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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shoel Sweeny" data-source="post: 2948966" data-attributes="member: 40608">As far as I've seen alignement works best when its kept secret from the players and the characters.  When one has to ask if their action changed their alignment, it seems much more like metagamaing one of the most important aspects of the game, what your character does.Morality based on society and "the times" is a ridiculously far fetched notion.  Sure, it wasn't excusable for cultures to set up the laws they did (such as the Romans orphan knife fights, or the slave that you don't participate in but don't actively try to stop) but these were the times, and it's an unfortunate habit of people not to question the morals apparent in their time.However neither you nor your character are living in those times.  D&D is rather a mishmash of pseudo medieval romanticized cultrue with modern moralities, and this is the way its been presented to us in the Players Handbook.  Additionally you are born and raised in a moraly enlightened time, the fact that you recognize rape, murder, slavery etc as evil shows you knowing better, so how can you justify your actions by a time period to which you don't even belong?A six hundred years ago (give or take, numerical history isn't my strong suite), people believed the world was flat.  In fact, nearly all of Euorope believed this was so.  Today however, we know this is untrue.  The fact that nearly everyone believed differint doesn't change the fact that they were so very wrong, so why is it so hard to believe we've grown in our moral knowledge* as well as our geographic (etc) knowledge?*A disclamer:  I'm not saying people are any more intristically good today then they were some odd hundreds of years (or even one hundred years) ago, just that we have a better idea of what is good and what isn't in this time period.  Sure, some people murder, and some still kidnap people to lock them in their basements and use them for their own nefarious purposes, but at least know we know it's wrong.*end disclaimer*But I digress.  My first point is that despite what other people have done (which is really no defense at all) you and your character know right from wrong.  Unless of course your character is insane (not chaotic neutral, that's not insane).Anyway, my second point, this time proto argument is it hurts to have one's face burned off.  In fact, it hurts alot.  Were I to choose between getting my face burned off, and pretty much anything else, I'm pretty sure I'd pick not getting my face burned off.  You'd need second degree burns at least for facial disfigurement.  That's like taking a hot clothes iron to someones head and pressing down real hard, for at least a couple minuets.  There'll be sizzles and pops and ichor and blood curdleing screeches of pain.  Lots and lots of pain.  She threw garbadge at you?  Suck it up.  Only a heinously evil individual, or an individual who has severe mental problems would murder to retaliate for insult.  The HP system makes the horrors of combat much less real and gritty then they are.  Saying, "I cast whome evers fire" and deal eighteen points of damage is alot less then taking a flame thrower to someone and playing make-over Jeffery Dahmer style.  In a game sense, you've commitied a nonsensical act against a very low threat individual.  In the story sense of the game, you've greviously murdered another human being.  In my book that's either textbook sociopath, comic book evil.</blockquote>

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