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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4236965" data-attributes="member: 42582">Celebrim, for reasons both of time and board rules I'm not sure this discussion can go much further.So just a few points to try and sum up my view:*Despite your suggestion that I am being disingenuous, I cannot see why Rawls is Chaotic and not Lawful - he was a professor of government, and is most famous for his theory of just social institutions. He is extremely hostile to libertarianism and anarchism of all sorts. Likewise, your characterisation of post-Enlightenment law and government as chaotic because self-consciously mutable is mysterious to me - not in the sense that I can't see your reasons, but I can't see why one would not take account of the equally plausible reasons that might be put on the other side.*More generally, I don't find the Law/Chaos axis very illuminating outside of certain fantastic cosmological conceits (eg Moorcock, Lovecraft) which have little bearing on the mundane problems of human politics and social organisation. Your post associates law with such disparate phenomena as concepts, law, government, and organisation. Others would include in the list tradition, honour, consistent behaviour. There is nothing particularly interesting or unitary about these phenomena taken together (again, unless one buys into a cosmological conceit of the Lovecraftian type - but notice that, in Lovecraft, no human activity except perhaps certain artistry is Chaotic - certainly no widespread form of human life is Chaotic in the relevant sense - whereas D&D requires us to apply the notion to mundane humanity).*Good and Evil are also tricky, but frequently less so, especially in a fantasy context where certain real-life questions that tend to be the focus of actual contemporary moral debate (poverty, civilian deaths in warfare, undemocratic government) are bracketed off as genre-inapplicable. By the way, I don't know of any virtue theorist who denies that courage is a virtue (ie good in itself). Whether it is lawful or chaotic is not a question, as far as I know, that they address.*I have nothing against a game that raises moral questions. My objection to alignment in D&D is that it requires those questions to be answered if play is to progess. In practice this all too frequently leads to player-player or player-GM conflict. What is the point of spoiling the game like that?*The less-than-total ambitions of the new system seem likely to reduce the need for these answers to be produced, because players can just take refuge in the "unaligned" category. Hence, an improvement from the point of view of gameplay.</blockquote>

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