John Morrow
First Post
Acid_crash said:This whole discussion is mute. Why? Under what society are we determining what is a Good or Evil action?
You don't have to use any real society. You use the definition in the Player's Handbook or d20 SRD. Specifically, from the d20 SRD:
Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.
"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.
"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.
That's a quite functional objective definition.
Acid_crash said:But... What is Good? What is Evil? These are philosophical debates that have no clear cut answers and never will. Also, just because WE in our western society think something is evil, perhaps in a different culture and in a different society those same actions are seen as Good.
In D&D, alignment is treated like color or shape. It's just another trait that living creatures have and it's entirely objective, not subjective. One can look at the grass and see that it's "green". One can do a Detect Evil on a Goblin and see that it's "Evil". It's not culture dependent any more than the color of grass is.
Acid_crash said:This is why alignments in roleplaying games fail so much, because each player has his/her own interpretation of what is considered good/evil or law/chaos, and then we have to rely upon one person (the DM) being open minded enough and able enough to look beyond just his/her own view on it and take into consideration how everybody else views them.
Alignments fail when the players or GM attempt to use them in a relative way rather than an absolute way because that's now how they are designed to be used. Yes, I know that the idea of absolute morality grates on the modern sensibilities of people used to looking at the world through a morally relative lens. Simiilarly, the idea that a creature can be inherently Evil grates on the modern sensibilities of people used to thinking that bad people learn to be bad and aren't born that way. But D&D is designed to reflect the older world view of a lot of historical mythology and fantasy -- a world view where morality is absolute and creatures can be evil by Nature. You don't have to believe that things work that way in the real world to use them in D&D, any more than you need to believe that people can levitate in the air by waving their hands and speaking a few magic words.
Acid_crash said:Alignments are a failure in execution because they are so limiting and they try to hard to define Good/Evil/Law/Chaos into such simple terms when these four terms are unable to be answered.
If you don't believe that Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos can be defined in an absolute sense (despite the fact that the SRD and Player's Handbook do just that), then you aren't going to like alignment. Those things mean something very specific in D&D and what they mean is pretty functionally defined.
Acid_crash said:If anybody can come up with a good answer for them, and convince the philosophers of the world that they are correct, that person would be the smartest individual alive.
I think your problem is that you expect the D&D alignments to be true in a real world that you prefer to see in morally relative terms. In the D&D setting, one need only do the proper Detect spells to answer the philosophers' questions. D&D is a fantasy game and you don't have to like the definitions or their nuances in order to use them.
In fact, in D&D terms, a lot of real people are simply Neutral and not Good, even if they think of themselves as Good. And in D&D terms, if someone is Not Good, they are not necessarily Evil. They may simply be Neutral. Similarly, if they are Not Evil, they may not be Good. They may simply be Neutral. A lot of the world is simply Neutral and being Neutral is not being Evil. It's simply not being Good, either.
Animals are Neutral in D&D and Neutral simply means that one acts out of self interest and personal relationships. Lots of people behave this way, too. Good, in D&D, implies altruism while Evil, in D&D, implies cruelty. The Good character goes out of their way to help others, perhaps to the detriment of themselves. The Evil character goes out of their way to harm others, perhaps to the detriment of themselves. The Neutral character will help or harm others for a reason, but will not go out of the way to do either because of the light or darkness in their heart. In fact, think of "Neutral" as "Pragmatic" and it works pretty well.
A morally relative world view seeks to define everyone as Good by their own standards. That's now how D&D works. D&D defines Good as something very specific. To repeat:
"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.
If you aren't out there making personal sacrifices to help others, don't respect life, and don't have a concern for the dignity of sentient beings, then you aren't Good in D&D terms. You might think you of yourself as a Good person and might be able to justify your behavior to yourself or others. But in the objective and absolute alignment of D&D, you are not Good. You are probably just Neutral.
Acid_crash said:Think Dead Zone. Here we have a person who knows that by letting one person live and become president, he would start World War 3. So, the only way for him to stop WW3 is to assassinate the person. Is this Good or Evil? Is it Evil to stoop to those measure to kill one person, thereby taking a life (and innocent because he hasn't committed the crime yet) to prevent the future, or what?
And that is where I think Law, Neutrality, and Chaos on the other Axis come in...