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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 4659265" data-attributes="member: 1003">Sure I do. I just did. Sort of like how if you were using a hammer to put screws through drywall I could say "Dude, there's a better way to do that." The only "right" here is your right to not believe me or ignore me.There are plenty of examples in the thread. All the DM has to do is remove the concept of "Cosmic Evil" and start saying stuff like "You discover that the orcs are actually trying to recover treasure stolen from them the year before, and that prior to such theft they'd been idyllic pastoralists - until those nasty humans came along." Or whatever. Like I said, there are plenty of examples in this thread and I was responding to those examples.I've never actually seen someone quote a philosopher at the game table, but I have I have seen dice put down for long stretches of time while the merits of wiping out a goblin village was debated. Boy was that fun. So while your example is extreme, yeah, that's what I'm trying to avoid.And if someone did try to quote Plato to me at the table, I'd be happy to say "Stow it, Socrates*, we're playing D&D here."*Using the Bill S. Preston pronunciation.This is clearly what you're missing. "Argument" is a term of art. Building a philosophical argument has a lot in common with doing a math proof. Do you see a lot of math proofs in gaming? I don't. They've already been proved (or consciously ignored (cf., diagonal movement)). So there's no point asking questions we already know the answers to.And that's fundamentally different from a fighting orcs or roleplaying out a discussion with Baron Bigimportant. Neither the players nor the DM know how that's going to play out, and the journey of discovery (and competition between the DM and players) is different than a Socratic discussion of some new objective moral truth. I think this is a major misunderstanding about RPGs.  You can tell stories about D&D, but you can't tell stories within D&D. Playing a "human DM" RPG (as opposed to playing pre-defined game like Baldur's Gate II or Neverwinter Nights) is quite different than "telling a story." No one has editorial control. If the DM was just "Telling a story" there'd be no need for dice or character sheets. You can tell stories later about how the game went down, but you can't tell a story during the game. You can only explore possibilities and roleplay your character (as opposed to anyone else's).That's why comparing D&D to Battlestar Gallactica or Watchmen ultimately breaks down. There's no Ron/Alan Moore equivalent who has control over where the story is going or how it's going to end, or when characters will die or redeem themselves.So if you already know what right and wrong are, what's the point of moral ambiguity in your game? Just to make people uncomfortable? Or do you get some sort of excitement from playing at being the bad boy (sort of how I assume whoever wrote up the Warlock class does)?As I already mentioned earlier (both directly and by referencing Jasperak), putting dice down for an hour and debating the moral merits of various courses of action within a game is not fun for me. (Normally I wouldn't include those last two words, as "fun" is always subjective, but I guess we're having extra difficulty remembering that in this thread)  Further, being evil or "delightfully gray" isn't fun either. If that's that extent of our disagreement I guess we're done here.I do have a question though: What do you do when you decide that there's no moral course of action available? Have your PCs go home? Abandon the quest? Abandon morality and kill the orcs anyway, babies too? Because none of those sound terribly fun to me, even if occasionally those courses of action are necessary in real life. Lastly though, if you have never actually encountered a situation in your games where the moral course of action wasn't (eventually) clear, I would suggest that you don't really have moral ambiguity in your games. You'd have faux ambiguity in that case; it's a sleight of hand by the DM that evaporates on close inspection.</blockquote>

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