangential to dieties. Someone who may worship good deities, but only because these deities are aligned with Good, not because they somehow define or determine Good. In the same way, a Paladin should and would raise arms against a nominally good deity that is behaving evilly.

Servants or champions of a given deity should be clerics or cleric/fighters...

 

[Chaosmancer]

Your assertion that it is unrelated is just that - mere assertion. The game rules do not specify any particular fictional reason for why the fiction will include the victim of the baleful polymorph turning back to their normal shape. My player supplied one. You are in no position to say that he was wrong, or lying, or self-deceived: the fiction at our table is not something that you are a part of establishing.

The game does provide a reason. Duration. Time. You may as well say that the game offers no particular fictional reason that a torch only burns for one hour, and therefore when a torch goes out it is because of the God of Flame is demanding more sacrifices in his name and therefore it was divine action that causes the torch to go out after one hour.

But that isn't what is happening. There is no divine intervention that causes a torch to stop burning after one hour, just like there is no divine intervention when a spell that lasts one round, ends after one round.

OK.

What does that have to do with my point? I didn't say anything about when a PC dies. I said that, from the fact that something is rolled up on a table (and so, in the real world, is shaped by randomness) doesn't mean that, in the fiction, it is random.

Because you cannot have Providence, a Divine, Immutable Destiny planned from before your birth if you can die randomly at any point because of random events. The two concepts are incompatible. And just because you can declare after the random events that they were always planned, doesn't mean they were actually always planned. We, as the consumers of the story, know the truth of the situation.

The actions of my RPG characters do not depend on dice rolls. The dice rolls happen in the real world, not in the fiction! In the fiction, they live and die for whatever reasons are apposite in the fiction.

To reiterate, the use of dice rolls in a sci-fi RPG does not mean that, in the fiction, mechanical determinism is false. If I'm playing a historical RPG in which my PC is Newton, or Einstein, it doesn't refute my conviction that the world is deterministic to point out that, at the table, we use dice!

But if the fiction needs to constantly change because of the dice rolls, then it is just lying to yourself that the fiction was planned from the beginning. No it wasn't. It changed because you rolled dice.

You are like a salesman whose product blew up and declares "it was meant to do that!" while shuffling it away in the bag to pull out the next thing.

This is obviously false. From the fact that I am playing a game of Fate, nothing follows about whether the fiction affirms Calvinism, existentialism, mechanistic determinism, Hegelianism, Buddhist "emptiness", or any other position on the causal nature of the universe and the relationship between and meaning of events.

If you are randomizing events, there is no script that everyone is following. AGAIN, a classic example of Providence is Lancelot, seeking his name, coming across Dolorous Gard an ancient fort. Hearing that only a true hero can clear it, and that the hero's name is carved in stone in a tomb in the fort. He clears it, and he finds his name carved in that stone, marking the place he will be buried.

If you were to play that event in an RPG, write down a character's name and put it in the envelope, could you guarantee that the name in the envelope will be the name of the character who clears the last room and enters the crypt to open the tomb and read their name? No. You couldn't. Unless it was a solo adventure and you refused to kill the PC, you have no idea who is going to succeed or even if they are going to succeed. Now, sure, you could simply declare that whoever does it was destined to do so and tell them they find their name, but it is a quantum ogre, a deception. You never planned who it was before the moment they succeeded, because you cannot know who will succeed.

I understand that you can make it look like it was Providence, make it look like it was planned, but you are missing a key component. It ACTUALLY being planned and pre-determined.

Would it? Or would it suggest that something else has happened between the two events?

And how did your divine, immutable destiny change in six seconds?

This is a version of the problem of evil. Theodicy is a well-ploughed field. It doesn't raise any particular puzzle, in the context of RPG play, that is distinct from the general ones that it raises in the real world, and that real world believers resolve using the various intellectual and emotional devices that are open to them. The two that I'm most familiar with are the best of all possible worlds and mystery.

It is almost like you responded to a single sentence in a paragraph, instead of reading the entire thing. This is not a version of the problem of Evil. The problem of Evil only exists if the deity in question is Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnibenevolent. I literally laid out in the paragraph that you seemingly skipped over that the Raven Queen is not Omniscient nor is she Omnipotent. And I don't think we really need to discuss whether a Goddess declared "unaligned" is Omnibenevolent. My point had NOTHING to do with the Problem of Evil.

So, how about you go back and actually read the point I was making in that paragraph, instead of addressing something completely tangential to that point.

This is all just repetition. You are asserting that the rules of the game must be part of the causal process in the fiction. This is the same thing that makes people conclude that hp are meat, that Come and Get It is martial mind control, etc. Suffice to say that other approaches to RPGing are possible - Gygax identified them in his PHB and DMG 45 years ago, and subsequent designers have developed them further.

If a caster casts a spell, then a caster has cast a spell. The effect of the spell did not materialize because the clock struck midnight, it was because the caster took the action to cast the spell. If the spell lasts one minute, and at 12:01 the spell breaks, then it was not because it is no longer midnight, it is because the spell lasted one minute.

Yes, you can declare that the caster took no action while spending their action and their spell slot and that the spell would have lasted for much longer if it had been cast at any other time of day.... but those are falsehoods. The rules make it clear what happened. You may as well say that the spell ended early because the player had their lucky quarter in their left sock, or any other superstition. Just because you can declare two events are related, doesn't mean they actually are. This is not the same as calling an action that forces a reaction "mind control", it is not the HP is meat argument, it is "if something has a time limit and reaches that time limit and thus ends, it was because it reached the end of its time limit" Just because your character might BELIEVE it was something else doesn't mean it WAS something else.

More dogmatic assertion! The reason why the player of paladin has authority over what happens to him, and how that relates to the Raven Queen, but not over another player's character, is obvious: RPGs distribute "ownership" of different elements of the fiction to different participants. It is then the job of the rules to integrate these cohesively (and it a sign of a poor ruleset that it doesn't do this very well).

And you say it is not faith, it is mechanics as if these contrast. Which is bizarre: one (faith) is fiction, the other (mechanics) a real-world process used by the players of the game to help determine the shared fiction. You may as well say that the reason a fighter PC killed an Orc is not fighting prowess but mechanics. I mean, that would be an absurd thing to say, and your example is the same. Similarly, we may as well say - in our game of Fate in which a character's aspect is Always Troubled by Suitors - that the reason the suitors accost the character is not because they are besotted, but because the player spent a fate point.

It's not possible to say anything useful about how RPGing works until we distinguish events in the real world and the imagined events of the fiction.

But the player does not get to declare authority of NPCs. And the Raven Queen is an NPC. And the Raven Queen did not act.

Let me try again. Let us say that there is a trap that hits a target, and it deals 1d4 fire damage, every turn, for 1 minute, unless the fire is extinguished with water. IF the character spends that entire minute praying for deliverance and for the fires to be extinguished, it is NOT the divine intervention of the god that after 1 minute the fire stops burning. Yes, you can declare it is so. You can declare that it was because of their fervent prayers that the duration of the effect written in the rules was 1 minute... but that is false. Their actions had nothing to with the duration. They could have taken ANY action for 1 minute (except diving into water) and the exact same result would have occurred. And just because they did not take other actions, does not mean that the effect was changed.

Again, I get that someone could believe it did. I get the character could declare it did. But that doesn't make it TRUE.

In my post I was proposing it as an aspect, that would work the same way that any other aspect does in Fate. Upthread you said that you have played Fate, but now you do not seem to be very familiar with some of its basic features.

It has been about... seven years? Since I touched the game. And I never played it much before that.

Now you seem to be getting it!

Fiction is not self-creating, or self-validating. In the context of RPGing, it is joint. It is shared imagining.

Right. Go ahead and tell your DM at your next session that your character's personal gravity doesn't work in this dungeon, so you can walk on the ceiling. I'm sure that will work well for you.

And yeah, maybe the DM will agree with you... but I bet that they would give a mechanical reason to alter gravity, like a spell affecting the area. Instead of it just being a "shared fiction".

Look, I love when my players and even when DMs let me help craft the story. I do. I believe that Player's should have full autonomy over their character, and even a strong say in the fiction crafted around that character (I have told DMs in the past that when I create a married character, I am not interested in the wife cheating on my character, and I do not want to explore those stories) but that does not extend to declaring that the entire story is a pre-written script that must follow certain events and then randomizing the events and making up the script as we go along. Those two ideas are not compatible. I may as well say I am feeding the tiny gremlins in my computer when I plug it into the wall. I know it is a falsehood.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I am talking about playing a paladin in accordance with the rules of AD&D, as found in Gygax's PHB and DMG. These rules tell us what counts as good. It is a capacious conception - roughly, anything that has been treated seriously as valuable in human life counts as good. They tell us that evil people are those who scorn value, and who do not treat value, and the obligations to which it gives rise, as imposing any constraints on their action.

If an individual player doesn't prioritise the beautiful in their conception of the good, I don't think that is likely to do any harm to play. But there is no point, in the play of the game, in contesting the idea that beauty is, on the whole, valuable and hence good. If you want to make that sort of contestation a component of your play, then you need to just drop the alignment system. Because it has no resources to help such contestation, and will actively get in the way.

Likewise for "truth". This is one reason why making truth and honour part of lawfulness rather than goodness generates incoherence: because it creates a situation in which it is supposed to make sense for someone to assert that truth is valuable but not a good. But that doesn't make sense - it's prima facie contradictory, and trying to untangle the apparent contradiction is not going to improve play!

What Gygax's alignment scheme puts into contention is not what is valuable but rather is law or chaos the appropriate means for realising value?

I dropped the alignment system decades ago because it is utterly worthless to me and makes these sort of claims. And again, you keep insisting on Gygax's AD&D version, which has not been in print for even longer than I've played DnD. I keep telling you, I don't care about Gygax's system. I have never been talking exclusively about Gygax's system.

And frankly, if you can't see how ideals of "beauty" or "truth" can be used for evil... you need to expand your horizons. Many horribly evil beings and characters utilize "truth" to destroy people, and "beauty" is nothing. Again, Sune from the Forgotten Realms actively has her followers kill anyone and anything that isn't beautiful, because she has declared ugliness as evil. That sort of thinking is literally the basis for at least one dystopian society I am aware of in literature, if not more. Yet we want to declare "beauty" as purely good just because Gygax said so and didn't give us any text in the first edition of the game to challenge that?

I regard it as very telling that you see such an injunction as directed to the GM - who presumably will then use it to tell the player how to play their PC? - rather than as directed to the player.

Yeah, funny thing about being the referee in charge of enforcing the rules. The rules tend to be directed towards you to enforce. I mean, suppose it could be that the rules are given to the players, so that the players can decide whether or not they want to follow them, and the DM could... huh, what would the DM do if they had no knowledge of the rules? Make up new ones that then the players could decide on?

Now, before you continue on your high and mighty horse, I am not the type of DM you seem to think I am, nor am I the sort of player you seem to think I am. But I have seen a paladin player who got to decide for themselves what the alignment system meant. I was playing a Cleric, they were playing a paladin who believed the gods were evil and corrupt and they were the only truly good thing in the world. They declared my cleric evil for showing mercy to our enemies, destroyed shrines to my gods, murdered with impunity.... and because they insisted they were good, the DM let them take and hold an artifact that could only be held by people with the good alignment, cementing to them that they were correct in all of their actions.

Does that sound like how things are supposed to work to you?

No. You have a problem resulting from the players not knowing how to pursue RPGing with players whose goals and means are opposed.

If you want to play a game in which expedience is rewarded, in which moral trade-offs are encouraged, in which the protagonists never clash over questions of means or of ends, that's obviously your prerogative. It strikes me as obvious that such a game has no room for the paladin ideal, though.

Thankfully there is nothing about FRPGing as such that limits it to the sort of game you seem to be advocating.

"Never clash over questions of means or of ends"? They CAN'T clash if the paladin is in the party. That is the bloody point I keep making about those old restrictions. If a paladin "will not adventure with people who do X" then if the party engages in X the paladin is forced to leave. If a paladin cannot adventure with an evil character, then a paladin cannot adventure with a warlock who sold his soul for power, and those two characters cannot clash and have interesting discussions and scenes, because the paladin CANNOT adventure with them. They must, at the least disruptive, leave the party and never return. Or, they must smite the evil-doer and kill the other player's character and force them to make a new one.

This is why those restrictions were such a terrible idea. Because they meant that the paladin could not be in a party who disagreed with them. If the rogue wanted to steal the McGuffin, they couldn't argue with the paladin over whether or not that course of action was correct, because if the paladin participated in any way and did not turn the rogue in as a criminal, then they were an oathbreaker, forced to abandon their oath and no longer be a paladin. And that isn't fun for anyone. It isn't fun when one player is forced to constantly say "Guys, we can't, because my character will literally cease to function if we do that." That one player then is forced to dictate to every other player the types of things they can have happen, and force everyone else to either lie to them about what they are doing, or also play LG characters.

And not only is it abysmal for both sets of players for the Paladin to be the Party Cop, policing everyone's behavior, but it isn't even how a Paragon archetype SHOULD act. They should not be the Morality Police keeping a close eye to make sure you don't do anything they disagree with. But that is exactly what those restrictions did.

And again, I am so glad that we abandoned Gygax, Cook, and everyone else's previous versions of this in 5e, and left it in such a way that a Paladin can actually be a hero with a moral code, instead of the mess they were previously.