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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1917665" data-attributes="member: 7240">Well, staggering back in from another crazed round on the other alignment thread, I think we will be much better off if we make a distinction between how alignment actually works in most people's campaigns and how it is set out in the core rules. I do not dispute that if you apply the core rules to the letter, they probably prohibit slavery but then again, if you apply to core alignment rules to the letter in your game, explaining slavery will be the least of your problems.From the many innovative amendments to the alignment rules that people have suggested in the other thread, it seems pretty clear that the way alignment is applied in most campaigns, slavery is not evil.In the post that compared slavery to medieval serfdom, one point that went unmade is that the boundary/difference between these things was essentially undefined and in the Slavic world, one can make a pretty strong case that the difference between a serf and a slave was not a very meaningful one. And now my response to a few individual posts:So, what if the slaves are paid for their work and can purchase their freedom? Still evil? In Roman, Spanish and Portuguese slavery, slaves were paid and could purchase manumission. You've also run into another problem here -- under your definition, aren't most pre-modern models of marriage also evil then?As another poster pointed out, there was really no difference between a litus and a servus in the Carolingian world, no real difference between a Russian serf and a Roman slave. This is what I hate about alignment. Rigorous application of alignment rules effectively acts to prohibit any setting in which people think and act in pre-modern ways.So, is a military draft evil? Isn't this the state deciding that it has the right to send its citizens to their deaths against their will and to keep them under the absolute authoritarian command of a military officer until that death happens or the war ends?Nicely put, Doug. D&D is a very uncomfortable and sometimes incoherent mix of modern and pre-modern values and behaviours.I'm a big fan of applying D&D rules to the letter and not messing with them under most circumstances. Because balance is such a big part of D&D 3.5, messing with the rules is a dangerous and unproductive thing to do generally. But when it comes to alignment, I'm coming from somewhere else. For me, playing in cultures that do not share our modern assumptions and values is probably the single most fun thing about playing RPGs. Having modern people thinking modern thoughts living in modern societies but using pre-modern tech just doesn’t do it for me. Basically I just cannot suspend disbelief. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it was funny when King Arthur met the anarcho-commie peasant but it was funny, in part, because it attacked the audience's suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, without medieval social structures, I don't see how one can produce/explain a landscape dotted with castles and manors -- and that's the landscape I often want to play in.</blockquote>

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