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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6619795" data-attributes="member: 42582">I guess I don't feel that the line between 1st ed AD&D good and evil is as fine as you suggest.I agree that there are behaviours that are hard to categorise as Good or Evil in the AD&D scheme. A simple example: someone regularly lies to save a group of villains trashing a gallery, thereby sacrificing truth to preserve beauty - is s/he good or evil?]A more complex example: a ruler suppresses consumption to build up capital (eg by stockpiling grain for trade, by making clerics cast Stone Shape spells rather than healing spells, etc) in order to do long-term improvement works in the city. (Many modern European cities, at least, were built in something like this way.) As a result, the people are hungry, child mortality is higher than it might otherwise be, etc. But N years down the track, the people living in the nicely built, well-sewered city with straight, safe roads are very happy, and don't feel any personal connection to the suffering of their ancestors. Is the ruler good or evil?But I don't think these difficulties of classification arise because of a "fine line". I think they arise because AD&D works with a very broad and loosely defined notion of goodness. If it matters in play to be more precise, I think that's left for the GM and players to work out.I'm not sure that the 3E definitions do a significantly better job of getting these cases right, either. For instance, if they tell us that the character in my two examples are straightforwardly evil, then I think something has gone wrong, because they are producing an answer that is too glib relative to the complexity of the trade-offs and choices that are being made.I agree that AD&D 1st ed and 3E aren't too far apart in how they define evil. I also think there is some overlap in relation to good, probably more than you do, because I don't (or at least in the past, haven't) made as much of the sacrifice notion as you have stressed in your post.I think there are two ways of going here.In the Feb 1976 edition of The Strategic Review, Gygax said that "most of humanity falls into the lawful category, and most of lawful humanity lies near the line between good and evil. With proper leadership the majority will be prone towards lawful/good. Few humans are chaotic, and very few are chaotic and evil." So I think he agrees with you that, on his definitions, most humans will end up good.But here is my take, posted upthread: a person who, despite professed LG convictions, always cheats on taxes, always finds a reason to tell the beggars to go elsewhere for alms, always evicts squatters relying on the thought that it's "someone else's" job to find them somewhere to live, etc, is probably LE but moderately self-deluded. Despite this person's convictions, in fact s/he is cultivating a system of socially-ordered power in which s/he has her place and pursues her desires, imposing a yoke upon those beneath her.I think I could have just described more than 10% of the inhabitants of a typical fantasy world, once even just a little bit of the "cheerful peasant" veneer is peeled away.</blockquote>

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