Quote from: Manzanaro;915087Oh, I believe that you would let the PCs take the goblins back to their farm and then run the whole child rearing thing as an economic simulator type deal. But I don't buy that you would try to make it compelling, because that isn't how you work. You think the "compelling" thing needs to arise "naturally". Sitting in a static environment and raising kids (even goblin kids) isn't an area where sandbox style play shows its strengths.

When players run into situations, they are always thinking on some level, "What does the GM expect or want us to do here?" Now maybe there is no answer in your case. Maybe you put the goblin kids in the dungeon because you felt that they should logically be there and that's as far as your thinking went. But the players are still going to consider their choices in terms of how they would work in your style. even if they flash on the idea of raising the goblins themselves, they have a pretty good idea of how that would play out in your game. Doing dry household budget allocations while getting reminded that, "If this is boring you could always make new characters, or dump the goblins off at the church and get back to adventuring in the sandbox." And meanwhile they're thinking, "Christ, we should have just killed the fuckers and kept on with the game".

Now, maybe I'm still being unfair, but the fact that when I pressed you on how you would handle it, you started talking about financial simulations rather than ways that you could make the situation interesting is something I suspected to be revealing.

Was my response curt and snarky? Probably so. Nobody's perfect and sometimes I don't have time to write as fully as I am thinking. And, you know, when you lead off with "That is why you fail," you really don't think you are going to get snark back? And when just a few posts earlier you had gone on about how nothing I said had any application outside of my own circle of shitty players and GMs? Give me a break.

Doing things like that is very sandboxy I think. And I also think it will be everything but static - double points if you are evil and have use for some devious agressive and now well trained youngsters... .  
(OK, we didn´t deal big with goblins - they usually didn´t survive the first contact but for times we had a venerable zoo and in other times we posed as a circus because we couldn´t cover all out "pets". (and keeping them fed was a first rank problem sometimes)

And thinking  "What does the GM expect or want us to do here?"  too much is exactly what you don´t want to to in a sandbox. Either the theme is well known from the beginning or not and everything after that is free game.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915087Now, maybe I'm still being unfair, but the fact that when I pressed you on how you would handle it, you started talking about financial simulations rather than ways that you could make the situation interesting is something I suspected to be revealing.

The financial aspects were examples because a lot of the time that's the type of "non-adventuring" behavior that arises.  Many issues with Goblins are, finances aside, going to be diplomatic and social in scope, as the tolerant PCs might have a lot of problem with their neighbors, prompting them to seek allies, probably with good or pacifistic churches, more tolerant races or cultures, etc.  Possessing such children might prompt raids to steal them back.  If this whole thing makes the PCs famous, then now they get dragged into other's political machinations, for good or ill.  Of course there's always dealing with the gobbos themselves.

It just depends on what setting, what location, what type of humanoid, etc.

If the players choose to do something, then by definition it is what they are interested in, otherwise, why do it?  If they weren't interested in dealing with the goblin children, then they should have pawned them off on someone with a bag of gold, or left them to fend for themselves.

I don't have to force things being interesting any more than I do when they're out adventuring, they'll keep themselves, and me, plenty busy.

"I would categorize both of those as small g good. Not capital letter GOOD."

I get that.  But to a Catholic or Christian (or anyone who is truly religious), it is not a small g, it is a cap GOOD, so there is no difference between Christ or Heironeus or whatever for the purpose of the comparison.  To you personally there might be a difference. I'm pretty sure there is just from the fact that we're still talking about this, but to one of your characters, who is a Catholic, or a follower of any god, there is not, even if you as a player believe that the Christian character, playing in a morally relativistic reality, is in fact deluded. This does not matter to you, I suspect.  I'm mentioning it in reference to a point below.




"To me that sounds like the God of Not Lying, not the God of Truth. I wonder if that is part of the difference of opinion or lack of agreement"

It doesn't matter. The "God of Not Lying" could have been anything BLACK and WHITE.  The God of Chastity.  Whatever it is, it is defined by the setting and the GM as being absolute GOOD.  You seem to be claiming that I somehow prefer this kind of god though I have gone to great pains to make clear I do not prefer any type of cosmological/philosophical scheme.  I am explicitly responding to what I believe is your assertion that BLACK and WHITE or GOOD vs EVIL cosmology is somehow less "complex."  I do not agree with that.

The God of Truth, Lancelot, and all the rest of it deal with that, the idea that the BLACK and WHITE is less complex because it is easy to know the correct thing to do in order to satisfy your god.  What I am saying is that very outlook by its very nature is a simplistic way of viewing roleplaying itself.  It may be less interesting for you, and that may never change, but that is because you are deciding not to roleplay a character in a BLACK and WHITE cosmology, not because that senario is less complex.  It's just different, and you don't like it.  You don't want to roleplay that character or engage under that set of conditions because you aren't interested in doing so.  That's all that's going on. There's nothing superior or more complex about one or the other.  They're different sets of rules, both of which offer as much to the player and GM as they are willing to put into them.




"What I am saying is that I do not see adding in absolute and detectable GOOD and EVIL adds anything to the roleplaying."

I never claimed it added anything. It's different and is not by definition either more or less interesting, complex, or valuable.  It's a different set of conditions and one that apparently makes you uncomfortable (I think...I'm still not sure).



"I'm still waiting for someone to explain how having those absolutes as concrete objects in the game world makes the moral choices of the PCs more interesting than they would already be without those choices as absolute, concrete, detectable objects."

Again, I'm only disagreeing that one is by its very nature more complex or objectively superior.  In the hands of a talented GM and engaged players, this material could be very interesting, and so to the extent that you dismiss one moral paradigm without including them, they could have made the moral choices of the PCs more interesting had they been included, but they were not so they didn't.  Your ability to incorporate them or refusal to do so is self-determinative in this respect.  Some people do find the value in such options and do derive dimensions of roleplaying from them that you do not access or experience for whatever reason.




"Still not seeing the need or advantage for GOOD and EVIL rather than good and evil. Lancelot is torn between love and loyalty to his liege. He doesn't need either one of those to be absolute to have a difficult morale choice. He just needs to care a lot about both of them. How does making one of those an absolute and detectable object meaningfully change that situation?"

Not the point of that example as I explained above but since you bring it up, the interpersonal dilemma and emotional issues can stand alone. The moral dilemma is separate and does add a separate and very distinct roleplaying element to the crisis. If you cannot see that, then that is where the conversation comes to a close.





"I'm just not seeing what you think you are getting. It sounds like you think this cosmology is providing some meaningfully different game experience or you have had some meaningful moment of complexity based on killing or not killing EVIL goblins (or something similar). I'm still not seeing the need, advantage, or desire for the GOOD and EVIL. I don't' need the game world to have absolutes to play characters who believe in absolutes."

Correct.  Every character you ever play or GM that ever believed in or believes in an absolute, could certainly do so in the absence of actual absolutes and I am pretty sure that is what will in fact happen.  What I am getting is a variety of experiences, some with absolute truths, which I find interesting, and some with moral relativism, which I also find interesting.  

What are you getting by never having one of them? It seems that you are satisfying some need by only doing the one and never the other, I'm not quite sure what it is.  I don't think it's anything other than that you just don't like the idea of moral absolutes.  Whatever the reason, I think you have decided that it has to do with complexity.  It doesn't.  There's nothing more complex or superior about moral relativism.  It's just different.




"I had all that before you wanted to add in GOOD with capital letters."

I inherited the GOOD vs EVIL from the thread. I didn't add it in.




"The Dracula clip didn't help me to understand. But that may be more about me. Vampire angst never did resonate with me."

Dracula is about as far from angst as literature can go.  It's not like you're gonna find him brooding in the corner with his Immanuel Kant or something.



 

"So what do I get by making the game world have objective, detectable, and measurable answers to these questions?"

I'm sure you would get nothing from it.  You can only get out what you put in and I'm pretty sure we can at least agree that that will never happen.  There's nothing wrong with that.  The reason you prefer non-absolute to absolute is because of something in you, not because of something innate to any given philosophy/cosmology.




"I don't think I am missing out by avoiding campaigns with clear, detectable absolutes. If I'm wrong, I can live with that."

I'm absolutely certain that you're missing out, but you're doing what you're into so, what does it matter?  You're simply opting out of the absolute morality thing.  It's all good.  Just enough with the idea that it's because other people are dumb.  It's your own roleplaying limitations that determine that you only rp a certain way. Nothing else is happening.




"The only things I've ever seen these absolutes of the capital letter, detectable type add to a game is frustration and annoyance as people argue about what the absolutes should be in the game world. And people seldom seem to agree. I don't find that sort of argument particularly interesting in a game. And framing the game world in absolutes causes some people to become very personally invested in the outcome. Which has the risk of having the argument become about a lot more than a game world."

This I completely get.  With some people, this shit just isn't worth dealing with.  However, with other people it can really great.  Different strokes.

I find that adding hard wired, baked in Good and Evil to a setting, allong with Law and Chaos to a lesser extent, actually makes moral questions less interesting.

The answers would be known to everyone. "Is killing goblin childeren evil?" Well, let's look at the list of Evil acts.

To me what makes moral questions interesting is that they are questions. People can have different answers.

The nested quotes are getting a bit awkward. I'm going to try bolding the stuff I said to try to make it clear which parts of the quotes are me and which are you. Maybe that will help.

Quote from: Ghost;915093"I would categorize both of those as small g good. Not capital letter g GOOD."

I get that.  But to a Catholic or Christian (or anyone who is truly religious), it is not a small g, it is a cap GOOD, so there is no difference between Christ or Heironeus or whatever for the purpose of the comparison.

Yes I am starting to think that you have a very different notion of what it means for something to be absolutely and unequivocally good than do I.

QuoteI'm pretty sure there is just from the fact that we're still talking about this, but to one of your characters, who is a Catholic, or a follower of any god, there is not, even if you as a player believe that the Christian character, playing in a morally relativistic reality, is in fact deluded. This does not matter to you, I suspect.  I'm mentioning it in reference to a point below.

Quote from: Ghost;915093I get that.  But to a Catholic or Christian (or anyone who is truly religious), it is not a small g, it is a cap GOOD, so there is no difference between Christ or Heironeus or whatever for the purpose of the comparison.

Yes I am starting to think that you have a very different notion of what it means for something to be absolutely and unequivocally good than do I.

QuoteI'm pretty sure there is just from the fact that we're still talking about this, but to one of your characters, who is a Catholic, or a follower of any god, there is not, even if you as a player believe that the Christian character, playing in a morally relativistic reality, is in fact deluded. This does not matter to you, I suspect.  I'm mentioning it in reference to a point below.

Whether or not my pretend Christian or my pretend Humakti is or is not deluded about the nature of the pretend reality that they inhabit indeed does not matter to me. Why would it? The reality is a pretend one. Are you saying that it matters to you whether or not your PC is right or wrong in their understanding of their pretend world?

QuoteIt doesn't matter. The "God of Not Lying" could have been anything BLACK and WHITE.

Could it actually be anything though? Are you saying that good and evil in the RPG setting don’t need to have any connection to concepts that we as humans in this world recognize as good and evil? So black could be WHITE and white could be BLACK in the game world. If so, I guess I can imagine that you would end up with a different sort of RPG experience, though depending on what arbitrary values you picked for BLACK and WHITE I’m not sure I’d want to play that game. More roleplaying limitations I guess.

QuoteI am explicitly responding to what I believe is your assertion that BLACK and WHITE or GOOD vs EVIL cosmology is somehow less "complex."  I do not agree with that.

You don’t have to agree. And I’m still not certain we mean the same thing by absolute good or evil.

I think that knowing what the moral action is when the choice is between something good and something bad is not very difficult. Nor am I alone in that position. Making the choice and sticking to it might be difficult (but following through on doing the right thing is a different issue that knowing which action is the right action). So in the case of choosing between good and evil, knowing which choice is the moral one, is not difficult. And again to be clear, sticking to the right action, following through on it, living with it, are different issues than is determining what the right action should be.

What is certainly more difficult than choosing the most moral action between good and evil, is knowing which action is the most moral between one good and another good, weighing the two, as it were to pick the best choice among two or more good choices. Similarly when there are no strictly good choices, only bad ones, then weighing up the bad to choose which action is the most morale by virtue of being the lesser of the evils is certainly more difficult than simply choosing good over bad. Presumably you agree. If not, they we probably do not share a similar enough view of morality to have a productive conversation.

By adding in absolute GOOD and absolute EVIL, you have simplified the decision as to which action is most morale anytime either GOOD or EVIL appears in the list of possible actions. Since GOOD is absolutely good, one should always choose that over any lesser, possibly contingent goods. And similarly, since EVIL is absolutely and uncontingently evil, one should never pick that action. The calculus of weighing moral choices is simpler with absolutes than it is without them. Which would be why I said, adding in absolutes simplifies moral choice. One now knows which action is the right action.

QuoteThe God of Truth, Lancelot, and all the rest of it deal with that, the idea that the BLACK and WHITE is less complex because it is easy to know the correct thing to do in order to satisfy your god.  What I am saying is that very outlook by its very nature is a simplistic way of viewing roleplaying itself.

You know, for a person who seems very uncomfortable when people suggest that your roleplaying might lack complexity, you make that accusation about others with some frequency.

Quote"What I am saying is that I do not see adding in absolute and detectable GOOD and EVIL adds anything to the roleplaying."

I never claimed it added anything. It's different and is not by definition either more or less interesting, complex, or valuable.  It's a different set of conditions and one that apparently makes you uncomfortable (I think...I'm still not sure).

Uncomfortable? I don’t know that uncomfortable is the right term. But "uncomfortable" is a term that, when discussing choices, sometimes is used dismissively. As in "Try it you might like it." or  “Why don’t you let yourself get out of your comfort zone for once?” or to make the speaker feel better, "Well yeah, I guess I am more comfortable with that then you are."

If including it doesn’t appear to add anything for me, then adding it seems rather pointless. I have, sitting on my shelf or saved on my computer far more RPG games, adventures, scenarios, and ideas that I can possibly hope to run or hope to play in seven lifetimes. I can’t play all of them. And neither can you.

QuoteNot the point of that example as I explained above but since you bring it up, the interpersonal dilemma and emotional issues can stand alone. The moral dilemma is separate and does add a separate and very distinct roleplaying element to the crisis. If you cannot see that, then that is where the conversation comes to a close.

The moral dilemma doesn’t require a measurable, detectable objective absolute GOOD and EVIL. I mention that, because we keep coming back to your assertion that having absolutes clearly known makes a difference to you in play. But a difference in what? It doesn’t seem to make any difference in what Lancelot’s chooses. The only thing I can figure is you feel different when you play Lancelot with measurable, detectable, absolute good and evil and without measurable, detectable, absolute good and evil .

QuoteCorrect.  Every character you ever play or GM that ever believed in or believes in an absolute, could certainly do so in the absence of actual absolutes and I am pretty sure that is what will in fact happen.  What I am getting is a variety of experiences, some with absolute truths, which I find interesting, and some with moral relativism, which I also find interesting.

Is your enjoyment that having GOOD and EVIL, even arbitrary good and evil, provides a different emotional response when you play your character?

So when you as Lancelot choose evil in a world where you know, because the setting established and the GM told you, that what Lance just did was, without question certainly, totally, and absolutely EVIL then what you get some play experience or emotional thrill that you would not get in a world where you don’t know if Lancelot’s choice is absolutely EVIL or just merely contingently evil?  So playing Lancelot in BLACK and WHITE world feels different or provides a different emotional reaction, kick, or feeling than when you are playing Bertram du Guscelin who lives in world where you the player don’t actually know if maybe Bertram killing that peasant woman was totally BLACK, or maybe it’s just black, or maybe it’s gray or, horrors, a slightly white?

And similarly if Lancelot chooses to actually do GOOD when GOOD is obvious in a world with the ame BLACK and WHITE assumptions and choice that feels different to you than when Bertram de Guscelin chooses GOOD in a world where you don’t know if he was RIGHT to do that, or merely right, or maybe even just a teensy bit wrong?

QuoteWhat are you getting by never having one of them? It seems that you are satisfying some need by only doing the one and never the other, I'm not quite sure what it is.  

Playing RPGs is a leisure activity. I wouldn’t use the word “need” to label what I choose or don’t choose in an RPG. As I said, there are way more things to play than there is time to play them.

Quote"The Dracula clip didn’t help me to understand. But that may be more about me. Vampire angst never did resonate with me." Dracula is about as far from angst as literature can go.  It's not like you're gonna find him brooding in the corner with his Immanuel Kant or something.

He, Dracula, seemed pretty angsty in the film, which was what I was responding to. And I wouldn’t expect a 15th century Transylvanian blood drinker to be all brooding about his duty and pondering whether or not blood drinking can be universalized as a categorical imperative. I’d expect Dracula to be more angsty in that “why me, woe is me” kind of narcissim that many young teens go through.

QuoteI'm absolutely certain that you're missing out, but you're doing what you're into so, what does it matter?  You're simply opting out of the absolute morality thing.  It's all good.  Just enough with the idea that it's because other people are dumb.  It's your own roleplaying limitations that determine that you only rp a certain way. Nothing else is happening.

Well I guess I will just have to soldier on bravely despite my roleplaying limitations.

Quote from: Bren;915113Well I guess I will just have to soldier on bravely despite my roleplaying limitations.

It's the same situation we're all in.

Since you guys are talking about Lancelot, if you're speaking about the Mallory version, then Lancelot dishonors himself, betray's Arthur's trust, brings discord to the Knights of the Round Table, ruins Arthur and Guinevere's marriage, basically destroys Camelot...and damns his eternal soul.  So for Lancelot the character, as well as the audience, adding that component of a Mortal Sin makes that a much more serious and powerful choice, because it has more consequences.  As far as consequences go, World < World+All Eternity.

Now, I'm guessing what's coming is that a Mortal Sin to a Catholic or violating one of the ten Commandments to a Christian is not something you would consider an Absolute.

Why don't you give an example of a couple Absolute Goods and Absolute Evils since you admit there's probably a definitional issue.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915123Since you guys are talking about Lancelot, if you're speaking about the Mallory version, then Lancelot dishonors himself, betray's Arthur's trust, brings discord to the Knights of the Round Table, ruins Arthur and Guinevere's marriage, basically destroys Camelot...and damns his eternal soul.  So for Lancelot the character, as well as the audience, adding that component of a Mortal Sin makes that a much more serious and powerful choice, because it has more consequences.  As far as consequences go, World < World+All Eternity.

Amen. I don't get the difficulty on Lancelot any more than I get not seeing the difference between Twilight and Dracula but it's not really something you can explain through elaborate layers of nested quotes either. Bleh.

Note that you don't need to have a baked-in mechanical alignment system in order to have black-and-white morality in your game. For those who don't like moral dilemmas in their gaming, it's pretty easy to accomplish this by *not having goblin babies* - and more generally by having clearly categorized characters and situations. i.e. Bad guys are clearly bad, and good guys are clearly good.

Trying to avoid moral dilemmas by having an alignment system where killing goblin babies is defined as Good is a big can of worms to open.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915068Just to clarify, I didn't say I had a problem with PCs killing goblin kids. I said I would rather avoid the subject unless it was a very serious game, for the reasons you note. I find that escapism and murder of children don't mix too well for me. And honestly, I could have a problem with it in a game of any sort if I felt the players (or the GM) were enjoying it a bit too much. Some people really do play RPGs for the wrong reasons.

So are you saying that it's not to your taste if people enjoy their dark role-playing? Or that there is something objectively wrong with it?

To my mind, it's perfectly possible for good people to enjoy role-playing evil acts.

People role-playing evil acts might be twisted or wrong in real life, but their enjoyment of the role-playing isn't proof of that.

Quote from: Bren;915041No goblin babies? Then who eats all the Happy Meals in the dungeon McDonalds?

That McDonald's is from before the age of Happy Meals.

(Also, I could TOTALLY see doing the entire "goblin dad getting Happy Meals for goblin kids" thing like the old Warner Brothers' cartoons with Sam the Sheepdog and Ralph the Coyote.  "Mornin' Sam."  "Mornin' Ralph.")

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;915155That McDonald's is from before the age of Happy Meals.

I think that's true on all levels--Happy Meals were introduced in June 1979.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;915161I think that's true on all levels--Happy Meals were introduced in June 1979.

OSR Big Macs FTW!!!!!

I have to quibble with everyone saying that the cosmology of the world should be made obvious to the players.

It's not like we know in real life if God is real or if absolute morality exists. Why would the PCs.

So even if goblins are inherently evil, that doesn't mean the PCs would know that; it makes more sense that they should all act and decide it themselves amongst each other, just like morality in real life.

For instance, suppose the party comes up to the group of goblin children, then looks at me, the DM, and asks me if they're inherently Evil or not.

Would it be wrong if I just shrug in response and say, "Who knows"?

Actually, this exact situation came up in one of my games, except it was with a goblin that surrendered.

The party had killed all the other goblins, and wanted to kill this last one too. But one member, the party Fighter, argued to spare him, and basically took in the Goblin as a pet.

The party was baying for the goblin's blood, but the Fighter turned him into his butler. He'd defend the goblin when the party wanted to kick it out; when the goblin stole from other party members, he'd argue for mercy, etc. This led to many jokes and poking fun at the expense of the Fighter.

Later on, the same Fighter, who'd cared for and clothed and fed this Goblin, unceremoniously cut off the Goblin's head without warning and fed it to a monster so the monster would be distracted long enough for the party to pass. The rest of the party balked at this; even though they wanted the goblin dead originally, the Fighter basically had taken him in like a son, and so heartlessly betrayed him.

Now THAT, I would consider evil. Not because of the goblin's inherent evilness itself, but because the Fighter acknowledged the Goblin's "humanity" in his own eyes first and then betrayed him. It was all relative; it was the Fighter's actions that bestowed a moral value to it.