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General Tabletop Discussion
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How welcome would a wordy and somewhat philosophical treatment of alignment be here? [Thread resolved, thank you.]
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7866411" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>[USER=4937]@Celebrim[/USER] Yeah that's a good guess, I came in in 1988-1989, so the dawn of 2E. I was incredibly fortunate to have an older cousin come over shortly after we got the books, and she was a proper non-adversarial DM who taught me all the basics like Obi-Wan teaching Luke. She also told me not to listen to anyone saying 1E was "better", before anyone actually did, which was helpful, and particularly relevant here, not to take the alignment stuff too literally.</p><p></p><p>I played with people like me but some people just took alignment stuff incredibly literally in a very boneheaded way, and I could see from letters and articles in Dragon that it wasn't an uncommon issue at all, indeed some of the stuff in Dragon was equally boneheaded, especially that you had a couple of articles promoting the idea that NN made you some sort of balance-obsessed loon who literally had to switch sides if Good or Chaos or whatever was "winning", rather than y'know, neutral. And tons of 2E sourcebooks stuck their oar in too, often in contradictory ways. </p><p></p><p>I do feel like over the course of 2E, things chilled out on this a lot, and got more sane. Then 3E managed to cause a bit of trouble but nowhere near as much, and 4E and 5E finally kicked the silly business to the curb.</p><p></p><p>Re. Reason vs emotion I think that's actually one of the more productive takes on law vs chaos in terms of RP and making it real to players. I don't know if you've read Wuthering Heights by Bronte but you may recall that in many ways the whole Linton vs Heathcliff is both reason vs emotion and law/order vs chaos, and particularly interestingly the actual imagery associated with the houses and characters is somewhat mirrored by Moorcock's much later imagery for those forces. There's also the whole nomos vs physics thing in ancient Greek drama and thought which is sometimes nurture vs nature but also order vs chaos and rationality vs emotion.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7866411, member: 18"] [USER=4937]@Celebrim[/USER] Yeah that's a good guess, I came in in 1988-1989, so the dawn of 2E. I was incredibly fortunate to have an older cousin come over shortly after we got the books, and she was a proper non-adversarial DM who taught me all the basics like Obi-Wan teaching Luke. She also told me not to listen to anyone saying 1E was "better", before anyone actually did, which was helpful, and particularly relevant here, not to take the alignment stuff too literally. I played with people like me but some people just took alignment stuff incredibly literally in a very boneheaded way, and I could see from letters and articles in Dragon that it wasn't an uncommon issue at all, indeed some of the stuff in Dragon was equally boneheaded, especially that you had a couple of articles promoting the idea that NN made you some sort of balance-obsessed loon who literally had to switch sides if Good or Chaos or whatever was "winning", rather than y'know, neutral. And tons of 2E sourcebooks stuck their oar in too, often in contradictory ways. I do feel like over the course of 2E, things chilled out on this a lot, and got more sane. Then 3E managed to cause a bit of trouble but nowhere near as much, and 4E and 5E finally kicked the silly business to the curb. Re. Reason vs emotion I think that's actually one of the more productive takes on law vs chaos in terms of RP and making it real to players. I don't know if you've read Wuthering Heights by Bronte but you may recall that in many ways the whole Linton vs Heathcliff is both reason vs emotion and law/order vs chaos, and particularly interestingly the actual imagery associated with the houses and characters is somewhat mirrored by Moorcock's much later imagery for those forces. There's also the whole nomos vs physics thing in ancient Greek drama and thought which is sometimes nurture vs nature but also order vs chaos and rationality vs emotion. [/QUOTE]
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How welcome would a wordy and somewhat philosophical treatment of alignment be here? [Thread resolved, thank you.]
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