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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6125795" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is part of why I thnk the AD&D alignments are a huge step backwards from original D&D (to which 4e marks something of a return).If you're playing 4e, or original Morcockian D&D, it doesn't really make sense to ask about James Bond's alignment - he doesn't exist in a world defined by a struggle between the forces of law and chaos. And in the gameworld itself, you could play a Bondish character as unaligned/neutral easily enough, or Lawful (in classic) or Good (in 4e), assuming that he's aligned with the gods and the "civilised" races against the goblins and hobgoblins and drow and orcs. These systems bring a whole set of cosmological conceits to bear, which give content to the alignment system: for instance, they make it true that altrustic people will generally serve the gods ahead of the primordials, because it is built into the cosmology that the gods pursue human welfare while the primordials are indifferent to it, or even actively oppose it.Take away that cosmology and 4e/original D&D alignment makes no sense (and so, for intance, I would say that alignment probably has little to no work to do in a Dark Sun game, unless the focus of the game was on restoring the gods to Athas - for instance, it's too simplistic that it must be evil to serve the Sorcerer-Kings because there is no cosmological truth that says they are purely bad - arguably, by preserving the trappings of civilisation, they also make (limited) human flourishing possible).But AD&D alignment doesn't locate itself within a particular cosmological struggle and set of cosmological truths. In fact, it purports to be a universal framework for the moral classification of behaviour, and purports to be able to judge and catalogue cosmologies!(Another objection to AD&D alignment, of course, is that it requires that evil people judge what they do as not being good, which verges on irrationality - it's true that Milton's Satan says "Evil be thou my good!" but he is clearly using the word "evil" in some sort of ironic or "inverted commas" sense.)I don't even think you have to go this far.It's enough that you note that different people have different opinions which history and human experience reveal to us aren't amenable to reconciliation. Whether they're true or false (or all true but in some relativist sense) doesn't matter, for current purposes. Noting that people have different opinions, you have two options: let the GM decide; or let the player decide.Unilke disagreements about (say) the melting point of lead, there is no shared methodology for resolving moral disputes; hence, even if you believe in objective moral value, the player with whom the GM disagrees has no reason to think that it is the GM, rather than the player, who has ascertained the objective truth here. And unlike disputes about the melting point of lead, moral disputes are likely to go to the heart of a players' conception of his/her PC, or even of his/her own personality. Why should the game rules require the GM to judge these things? For me, that's the bottom line - what does it add? (For clarity - I get what it adds to [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION]'s game - but what does it add to a game in which the paladin's code is not meant to act as a disadvantage in game play?)Two responses.First, as I replied to [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] upthread, your statements of "absolute morality" are going to require interpretation, and it is very easy to come up with plausible situations that might arise ingame that apply interpretive pressure. This will be all the worse because it's likely that some of the words that require interpretation will carry, as part of their ordinary language meaning, ideas or elements that get their content from ordinary evaluative languages and practices - so the process of interpretation will undo the decoupling.Second, decoupling means that the paladin is no longer an examplar of truth and goodness. Rather, s/he is an examplar of X and Y, where X and Y are some fictional constructs at best related in some fashion to the GM's conception of truth and goodness. Which, for me at least, pretty much defeats the purposes of having PCs ilke the paladin in the agme (as [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] pointed out).Well, I play a game in which some of the issues are to be overcome by the players, using their PCs as vehicles. And I know from experience that I can have a perfeclty good game which "allows for the dramatic and thematic impact of actual real questions of good and evil" provided only that I drop AD&D-style mechanical alignment rules. Therefore, I would prefer a version of D&D that allows me to run that sort of game - ie one which doesn't bake notions of a GM-enforced code or GM-enforced alignment into classes like the monk or the paladin.If there's a sidebar or option or whatever telling you how to run an AD&D-alignment-style game, go to town! I'm just saying I don't want it built in (as it is in AD&D and 3E).This may be true of your game. It is not true of mine, though. Moral issues arise at my table all the time; they are "resolved" by the players playing their PCs.</blockquote>

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