A question of alignment

[B9anders]

I don't know about you, but our group ends up spending a significant amount of time discussing moral philosophy.

An example, in a fairly high level wizards dragonlance campaign we are running, we are monitoring blode and the minotaurs in Silvanesti. This has gradually developed into political manipulation, using magic to fake skirmishes between the two to break up their alliance, feeding false information etc. I expressed my concerns that as a white robed wizard I was having trouble with the fact that we are engineering a war in which a population of ogres who have nothing to do with the ogre titans will get slaughtered just to weaken the minotaurs influence in eastern ansalon. The whole thing culminated when the plot threatened to crash down on us when a minotaur ambassador went for an emergency meeting in Blode and we ended up assasinating him and his guard en route before he could unravel our machinations - which the ogres of course are also being framed for.

The rest of the group argues that both sides are fundamentally evil and it is better to have them fighting each other than us. I am asking for proof of the fundamental evil of peasant ogres living in their home country and also arguing that our methods of late are far to CIA-like, whom I have always identified as Lawful Evil.

I guess the fundamental question is can you still have blood on your robes and claim they are really white underneath?

 

[Teflon Billy]

This kind of thing is why we have done away with alignment in our games.

But if you are worried about it in-game, I think you can safely let it go. D&D's alignments are absolutes...Ogres are evil, Minotaurs are evil...as a good guy, killing them is fine.

The D&D alignments are more about "The Side You are On" than "The Actions You Take"

And they have to be, as a good deal of the game is about entering someone else's home, killing them and taking their possessions.

If the alignments aren't absolutes, it all falls apart.

 

[Trickstergod]

This kind of thing is why the typical human morality is listed as true neutral.

The alignment system works fine so long as it's understood that the GM is the ultimate arbiter and folk at the table understand that there's a prevalence of neutrality for a reason. Alignment is nearly all about the actions you take, the motivation behind them and the end result, all of them factoring in to various degrees.

And, generally speaking, most folk are going to wind up wearing something neutral. Particularly for games that are nothing more than breaking into someones home to kill them and take their stuff. Of course, very few of the ones I've played in or ran revolved around that.

Meanwhile, races listed as some alignment extreme should also get recognized as intrinsically alien, in some form or another, to humans. Elves and orcs aren't human and shouldn't just get played as humans with pointy ears or tusks. That they tend towards alignment extremes is one sign of this.

A good rule of thumb is to gauge whether you find the actions more or less idealistic in nature, reasonable but not necessarily all that great, or outright ruthless.

Those sorts of tactics fail as idealistic ones. They have sound reasoning behind them, but don't sound like anything a good individual would necessarily engage in regularly.