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I was avoiding Steal because poor Sophie Turner looks distracting levels of awful with flat pale blonde hair and the male leads are not actors I have seen give good performances (except maybe Andrew Koji), but maybe I'll look at that when I've finished Slow Horses. Well that and it's on Amazon...

Two points worth considering with societies like this, whether fictional or real: 1) Re: the bolded bit, how much of that is due to the wealth of the society doing the totalitarianism? Because I would say an awful lot of it is. I don't think that's really anything inherent to the approach to...

In real life? Sure, they wouldn't be. But in the vast majority of D&D groups and groups in a lot of other games, realistically they are basically doing as a form of demented benevolence. Not sure I'd equate donating to churches in D&D with benevolence given how awful most gods are, but I've...

I think that's a very interesting question because the sheer common-ness of the concept does suggest a common ultimate source, but I'm 47 and have been thinking about this for a long time, but haven't really seen any pop-culture place this "We need like, good and evil both maaaaaaaan" concept...

I think the problem here is that the bolded bit is hard to support, and it's extremely easy to argue that in practice this is purely about protecting elites and allowing the targeted suppression of any dissidents, not creating "great quality of life" generally. The more closely you look at laws...

Depending on the source, though, that's either for essentially "Lawful" reasons in that he was getting above his station and challenging the authority of the gods, or because of the "Doctrine of Balance", which is a very vague and wishy-washy Krynnian concept from the 1980s, one which is rarely...

Rare reverse example - Slow Horses S5. (Not really spoilers as this happens nearly immediately) - A guy shoots a bunch of people with an assault rifle, gets sniped at the end of his rampage (by someone waiting for him to finish), and I was immediately like, "Well, that's a 5.56mm weapon, and...

I voted medium-rare but honestly if I trust the place and the steak quality, rare is what I increasingly prefer. But either of those elements is questionable medium-rare. I've had blue steak and have had mixed experiences with it honestly, so I'm not super-keen on that. By the time you've got...

Right? That's the the sort of thing that it's very easy to claim, and countless games have claimed something along those lines, but relatively few of them have actually lived up to that. More often it's just that you have a couple of kinda-flexible abilities and some really easy puzzles...

There's no actuality to in any edition of D&D that I'm aware of. This is what I was referring to when I pointed out that Gygax/Arneson have a lot to answer for, because they were the ones who decided to expand TN from being between Law and Chaos (where it made sense, and where the consequences...

"Players" very much including DMs here, I presume? Most of the absolute worst takes on alignment that I've ever come across "in the field" have been from DMs. Indeed the very first time alignment became an issue in D&D for my group was one I've mentioned a few times - when a DM told us we "had...

To be fair to Mordenkainen, which I don't really wanna be but w/e, the concept of The Balance in an FR perspective relates specifically to the gods, and is backed/enforced/desired by AO, the super-god, it doesn't relate to like, day-to-day activities/horrors normally. But it would mean, at the...

According to Gary Gygax literally everyone in this picture could be Lawful Good except the bearded guy holding Stabby back, who would have to be NG or CG. I'm not kidding or exaggerating, note, he was very clear that killing defenceless prisoners was A-ok for LG, even women and children (he was...

This is probably the most coherent take I've seen on this - there's no logical reason it should be generally appealing or even seen as correct (it's basically a pure anti-change position) but it's one that has consistency and makes logical sense, even if you say "Well that's codswallop!", which...

What exactly are you referring to? I can't see anything they did as actively fighting back against good or promoting evil for the sake of evil, but perhaps I'm forgetting something. He talks the talk re: The Balance (which is a formal but basically deprecated concept in FR cosmology - it's been...

I don't think Daoism can really be argued to oppose Good, or to promote Evil, in D&D senses, though. Daoism certainly fits with Moorcockian neutrality - i.e. between Chaos and Order, but ultimately it's actually pretty concerned with what it sees as "good". I mean, for example, the "three...

Yeah the second point is the huge issue. The whole thing is very firmly Gygax and Arneson's own stupid fault. They're both worthy of significant criticism for creating the whole situation. True Neutral made sense when the Cosmic Forces were Chaos and Law, neither of which was inherently "good"...

Priests healing people isn't remotely a D&D thing. Sorry but no. Priests have had "healing powers" in myth and legend and even people's day-to-day lives (as far as they believe) for at a minimum 5000 years. D&D doesn't get to claim that lol. Clerics are very different to priests. Clerics and...

Warhammer Fantasy is interesting here because it has some D&D influence but a lot more direct Moorcockian influence. Like I think it's probably reasonable to say Moorcock was the biggest early literary influence on Warhammer Fantasy (40K is a complex one), with Tolkien next, and D&D third. D&D...

Definitely not. Games Workshop did that. Green orcs with tusks are 100% a GW thing. They had them from the mid-1980s or earlier, and D&D continued with pig-orcs and grey orcs as the main approach for a very long time after that. A lot of Warcraft is taken from Warhammer Fantasy because...