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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2120755" data-attributes="member: 27012">I absolutely do.  When I see a module where the Paladins side with Lawful Evil people to put an end to the chaos caused by all those Chaotic Good Elves in the way I might see a module with Chaotic Good elves siding with Paladins to defeat a Lawful Evil enemy, I'll believe they are equivalent.  I'll also point out that a Paladin who becomes a Blackguard is considered "fallen" in a way that a Paladin who becomes a Liberator is not.  That's not to say that Law and Chaos aren't important.  But I don't think that Law and Chaos define the morality of D&D in the same way that Good and Evil does.I think that's essentially accurate.  But it's a campaign tone issue as much as an alignment issue.  Even if I were to remove alignment entirely, a player who plays a good character is going to have a much heavier moral dilemma to resolve if their opponents are not Evil by nature.  Star Wars would be a very different movie if the heroes had to worry about what to do with wounded Stormtroopers, if the Stormtroopers were brainwashed but redeemable soldiers (ala the Kurt Russel character in the movie Soldier), if we could see their faces as real human beings, or if the Death Star had a day care center for the children of all of those crew members.  The heaviness of such real-world concerns in Star Wars is even addressed for comic effect in a Kevin Smith movie.  And, heck, look at how much effort George Lucas went through to make Greedo shoot first, because he thought Han's pre-emptive shot made him a murderer.If you want your Star Wars to be morally heavy, then make the Stormtroopers real people and put families on the Death Star.  If you want your Star Wars to be morally light, make the Stormtroopers cruel, irredeemably evil, and cover their faces so they look like robots.  Better yet, go the original Battlestar Galactica route, dealing with anti-violence television restrictions, and make the bad guys robots.  A lot of translated anime for children during that period does the same thing -- "robot tanks", "robot planes", etc.  Undead often get used the same way in fantasy.Several people in my group (myself included) either role-play immersively (they try to think and feel in character) or from a strongly in character perspective.  Before running D&D, we hadn't been using D&D or alignments but we still had to deal with these problems in any setting that we played in.  Basically, it's a moral issue whether it's wrapped up in an alignment system or not.As for modernity, I can't avoid the fact that myself and my playes are modern Americans.  Ultimately, the players are going to like or dislike their own characters based on their own morality.  I think your point is legitimate and fair, but I think I'm talking closer to the norm, at least in my anecdotal experience in the US.  There is a scene in The Princess Bride where the grandfather suggests that the story won't have the ending he expects and says, "Jesus, Grandpa!  Why are you reading me this thing!"  While there are certainly a lot of people who enjoy exploring the unpleasant aspects of human nature, a lot of people simply want something that they'll enjoy and like.  That's why you don't see too many movies where the good guys lose or the protagonists are unlikable monsters. At it's heart, D&D is tapping into the same well that real world human monsters use to encourage real people to do awful things to other real people, much in the same way that making all elves a certain way taps into the same idea.  I can certainly see why people feel that's troubling.  But movies do the same thing all the time.  Why do villains wear masks, helmets, sunglasses, and unforms in movies?  Because it dehumanizes them and makes it emotionally acceptable to kill them.  When that fails, the heroes in movies can look like quite the monsters themselves (e.g., the scene in Goldeneye that I mentioned earlier).Using movies and television as a guide, if it were that easy, we'd see more movies where the characters are historically accurate rather than sanitized for a modern audience.  And when movies do depict past atrocities under modern moral standards, they feel obliged to cast them as such rather that treating them in terms of the morality of the day.  I agree that it's possible for people to play and enjoy your type (c) games, but I'm really not sure that most role-players are up for, or even want, that challenge.Well, the D&D RAW does provide a fairly objective moral system and the idea of, say, "Detect Evil" in the RAW really doesn't make any sense outside of a transcultural and transhistorical sense.  Yes, a GM could certainly go down the road of moral relativism but that's really not any more RAW-friendly than what I'm doing.  And that's fine, but they are all going to be looked at with modern eyes, which is what the D&D alignment system is, in many ways.  There is no reason you can't run a Charlemagne or Cortes within the D&D alignment system just as there isn't any reason why you can't make a movie about them for a modern audience.  Sure, the alignment will judge those people in much the same way modern people judge their behavior but it doesn't have to change their behavior.  I think of it more as a way to define a character rather than as a straitjacket. Why can't you just let your Charlemagne or Cortes be Neutral or even Evil, if that label fits?  Nothing in the rules says that your point-of-view character nees to be Good, though it does do a lot of limit the utility of alignment if everyone is Evil, for example.I agree with you on that.  I don't think one size fits all and the attempts to encompass every possible option has made the RAW so vague that it's nearly useless in many areas.</blockquote>

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