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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7972903" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can only speak for myself. (Obviousy!)I think that - at least as Gygax presents it in his AD&D books - good covers a wide range of moral outlooks that affirm human (and other sapient) wellbeing, life and rights, and also truth and beauty. Conversely, the evil are those who disregard or even scorn such values in their action.There are real-world moral questions - some of which are very live debates at present! - about (eg) what sorts of trade-offs across values, and between one person and another's wellbeing, are permissible. Gygax, though, glosses over all those debates in his presentation. So do most superhero comics. In this sense, at least, I think D&D benefits from being simple or even :simplistic". I think the D&D alignment system simply lacks the resources to do (say) health economics in any serious way.But there is a second aspect to D&D morality that I think is important if we are to preserve the tropes of heroic and romantic fantasy. In the real world, many people who have considered views on the matter tend to doubt the morality of violence, especially retributive violence. And they tend to doubt that (eg) dueling or other consensual submission to violence is morally acceptable.But if you take this outlook into D&D then the whole suite of mediaeval tropes - knights who fight against dragons who terrorise the countryside; jousts and duels; G2, as has been discussed above - disappear. Instead we need anachronistic institutions and moral conceptions like police forces, independent prosecutorial agencies, standing armies, etc.So I think that D&D and similar fantasy RPG works best when (i) we go aong with Gygax and don't get down into the weeds of sophisticated thinking about how values relate to one another but focus on scenarios where they can all be affirmed togehter, and (ii) we don't treat (justified) retributive and conensual violence as a scorning of the value of life and the rights of others.As I said, this approach will collapse if you try and do the morality of infection prevention and quarantine (and for a comic-book comparison: if you ask why Storm uses her powers to fight Magneto and Dr Doom rather than ending drought and famine the world over, the whole moral framework of the X-Men collapses). But it will certainly survive surrendering hobgoblins, orcish children (if you want them), etc - because the approach I've described has plenty of scope for thinking about honour and redemption!</blockquote>

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