It doesn't. It just determines if he is bribable or not. Let's say the guard is NE, he's likely to be bribable so I'd set the DC lower than a guard who was LG or LN. Alignment for me determines the moral character of the NPC. But no one is perfect and I don't know if this particular guard is going to be bribable or not, so roll away.
I agree that you can't be perfectly impartial, but I do think you can get close enough that it doesn't matter.
It's pretty darn rare, but I have seen it. Usually if the geography is very unusual in and of itself. There was one time that a ring of mountains surrounded a small, flat plains. We decided to see if there was a reason for that and went there. I can't remember any of the other occasions.
Sure, but the goal is exploration. It was just the exploration of a specific area of the map and everything in-between that the group has to travel through. There's nothing beyond exploration involved at that point. Later on if the party comes to a town or city near the forest and asks around, perhaps someone will have an adventure hook dealing with the forest adding another goal.
No one is saying there aren’t biases. Again it is about the goal of bringing impartial and striving for it. For me that is very important to running one. Doesn’t mean you don’t have biases. It means you are trying to be as impartial as you can
impartiality isn’t about setting creation or setting integrity, it is more on the adjudication side. For example if players go to a gambling hall and I know the proprietor has Madame Wu’s leg taking strike, and I can tell conflict between him and the party is brewing, I try to put aside biases I might have about him using or not using that technique on a PC, and use my best judgment about whether he would or not. If I find myself leaning towards he would, I think I have to ask myself if that is because I personally think it adds more excitement to play or is it what I think the NPC would genuinely do. That is an extreme example but cokes up with other aspects of NPC motivation and I think at least doing your best to be as impartial as you can, is important for fair play. And if I ultimately decide he would, I think I have even more duty to mind my impartiality and make sure I am being fair and even-handed to the PCs as things progress. I want a let the dice fall where they may approach but I also don’t want players feeling like I screwed them over
Yes. If I am genuinely trying to be impartial and feel that I'm succeeding and the players who have participated in my games over the past couple of decades feel I am extremely fair and impartial, then I'm quite comfortable in asserting that I am, in fact, impartial, by any meaningful standard. (Conversely, in my current campaign, impartiality in the way the world operates is not as important and I've been clear up front that I'm intentionally setting up things suitable to the game's genre and style.)
But the goal was to explore a place. You can't say that exploration doesn't count as exploration in any situation where the goal is to explore. Or, I mean, you can, but it's an argument that makes no sense.
Except that both of those things have actual answers to the question. The first is "diamond companies have had an extremely successful ad campaign and have convinced people synthetic gemstones are inferior". Bitcoin, likewise, has greater-fool theory as is the case with most speculative bubbles.
Are...
Then you and I have dramatically different ideas of what "harm" means.
First, diamonds have been valuable for far longer than companies have existed, let alone synthetic diamonds. Second, so what. The reasons are irrelevant. We all have reasons for what we find valuable. What the DM finds valuable in exploration can be different from player 1, and player two's reason can be different than the DM or player 1.
