Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4794600" data-attributes="member: 2067">This is an interesting tangent, but weird from the context of D&D and the MMII conversation, which doesn't have much at all to do with altruism being instinctive or not, but more has to do with why the designers avoid the Good alignment in monsters as if it were plutonium. One assumes this is because they are under the wrongheaded belief that Good monsters aren't useful. The whole "Gold Dragons have evolved!" is a peculiar sort of excuse that seems to miss the more salient points entirely: the designers believe that "Good" is not a fun alignment in play for anything opposing the PC's goals. I would -- very much -- like to disabuse them of this notion. I'm not sure we need the galaxy of Good that the artificial symmetry enforced, but this is a baby-bathwater problem. There's a happy middle ground that reserves Good for truly iconic creatures (such as the Gold Dragon) and doesn't worry about having the occasional Good adversary or rival, as long as it is used in moderation. That bacteria display altruism is interesting, but doesn't mean a lot for D&D or the MMII. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>