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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4004046" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sorry, I wasn't meaning to set a trap - but I do appreciate the reply.I didn't have anything terribly profound in mind here - I actually had in mind what Kamikaze Midget (I think that's who it was upthread) and others have said about the Blood War illustrating the self-destructive, self-consuming nature of evil. In Blood War play the players don't get to find out, through their roleplaying choices, whether or not this is true, because the game (by way of the Blood War) already gives them an answer.D&D 3.5 tries to answer the question in a couple of ways (and I'm not sure they're all consistent): it's alignment descriptions in chapter 6 of the PHB, it's description of the societies of humanoids which are labelled "usually Evil", its retention of the Blood War as a gameworld element, etc.I'm not calling for mystery. Rather, I think it improves the game as a game if the answer to the question "what is the nature of evil" is able to emerge in play - and not by discovering something in the game texts, but by making roleplaying decisions at the gaming table. The answers that emerge might be pretty trite if the players aren't all Graham Greene (and I know in my group we're not), but it's still the players' answer and not that of the game designers. For me at least, it is the chance to develop and explore my own and my friends' (trite) answers to these thematic questions that is a big part of the fun of RPGing.To make room for this to emerge in play, the designers have to set up antagonists who raise moral questions, but back off at the point the players want to get involved in the resolution of those questions. And W&M gives me a sense that the 4e designers are doing this (I don't know if it's deliberate, but it probably is - they're pretty clever designers): they are significantly winding back alignment, which is a small but (for D&D) very important start; and more affirmatively, they expressly discuss the possibility of a (martial but non-self-consciously evil) PC cleric of Bane coming into conflict with an NPC Hobgoblin cleric of Bane and each trading holy blows with the other.Such a state of affairs obviously satisfies gamist desires (the player doesn't get nerfed during play for a choice of god made at character build time, before the direction play would take was fully known) but it also creates the possibility for the player to resolve as part of his or her play the moral questions to which this situation gives rise (about war, evil, conflicts between loyalty to party and solidarity with fellow communicants). That situation could give rise to really interesting roleplaying of a sort that I don't think D&D has really tried to support in the past (Eberron may be an exception - I know it did stuff to downplay alignment, but I don't know if it went so far as to allow Evil Silver Flame worshippers as sincere rather than merely corrupted but undiscovered.)</blockquote>

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