Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3292887" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think you can fault the rules for your reading of them.  I don't know that this is a myth so much, as very few people hold it.  I think the general problem I have with the 'alignment is useless' crowd, is that in my experience the one thing that is certainly more useless than having alignments is not having alignments.  On all these issues, interpretation and what have you, you still have them without alignment.  The difference is that you must deal with the problems without any guidelines at all and without any integration into the rule mechanics of the game.  It seems to me that you are complaining that some guidelines require DM fiat, so you'd rather use DM fiat.  I don't see a net advantage in that.In any event, the problems you raise are hardly fatal, and in some cases they are trivial.  For this you are excused on the grounds that if you haven't paid much attention to it, you are understably unable to say anything interesting about it.I'm sure it is.  Just as one can develop a poweful adversion to food if you get food poisoning from it and spent the night vomiting it up, you can understandably have a powerful adversion to alignment if it was the crux of some very bad DMing.  But personally, I'd rather blame the bad DMing.Thanks for the tip.  I'll have to read the article when I get the chance.Now, as for some of your other critiquesI think you are going to paint yourself into a corner with that claim if you follow long enough.  'Sloth' is one of the seven deadly sins.  It's not particularly hard to make a case for its evilness.You've some wierd ideas about history.  Are you a student of history are are you pulling the claim that criminal culpability is a rather new and modern concept out of the air?  Are you supposing that unless someone has plastic barrier tape that they can't be duefully dilligent?Oh, I agree that it is a matter of taste.  But it is I think everyone's best and strongest argument.  Why did you remove alignment from the game?  Obviously, because you think that the game is more interesting that way.  If you don't like alignment, ignore it.  Many things can be dealt with that way.  For me, you've not said anything convincing to get me to switch, but then I've clearly not said anything in this thread convincing to you either.That quickly paints one into a corner as well.  It's not hard to show that many of the great evils of the world were done by people who had, or who thought they had, the best and noblest of intentions.As I've said elsewhere in the thread, alot of people in the world's history would beg to disagree with you on that.  But I'll leave them to do it, as this thread is already clearly on its way downhill.To a certain extent, this is a puzzle of the form, "If an immovable object counters and irrestible force, what happens?"  Of course in these debates we tend to see it in the form that you've just given which is, after we boil it down, "If a person is evil, but they never do anything that is evil, are they really evil?"   In the example you posit a person so traumatized that they are a total emotional and moral vacuum and have "no good in thier heart".  You then proceed to give as examples of thier actions a person who is acting in large part according to minimal social norms, which isn't what we'd expect of someone who really had been traumatized to a point of being a total emotional and moral vacuum.  Greeting ones doctors, acknowledging them as fellow beings, responding to question, cooperating and so forth all imply a certain ammount of remaining goodness, or at least orderliness.  The vagueness disguises the problem it has.  The natural responce to this objection would be to continue restricting the actions of the hypothetical person until they really represented complete uncaring.  The problem with that is that you eventually must place the hypothetical person in a state of catatonia, at which point I can simply respond that the person in question has been traumatized to the point that they no longer possess a will and therefore doesn't fit into the claim I made in the first place.  I think realistically, if you are dealing with some one who has been traumatized to the point of being a moral and emotional vacuum, then either you get catatonia or else a strong tendency to sociopathic behavior.  In short, actions are rarely if ever essentially meaning free, and if they are they imply that there is no will behind them.  Such an individual in either case would be an excellent example of why compassion is often an appropriate response to evil.</blockquote>

Verification