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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 8839537" data-attributes="member: 6915329">I think we can safely discount Gygax's take on morality.Also, while the books may say "here's how feudalism works," how often is it actually used properly in a game? Maybe your game use a feudalism system, but how many games in total do you think use it?Which, IME, describes the vast majority of D&D games. How are the knights accruing wealth? Killing dragons, most likely. How is the population supported? Well, since most settings have gods dedicated to nature or agriculture, their clerics would have the duty to use their magic to make sure the crops grow healthy and strong.I should hope that nobody calls me a fascist for making a world where people aren't being abused!And reactionary and vicious to who? This isn't the real world and it doesn't have real history. The moment you include magic or sentient non-humans or active gods you take it away from anything approaching realism. Gold dragons, or elves, or human monks (the class) developed Enlightenment ideas ages ago.It is unrealistic to make a fantasy world, include fantasy elements, and assume that it works exactly the same way that the real world worked.I wasn't aware that Haiti was in the American South. And have you not heard of "scientific racism?" Of the leaps people made to come up with reasons while non-whites and women should be kept in their place because they couldn't handle things the way white men could, that they needed white men to show them the way? There are literally people today who say that slavery was good because it helped to "civilize" Africans. Yes, racism and sexism was very much considered good in many places. This is also ignoring the actual point, which is: just because something was acceptable then doesn't mean it's acceptable today.And divine justice, in a fantasy world that uses alignments, is evil--at least when it involves genocide and world-damaging events. Nobody was taught humility or pride; they were killed. The survivors weren't filled with hope or redemption; they were abandoned for centuries, even the ones who had always been faithful. The kingpriest and his most evil followers weren't targeted with pinpoint-accurate strikes.It's even not "divine justice." It's a meaningless backstory and plot contrivance used to make the players feel heroic when they reverse it in the very first adventure. It might be divine justice if the meta-plot advanced in a way that, after several years of the game and things being progressively worse, Dragonlance decided that the gods were leaving and here comes the next boxed set or edition, sans divine spellcasters. If it had been done as a series of adventures like the Grand Conjunction of Ravenloft.Instead? It's nothing. It's literally pointless. It has no meaning to the game or setting being played, unless the meaning is "the gods of this world are jerks and shouldn't be worshiped" or you're choosing to play a game during that time period.Why would I care about the French Revolution in a setting that has no France?Which is rather what you're doing as well, you know, by saying that people who aren't accepting that this "divine justice" is perfectly OK are wrong.</blockquote>

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