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<blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6129452">It's a social contract issue.&nbsp; The books can NEVER say, 100% exactly when or where or why a DM should make a ruling, because as we discussed several pages before, each gameworld has it's own morality, each DM has their own morality, each player has their own morality, and each character has their own morality.&nbsp; It's a great big moral jumbled soup, and different characters in different settings with different DMs are going to run into different moral issues.&nbsp; Even if we only change ONE variable, such as the setting or the DM, then a moral issue you encountered with a previous setting or a previous DM might never even happen.In one game, a DM might find it perfectly reasonable for a paladin to go around destroying the stores owned and operated by the evil merchant, seeing a &quot;greater good&quot;, while a different DM in the same game might find that completely unacceptable.&nbsp; There is NO WAY the rules can ever account for this, because(as discussed before) the rules would be attempting to create a moral hierarchy more complete than any philosophized before.&nbsp; It gets worse that D&amp;D is a pan-theistic universe wherein multiple gods have multiple definitions of right and wrong.I think the best thing the rules can do is to simply flesh out a general idea of what each god/religion sees as &quot;serving them and their cause&quot; and &quot;not serving&quot;.&nbsp; Then we don't need perfect moral codes, we only need to know what each god finds acceptable or not.&nbsp; By doing this, we remove the DM as moral arbiter, the DM simply says &quot;no that's not what your god likes&quot;, he's not making a moral judgement, he's reading from a list of &quot;to do&quot; and &quot;not do&quot; of that player's god/religion.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Sunseeker, post: 6129452"] It's a social contract issue. The books can NEVER say, 100% exactly when or where or why a DM should make a ruling, because as we discussed several pages before, each gameworld has it's own morality, each DM has their own morality, each player has their own morality, and each character has their own morality. It's a great big moral jumbled soup, and different characters in different settings with different DMs are going to run into different moral issues. Even if we only change ONE variable, such as the setting or the DM, then a moral issue you encountered with a previous setting or a previous DM might never even happen. In one game, a DM might find it perfectly reasonable for a paladin to go around destroying the stores owned and operated by the evil merchant, seeing a "greater good", while a different DM in the same game might find that completely unacceptable. There is NO WAY the rules can ever account for this, because(as discussed before) the rules would be attempting to create a moral hierarchy more complete than any philosophized before. It gets worse that D&D is a pan-theistic universe wherein multiple gods have multiple definitions of right and wrong. I think the best thing the rules can do is to simply flesh out a general idea of what each god/religion sees as "serving them and their cause" and "not serving". Then we don't need perfect moral codes, we only need to know what each god finds acceptable or not. By doing this, we remove the DM as moral arbiter, the DM simply says "no that's not what your god likes", he's not making a moral judgement, he's reading from a list of "to do" and "not do" of that player's god/religion. [/QUOTE]

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