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I'm not sure one could conclude from the fact that his writing in D&D evolved much about his own personal thoughts. D&D itself was a rapidly evolving thing during the course of the '70s, with many of its tropes not really being solidly established until the late '70s. Ironically enough, my...

Totally agree that it's really no more than a sometimes useful two-word phrase descriptor of a PC and that we shouldn't treat it with the same seriousness as genuine RL moral inquiry. I think you could, but that kind of character might be a good candidate for Chaotic Neutral. Given that it...

Yeah I mentioned somewhere upthread the fact that RL morality and ethics descriptions and so on have pretty limited degree of applicability. The goal of fantasy ethics and morality is to make for interesting and thought-provoking fiction and allow us to explore things that don't exist IRL. One...

Or, you know, him not actually thinking that the various things he wrote for the PHB and DMG were, you know, equivalent in intellectual depth to, say, A Theory of Justice... which is to say, E. Gary Gygax != John Rawls. :erm: Whatever his own personal flaws, Gygax wasn't pretending to present...

Character growth arcs often involve shifting priorities. Insofar as D&D has a personality stat, this could well be indicated by an alignment shift. Sure, and one interpretation someone else suggested was essentially a notion of how large the circle of caring was. I agree that's how things...

I don't think it's just younger players. My guess is CG has been popular all the way back.

I'm running a godless setting at the moment---I seem to gravitate to those---but in this case, Law and Chaos have taken over as the real prime mover forces. As I've said to folks playing in my games, all my games tend to have a hefty dose of Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber influence.

Interesting. I haven't read any Dragonlance since the '80s so I was going on memory and Wikipedia, which didn't have a lot of details. I'm in a campaign where, after winding the Horn of Change, we drove many of the forces of chaos out of the campaign world but this has created a real problem...

Real life is filled with examples like that and I've used the Frodo meeting Aragorn story more than once to illustrate the difference of "seems fairer but feels fouler". This is all very useful IRL, but one huge difference between RL and fantasy is that, at least in many (but not all)...

Agreed, it's exceptionally brief, much like the almost total lack of description of skills. On one hand this gives the DM freedom but on the other hand it provides essentially nothing to work with. The only parts of the game that got solid attention (in the PHB especially) were the classes...

My understanding of what military psychology has found is that for the most part soldiers don't really sacrifice themselves "for their country" but do for their buddies or small units, although larger concerns often are what get the soldiers into the smaller units in the first place. I'm sure...

It really depends on what "group as a whole" means and there's no reason to suppose it would represent the nation as a whole. IRL nationalism is actually a pretty new concept, only really dating to after the Napoleonic era. The Mafia and other similar ethnic criminal organizations are actually...

I believe that was actually common back in Ye Olde West, where an empty or jammed gun would simply be dropped.

Very Medieval in that sense and it's a direct lift from Three Hearts and Three Lions as well as Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books. Being ruthless in the field is one thing, but murder hoboism often seems to go well beyond that, though, as one says, there are degrees. I have less...

One thing that I think happened was, in addition to a more consistent separation of the genre of "weird tales" into fantasy and sci fi, there was a desire to present a more consistent world, which meant that having intrusions such as sci fi felt "wrong," like the obvious glossy attempt at a...

I think that's been true from way back. Dorm room style argumentation aside, IMO the real problem spots tend to be the conflicted alignments like Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, and Lawful Evil, where there's inherent tension between the adjectives. Part of it, I think is that there's an implicit...

Sure. I totally agree with that. That's certainly one of the most problematic types. There are others, such as a character that's hyper-focused in a particular domain that means nobody else need bother with that role and conversely that character is totally useless outside their narrow domain...

I agree overall about the issue of jerks, but in my experience it's often not so cut and dried. I know certain character types can bring out the worst in some people. These players may be totally fine with one kind of character but become really problematic with others. I can think of a few good...

I believe that Chaosium and the authors felt that way, too. Certainly Michael Moorcock said as much about it. However, copyright law is quite complicated.

I believe that Chaosium and the authors felt that way, too. Certainly Michael Moorcock said as much about it. However, copyright law is quite complicated.