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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6620843" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a non-sequitur.For instance, the question of whether or not my sword stroke will run the orc through is a question of objective forces, but the GM is not allowed to fiat it (and certainly is not allowed to fiat it into a miss): rather, we roll the dice.More generally, the "objective" status of alignment is a truth within the fiction. But what I am talking about is who is the arbiter of that fiction. And my strong advice is that GM's who assert to themselves the unilateral power to tell the players' what the moral character of their PCs is, in circumstances of alignment disagreement, are setting themselves up for needless dispute and confrontation.You might disagree with that. There could be at least two grounds for disagreeing: (1) in your experience, players shut up when the GM reiterates his/her unilateral conception of the shared fiction; (2) you think the dispute and confrontation that ensues if the player doesn't shut up is not needless.I'm interested in hearing anything along the lines of (1) or (2) - or a (3), (4) etc that I haven't thought of - but just reiterating that alignment is objective isn't going to make me change my mind. I know it is. I'm talking about who, at the table, gets to author the facts about these objective forces.Says who? I don't know if I've ever met a GM who took this view, and of the two I've played with who came close both had players walk and hence their campaigns collapse, so I don't think the policy served them very well.My own view is that table consensus is preferable, and that the GM should be prepared to yield to the players when their ideas and reasons are better than his/hers. This includes ideas and reasons about what sort of conduct serves or disrespects what sort of values, and also what sorts of values are within the scope of good.As you describe this, the whole episode sounds rather confrontational. Consistent with that spirit, I would have thought that the basic negotiating tactic is to threaten to quit the game.*****************************I think you are referring here only to 3E.In Gygax's PHB, Lawful Good people are said to regard truth as of the highest value, while the Lawful Evil scorn it. In the Strategic Review article that has been referenced upthread, Gygax identifies honesty as one trait that exemplifies goodness.So there is in fact a long tradition in D&D of identifying honesty as good, and dishonesty as evil.Again, Gygax identifies beauty as something of great importance to the Lawful Good (but does not mention it in relation to the Chaotic Good), while it is another thing that the Lawful Evil scorn.Since when? What if the clerics serve a god who is misguided? (Eg they are druids, or are clerics of some peasant god who doesn't acknowledge the importance of urban civilisation.) There is nothing in D&D that suggests that Lawful Good is opposed to the use of coercion to produce right conduct, and in fact the prominence of paladins as part of the game suggests that Lawful Good positively embraces coercion as a means of producing right conduct or preventing wrongdoing.In D&D, killing for profit is not per se evil: nearly all D&D PCs kill for profit (in the form of rewards, or loot) but many are not considered evil.Murder is by definition wrongful killing, so of course murder is evil. But we haven't been told that this PC is a murderer in the strict sense, only that he would be willing to be one.We haven't been told that the PC has killed innocents for a price. All we've been told is that the PC would do so. But the player also says that the PC would do good things if s/he wanted to. Why is one set of boasting to be taken more seriously than the other? There are plenty of people who boast that they would do anything for a price who turn out not to be able to (eg they're too squeamish, or they turn out to have more of a conscience than they anticipated). How do we know that this PC is not such a person?</blockquote>

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