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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4005846" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think that the problems are due to the fact that the PHB defines &quot;Good&quot; as precluding needless killing, and indeed the killing of any innocent, and then sets up a premise for play in which killing all sorts of things (some of which are, arguably, innocent or at least not immediate threats to anyone) is the order of the day.The paladin problems would arise if we were all medieval Thomist moral theorists, or ancient Platonist moral theorists, just as much as they do for us as contemporary moral theorists. The only contexts in which serious moral codes that I am familiar with permit killing on anything like the scale that D&amp;D characters engage it are political or religious violence, whether warfare, or some other social imperative seen as equally pressing (eg of the mixed social and religious imperative that drove killings by Aztecs).Hence the traditional role of alignment in casting D&amp;D adventuring in the light of a war of Good agasint Evil (which makes it very different from Conan, for example, who is in many adventurers obviously just a murderous thief, and leads to some of the consequences I'm objecting to.) But once the war metaphor falls over, as it frequently does (eg are the Orc children, or the Evil 1st-level merchant, really soldiers of darkness?), then the Paladin problems arise.This is not a critique of the prominence of killing in D&amp;D. Like superher comic books, D&amp;D is a genre in which conflict is modelled via combat. It's just that it's a serious design mistake to take such a game, then try to use moral metaphysics as a way of keeping the killing focused in the right direction to facilitate play, because someone is inevitably going to notice that by the light of that morality (which has to be tenable for the game's players, and therefore have some connection to the real world) killing is mostly wrong.In the &quot;Metagame function of PoL thread&quot; I have tried to explain what superior techniques I think 4e is going to use to keep the killing focused in the right direction to facilitate play.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 4005846, member: 42582"] I think that the problems are due to the fact that the PHB defines "Good" as precluding needless killing, and indeed the killing of any innocent, and then sets up a premise for play in which killing all sorts of things (some of which are, arguably, innocent or at least not immediate threats to anyone) is the order of the day. The paladin problems would arise if we were all medieval Thomist moral theorists, or ancient Platonist moral theorists, just as much as they do for us as contemporary moral theorists. The only contexts in which serious moral codes that I am familiar with permit killing on anything like the scale that D&D characters engage it are political or religious violence, whether warfare, or some other social imperative seen as equally pressing (eg of the mixed social and religious imperative that drove killings by Aztecs). Hence the traditional role of alignment in casting D&D adventuring in the light of a war of Good agasint Evil (which makes it very different from Conan, for example, who is in many adventurers obviously just a murderous thief, and leads to some of the consequences I'm objecting to.) But once the war metaphor falls over, as it frequently does (eg are the Orc children, or the Evil 1st-level merchant, [i]really[/i] soldiers of darkness?), then the Paladin problems arise. This is not a critique of the prominence of killing in D&D. Like superher comic books, D&D is a genre in which conflict is modelled via combat. It's just that it's a serious design mistake to take such a game, then try to use moral metaphysics as a way of keeping the killing focused in the right direction to facilitate play, because someone is inevitably going to notice that by the light of that morality (which has to be tenable for the game's players, and therefore have some connection to the real world) killing is mostly wrong. In the "Metagame function of PoL thread" I have tried to explain what superior techniques I think 4e is going to use to keep the killing focused in the right direction to facilitate play. [/QUOTE]

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