cool.  Enjoying the thread.  Not the shouting and telling people they are stupid so much, but its cool any way. Time for the welcome to to the internet you must be new here"

About 10 pages ago we came to an answer on killing goblin babies.

1, Nope but its no fun so they aren't there.
2. Nope but it is fun so they are there. (or even yep but its fun so we do it anyway)

3. Yep but it maybe a lesser evil so we will do it or not and deal with the consequences.  

I think everyone agreed that the players should know which game they are in.

Now ghost and Gronan are agruing about playing in a game with Absolute knowible and know Evil and Good.  

I have a quandry.  I don't actually know what EVIL is.  I know evil acts, I know, evil regiems.  But EVIL don't make sense to me.  Nihilism could be evil, but I don't think its, EVIL.  Suffering?  I dont' think so.  Sadism?  Uncontorlible Sadism? that seams like a sickness.  Cuthulu old ones and outsiders seem close, but they are just alien.    The concept of Evil is alien to me I can not wrap my head around it.  



Second the guy with the Absolute knowable evil, in the world seems to be playing an interesting (your mileage may vary) thought experiment where morality actually is absolutely culturally relative.  Or if he's not he could be.  If there are gods and they can talk to you and smight you then goodness is obeying your god.  The will of the strongest to quote Thrymisicas.

If that isn't the case if it can be good to disobey your god.  Then there is Morality beyond the will of the gods.  But that isn't personified and so isn't real and absolute and knowable and known.

As I recall, atheists on the Disc world are likely to get a brick through their window.

But just because a god says they are good doesn't mean that they are.  Even if they help you out they might well oppress someone else.

What is ultimate good?  More food?  More babies?  More money?  Less work?

We all like these but all of them can be had at the expense of others.

Quote from: Headless;915238Second the guy with the Absolute knowable evil, in the world seems to be playing an interesting (your mileage may vary) thought experiment where morality actually is absolutely culturally relative.  Or if he's not he could be.  If there are gods and they can talk to you and smight you then goodness is obeying your god.  The will of the strongest to quote Thrymisicas.

If that isn't the case if it can be good to disobey your god.  Then there is Morality beyond the will of the gods.  But that isn't personified and so isn't real and absolute and knowable and known.

A corollary of this (which is how I usually play it) is the Gods themselves are the personifications as part of their divine nature of those moralities and that makes it beyond them yet part of their very nature.

How that translates to how they deal with their worshipers depends on the conceits of your view of the D&D cosmology. I generally go with Primal Order - since it's fun as hell, as set of mechanics that I find useful.

It changes nothing about the act of killing Goblin, Gnoll, Nazi children. That's why my Paladins carry bags of demon-blood with them. They just spray the kids with them, rendering them cosmically evil. Then, you know... HUH-HACK!

White Wolf seems to love these sort of situations. Some of the Cryptic alliances in their d20 Gamma World were such that you could all too easily end up having to genocide whole villages or risk them spreading their faction ideal/pattern by force to other towns. Either that or risk losing your character trying to over-write them one by one.

There are times when Im up for that sort of hell. And theres lots of times Im very not.

Quote from: Manzanaro;914454Frankly, while ethics may vary, I don't think morality does to anywhere near the same degree. I feel like "Don't victimize the weak" is the invariable heart of morality, with a function on an evolutionary level, not merely one of social mores. Hell, you can even see it in a lot of animals. I'd hesitate to classify a religious stricture against eating pork as a moral tenet, though one against eating animals at all may be.

The reason I say killing goblin children MAY not be evil? In a fantasy world, you can have races that are inherently evil without deviation.

But unless everyone is playing a VERY serious game, like art level serious, I really don't want to explore that territory.

There's a reason Tolkien doesn't include orc children in LotR.

He did include them in The Hobbit, mentioning that Gollum killed one of them. This was an example of what a monster Gollum was meant to be.

Quote from: Bren;914492I don't remember that. Was it in the original Monster Manual for AD&D or did it come later, like in AD&D2?

No, he's bullshitting -as usual.

Quote from: jhkim;915150So 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.

Okay. To me this is like asking, "So you think something is objectively wrong with punching people?" The answer is that it depends on the circumstances. Not everything in life is as clear cut as we would like it to be.

If one of my players says to me, "Hey! I think it would be cool to play a game where we are all supervillains like Suicide Squad, or Secret Six, or the Secret Society of Supervillains!" I'm not going to respond by jumping up and screaming at him for being a sick fuck. I might wonder what is up with all the "S"s in supervillain group names, but I would agree it could be fun.

On the other hand, if we are playing D&D and I mention how the innkeeper's 14 year old daughter comes out and starts clearing the plates and a player informs me that he is going to try and get the girl alone, and then rape her and murder the entire family? I am not only done gaming with that dude, but he would be well advised to stay clear of me, period.

So it's a matter of degree and circumstance. I'm not going to try and precisely define these personal boundaries for you, but I know when they get crossed.

I'm going to try and illustrate my point further with a couple hypothetical conversations, because that is how I roll.

Conversation 1

Me: Hey Bill, did you know there's a game called FATAL which seems to have some degree of focus on rape scenarios? Like, you roll up stuff like penis size and the circumference of various body orifices and there's formulas for taking damage if an object is inserted into an orifice that is too small and shit like that?

Bill: Holy fuck! That is some twisted shit! Who the fuck wants to play an RPG designed for rape simulation?

Conversation 2

Me: Hey Bill, I was running an RPG the other day, and a player had his character try to rape an NPC just out of the blue.

Bill: Oh yeah? What happened?

Me: Well, I stopped the game and kicked the guy out of the group.

Bill: That seems a little extreme, man. It's just a game. It isn't like anyone was really raped.

So, Bill now thinks that I am confused and unable to differentiate between a game and reality, despite the attitude he displayed in our first conversation.

Meanwhile, I feel very much like it's Bill who is the confused one. And I sometimes find myself amazed by the number of people who seem to think like Bill thinks (especially in conversation about RPGs in on-line forums).

Quote from: tenbones;914931This thread is so meta-as-fuck I almost put on my Powerslave t-shirt... oh wait, meta....

Despite all the armchair ethical talk, what happens at the table and what happens in the game are kinda different things. It's about the CHARACTER and what the character does. Does the character kill kids? Probably evil.

Is alignment absolute? Not unless it's magically part of their nature - which in D&D *is* a thing. So what's so fucking hard about figuring this out? Is it because players wanna cling to some ill-conceived idea their precious PC is a do-gooder whilst decapitating goblin children because their goblin parents raped the horses and road off on the women?

Why in the hell is this even a discussion at this point? It's another indicator of why "alignment" is a useless extra appendix to the D&D system

Yes.

I also think part of it is caused by players' resentment of DM bullfuckery. I've found that while little goblins in the goblins' lair, or the camp followers of a gang of brigands can add a nifty bit of detail, I also realize that if I make a habit of including these sorts of non-combatants, there's a good chance the PCs will kill them, whether they're caught in the crossfire or massacred on purpose. If I make a habit of putting PCs into moral no-win scenarios, they might just decide "Fuck this!" and just slaughter the bystanders. It's like that annoying, wanked-out DMPC. Any DM who includes that kind of chickenshit in his game has no business whining if the PCs decide that playing second fiddle to Elminster sucks mule cock, so why not just kill him?

Quote from: Ratman_tf;915224In a D&D campaign, the gods can show up and do stuff.* Forgotten Realms, Time of Troubles, for one instance.
Not to mention Planescape.

*I suppose God showed up in the old testament, but then we'd be off on a theology tangent.

The D&D gods aren't like the Biblical god though. They're more like the Greek gods. In other words, not absolute arbiters of morality but just basically humans on a larger scale. So just because God #94854984 believes something doesn't mean it's objective.

Sure, the followers of that god might just go along with what that god believes and wants, but that's different than the players asking for an absolute answer.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915091The 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.

Okay, both you and Maarzan gave answers here that are much closer to the possibilities that I would see myself. However I still stand by my contention that many GMs would not be willing or able to focus a game on this kind of thing and make it interesting. If you want to chalk that up to these GM's being shitty GMs, so be it, but they DO exist, and for evidence you can look to elsewhere in this very thread where my proposed goblin raising scenario was labeled as some bizarre hypothetical that could never conceivably arise in the course of a real game (which is kind of funny, considering that I've actually been talking to players about wanting to run this exact scenario just because of all the possibilities I think it has).

Anyway, I wanted to specifically address the part of your response that I bolded, because I think it has application to a lot of what is being discussed in this thread.

I may think that raising goblin children could make for an extremely interesting scenario. But that doesn't mean I think it could be interesting with any given GM. You see where I'm going with this?

Let's try another one. I may think it could be very interesting to be an entomologist who studies bugs in a fantasy world. But that doesn't mean I think it would be interesting in your game. And it wouldn't be fair for me to think it would be. I can't expect you to have hundreds of fascinating pages detailing the bugs of your magical D&D world. I know that you want your players to treat your game world as a real place, and you do your best to make this illusion believable but it isn't a real place. It is not fully delineated. If I were to spring upon you that I wanted my character to be an entomologist, the best I could expect would be for you to just start making up bugs on the fly, or more commonly, to use my character's interest in etomology as a background detail to draw him into more conventional sandbox adventures. And that's fine.

We are not engaging with a real world, we are engaging with a GM's partially delineated construction of a world. That's an unavoidable truth. The play experience is often best if we consciously make an effort to stick to the parts of the world that are more fully delineated (like dungeons for instance) although there are certainly GMs who are very good at delineating things on the fly.

Let's take what I am saying here and apply it to the level of Good and Evil.

Do I think it could be interesting to play in a game in which questions of Good and Evil were central to events of the game? Sure. But the problem is that the game isn't really about Good and Evil. It's about the GMs beliefs about good and evil, which may not match up to my own. If the GM wants me to believe his game is about ultimate GOOD and EVIL, he is going to first need to convince me that he understands exactly what these things are.

This is one of the reasons paladins often create problems in games. The GM decides that the paladin did an act of evil, so now he is just a fighter. Meanwhile, the player has a different conception of what is evil, and decides the GM is full of shit. Premarital sex is evil? WTF? Killing an orc that surrendered is evil? Dude! Opinions will vary.

So you avoid this by simply avoiding the pretense that your gods and devils are manifestations of ultimate GOOD and EVIL. Seeing as many fantasy world religions revolve around a pantheon of deities rather than an all-knowing monotheistic creator, it isn't that hard to do. Instead of saying "Your god Avar is the god of goodness and you will lose his sponsorship if you do evil (as judged by me)" you say "Your god Avar is the god of battle. Here's his code of conduct. If you don't follow it you will lose your powers."

Problem solved.

You can still have moral issues and questions of good and evil in your games, but you avoid taking the role of the ultimate arbiter of morality as part of your GMing duties.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;915264The D&D gods aren't like the Biblical god though. They're more like the Greek gods. In other words, not absolute arbiters of morality

The Greek gods were absolutely absolute arbiters of morality.  It's just that to the Greeks, "morality" was defined as "what makes the gods happy".

The same is true of Judeo-Christianity.

Wow, proving simultaneously that you know fuck-diddly-doo-dah about BOTH Greek mythology AND Judeo-Christian mythology.

I thought I was the only one scratching my head there...

Quote from: CRKrueger;915185Not going to give an example of Absolute Good or Evil in your view, huh?  Just flag all examples as not Absolute.  You're incapable of even engaging the premise, then, which explains much.  Got it. Moving on.

As I said, you don't appear to mean the same thing by the word "absolute" nor do you appear to mean the same thing by the word "difficult" as I do. When deciding which is the moral act, according to you, you have difficulty in choosing which is the moral action when the two choices at hand are (1) an absolute good and (2) something bad. :eek:

Since you don't answer questions, I don't see any way to agree on a common definition of the words and phrases being used in the discussion. Words and phrases like "Absolute Good," "Absolute Evil," and "difficulty in deciding which is the moral course of action" seem to mean something completely different to you than they do to me. Moreover, since you ask but do not answer questions, a style of forum "discussion" I've seen before, I don't have any interest in singing and dancing in the private mystery play inside your head.

So by all means toddle on off and vent your bile on someone else. No doubt you will feel like you "won" the discussion since I'm not engaging your premise and that will perhaps make you a little less angry.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;915275I thought I was the only one scratching my head there...

Merge this thread with the one about Paladins killing surrendered enemies and the whole "my interpretation of Paladins and Alignment is the only one!" standard end to these.