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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 3610232" data-attributes="member: 6777">Ah, see, my very contention is that the rules don't make the assumption that the player has assigned any imagined motivations, because they may not even exist. A character is just a sheet of paper with a set of stats. It has no feelings or motivations. As a DM, the only tangible, reliable thing you can base adjudication on is what happened in the game. Ergo, the rules focus on just that, telling us what characters of the various alignments do that exemplify their alignment stat.Well, not the way I see it, exactly. It's certainly something that you, the player, ascribed to your PC. But was it after the fact? Is the motivation being rationalized to fit with the meta-motivation (e.g., "I was bored and wanted some combat")? It's just too nebulous, and makes too many assumptions about the groups style of play.As for grounding in actual play, I'm just trying to convey the idea that theorizing needs to be kept in the same context as the mechanic, i.e., that of people sitting around a table playing D&D. Leading off an argument with real-world morality or talking about real people (and even some fictional people) just confuses things, IMO, because we're not talking about morality; we're talking about a D&D mechanic.</blockquote>