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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8481587" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I think there's a vast difference between a person taking a black-and-white morality as given in a world and drawing conclusions based on that, and saying that the real world person actual believes that.Like I can look at the Warhammer 40K universe and say what I think a space marine would do if he found a bunch of children of any other race. He'd exterminate them, call it a righteous act, thank the emperor for the chance, and be rewarded by his chapter for the deed. I think that space marine would absolutely agree with the same statement that Gygax quoted, too. That doesn't mean I think it's righteous, or moral, or just, or any of that. That's acting out how someone else might respond. Roleplaying, remember?Even if he's not roleplaying, you still can't claim intent. It's like how sometimes Crawford will answer with RAW or RAI. I don't think it's clear at all that Gygax is giving a RAI answer. I think you have to consider that he's just giving the RAW answer, and verifying that there are some very incorrect results that the game allows as written. 1: The paladin kills evil. 2: The orc children are evil. 3: Therefore, the paladin can kill orc children. That's just looking at the system and seeing 1 + 2 = 3. I don't think that's an incorrect interpretation of AD&D as presented circa 1980. A Paladin could justifying themselves that way in-universe, including with that quote Gygax mentions. That doesn't mean it's actually morally correct. It also doesn't mean that that's what Gygax's personal beliefs are. It's just what the books say, which is exactly what was asked of him to address. 2005 Gygax can't do anything about what 1980 Gygax put into his books.Yes, there are issues with a game system that has those results. That's why it's changing. This is the same reason that Games Workshop released their <a href="https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/" target="_blank">anti-hate statement</a>. However, you'll note that this statement was released less than 30 days ago. It's dated November 19, 2021. They are just now, well after WotC has made their changes, coming out and saying, "Hey, all this ultranationalism and racial hatred in our game that came out in 1987 is wrong and you shouldn't actually want to do that. It's a fictional game based on an ultra dark future." Warhammer 40K has much more problematic morality in it, too. We're talking explicit religious wars of genocide on unimaginable scales constantly with the books filled with in-universe propaganda calling those wars righteous and correct. So I don't really get pointing at the corner cases in AD&D that have horrific results and then claiming the original author's intent was malicious. And, yes, it's a corner case. There are no AD&D modules billing themselves on the "adventure" of the moral complexity of encountering orc children.In other words, I think Gary could simply be agreeing that if you take the simple morality system he wrote up 25 years prior to his statements that you end up with "good" characters that have no problem doing horrific things based on that morality and calling it "good". I don't think he cared because he wasn't playing D&D to make social commentary about racism, colonialism, or systemic oppression. So he's not upset that the toy morality system he invented 25+ years prior doesn't work when you put even a trivial amount of pressure on it, because the point of the toy morality system is not to replicate real world morality. It's to serve the straightforward goal of the game: to provide a reason to have conflicts that are easily solved by PCs, particularly with violence. AD&D is a game about fighting monsters. It's not trying to generate some complex analogy for your actual real world beliefs to map to.Now, I agree, you don't need to create a game that does this kind of thing. You obviously shouldn't have that as a morality system. It's not a good design because it can be co-opted, it alienates people, it dehumanizes people, and people will see those horrific parallels. You shouldn't be selling a game that has a morality system in a game where "good" is capable of such horrific results. Yes, the modern game is better and is improving with the changes being made. That doesn't mean that Gygax's goal with the system was those horrific results. That just means the morality system in AD&D is braindead and too simple. It's unable to handle complexity of any kind. The point of alignment is not to punish the paladin while the DM invents gotchas to the inconsistent morality system. It's to have a reason to adventure into a dungeon and fight dragons. That's why the orc children scenario is stupid. It doesn't belong in AD&D because it's morality system is very clearly unable to handle it. The fact that you've had a DM who was so juvenile that they put that in the game doesn't mean that that is the goal. It means you had a bad DM.But if we're going to sit down and point out the horrible design choices that were made in AD&D, the alignment system and monster design have a lot of company. Bad design is not an aspect of AD&D's game mechanics unique to alignment. Hit points and damage also do stupid things. Weapons and armor don't always make sense. Heck, look at the fire rate you can achieve with a heavy crossbow in 5e. That's a modern design for the core component of the game, and it's completely absurd. Or look at how stealth works with a halfling rogue, or just how hiding vs standing behind cover works. Again, that's all total nonsense, and it's explicitly the kind of thing the game is about!I just can't buy it that when you evaluate old alignment systems and end up with contradictory results for situations that usually don't come up that the conclusion is the contradictory results must have been the goal. That doesn't follow to me. Nothing from AD&D says that it's was designed to represent and portray realistic or complex morality systems. It's not! It's designed to generate conflict and adventure in ways that PCs can participate in! The morality system serves that first and foremost.It's a game. It's not supposed to be real. We absolutely should fix it when it's doing things that are offensively incorrect, but it's still a game whose primary purpose is being a game.</blockquote>

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