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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4026614" data-attributes="member: 42582">This suggests to me that you are using "narrativist" - or, perhaps, "theme" - in a different sense from many of the other posters on this thread.I think that Skeptic, Lost Soul, Apoptosis and I are all using "narrativism" to mean (roughly) play in which the point of the play is for players to make statements about some thematic premise, which statements develop that theme. (If the premise is thought of as a question, then the statements worked out in the course of play would constitute answers to it.)This understanding more or less entails that play in which the point is not the theme (ie in which the aim of play is not for the players to engage with and develop the theme through their play) is not narrativist play.I want to know more about the mechanic. Of course the game can take place in a world with a received moral code, and narrativistically explore the merits or limitations of that code. I don't think, however, that this is how alignment in D&D is generally used - "good" and "evil" as used in D&D appear to be intended to carry roughly their ordinary meanings in English, and thus to figure in moral inference in the ordinary way.Keeping this in mind, contrast two facts of entailment: "X believes that Z is bad" does not entail that Z is bad; "Z is bad" does entail that Z is bad. The gameworld with the received moral code is built up of propositions of the first sort, but the D&D gameworld appears to be built up of propositions of the second sort. If you treat them as really propositions of the first sort, then what we get is that the Seven Heavens are the planes of "so-called" goodness, and the Abyss a plane of "so-called" wickedness (and we might ask - so-called by whom?). At that point, why not just drop "Good" and "Evil" as mechanical descriptors and replace them which such traits as "Blessed by the Heavens" and "Empowered by the Abyss", introduce such propositions into our gameworld as "Most humans think that the Heavens are good, but Orcs think that of the Abyss" and leave the players and GM to work out for themselves the moral truth of the situation. (This is an elaboration of my earlier Team A/Team B remarks to Psion.)I don't imagine that it does, unless the PC is a Paladin who wants to remain such. But as I posted in reply to Psion (and also in more detail in reply to Kamikaze Midget on the recent Blood War in 4e thread) I don't see how this on its own allows for thematic development. If what the good PCs are doing, in supporting the evil NPC, is really good, then there was no choice. If it is really evil, then they will (in the long run, at least) lose their status as good. Where is the capacity for players to answer a question about good and evil?My impression is that, in practice, it is not uncommon in such situations for high-intensity alignment debates to erupt at the gaming table. But a peculiar thing about D&D is that its alignment rules tend to shift all those moral arguments to a non-game space (eg messageboard alignment threads) whereas in narrativist play these arguments would be unfolding within the course of play itself (that being the point of narrativist play intended to develop moral themes).Does "they" denote the PC and NPC, or does it denote you (the player) and your fellow players (including the GM)? I have no doubt that simulationist play has scope for various characters to debate points of morality and religion. But the point of narrativist play (in the sense in which most of the participants in this thread are using that term) is for the players to engage in the questioning and answering.I could play a simulationist game in which my character is an Aristotelian quite well, playing my PC and arguing out the merits of Aristotelianism against some Kantian NPC. But if that was all that the game permitted, it wouldn't be a game in which I actually got, through the very act of play, to make a statement about the truth or otherwise of Aristotelianism. For that to be the case, I would have to be able to do something else as a player, like have my PC change opinion, or perhaps (adopting a more authorial stance) to play out my PC as having a non-flourishing life as a result of being an Aristotelian.But in D&D it would be very odd to have my good PC change alignment and decide that good isn't good at all - the very statement sounds contradictory, and once I put the first "good" inside inverted commas (and thus say that "good" isn't good at all) then we are back in the situation where Team A and Team B would be better labels, and the Seven Heavens are simply so-called good (so-called, presumably, by the dominant human religion).For similar reasons, it would also be very odd for me to adopt author stance towards my PC and try to show that adhering to good ideals will lead to personal ruin, unless again "good" means simply "so-called good".Well I'm in the thread, and I not only imagine but believe that alignment mechanics of the D&D sort (ie which actually make assertions about what is good and what is evil, rather than simply telling us that some people in the gameworld have beliefs about good and evil) are an obstacle to narrativist play intended to answer moral questions. I have experienced it at the gaming table, I have seen it reported on innumerable message board threads and letters to the forum in Dragon, and I have sketched some of the theoretical explanation for it above.As I noted in my earlier post, those rules aren't necessarily an obstacle to a different sort of narrativist play - for example, one which takes the mechanically defined moral standards for granted and addresses the question of whether corruption is an inevitable feature of human life. But to be honest I have never seen a published example of D&D play that addresses this question (perhaps some early Greyhawk play is an example of such, but I am far from sure).</blockquote>

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