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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6619762" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't really see how the GM authoring the PC's backstory is controlling the PC's actions. But if you think the GM isn't allowed to do that, then you're conceding that the player gets to control some NPCs' actions: because I can't write a backstory for my PC without saying some things about what NPCs did in my PC's past, which - by your apparent definition - is my controlling those NPC's actions.But I think this whole "controlling actions" thing is a red herring. Writing backstory isn't controlling anyone's actions - it's not actually playing the game.Lots of things are objective but subject to dispute. What was the true cause of the First World War? There's probably an answer, but clever historian disagree over what it was. Is such-and-such a fundamental particle divisible or not? Reasonable phyisicists might disagree over the answer.Is killing one person to save ten good? Reasonable people disagree over the answer - Gygax in his DMG at least suggests that this is what LG people might think, given that he describes LG using the Benthamite formula of the most benefit to the greatest number.The fact that alignment adjudication generates any number of disagreements, both at tables and online, to me just reinforces that insisting on objectivity doesn't take the debate any further. The issue isn't about objectivity, it's about reasonable disagreement and maintaining a cooperative endeavour at the table.Final say isn't equivalent to unilateral say, nor to anything goes.I would never advise a GM to make unilateral changes to how Fireball works at a table with an invoker. For more-or-less the same reasons that I think it's a mistake for the GM to make unilateral determinations about the moral meaning of a PC's actions.Who is suggesting that?Gygax asserted that assassins must be evil, but the reasoning is not very persuasive.The most basic D&D campaign assumes that the PCs are mercenaries to some degree, who will fight goblins and orcs in exchange for reward and the right to keep the loot. The reasoning given for supposing that the PCs aren't evil is that the orcs and goblins are legitimate targets. If the contract killer only kills legitimate targets - say, people who aren't deserving or aren't innocent (eg greedy merchants, corrupt mayors, vicious slave-masters etc) then I don't see why, within the basic D&D alignment framework, s/he has to be evil at all.The OP says that:There's not a lot of information there about the targets of assassination, or who is supplying these jobs, or what role the GM has in having NPCs approach the PC to take on the jobs (or is the player having the PC hang out his shingle as a killer-for-hire? - we haven't been told).To me this seems like the majority of the group don't like how this one player is playing his character. I would suggest that the group should talk about that real issue, rather than try to sublimate it through a discussion of ingame questions like which group of gods does or doesn't approve of the PC's actions.</blockquote>

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