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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lewpuls" data-source="post: 7756994" data-attributes="member: 30518">“Presentism” is the imposition of contemporary morality on historical figures of centuries ago, usually resulting in criticism of those people. It’s nonsense, because circumstances were quite different, and morality was different, “back then”. Example: people think the Romans were evil for having slaves. Slavery is always bad, right? No. Romans enslaved prisoners of war (and virtually every year, Rome was at war somewhere). If you said to a Roman that’s wrong, the Roman would say, “what, you want us to kill them instead? We can’t afford to keep our enemies alive, they have to earn their keep - via slavery.” (The Romans may have been the nation in world history most likely to enable their slaves to earn their freedom, by the way.)What I see here is some people imposing their standards of morality (from the current oh-so-safe wrap-kids-in-cotton-wool modern world), on people in life-and-death adventuring situations. And it’s just as much nonsense as presentism is. None of us here are likely old enough to remember WW II. That was a much grimmer reality than anything today, and if my understanding of history is correct, morality wasn’t quite the same then as now. Desperate situations make for different points of view.Some of us may remember the heart of the Cold War, perhaps even the Cuban Missile Crisis, when people genuinely feared that nuclear destruction was about to begin. Once again, standards of morality just might have been different then, than they are now, when there’s no such sword hanging over our heads.I chose dictums that made sense in a very dangerous world. Some people here are talking about a fantasy morality in the sense of “this could never happen in a real world of adventuring.” There’s a war on. Combat is war, not sport. (See RPG Combat: Sport or War?<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?4580-RPG-Combat-Sport-or-War#.WeJ8zGiPKUk" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?4580-RPG-Combat-Sport-or-War#.WeJ8zGiPKUk</a> ) The object is to make the enemy surrender, or slaughter them if they won’t. Being nice is not an option. Perhaps contemporaries don’t understand that kind of desperate situation, given our safe-and-secure contemporary world.I don’t see how you can impose contemporary “no one can actually hurt me” morality on a game where people DIE. Now if you play story-telling instead of a game, there’s no real danger involved, that’s a different kettle of fish. I'm talking about role-playing GAMES.Your mileage may vary.</blockquote>

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