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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3519289" data-attributes="member: 42582">This post brings together a number of different things asserted on this thread by different posters, not to try and refute those posters, but to try and illustrate why I think that alignment is complex, not simple, and also why I think it pushes D&D away from gritty fantasy and towards Forgotten Realms-type fantasy (whether that is a good or a bad thing would be an issue for a different thread).First, on PCs killing things:I agree with both these claims. But notice straight away that it rules out (for example) two rival Good churches whose paladins kill one another in holy vengeance. Thus, D&D can't really be used to roleplay the Crusades, medieval Spain (with conflict between Christians, Jews and Muslims), Charles Martel's battle in the Pyrenees, etc.Instead, paladins' enemies have to be Orcs or other more-or-less inherently evil humanoids (in practice, if not in theory - once orcs, in practice, are given the same range of alignments and personalities as humans, their utility as a game device is lost), and demons. At the same time, there is a push towards homogeneity among the Good churches, because their clergy (if they are to remain Good) must cooperate with one another in the face of evil.Again, this puts limits on certain sorts of plots. For example, it is natural to thing that feudal warriors should be at odds, even at war, with the villagers and druids whose lands they are subordinating and bringing under military rule. But a paladin of Heironeous (the natural examplar of feudal rule) who kills a cleric or NG druid of Ehlonna (a natural defender of the villagers' ancient ways) is in danger of losing his or her paladinhood. Thus, the conflict can't reallly develop in the way we would naturally expect. A certain sort of plot is excluded by the operation of alignment - unless we want to make all the feudal warriors LN or LE Hextorites, which has its own difficulties, obviously, because historical knights saw themselves as Christians, not Satanists.But a paladin who kills the non-evil is in danger of losing paladinhood. And to slay others simply to take their loot is obviously evil, in any standard moral system (natural law, utilitarianism, Kantianism, etc). And so would it be regarded by most GMs, I think. Hence the need to dress up D&D killing and looting in moral terms, as defence of the Good from the Evil (Orcs, demons etc).In Tower of the Elephant, Conan kills guards so he can rob a tower. There is no reason to think those guards are Evil, and they're no threat to anyone except burglars. Looks Evil to me.In The Pool of the Black One, he kills a pirate so he can take his job. At best Neutral.In Xuthal of the Dusk, its a massacre of the city folk who are no real threat to anyone. Highly non-Good, I would say.That's just off the top of my head.So Conan (as written by REH) is at best CN, plausibly CE. Nothing wrong with that, you might say, just descriptive alignment at work, but:And Conan is not in the least untrustworthy, and very frequently goes out of his way to protect his allies and those to whom he has made commitments. But once the CN or CE label appears on the character sheet, a certain picture is painted which tends not to leave room for the sort of nuance that we know is typical of actual people and actual fictional characters. I think this is an instance of alignment not being sufficiently discriminating. It ha no label for "murderer, thief, but loyal to allies". Nor for "honest, reliable, good-hearted, but hating of religious/political/etc foes". And so on.Agreed. This would not be a problem except that most canon D&D material goes out of its way to make Good the norm, Neutral the tolerated and Evil quite abberant for PCs.Thus making it very awkward to play a Good rogue, because rogues scoff, cheat and deceive to deliberately harm others (via sneak attack). I think this quote also shows that it is difficult to get agreement on which aspects of behaviour are Law vs Chaos, and which Good vs Evil.True. But in our actual moral thought we use more than two dimensions to characterise people's behaviour. But the D&D cosmos forces everything into two dimensions. This means that, if our D&D game admits the full scope of human personality, politics and society, the cosmos gets confused. For example, are church-going, family-loving, loyal, honest but Japanese-hating veterans of the Second World War Good or Evil? For a D&D campaign to progress smoothly, it has to put these difficult cases to one side - again, certain sorts of plot or protagonist are (in practical terms) ruled out.OK, at this point I will disagree. In the real world, moral philosophy is not all common sense. If it were, there would be no work for professional philosophers to do.And alignment, by forcing everything to be captured in two dimensions of evaluation, makes the moral analysis harder, not easier. The best way to handle this is simply to drop many of the problem cases from the game. But this rules out a number of interesting options for plots and protagonists. In this sense, I think alignment is limiting. I'll leave it to others to argue why it is nevertheless a useful game tool.</blockquote>

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