Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7975260" data-attributes="member: 42582">In LotR Gandalf seems either LG or (perhaps) NG:[T]he rule of no realm is mine . . . But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. . . . For I also am a steward. . . . To me it would seem not that a Steward who faithfully surrenders his charge is diminished in love or in honour." (pp 788-89, 888)He also returns the Palantir of Orthanc to Aragorn, bowing and saying (sincerely, as I read it), "Receive it, Lord!, in earnest of other things that shold be given back." (p 618)Most of the sodliers and captains likewise. Which prominent character thinks that the good is best achieved through self-realisation rather than through honouring and restoring proper traditions and ways of living? Maybe Bombadil? If we go to the Silmarillion, maybe Feanor and Galadriel? But the latter, at least, has changed her mind and repented of her individualism by the time we gto to LotR.The issue of obeying the law is a pretty secondary matter when it comes to LG, and in the context of a pseudo-mediaeval FRPG seems to involve an anachronistic projection onto the gameworld of contemporary state law that makes a content-neutral claim on obedience.Tradition and community are the key notions.Of course, if the gameworld reveals that honouring tradition and community will only lead to misery (eg tradition includes slavery and there seems to be no way of ending it) then the rational thing for a LG person to do is to renounce the lawfulness. This could make for interesting RPGing, but unfortunately the tradition in D&D is to penalise rather than celebrate playing out that sort of moral response to the revelationsof the fiction. I think it's a bit ironic, and mostly just a sad thing, that per canonical approaches to D&D we can't even play out the character arc of Sturm Brightblade, the iconic knight in one of the first D&D novels.</blockquote>

Verification