Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6632832" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, but here we are working on the basis of Pemerton's assertion that Gygax's definitions of G/E and L/C are definitive. By those definitions what you are saying is that Lawful Evil is LESS EVIL because its adherents actually adhere to principles of GOODNESS WRT their own community. This, to me, doesn't define a lawful evil community at all! It isn't that I don't get where you're coming from, but the sorts of 'evil societies' that are defined by the classic D&D 9-point system are incoherent. They simply don't fit within the system because such societies would not be consistent. You would not be able to say that a society of LE humanoids was 'evil' by its own terms, and its members would NOT subscribe to evil tenets, they would subscribe to GOOD tenets WRT each other.In fact many examples of such societies do exist throughout human history. In fact one could easily argue that most human societies are of this type. I don't think we would argue that Ancient Egypt was an 'evil society' just because they were perfectly happy to go plunder and enslave their neighbors. Yet such a society would describe those means as being for good ends, would it not? In fact even Gygax's definition of good might well support that! You can't hold up the 9-point system to examination AND hold that these societies are coherent within it, they can't be described as being "of an alignment".I disagree, self-sacrifice has nothing to do with law or chaos. A chaotic good character could just as easily sacrifice himself for others as a lawful good one. Nor is it natural for evil creatures (of law or chaos) to sacrifice themselves for anyone else because evil is defined by the individual's focus on his own good and his own will! You have to abandon Gygax's definitions of good and evil, and thus the 9-point system to get here.Sure, and I am not intending to imply that any other attribute that I apply to these 'Gygaxian societies' corresponds to the way REAL societies really think of themselves and operate either. Hmmmm, well... This is one of those moral dilemma questions that the alignment system doesn't seem to be designed to really deal with. Again, if you go strictly by its definitions, we don't know. I would say that selflessly serving another for some higher purpose which enhances their welfare is not evil. It might be stupid, but it isn't evil, not by Gygax's definition if you stick to the letter of it.Chaos is DEFINED as the placement of the individual's freedom from restriction by others above rules, as such. The real problem here is that the whole idea of a law/chaos dichotomy doesn't REALLY work. ALL rules have moral implications and thus any sort of simplistic prognostication like "all rules will make people worse off" is logically ridiculous. So its hard to even come up with reasoning about "Chaotic" anything. All we can really call law/chaos is a personality trait, you are either a person who likes rules and authority or one who doesn't. It really has no moral or ethical character because as soon as you bring moral or ethical reasoning into play you have to discard the utterly simplistic idea that you can categorize on the axis "rules vs no rules". Sure, but again you cannot use the 9-point system to describe the later! I think the upshot of this little conversation we've had is that I no longer accept that you can talk about society in terms of alignment. Alignment is an attribute of individuals ONLY, and not of society as a whole. There are no 'lawful societies' or 'good societies'. In fact you really cannot apply Gygax's descriptions to more than one individual collectively. You can have a society in which "most individuals are lawful good" or whatnot, but the society itself doesn't have an alignment.Once you accept that limitation then all of a sudden things become a LOT clearer. You can have a society that has entirely selfish masters at the top who are neutral evil and simply follow their own good who oppress masses of slavish lawful followers who do their evil bidding. There will be a mix of individuals in this society, some that deplore the 'masters', some who wish to emulate them, some who dream of revolution. Given the limitations of the 9-point system some of these people cannot be described coherently as being of a specific alignment. Frankly I think the system works OK for describing a basically lawful good-oriented society in which the PCs encounter many people who are lawful, many who are good, and many who stand somewhat in contrast to those people, with some 'bad guys' who aren't that closely examined. The bad guys are either internal or external, but either way they are mainly there for the killin'. If they form some sort of 'evil society' it is largely off stage and not closely examined. At most the PCs interact with it as outsiders insulated from its huge inconsistencies. Somewhere at the fringe of the PCs society are the 'chaotic guys', rangers, elves, and such that are basically 'grumpy guys' that might help you but don't like anyone crowding their space. They don't really have a separate society (or maybe again the elves society is just not really examined). 9-point is a sort of 'Keep on the Borderlands' kind of system. It lets you slap a 'caves of chaos' label on some part of the map and put 'bad guys' there and have the 'good guys' go kill them. The law/chaos divide then adds a bit of color where some of the good guys are 'ornery' and some of the bad guys are just really absolutely stark raving insane droolers. You get a label for each of these basic 2-d character types and thats enough to play a dungeon crawl with. I wouldn't read too much more than that into Gygaxian alignment. Gygax wasn't really that fond of elaborate plots and loads of shades-of-grey type play AFAICT.</blockquote>

Verification