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Message: <blockquote data-quote="twofalls" data-source="post: 2165509" data-attributes="member: 23718">It's a GAMEI keep allowing myself to return to this thread. I'm not even certain why. At the time of the events that transpired in my game, I was personally disgusted by the actions of the characters, but (as John Morrow pointed out in the link to his article on how emotions strongly influence reasoning) I viewed the Zhents much like soldiers in the Third Reich. These soldiers didn't commit atrocities, they fought for their commanders because that was the culture they lived in, and their lives and the lives of their families depended upon their obedience. These were Zhent Soldiers not Zhentarim. The parallel between the two is similar to the difference between the common German Soldier and German SS or devout Nazi party supporters.  I drew real life parallels and identified too closely with them, thus I was affronted when they where slaughtered rather than just blowing it off as part of the game and moving on (which I eventually did after an emotional firestorm).As gizmo33 just stated;I agree completely. I drug the RW into it by identifying with the NPC's, and my players did the same by bringing in the US military and using it as a justification. I did away with the Alignment system in a previous campiagn and it really didn't damage the game at all. I would still have reacted the way that I did because it was an emotinal response, I just wouldn't have had the alignment concept to use as a club to back up my disgust. However there are many game mechanics that make having the alignment system useful in 3.0, and when we started this game over three years ago we were all learning this new system and I decided not to make any uneeded changes until I knew it very well. Later on I just didn't bother with it.Now regarding the part of this thread on sitting down and laying out the law in a list format about what can or can't be done by members of a certain alignment... give me break. How many GM's can, with any shred of honesty, tell me that they give each of their players a list of do's and don'ts before a campaign is started based on that characters choice of alignments? In all my nearly 30 years of gaming I've not once seen that done. The alignment definitions are in the books and people interpret them differently. Now I'm not saying that its a bad idea, or that I shouldn't have interjected and said "Hey, that’s an evil act and is going to get you into trouble", but I really do try to let my players do what they will and I didn't anticipate my own strong reaction to what happened after the fact. The argument that ensued after the session only made my feelings (and everyone else's) more intense. However, telling me that what I should have done is to give a do and don't list to my players before the game started is tantamount to telling our current administration that they screwed up for not mounting anti air defense missiles upon the top of the world trade centers. Who has a freaking crystal ball to foretell these events?This isn't real life... it is a game. John... buddy... if I've learned one thing from this thread it's that it can be self defeating to model a game so closely after real life morals and expectations so that conversations like this get started on the web, because everyone has an opinion and more often than not they are different. You are searching for an answer to a question(s) that doesn't actually have one single answer to offer you,  and never will outside of fundamentalism (and even they are fractured).No, I've learned another thing. To lighten up, again, it's a game, its meant to be fun and getting upset with my friends and nearly breaking up my group wasn't fun. It was pure hell in fact. I still think what they did was evil and wrong... I don't think it will ever happen again with this group because of the trauma it caused, but it may with a different group I run and if so I will be better able to handle it because of my experiences the first time and this LOOOONG thread on Enworld.Ultimately we view the game through the lens of our RW biases and moral character, we can't help it, even when we try to place a medieval colored plastic sheet over the lens we still are who we are. What I think this boils down to once all the hot air that’s been directed at it here boils away the fluff is that you wont find the answers outside of the group of people you are dealing with., and within that group you will require compromise. That, perhaps, is really the best thing to learn in the long run.</blockquote>

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