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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bawylie" data-source="post: 8020339" data-attributes="member: 6776133">I did the “What is right?” argument for d&d once in college. We were 20 and played 3rd ed which had recently come out. Our DM had us talking to a Night Hag and we got some help from it for some quest and then we killed it. The DM was furious and told us all that was an alignment shift toward evil (Good got dropped to Neutral and Neutral dropped to evil).  We all objected (not least among us the lawful good dwarf who was the DM’s brother). Our DM’s position was that the Night Hag had no ill intent or ulterior motives in helping us achieve the quest and that killing her unprovoked was an act of evil. The players’ position was that a Night Hag was listed as Always Neutral Evil and that destroying an evil creature could never be considered an evil act because it removed a significant amount of evil from the world. (Moral particularism vs Moral Absolutism, or moral utility perhaps).  In the end, we made the DM decide whether morality was an absolute feature of his game or if it would always be relative to circumstances. (Can we just kill monsters or are they all gonna show us photos of their kids?). We decided we’d all rather play in a morally absolute world for that game, not least because we never wanted to argue alignment ever again, and because we wanted to focus on high adventure stuff with a side of character growth rather than play d&d like an overwrought game of Vampire the Masquerade. In my own games (decades later), I don’t discuss alignment as a feature of the game (but I know for my setting how it works). The only thing I tell the players is that characters must be adventurers and not defective. They can have whatever motivation or goal they want but they have to go on adventures (none of this “why should my character care?” BS) and they can’t run like psychopaths. This arrangement has worked ever since I started it and never once given me a problem (though I speak only for my own game here, and pass no judgment whatsoever on any of your games which I am sure are delightful).</blockquote>

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