Quote from: Manzanaro;915420And it brings to mind to me, Krueger, that you're being inauthentic. You're the one who started bringing in discussion of real world religions and their application to D&D.

Now suddenly it's, "I was talking about CROM you fools."

And really, how many game settings have the premise that, "Good and evil aren't the same in this setting as they are in reality"?

Silliness.

What is different isn't the nature of good and evil. It's their application.

So you might say, "You know how in reality killing people is viewed as wrong or at least morally questionable? Well in this world, there are beings who are inalterably evil, and it is completely GOOD to kill such beings. It's like killing demons or zombies".

You may have been discussing application to D&D, I'm discussing application to D&D and many different settings and games which are going to have different cosmologies.  I brought up the link to real world religion because it was fairly obvious to me that to you, Bren, etc... the concept of an Absolute Good in a setting that was not our world, was unthinkable to you because of how little you think of the idea of Absolute Good or Absolute Evil used by Religion in our world.

The past few of your posts have done nothing but reinforce that idea.  Somehow to you it is more interesting to be faced with a choice to do "X" if my god Avar says "Don't do X", then being faced with a choice to do "X" if the One God of All says "Don't do "X".

If I tell players "Avar's Church says if you murder you hang for all eternity from Vulture Rock" - interesting setting to you.
If I tell players "Murder is an Absolute Evil and everyone knows you go to Hell." - I'm imposing my own personal view of Good and Evil upon the players.
Umm, ok, whatever.

Hell, man. You got it precisely twisted.

It's the idea of an ABSOLUTE GOOD in THIS world that I find wildly unfeasible.

There's nothing at all unfeasible about an ABSOLUTE GOOD in an imaginary setting. And what that would MEAN is it would be an imaginary representation of it's creator's views on what ABSOLUTE GOOD is, which as you admit, has little to no bearing on 'goodness' in reality.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915420And really, how many game settings have the premise that, "Good and evil aren't the same in this setting as they are in reality"?

Blue Rose is one.

BTW, just because the Good and Evil in Westeros aren't different from ours doesn't mean there's an absolute good, in fact the world of Westeros is pretty different from ours in that no one believes even in their own absolute good.
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Quote from: CRKrueger;915430Blue Rose is one.

BTW, just because the Good and Evil in Westeros aren't different from ours doesn't mean there's an absolute good, in fact the world of Westeros is pretty different from ours in that no one believes even in their own absolute good.
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Not familiar with Blue Rose, but i would assume these differences are codified, as I have suggested is ideal for gaming purposes involving following a given code of conduct. Pretty damn hard to follow a rigorous but uncodified code of conduct.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915429Hell, man. You got it precisely twisted.

It's the idea of an ABSOLUTE GOOD in THIS world that I find wildly unfeasible.

There's nothing at all unfeasible about an ABSOLUTE GOOD in an imaginary setting. And what that would MEAN is it would be an imaginary representation of it's creator's views on what ABSOLUTE GOOD is, which as you admit, has little to no bearing on 'goodness' in reality.

You just restated what I just said.  You find the concept unbelievable in our world due to how you view Religion in our world.

As a result, you think that to have such a thing in a setting is to basically be a creation of the author.  In that you would be correct.

Where your bias fails you is that it leads you to the conclusion that my creation of the Church of Avar is somehow going to be objectively more interesting and believable than my creation of an Absolute Good, One God, Dualist Cosmology, whatever.

The second failure is believing that my creation of an Absolute Good is going to be somehow affected by my personal beliefs in a way that Avar is not.

The third failure is thinking that my made up Avar will be codified fairly and my made up Absolute Good, One God, Dualist Cosmology etc, is going to require some kind of "playing the GM" to find out.

Let's put it this way. I want to make a holy knight that serves a diety. Maybe the god of light and knowledge, maybe the god of the sea and trade, maybe the goddess of healing and kindness. All of these sound like different and fun experiences to me. And so now, ideally, I can look at the basic precepts and tenets of these religions and know what I am getting into beforehand. The idea of whether you laid these tenets out "fairly" doesn't even enter my mind. If I don't like a set of tenets, I won't choose that god.

Compare that to you telling me, "To be a holy knight you must always be GOOD". Well unless you can tell me precisely what you mean by that, this becomes a campaign long guessing game where any given action on my part may be forbidden or penalised based purely on how well our notions of GOODNESS match up. And yeah, fuck that.

"To be a holy knight you must always be GOOD"

A GM doing that is just a Shit GM.  That isn't a given assuming you have a setting cosmology where there is Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, a GM can make you play pull-my-finger with the Church of Avar too.

Well, it's how paladins work in AD&D1e if memory serves. Guess there were a lot of shit GMs in those days?

And wasn't it you talking about how in your game a paladin would face repercussions if he strewed goblin entrails about in order to scare off other goblins?

How come? And where is this codified? Desecration of a corpse is EVIL even if it prevents the need for further killing?

Sounds like what you would call "shit GMing" to me.

Or just further evidence of your propensity for double standards and shifting goalposts.

Glad you like the name "Avar" though. It does have a certain ring to it.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915402If you (general you) aren't actually claiming that the decrees of your gameworld gods have anything to do with real world good and evil, why are we having this discussion of absolute GOOD and EVIL?

Because someone brought it up? (shrug). And because its impossible to have a conversation about morality or ethics that doesn't in some way involve the issue of moral absolutes, in the real world or the imaginary I suppose.

Some people think there are absolute concepts of Good an Evil in the real world, but in fantasy all bets are off.
Some people think there are absolute concepts of Good an Evil in the real world, and thus apply equally to situations in fantasy worlds.
Some people think absolute concepts of Good and Evil only exist in the imaginary world.

I seriously have no issue with any of these points of view.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915415Since in D&D you get more XP for Gold then you do for killing, then I guess D&D isn't supposed to be all about combat, it's all about Slavery, because you'll get more XP for capturing everything you see and selling it on the open market.

As an aside: in my house rules, if reduced to below 0HP by a sharp weapon, you bleed out unless someone stops you; if a blunt weapon, you just stay on -2HP or whatever.

This then explains why clerics use blunt weapons. The good clerics would rather not kill you, or do it as an execution, and the evil clerics would rather not kill you, but would like to enslave you or keep you aside for sacrifice later.

A GM could, in theory, compile the absolute, complete list of all possible acts which are Good and all possible acts which are Evil for his campaign world. We have people who try to do this for our world, they are called theologians and philosophers. I am sure we all know about how well they agree in our world...

In theory an Alignment system makes it easy to define the morality of actions. These are Good, those are Evil, these Chaotic and those Lawful. In practice it leads to many arguments and much splitting of hairs. "Killing an intelligent being is evil, but killing an evil being is good, so if I kill an Orc is that evil or good? What if the Orc murdered a family?"

Quote from: Manzanaro;915446Well, it's how paladins work in AD&D1e if memory serves. Guess there were a lot of shit GMs in those days?

And wasn't it you talking about how in your game a paladin would face repercussions if he strewed goblin entrails about in order to scare off other goblins?

How come? And where is this codified? Desecration of a corpse is EVIL even if it prevents the need for further killing?

Sounds like what you would call "shit GMing" to me.

Or just further evidence of your propensity for double standards and shifting goalposts.

Glad you like the name "Avar" though. It does have a certain ring to it.

As a side note, Paladins as a class, have to follow the alignment restrictions of Lawful/Good, not just “Good” and they also have several specific dictates they must follow.  Also, BTW, Shit GMs screwing Paladins with a pixelbitching approach to alignment is kind of an infamous cliche.  I kind of assumed that's what happened to you at some point.  That’s just a misdirection though, so let’s go back on point.

Simple Example of the point.
Q: What’s being a Priest of the God of the Sea like?
Good GM Answer: Detailed Descriptions and Codified behavior
Shit GM Answer: “Just do Sea Type Stuff”.

Q: What’s being a Priest of the Goddess of Light like?
Good GM Answer: Detailed Descriptions and Codified behavior
Shit GM Answer: “Just do Light Stuff, and hate Darkness.”

Q: What’s being a Priest of the God of Nature like?
Good GM Answer: Detailed Descriptions and Codified behavior
Shit GM Answer: “Be a Earth Guy.”

Q: What’s being a Priest of the God of Absolute Good like?
Good GM Answer: Detailed Descriptions and Codified behavior
Shit GM Answer: “Be Good.”

If that’s not obvious, not sure where to go from there.

As far as entrail stringing, let’s look at what actually was said:

Quote from: CRKrueger;914882I write a module where the enemy has younguns you're free to deal with it anyway your table wants.  Stringing the children's entrails from the battlements as a warning to others wasn't what I had in mind, and in my campaign, a Paladin who did that might be in for a bit of a shock, but if your table does that, what could I or anybody else possibly care, because it has absolutely nothing to do with me or mine.

Note: I said “enemy”, not specifically goblins.  What I had in mind by entrail stringing was more along the lines of a Silence of the Lambs display, just something crazy as an example of something that no matter what I thought of it, didn’t matter to your table. (as my explanation I thought made pretty clear.)

I then further explained it:

Quote from: CRKrueger;914893The Paladin stringing entrails was just an example of "That Guy", the person who says he's a Paladin, but is really just a KoDT caricature.

Me sanctioning a Paladin using gory tactics specifically with the intent to save lives, is an invented scenario you created from whole cloth as a distraction from the fact that you basically said the completely indefensible, namely that the Grade School Logic problem I placed up above isn’t true, and that somehow inherent to the idea of an Absolute Good/Evil in a setting is a nebulous “Mother May I”, “Playing the GM” approach to PC behavior which is obviously wrong.

A GM can give clear and fair expectations of any PC's religion.
A GM can play "Guess the way to behave" with any PC's religion.

What I said is that codification of a code of religious conduct was vastly preferable to generalities like "Follow the path of ABSOLUTE GOOD." You seem to be agreeing, so to that extent we're on the same page.

Now, where we disagree is that you seem to feel that ABSOLUTE GOODNESS could be codified in this same way, whereas I feel that goodness largely defies precise codification, as context is extremely variable, and indeed, 2 people could handle a situation entirely differently and yet both be motivated by goodnness. One man smites the enemy of the weak, the other turns his other cheek to the enemy.

Regardless, if you want to lay out a specific code and say, "This is the code of ABSOLUTE GOOD in my setting? That's fine. I may not agree with your premise, but it's workable for gaming.

As far as the goblin entrail thing? Chalk it up to faulty memory and laziness rather than a willful misreading inspired by malice.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915467What I said is that codification of a code of religious conduct was vastly preferable to generalities like "Follow the path of ABSOLUTE GOOD." You seem to be agreeing, so to that extent we're on the same page.

Yep

Quote from: Manzanaro;915467Now, where we disagree is that you seem to feel that ABSOLUTE GOODNESS could be codified in this same way, whereas I feel that goodness largely defies precise codification, as context is extremely variable, and indeed, 2 people could handle a situation entirely differently and yet both be motivated by goodnness. One man smites the enemy of the weak, the other turns his other cheek to the enemy.

Regardless, if you want to lay out a specific code and say, "This is the code of ABSOLUTE GOOD in my setting? That's fine. I may not agree with your premise, but it's workable for gaming.

I'll give you that it's more difficult than Avar and that Absolute Evil is probably way easier to define, but I don't have players grasping the dark waiting to hit them with the Gotcha hammer.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915467As far as the goblin entrail thing? Chalk it up to faulty memory and laziness rather than a willful misreading inspired by malice.

Fair enough.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;915450As an aside: in my house rules, if reduced to below 0HP by a sharp weapon, you bleed out unless someone stops you; if a blunt weapon, you just stay on -2HP or whatever.

This then explains why clerics use blunt weapons. The good clerics would rather not kill you, or do it as an execution, and the evil clerics would rather not kill you, but would like to enslave you or keep you aside for sacrifice later.

er... A blunt weapon can do alot of harm and/or kill.