Yeah, I'm being aggro.  Pet peeve.  Talking about Good and Evil vs. good and evil, the word "simple" always starts coming from people who have a problem with killing Evil things.  It's always gets translated to me as "Catholicism/Christianity touched me in the Bad Place" like a large chunk of gamers, especially here on the West Coast who are rabidly but also mindlessly anti-Christian.

Without cosmic Good and Evil we have - oh good, self-interest and biological imperative, yeah that's real fucking interesting, like a blocked toilet is to a plumber. Shades of Grey as excuse to be a fucking piehole, WOW, What a stretch that is from the real world, we're roleplayin' now boy!  

Alignment: C/D - Cognitive Dissonance.

Yeah that felt better.

No, most of my humanoids aren't Capital E Evil.

Quote from: Bren;914410Obviously that gap can't have anything to do with the term "roleplaying" not actually being a term used in gaming until years after those booklets were published now could it? :rolleyes: And the activity necessarily preceded the need for a term to describe it.

I would not be surprised to learn that "roleplaying" as used to describe the wargames campaigns of our hobbies derived from "roleplaying" as a psychotheraputic term for the practice of having people act out roles and situations to help them address issues in their lives.

So someone took a pre-existing term and applied it to the peculiar sort of game we were playing because it kind of fit.

Quote from: DavetheLost;914795I would not be surprised to learn that "roleplaying" as used to describe the wargames campaigns of our hobbies derived from "roleplaying" as a psychotheraputic term for the practice of having people act out roles and situations to help them address issues in their lives.

So someone took a pre-existing term and applied it to the peculiar sort of game we were playing because it kind of fit.

Roleplaying wasnt used to describe wargaming because the term didnt exist until more or less after D&D.

Quote from: Bren;914776Why not? I wasted my time reading and responding to you?

Nope. You're just typing. Responding to my posts WOULD be a waste of your time, but you aren't making that mistake.  Reading what I'm saying is of no interest to you. Not sure why you're here, but conversation ain't it. You just need someone to give you some flimsy excuse for the particular message you have in your head and need to vocalize. For that purpose, this post should serve as well as any other. So go ahead and bounce another one off me. What do I care?

Quote from: Ghost;914798Nope. You're just typing. Responding to my posts WOULD be a waste of your time, but you aren't making that mistake.  Reading what I'm saying is of no interest to you. Not sure why you're here, but conversation ain't it. You just need someone to give you some flimsy excuse for the particular message you have in your head and need to vocalize. For that purpose, this post should serve as well as any other. So go ahead and bounce another one off me. What do I care?

Yeah, he accused you like 8 times of discounting the possibility of different settings when that's what you said when you came in, but people miss shit.  Unless it's an obvious troll, you don't disengage, you Cowboy Up.

Quote from: Omega;914797Roleplaying wasnt used to describe wargaming because the term didnt exist until more or less after D&D.

A little digging shows "role-play" to date to 1958 and usage as a verb by 1961. So more than a decade before D&D.

Quote from: DavetheLost;914801A little digging shows "role-play" to date to 1958 and usage as a verb by 1961. So more than a decade before D&D.

Before D&D it was used loosely to describe a few different things. None of them related to wargaming as of last check. Back in the late 60s "classroom simulation" was one term. "Social Experiment" was used once too for those sorts of proto LARPs There was no "game" but you did usually play a role. Sometimes that was just "you in a fictional town/community with a job." others were more defined. This was before D&D. Though in my case not by much.

How far back does "simulation" go for those sorts of things? Id guess there were alot of different terms used, and still used.

Oh. And we sure as heck had to face moral dilemmas in those too. I ended up a juror in a trial discussing the fate of the accused.

Yes, I don't think anyone thought to apply the term to one figure = one person wargaming until D&D had been established for a while.

I played out a "game"/simulation about whether or not to establish a new national park. We certainy didn't call it role-playing , although that's what it was. It was a class room exercise.

I wonder if goblin children play Houses & Humans? Is it good for a goblin to kill an evil aligned assassin?

Quote from: CRKrueger;914799Yeah, he accused you like 8 times of discounting the possibility of different settings when that's what you said when you came in, but people miss shit.  Unless it's an obvious troll, you don't disengage, you Cowboy Up.

Seemed pretty methodical to me. If not it still boils down to not being able to follow a linear train of thought. either way I aint got the interest or energy for it.

Quote from: CRKrueger;914780You're limited in some part by your experiences, just like all of us.  In another thread here, we have people trying to have PCs rape young girls, we have guys masturbating at the table, we have people pissing on the floor.  Those might be among their experiences, but they're not trying to say those idiots have anything to do with roleplaying in general.  13 year old males tend to have a kickass247365 playstyle.  After that it's highly subjective.  Some people played Vampire: The Masquerade as a game of personal horror, some played Trenchcoats and Katanas.  A game that doesn't force playstyle...gets all kinds.  The fact that it gets one certain kind at one certain table says nothing about the game.  Do people tend to kick in the door and charge more in D&D than in RQ or RM?  Arguably yes, but I've seen careful D&D players and maniac RQ players.  The maniacs tend to die more, regardless of system, the way it should be.

That bolded part? I'm not doing that either. Nor am I saying a damn thing about particular rule sets. I feel like I am just a surrogate here for one side of a long term argument that you are having in your own head.

The reason I no longer have problems with people expressing their latent deviant fantasies though RPGs is that I now call people's bullshit in no uncertain terms.

QuoteHow "good and evil work" doesn't apply, the difference is Culture.  Wasn't too long ago in California that it most definitely was the "way things worked" for good people to gather together to kill the evil-doers.  Vigilance Committees were nearly everywhere and took the law into their own hands.  When the posse was called and you were an able-bodied man, you went.

Cultural relativism with a capital C no less. And here I thought that was a SJW thing. Me, I don't think culture has a thing to do with morality. The sex offender is not the good guy, but neither is the fella that looks up sex offenders addresses and throws molotov cocktails through their windows in the night (even if his neighbors quietly applaud him). Justice is not the same thing as morality. Cultural standards are not the same thing as morality. The good guy is not the person that kills the evil guy. A good person may kill an evil person, but it is not the killing that made them a good person.

QuoteMan I'd love to talk about Good and Evil in a fictional setting once without all the responses being smeared with the gamer's typical smug superiority concerning religious thought.

Who besides you is talking about religion?

Quote from: jeff37923;914781You do understand that we are talking about a game and not reality, right? Pardue, are you listening?

Yes I do. And when I see a film, I understand I am watching a film. When I read a book I understand I am reading a book. etc. Not sure what your point is.

Maybe it's that as a game, we shouldn't expect moral complexity because we are playing it as a form of escape from reality? Well, as it happens, I have no problem with RPGs as escapism. But if that is what kind of game you are running, I would suggest leaving out the goblin children. Because that kind of conflicts with your escapist goals.

Quote from: CRKrueger;914793Yeah, I'm being aggro.  Pet peeve.  Talking about Good and Evil vs. good and evil, the word "simple" always starts coming from people who have a problem with killing Evil things.  It's always gets translated to me as "Catholicism/Christianity touched me in the Bad Place" like a large chunk of gamers, especially here on the West Coast who are rabidly but also mindlessly anti-Christian.

That bolded part makes me think maybe the problem is with you, as opposed to with everyone else. Especially since no one you are arguing with has raised the topic of religion at all as far as I've seen.

QuoteWithout cosmic Good and Evil we have - oh good, self-interest and biological imperative, yeah that's real fucking interesting, like a blocked toilet is to a plumber. Shades of Grey as excuse to be a fucking piehole, WOW, What a stretch that is from the real world, we're roleplayin' now boy!

What nonsense. "Without cosmic Good and Evil all we have is self-interest and the biological imperative"? Please. So if your morality is not black and white, it must be bullshit?

The main issue I have with this is your dismissiveness of the biological imperative, as if nothing good could arise from it. The capacity for love is a survival trait. Morality, and the ability to extend the sense of self-interest beyond the self are also survival traits (not on the individual level, but on the social level, which is why we speak of morality as a luxury that tends to be over ridden if you are constantly fighting for your survival as an individual organism). Being survival traits doesn't devalue these traits.

Threads like these are a reason why goblins should be born of wet straw and dirt, like mice according to one of medieval Slavic beliefs. If you want to have an unsavable, corrupted race in your setting, make them truly inhuman spawn of evil whose children grow up from maggots dropping off from the corpse of their dead god, and let the murderhobos go to town on them without any moral quandries.

Quote from: CRKrueger;914793Yeah, I'm being aggro.  Pet peeve.  Talking about Good and Evil vs. good and evil, the word "simple" always starts coming from people who have a problem with killing Evil things.  It's always gets translated to me as "Catholicism/Christianity touched me in the Bad Place" like a large chunk of gamers, especially here on the West Coast who are rabidly but also mindlessly anti-Christian.

Without cosmic Good and Evil we have - oh good, self-interest and biological imperative, yeah that's real fucking interesting, like a blocked toilet is to a plumber. Shades of Grey as excuse to be a fucking piehole, WOW, What a stretch that is from the real world, we're roleplayin' now boy!  

Alignment: C/D - Cognitive Dissonance.

Yeah that felt better.

No, most of my humanoids aren't Capital E Evil.

What does anti - Christianity have to do with this? If anything, the notion that everyone can be saved if they possess capacity to think is more Christian than anything else.

And yes, Black & White, for the most part, bore me. What's the point of being Good when you are assured by The Absolute you ARE good?

Quote from: CRKrueger;914784Uh, is that what he did?

Seemed like it to me at the time.

QuoteWhere I come from directly stating that exact point is not dismissing it.  I'm guessing you just missed it because it was a bit back?

If by “a bit back” you mean, in a different post on a different page, then yeah I missed that. I don’t typically go back and reread threads. I read his statement in the one post and I responded to it.

Quote from: Ghost;914655To think that goblins could not be evil by nature in a fantasy campaign setting would also be illogical.

Which when I read it sounded to me like he said, “To think that a fantasy campaign setting could have goblins that were not unutterably evil would be illogical.”

Another interpretation would be that he meant, “To think that goblins could not possibly be unutterably evil in some fantasy campaign would be illogical.” That would be consistent with his other post. The one I did not go back and reread the thread to find.

Double negatives are a bitch. In hindsight I chose the wrong interpretation of Ghost’s somewhat confusing statement.

SORRY GHOST!

QuoteYou're really beating the hell out of this "Your ignorant, simplistic view etc..." line of argument which is claiming he's ignoring something he stated in his very first post in the thread.

The one some 200 odd posts ago. Yeah I missed it.

Now since you are so expert in reading back through posts, maybe you can explain why Ghost is responding to me to bitch about people who claim that roleplaying brutal or neutral or evil character is less thoughtful? Someone may have said that in this thread. But it wasn’t me.

QuoteComing from a guy who's goto game has “mechanics to support throwing bucket loads of opponents against the PCs with minimal threat to their survival.”  that's a bit thick with irony.  Mook rules means your H+I characters are chopping down hordes of HUMAN Pawns and Retainers.

It might be thick with irony if I actually ever said that playing brutal or evil characters was automatically shallow. Of course I didn’t say that. What I said was that if you eliminate the moral quandary of whether or not to kill by making your opponents unalterably evil, you remove the possibility of roleplaying questions about whether or not to kill in any thoughtful way.

QuoteThey going to court for all of those killings?  If not, what's simple again?

All of them? No. Some of them. Yes. Murder trial and everything.

QuoteWhich is pretty much my opinion about any game with mook rules.

Oh aren’t you special. Show us on the doll where the mook rule touched you in the bad place. :rolleyes:

QuoteYay, more mindless anti-religion masked as useless superiority bullshit.

So now Grand Theft Auto is a religion? What fucking shit are you on about here? I didn’t say anything about religion.

Quote from: CRKrueger;914793Talking about Good and Evil vs. good and evil, the word "simple" always starts coming from people who have a problem with killing Evil things.  It's always gets translated to me as "Catholicism/Christianity touched me in the Bad Place"

Then maybe you need to buy a better English  Kruger dictionary. Your knee jerk reaction has you seeing crazy anti-Christian conspiracy theory everywhere. You might want to dial the martyrdom back a couple of notches.

Quote from: CRKrueger;914793Yeah that felt better.

Not to me.

Quote from: CRKrueger;914799Yeah, he accused you like 8 times of discounting the possibility of different settings when that's what you said when you came in, but people miss shit.  Unless it's an obvious troll, you don't disengage, you Cowboy Up.

And go all crazy Hulk Smash Aggro. Apparently.

Quote from: Ghost;914820Seemed pretty methodical to me. If not it still boils down to not being able to follow a linear train of thought. either way I aint got the interest or energy for it.

It all follows from my misinterpreting your one statement about that nature of evil in a fantasy campaign.

Absolute Good and Evil (hereafter referred to with a capital) in a game setting where things can be Good or Evil is part of the Cosmology of a setting.  There may be a setting out there that deals with Good and Evil without Gods, Demons, etc... but I don't know what setting that is.  When you have supernatural beings of godly power engaged in eternal conflict as opposing forces...dunno what you'd call it, but when gods get involved, we're stepping into the realm of religion.

The concept of a human killing something that walks, talks, and thinks but is Evil, therefore the act of removing it from the world isn't Evil, but Good, is extremely uncomfortable.  One obvious reason why is our own history. Just one example, but one well known in the west, is the concept of the Crusader - a human being, who thinks he is killing in the Name of God, putting to death human beings of other faiths, thinking he's going to heaven for it - and around the world this thinking still persists in places.  Generally Western Civilization has put that behind us, or at least claim to.

There's a reason why "Crusader killing Muslim=Paladin killing Goblin" or "Humans exterminating orcs=Human race A exterminating Human Race B" are connections frequently drawn up when this topic is raised.

The descriptions we see - "simple, simplistic, black and white" these are the same terms Athiests use to dismiss people of faith.  You have PCs who exist in a setting where slaughtering EvilRaceX isn't an evil act, what are they? Murderhobos.  Again, dismissal with a slight sneer of the idea.

So, this discussion has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the history of Christianity, Catholicism in particular, is filled with people doing the exact same thing as these theoretical PCs and all of us grew up in lands where this was a shared religious history?  Ok, if you say so.

Frequently when Absolute Good and Evil is brought up, the idea of Black and White morality is brought up also.  The problem is again, people are too mired in Earth history.  When someone says Black and White, that's usually shorthand for everything being Black and White, when that's not the idea at all.  The idea is that certain things are Absolute Good or Absolute Evil, not everything.  Some things are Absolute Right or Absolute Wrong, not everything.

That's why having some things be Black or White can add depth to a setting because it changes the type of conflict and allows for a different type of character involvement.  Manzanaro brought up survival, well frequently faced with Evil, survival is on the line.  When the army facing you are humans from the other side of the river, that's a different type of army from an army of EvilOrks bred to destroy all humanity.

I don't think a moralistic view, or a non-black and white view is bullshit or simplistic, but neither do I think a Black and White one in a fantasy setting is necessarily simplistic, because a Black and White view or choice in a world where Black and White provably exist is completely different than what we have on Earth.

Any game, any setting, any cosmology can have players be Murderhobos, mindless serial killers racking up experience and a pile of loot. ANY
Any game, any setting, any cosmology can have players deeply engage with the setting from an IC-POV and make meaningful, thoughtful choices and have to deal with the repercussions. ANY

Do the GM and players want that or not?  They're the ones that make it happen, not game designers or rules mechanics.

Why did Gary put women and children in the Caves of Chaos?
1. Humanoids can breed.
2. Therefore Humanoids will breed.
3. Therefore where Humanoids dwell, they will make little Humanoids.

Maybe he placed all those little-uns because he was pissed at one of his players and was setting a Paladin Alignment Trap, maybe he wanted to simply weigh characters down with a train of baggage, maybe he was friends with Zimbardo and was running an experiment...I kinda doubt it, and Geezer hasn't weighed in on Gary's Caves of Chaos motivations.  At that time, though, people hadn't been navel-gazing about RPGs for 40 years by shoving their heads up their own asses like we have, so I tend to go with Occam's Razor.  

Why are they there, because they probably should be there, logically, so they are.  Deal with it.  It's the GM's job to decide what those little spuds mean.

Things actually get more interesting I think when you posit specifically in D&D the Planar Wheel and the nature of Alignment, because then you can deal with the concepts of certain beings choosing their alignment, ie. literally aligning themselves over a lifetime of choices, vs. those with "hardwired" alignments.  That's another post (or thread).