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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7973584" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't disagree with this. <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/session-report-against-the-frost-giants.358025/" target="_blank">When I ran G2 in my 4e game</a>, I ignored the non-soldier giants.A lot of this is about how the GM eestablishes consequences - which goes right back to your earlier (very good) post about what sort of moral tone the GM wants to establish.If the goal is a campaign that is recognisably romantic fantasy with simple/"ideal" morality, then it is on the GM to work with that. So if the players, in the play of their PCs, take steps to only attack combatant giants, and to return the treasure to its rightful owners, etc, then I think it would be a mistake for the GM to establish future evil being done by the giants that is easily attributable to the PCs' own handling of the situation.D&D simply doesn't have the resources - conceptual or mechanical - to turn the G-series into an investigation of genuine diplomacy, establishing compromises that will satisfy all parties, setting up post-conflict tribunals to establish a just distribution of the disputed goods and territories, etc.I don't think I do know what you mean. I get the sense you've got some clear examples in mind, but I'm not sure what they are.I think that there are clear literary/cinematic touchstones that can be drawn on to frame morality in D&D. Arthurian legend, LotR, films like Ladyhawke and Hero and even The Princess Bride, and to some extent superhero comics. (But with more lethality than is found in 4-colour comics.)Good in this context is easily recognisable - it affirms life, wellbeing, truth and beauty as important values that must be respected and affirmed in one's actions. Evil, on the other hand, disregards and even scorns these things. But where I think D&D has to depart from some contemporary conceptions is being more permissive in its reconciliation of affirming life and wellbeing with the use of violence. Even in the real world most people aren't pacifists, but can conceivel of pacifisim and see how someone might be one, and so most of us are capable - in imagination - of stepping our threshold for permissible violence up or down. I think D&D requires stepping the threshold down a little bit: that makes jousting knights, honourable warfare, punishing the giants and retaking what they stole, etc, all OK, while still making the contrast between good and evil a pretty clear one provided the GM doens't go out of his/her way to sabotage it.Conversely, if someone wants to run a game where vicious cycles of violence, the brutalising effects of warfare, chalenging trades-offs within and across lives, and the like are up fo grabs, that could be pretty interesting. But the D&D alignment system would add absolutely nothing to that game, and in fact would very much get in the way. Because that game would force its participants to consider moral questions that the D&D aignment system simply doesn't have the capacity to categorise, let alone to answer.</blockquote>

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