Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1284516" data-attributes="member: 812">Source for what? The quote about defenders starting wars? Nope, comes from the excellent novel Dragon by the excellent writer Steven Brust. Highly recommended. Not sure why it matters where the quote came from, though?Pleased to be providing new ideas. You're welcome!If it were my character, I'd suggest the king had lost his marbles. I'm assuming the king in question is king of the country the character tried to defend -- it's not entirely clear who "he" is in that sentence.Insane kings make for good adventures, though.It's entirely possible to declare a war and not start one. I'll point out, however, Hitler did not declare war on Poland, he simply walked in and set about being in charge. Had Poland not resisted, the war would not have started. At least, not then. Germany did not declare war on Britain, you know. Quite the other way around.Until the defender decides to resist the invader, there is no war. Indeed, in most cases, when the defender chooses NOT to resist, we don't even call it "invasion". Ask the Czechs about what happened in 1938.*waits for ruleslawyer to baste his word usage*  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Sorry if my usage is unclear. I capitalized Good and Evil to indicate their game-mechanical meaning. I don't use the game mechanic of alignment in my campaign.I'd also like to think that people with ideas and a willingness to express them are welcome in any thread.Not at all. Alignment is a mechanic designed to do a number of things -- to present a particular set of tools and potential problems to the players (alignment-based spells and items), to distinguish certain kinds of creatures and also to make certain philosophical questions irrelevant -- so that one can enjoy imagining the slaughter of others without worrying about the philosophical implications of such an act. Killing orcs is okay, because they're bad guys. For some campaigns, that's exactly how folks want things to be. And in such a campaign, yeah, the game mechanic morality and the purported philosophical morality need to be in alignment. Indeed, there doesn't even need to be a philosophical morality -- Good societies are by definition good and Evil societies are by definition evil. It's a fine way to play the game.It's by no means the only way to play, nor by any demonstrable standard the best way to play. Nor is it the only type of campaign in which Dogbrain's question is relevant.Please note that I have never said that it's not sometimes a necessary thing to start a war. When I say the defender starts the war I'm not saying the defender is morally responsible for whatever horrors are thereby unleashed -- I'm just saying that unless the defender chooses to resist, there is no war.If we consider the notion that war is always evil, then for a defender to decide to start a war, to decide to resist, they must somehow justify the need to do so. Perhaps they believe that failing to resist will only result in greater evil. Perhaps they feel that their right to the territory outweighs the evil of violence. You can make those judgements and still believe that war is fundamentally evil.This is a very interesting discussion. Dogbrain -- props.</blockquote>

Verification