NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8817963" data-attributes="member: 42582">You seem to think I've having trouble understanding. I'm not. I'm just not agreeing with you.Yes. I bought my copies of the AD&D PHB and DMG in the first half of the 1980s. One of the interesting features of the way that Gygax defines good is that it encompasses the full range of values - life, wellbeing, freedom, truth, beauty are the main ones he mentions - and the full range of moral conceptions - Benthamism (greatest good of the greatest number), human rights, virtue, wellbeing. He doesn't use alignment to distinguish between modernist, rights-based conceptions of good and more theological conceptions that emphasise humility before and obedience to the divine.This is relevant to understanding the place of paladins in the alignment system: they must be LG, and they seek to "take service or form an alliance with lawful good characters, whether players or not, who are clerics or fighters (of noble status)" (PHB p 24). Thus, while the DMG (p 23) tells us that LG holds that "good is best defined as whatever brings the most benefit to the greater number of decent, thinking creatures and the least woe to the rest" - Benthamism, which is hostile to all theological and aristocratic obscurantism - the PHB also assures us that being a knight of the round table, serving a divinely-anointed king and upholding the feudal order.Alignment - at least in its good vs evil dimension - doesn't purport to draw the distinctions that, in the real world, are fundamental to political argument and conflict. It doesn't purport to settle the dispute between the ancien regime and the French revolutionaries.Nonsense.The authors of the setting are not presenting the gods as committing genocide. They're presenting the gods as imposing retribution - collective punishment for the sin of pride.This is a well-known moral conception, consistent with the paladin-esque approach to LG set out in the AD&D PHB.</blockquote>

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