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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felix" data-source="post: 1870312" data-attributes="member: 3929">Defense of Alignment:DnD is a game, and meant to be fun.Morality is based on Right and Wrong moored in faith.In the real world, millions of people have been killed arguing over what is the proper way to define Right and Wrong.This game circumvents any problems there might be in Right and Wrong ambiguity by providing an absolute and non-relative definition of Right and Wrong. The details may be haggled about (as evidenced by the multitidue of "Is this Evil" threads) but there is general agreement over the established framework of Good/Evil and Chaos/Law.The alignment system provides an absolutist morality that is Truth in the game world. From there, DMs and players can decide what PCs/NPCs believe to be true, although the character might be mistaken. It is helpful that the game provides a Truth for DMs (and DMs are certainly encouraged to tinker with the system to their satsifaction) because once you have a Truth, the DM and the players now have a starting point they all understand. A lack of an objective alignment Truth, or moral relativism, in a game world does not provide a starting point, and therefore can lead to problems with the DM and the players having assumed different things about the game's morality.I was playing a good cleric in one game. The party ran into a member of a tribe that routinely raped, pillaged, raided, and slew members of my nation. I believe that he was accepted without reservation into the party because he was a new PC, and I felt chided when others didn't understand my character's reluctance to have this guy traveling with us. My cleric then began to say how his people are evil and not to be trusted, what with the raping, raiding, etc. The DM took me aside and said that "no, they weren't evil, because what they do are seen as virtues to their people. They're doing good in their eyes."I was flabbergasted. Raiding + raping + pillaging = Good. The alignment system was not the Truth, because he didn't really use it. He didn't believe in an objective Truth in his game world, and I had no idea about it.My problem with that DM was that the Alignment issue was not well defined; we hand no starting point from witch to go. And that is why it's a useful tool, as Umbran so eloquently puts it, and something that should only be discarded with careful consideration.</blockquote>

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