Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5365611" data-attributes="member: 4937">hamishspence: I'm not going to try to address all the difficulties I have with the many disparate and contridictory claims about alignment made in the splatbooks.  The basic problem I have is that if you go with all the splatbooks collectively, you typically end up with a self-contridictory mess where alignment is so ambigious as to be meaningless except as a 'team' designation.For example:How then do we know that this is good group?  From the description they kill innocents without moral doubt, so how does this separate them from any other alignment and evil in particular?  Is it because they are warring on 'evil' that they get a free pass to do evil?  Leaving aside that your Vigilante oddly doesn't get this free pass, well, what does this 'evil' that they are warring on mean?  By the own above account, their convictions allow them to use their abilities against enemies regardless of their alignment!  They are therefore according to the above description zealous in killing innocents in order to root out their enemies... that are good!  And this makes them zealously good?  When the above is boiled down to plain language, it amounts only to that there is little or nothing that they will not do to defeat their enemies.  This is 'good' only as a team designation, and having nothing to do with philosopy.  They oppose demons, not because the demon threatens a village and they wish to save it, but because they are not on the same team.   We know this because the above description implies that they'd oppose angels and saints on the same grounds, as the 'cause of good' appears to mean nothing more than 'our cause'.  This is indeed 'ones man's terrorist is another man's hero', for what can we say about this organization that we couldn't say about a LE one except for perhaps that one had a different taste in interior decoration than the other?I'm going to attempt to explain probably more than I should, but I think probably the biggest problem that the various contributers on alignment in official D&D sources had is that they confused character with personality.  As such, they tended to think of each alignment as having a consistant personality, and in order to introduce nuance and complexity into the system they described each alignment as having an inconsistant character!  So we have descriptions of LG for example, where everyone has the same personality traits - neat, judgmental, uncreative, conservative, prudish, reliable, whatever - but where everyone has wildly different actual character so that some LG characters are going around acting in a way that we'd describe as evil or even chaotic if it wasn't for the 'white hat' that tells us what we are supposed to think about them.   Everything is flexible in this account of alignment except the personality and mode of dress.I find that to be an incredibly shallow account, and taken together I am absolutely not surprised that if you tried to integrate all the official material into a single view of alignment you'd end up with a muddled mess that only made for argument.   Not that this fault is the only fault in the infamous history of attempts to explain alignment to the laity in official D&D tomes, but its among the most damaging.</blockquote>

Verification