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<blockquote data-quote="briggart" data-source="post: 9363997" data-attributes="member: 6805135">I was responding to [USER=7035894]@Clint_L[/USER] who, if I understood correctly, stated we can not have objective morals in game, because morals in the real world are ultimately subjective. I was pointing out that, even if the latter is true, it does not necessarily imply you can not explore a fiction in which objective morals exist, by providing a prescription for what Good, Evil, etc. mean within the context of that fiction.You seem to hold to an objective description of good, evil, etc., and disagree with the hyperbolic example I gave. Which, fine, I'm not trying to suggest a universal alignment system for D&amp;D. Rather I was trying to express something similar to your last paragraph. In D&amp;D we do have absolute authority figures, the DM and, to some extent, the players who are the ones that get to say what constitutes good and evil.&nbsp;But is exactly what we can do in fiction. A large part of scifi basically boils down to saying some circles are squares*. Proximity to a nuclear detonation gives you cancer, not make you transform into an invulnerable giant when you get angry. Mutations in your DNA are unlikely to make you able to control weather. It's clearly a matter of personal taste, but to me being on board with these is no different than being on board with ad-hoc definition of alignments.*The Orthogonal trilogy of novels by Greg Egan is IMO one of the most well-executed examples of this. The everyday laws of nature in that universe are so fundamentally different from those of our own reality to the point that he wrote <a href="https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html" target="_blank">several dozen pages working out how physics would change in that universe.</a></blockquote>

[QUOTE="briggart, post: 9363997, member: 6805135"] I was responding to [USER=7035894]@Clint_L[/USER] who, if I understood correctly, stated we can not have objective morals in game, because morals in the real world are ultimately subjective. I was pointing out that, even if the latter is true, it does not necessarily imply you can not explore a fiction in which objective morals exist, by providing a prescription for what Good, Evil, etc. mean within the context of that fiction. You seem to hold to an objective description of good, evil, etc., and disagree with the hyperbolic example I gave. Which, fine, I'm not trying to suggest a universal alignment system for D&D. Rather I was trying to express something similar to your last paragraph. In D&D we do have absolute authority figures, the DM and, to some extent, the players who are the ones that get to say what constitutes good and evil. But is exactly what we can do in fiction. A large part of scifi basically boils down to saying some circles are squares*. Proximity to a nuclear detonation gives you cancer, not make you transform into an invulnerable giant when you get angry. Mutations in your DNA are unlikely to make you able to control weather. It's clearly a matter of personal taste, but to me being on board with these is no different than being on board with ad-hoc definition of alignments. *The Orthogonal trilogy of novels by Greg Egan is IMO one of the most well-executed examples of this. The everyday laws of nature in that universe are so fundamentally different from those of our own reality to the point that he wrote [URL='https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html']several dozen pages working out how physics would change in that universe.[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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