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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5424392" data-attributes="member: 42582">I find the second sentence very hard to agree with (unless you mean simply that "good" is a generic term of commendation, and "evil" it's contrary - but that somewhat trivial fact won't resolve many moral disputes). Board rules make it hard to discuss in any detail concrete examples of moral disagreement, but just look (for example) at the very different reactions from various political and religous leaders (as well as from ordinary people) to the recent political assassination in Pakistan.Well, mugging a person who is impersonating your friend/acquaintance might be, if the "law" in question is a code of honourable loyalty. The board rules preclude dealing with real world examples in too much detail, but at least some activists in British Mandated Palestine prior to and during the Second World War appear to have disagreed with you. These days I GM almost exclusively. I have no objection to GMs playing the game. I just object to a mechanic the encourages, or even on occassion virtually requires, them to play the players' PCs.This is exactly where trust comes in. If you trust that your player of a paladin PC is sincerely trying to play an honourable and holy warrior, then let him/her play the god in question (or at least the god's attitude to their paladin). If s/he decides that s/he has wronged his/her code or god, s/he will enact the punishment (as in the actual play example in my OP).Alternatively, if this is too much to come at, decouple the class powers from divine approval (as 4e does).That's not insulting at all. That's the GM providing adversity. It's not the GM telling you that you're aesthetically and/or morally inadequate.Of course if the GM railroads you into doing what those NPCs want, we're back in the same position that I object to. (I'm not sure if that's what you have in mind in talking about NPCs who can or can't be killed.) But I have GMed a game with a high proportion of divine PCs in which the main theme of the campaign ended up being one of thwarting the will of the gods in order to save the world from a great evil that past divine contracts (in particular, contracts of forbearance) had allowed to emerge as a powerful threat. (The way I ran the campaign was loosely inspired by Wagner's Ring Cycle, as well as some ideas from Requium for a God and Bastion of Broken Souls.)I have players who do want to play true worshippers of gods, who are connected to those gods, and for whom those connections require forbearance and sacrifice. It's just that they want to play their conception of a true worshipper, not my conception of one - just as the players of the fighter and wizards wants to play their conceptions of warriors, mercenaries, scholars, alchemists etc. The concept of "holy warrior" or "priest" doesnt need any more exercise of GM control than these other concepts for PCs.The difference is that, in most games I know, if a player doesn't agree with how you're playing your PC they don't get to tell you to change if you don't want to be mechanically hosed.If the players in your D&D game are mostly interested in playing out massacres of civilians and torture of animals (in a gleeful rather than ironic fashion along the lines of I Kill Puppies for Satan), I do not believe that the alignment rules are the solution to your problem.More generally, if the GM has a problem with player taste or behaviour, alignment is not the solution. Out-of-game conversation is.</blockquote>

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