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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8044883" data-attributes="member: 18">I think death and doom are kind of two different things here. Death can be struggled against or avoided, or put off, doom cannot be. Your doom is your doom. Railing against it does no good, and may even do harm (particularly to others, but also in the sense of causing you to suffer instead of accepting it). Doom, i.e. fate, is a concept that resonates far less in modern society, because the idea that we have a predetermined fate is extremely hard to square with the universe we experience, and the things we know, and the general concepts of our society, which is somewhat founded on not accepting things are the way they have to be and events are inevitable (I'd argue that aside from science, both Christian and Islamic beliefs can influence societies towards the idea that things can/should change, though there are contradictory factors, of course). Death on the other hand, is perhaps more relevant than it has been for a while!So I think it's totally valid to have monsters as things be opposed, but I think the issue that keeps coming in is that people often want the monsters to have these complex societies and ideas and ways of doing things, but to still be totally legit to slaughter wholesale and get a gold star for Good-ness for doing so, and that's where things get sketchy as all hell/really complicated. When you have monsters simply as a death metaphor, even if they're intelligent or whatever, things tend to work out. Especially if it's them killing a lot of people vs. their one life.To me these feel like old questions/ideas, not modern ones, as much as some people see them that way. In earlier D&D and RPGs, it felt to me like you had really three kinds of monster. And I see that actually lines up pretty well with what [USER=7015698]@Undrave[/USER] is saying.He has:1) Natural disasters 2) Criminal organisations, terrorist groups3) Despot and cultists I'd put it a little differently:1) Natural disaster-type monsters - this isn't just mindless dragons or whatever, but things like Bulettes, Cockatrices or Trolls. Creatures of animal intelligence or not a lot more (or if it is more, they may be unable/unwilling to communicate/negotiate/etc.), who wreck ecologies, eat a bunch of people and generally cause havoc by their very presence. Mindless undead tend to fit in here, though they're more often the minions of 2 or 3. Gibberlings, too.2) "Bad People" - I.e. people (or sentient beings) who chose to be "bad", and know that they're harming others, but don't care, or don't care very much. This would be everything from some low-end bandits (ones who aren't purely a product of circumstance, but have gone beyond that) to highly-organised but not supernaturally-influenced oppressors and the like.3) "Supernaturally-influenced Beings" - This would be cultists who are actually in some way in thrall to the being controlling them, beings who are mind-controlled, beings who have supernatural "programming" to do evil (or good) and so aren't really free-willed, fixed-alignment dragons, and so on.In 2E, my experience was that players did consider the motivations of "monsters" and so on, and weren't necessarily into mindless slaughter or the like. I feel like the idea that we can automatically kill stuff because it's alignment says LE or whatever is in a lot of ways more a 3E idea, part of the whole "back to the old skool" deal 3E had, and I think partly influenced by videogames and so on.</blockquote>

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