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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7975292" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think there is scope for a lot of nuance here.In Iron Monkey, the title character has a companion who was a worker in a brothel before he paid for her freedom. But the same character robs from the corrupte officials and distributs that money to the poor. There character seems to be distinguishing between the brothel owner, who is not a nice person but engaged in legitimate transactions to acquire bonded workers, and the officials who do not have any just claim on the proceeds that they enjoy.In the slavery context, it could matter a great deal whether slaves have been sold into slavery by their families in "legitimate" transactions, or are pirsoners of war, or have been kidnapped. And also there would be no reason to expect two people both of whom believe in the value of order and tradition to look at the situation in exactlyu the same way.When Frodo and Sam go to Mordor, the idea of obeying the "laws" of Mordor doesn't really come up, They are dressed in stolen orc clothes, but seem unperturbed by that. (And I've never seen anyone who is commenting on LotR criticise Frodo and Sam for this theft. In the fiction itself, the only one to comment on it is Frodo and he feels sorry for Sam having had to rummage around the bodies of dead orcs to get the loot.)In an RPGing context, a GM who sets up a situation where it makes sense to talk about laws at all and yet they are very unjust is simply making it irrational to play a LG character. Which may or may not be fair enough, depending on what the group is expecting. I think it's noteworthy, though, that most romantic fantasy doesn't put such situations in the foreground.I don't now if you're familiar with EP Thompson's Whigs and Hunters, which in its epilogue has a very famous discussion of the rule of law in 18th century England.Thompson is writing a Marxist social history of the period, and so his discussion of the rule of law is nuanced - he describes the rule of law itself as an unqualified human good, but is very critical of the laws themselves and those who administered them. He also notes that the legal system had purchase even on those whom it harmed because they themselves lived in a world shaped by law and legal rights (various petty agrarian property rights, which the system of enclosure was dismantling).The Shire is something like the world EP Thompson is writing about but shorn of all the actual events of history! I see this as part of what makes LotR a rather reactionary novel. But there's no doubt that it equally makes for excellent FRPGing!EDIT: As I'm reading through posts I'm seeing an emerging dichotomy - if LG is not about the laws of a society than it must be about an internal code of ethics, which is no real constraint at all.What's missing in that dichotomy is organic society - like The Shire that [USER=6993955]@Fenris-77[/USER] has described - which is external to the individual, but is not just a code of laws demanding content-neutral obedience.If a group of RPGers can't take that sort of notion seriously - and I would understand why, for instance, some Americans may not be able to given that they live in the most modern society on earth - then it makes more sense that LG would be a problematic category.</blockquote>

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