Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6688470" data-attributes="member: 32740">pardon me for shouting a bit, but...Well OF COURSE it is simplistic!  Oh my word... Why don't people grok this?  Do you really think that the purpose of ever putting alignment into D&D was so that 40 years down the road players could still be arguing morals and ethics?  The point of still clinging to alignment is to ELIMINATE debates and arguments among DM's and players about morals and philosophy and actually get some frikkiin' gaming done.  The purpose is NOT to simply PERPETUATE debate.  Alignment fulfills its purpose by GROSS simplification.  OUTRAGEOUS simplification.  Assigning somewhat fixed parameters to what is otherwise INFINITELY fluid and malleable FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL.  What one person believes and how those beliefs guide what they will or will not do is SUPPOSED to have been made simple, generalized, and VASTLY easier to use as a comparison; a comparison for players to refer to in keeping their characters actions reasonable and consistent rather than random, meaningless and disruptive.If that is what your version of the game or your DM says that a paladin is, does, must do, then yes.  But paladins are not redeemers.  They have no powers to redeem.  Nowhere in ANY version of the rules that I know of are they given any mandate to redeem.  They are religiously supported AND secularly supported, but SELF-appointed KILLERS OF EVIL.  That this is so widely incomprehensible to people is similarly gobsmacking to me.  I can only assume that it stems from a relentless attempt (by various later versions of the rules and supplementary materials) to reinterpret them as being nearly everything else except adherents to that simple concept.I don't know why it should be an aspiration.  It just isn't that hard.  Or at least it SHOULDN'T be.  It only is because too many people have MADE it hard.  How?  By doing nothing more complicated than refusing to accept the SIMPLIFIED concepts that the system is attempting to utilize.[edit]  Down through the years alignment should have become simpler still with every new set of rules - easier to explain, easier to implement and to make use of.  Instead, it has become incomprehensible, re-defined so many times as to be meaningless and therefore useless, so abhorred due to so many stupid and ham-fisted attempts by both designers and players to "fix" it without first even being able to define what it is, and what it's supposed to be for, that every subsequent attempt only leads to greater confusion and LESS likelihood that it will ever be useful to more than a small handful who can filter out 4 decades of crap.</blockquote>

Verification