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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6115493" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is good GMing but has no bearing on alignment or "code" systems, or whether the GM should have the power to rewrite the sheet of a paladin player.When the PCs honoured their pacts with the duergar in my game, this led the duergar to be well-disposed to them later, and the PCs and duergar ended up teaming up against some demons. But I don't need alignment rules to do any of this.Football is a competitive sport. The players have an obvious conflict of interest in adjudging their own compliance with the rules. Hence, we have a referee.In what way does the play of a paladin or cleric look anything like that? Where, in the typical contemporary D&D game, is the conflict of interest? What advantage does a player get from deciding his-/herself what morality requires of his/her PC? ( [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] has argued cogently that in very trad D&D there is an advantage in being Lawful, of more reliable party support and better access to Raise Dead; and the price for this is the need to adhere to a code. I don't think these are features of any non-OSR D&D play today, however.)So then we don't need a GM-enforced code. We need a better system for changing class from paladin to anti-paladin; or a better system for players to bring their PCs into Atonement situations.I believe that you are confusing "need" with "want". You want to play a game in which the GM has the final say. That's fine by me. I want to play something different - where the player has the primary say on how their PC works, and where anything that needs to be coordinated across the group (perhaps a deity, if more than one PC serves that diety) is worked out by the group.A "big umbrella" game like D&Dnext needs to allow for both approaches to authorship of the gameworld. Which means it can't build either into its default structures.If my players were to behave in ways that made no sense, I would discuss that with them as people. For me, this is not an issue about game rules. It's about the social aspect of gaming. I'm not interested in playing with people whose company I don't care for, and I don't need the game rules to tell them "By the way, make sure you're decent company". For me, that's not an ingame matter.How does "taking away goodies" help here? Are you trying to train the player like Pavlov's dog? Are you hoping to drive the player out of the game? - in which case, surely you can just kick them out. Are you trying to send signals like "We don't mind how you play your assassins, but your paladins really suck?" - in which case, surely you can just tell them. I'm puzzled by this desire to sublimate social disagreements into ingame matters.I have zero interest in exploring fantasy world morality. Admittedly I'm not that well versed in fantasy literature, but the reason those authors I have read like Tolkien or REH have something interesting to say on moral matters, or the reason that a film like Excalibur or Hero can be emotionally stirring, is because they are dealing with real questions of value.REH, for instance, is not writing his Conan stories as an attack on fantasy "civilisation" - it's an attack upon the actual trappings of a certain sort of modern, urbanised, commercial life. Tolkien is not writing about "Shire morality" and Sauron is not a picture of "Middle Earth Evil" - Tolkien is sharing his conception of real moral matters, like the fall, the relationship between humans and nature, the nature of authority and rulership, the value of creation, etc.My RPGing is hardly great literature, but I want it to be focused on the real. (For various reasons, in my games that often ends up being to do with values like loyalty, sacrifice and tradition. One reason, I guess, is that these are the paradigmatic romantic values, which are therefore, at least arguably, inherent in heroic fantasy as a genre.)</blockquote>

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