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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mr Fixit" data-source="post: 6404131" data-attributes="member: 6779654">I would like to point that this is maybe a product of DMs and players being too set in their ways sometimes? Or maybe it's that D&D, as a predominantly heroic sword&sorcery game, isn't really all that well-suited to address the finer points of morality.That said, I don't see why a given campaign couldn't focus on law vs chaos, in a grounded if not cosmological approach. Our history and our present are full of examples of "law" siding with each other against "chaos" irrespective of their commitment to other values, such as good or evil. Institutions are almost always devoted to order because it is on this order that they base their strength and influence. A force for change, especially one that is willing to sacrifice much to achieve it, is probably devoted to chaos (as it pertains to the current order). All these things make for some strange bedfellows.I recently played Witcher, a great RPG game set in a world that's a very close analogue to medieval Europe. Feuding kingdoms ruled by monarchs, some kinder and fairer than others, sorceress lodges operating in tandem or in opposition to state factors according to some inscrutable long-term plans, demihuman races (elves and dwarves) that are second-class citizens blamed for everything one can get away with, and that turn to very bloody and indiscriminate terrorism against humans in pursuit of supposedly noble goals (freedom from oppression), religious knightly orders publicly devoted to good and charity--tenets many of their members do sincerely uphold--while rotten leadership secretly plots pogroms and coups. And poor little witchers, devoted to neutrality, in the middle of all this shitstorm. This is not a world of good and evil, though some factors are surely more sympathetic and "good" than others. If we were to translate this world to D&D parlance, it's primarily a conflict between order and chaos, old world and new world, where you're not exactly sure who's good and who's evil.Or to borrow a page from another popular modern fantasy saga, A Song of Ice and Fire. When Robert, Ned, Tywin and others overthrew the Mad King Aerys 15 years before the start of the main plot, that too could be framed as law vs chaos, just as easily as good vs evil. On the side of the "good guys", you had scumbags that were willing to do whatever it took (Tywin Lannister, for example; the new "good" king even married Tywin's daughter after the Rebellion. If that's not inviting a devil in your bed for the best of intentions, I don't know what is), just like on the "evil" side of the Mad King you had extremely noble and upright guys like ser Arthur Dayne or even the crown prince Rhaegar Targaryen. You could say that the conflict started because of Rhaegar's acts that completely destabilised the realm (the alleged abduction of Lyanna) and that were "chaotic" rather than "evil", since they endangered a delicate balance of power in a feudal system.Two nobles, one evil and one good, but both representing feudal order that empowers them, are very likely to stand together and support each other in the face of a peasant or urban-class uprising (chaos) that threatens to destroy the very system they rely on. And among those peasants, you'll have good guys who want lower taxes and more responsibility from their lords, and you'll have bad guys who use the situation to their own ends.I'd say that law vs chaos is intrinsically more political than good vs evil and requires the focus of the campaign to shift quite a bit from usual (and expected) tropes of heroic fiction. But I don't believe there's anything inherently wrong in presenting both axes as worthy of exploring in a game setting.</blockquote>

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