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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tuxgeo" data-source="post: 5919927" data-attributes="member: 61026">He wrote the 1E AD&D DMG, not the 2E AD&D DMG. Are they identical?I would ask "egalitarian in what sense," but I think I'm already getting too close to real-world politics, which is verboten here on EN World. (Short version: Is it "rights enjoyment" or is it "rights possession?" Possessing equal rights is not the same as enjoying equal results.)That's the thorn in the soup, to mangle a phrase. While Jeremy Bentham may have indicated that the rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness mandate sacrifice, other thinkers disagreed, saying instead that the taking-by-force of benefits from one person and giving those same benefits to another person transgressed the rights of the first person, thereby reducing overall welfare instead of increasing it. I don't want to go into specifics here; that's a topic for some other board, not for EN World. Since you don't have the AD&D DMG in front of you, I'll type in Gary Gygax's description of Lawful Good here, for reference (again, 1E DMG, page 23): Lawful Good: Creatures of lawful good alignment view the cosmos with varying degrees of lawfulness or desire for good. They are convinced that order and law are absolutely necessary to assure good, and that good is best defined as whatever brings the most benefit to the greater number of decent, thinking creatures and the least woe to the rest.Right. I wasn't supporting a chivalric ideal. I was clarifying which things Gygax himself had said and which he had not. Also, I had already understood the point of the Enlightenment; but thanks again for mentioning it, anyway.What I was saying was that Gygax himself never mentioned "altrusism," "dignity," or "sacrifice" in his definitions. Those words were later additions to the D&D rules, certainly in 3E (as you quoted in the SRD) and possibly earlier in 2E AD&D, though I cannot verify the latter as I don't have a copy of that version.Bringing in the subject of egalitarianism to conflate the ideas of Locke and Bentham may be a unifying trend in modern philosophy, but I think it hides their differences. And, with that, I'm leaving this discussion: I have already transgressed on the "no real-world politics" rule enough for one thread. . . .<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>

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