Quote from: GameDaddy;482238Please... like the Greeks have dibs on this kind of behavior...

I never claimed they did.

Quote from: GameDaddy;482238You want to see a real human example of a [strike]violent psychopathic parasite[/strike] modern culture in action (*cough* Helots *cough*), take a close look around you.

I think there are quite a few parallels between that and the Spartans.

So has anyone pointed out that the whining in the original post bears a striking semblance to the "video games cause violence" crowd?

EDIT: Also, I don't know how anyone could actually be friends with someone that smug, condescending, and histrionic.

Quote from: CRKrueger;482216Not if the God is real it isn't.

Yes, it is. If you are obeying an authority's commands because you fear or respect its power over you, it doesn't matter whether that is mundane or magical power.

QuoteYour only real problem remains that you happen to conveniently think your preferred fields of study in a world without an actual god made manifest have anything to do with a theoretical world in which such gods or god does exist and makes it's commands known.

Holy shit, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what reasoning does, as well as the history of moral thought.

Protip: Our moral theories evolved in an intellectual context in which people did think God (or the Gods) manifested fairly regularly, and that his commands were well known and even obvious at times.

In fact, one of the earliest philosophical texts is about the very problem of whether the gods love what is good already, or whether the gods' love makes a thing good, written with two interlocutors who both fervently believe that the gods manifest their will on earth. This is not an obscure text - I read it at least three or four times in various contexts in a basic undergraduate philosophical education, and it bears directly on the very topic under discussion.

Reasoning about morality exists to satisfy the rational demands that mere power fails to meet, whether that is divine power or mundane, or whatever else. Obeying God simply because he is powerful is totally rationally inadequate, and in no way bears on the goodness or rightness of one's actions in any sort of intersubjective or objective sense. God doesn't get to define what is "good", any more than chalk gets to define what "chalk" is (if anything, at least one classic argument for God's existence & character flows exactly the other way, presenting God as essentially the perfected composite of all goodness which can be rationally assessed as such - but if you don't even know about the Euthypro, I'm not going to waste my time going through theology).

Quote from: John Morrow;482239Only if the distinction between good people and bad people is arbitrary and not a legitimate assessment of the situation.

No, you are wrong. Differing moral standards based on the character of actors, whether obvious or not, remains relativistic. Ethiopians existing is an objective fact, and whether someone is an Ethiopian is a fact that can be "legitimately assessed". Holding differing moral standards for Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians would still be relativistic.

QuoteBeyond the oversimplification of Jesus and his death, Romans were not irredeemably evil monsters.

Sure. Fortunately, Jesus didn't say "Love everyone, except those irredeemably evil monsters".

QuoteThe emperor is not God.  You can have all sorts of fun equivocating things that aren't.  This is how PETA winds up talking about "sea kittens".  Romans are not inhuman monsters.  Emperors are not God.  Fish are not sea kittens.

You have missed the point of the analogy. As I said to Krueger, obeying power out of fear or respect for power is not an inherently good act, even if the power in question is itself good.

QuoteGiven that I haven't suggested a world of only irredeemably evil monsters and no humans, I'm not sure why I need to explain how they could survive without others to be parasitic on any more than one needs to explain how guinea worms could survive without humans in order to believe they exist.

You've missed the point again. Psychopaths are able to reach adulthood in our society because they are not surrounded by other psychopaths, and not in a psychopathic society with none of the fruits of human cooperation and reciprocity. Orcs, if they are a self-contained, self-perpetuating society of psychopaths, do not have that host society to burrow into like a human psychopath does.

QuoteSpecies don't last forever, nor do they have to be designed to.  If the evil monsters ever managed to kill all the humans and non-evil humanoids, their lives would become harder and they'd start preying on each other.  Maybe they'd die out after a millennia, a century, or even just a few years.  Why does that preclude their existence?  They wouldn't be the first species to go extinct or the first parasite to go extinct because it no longer had a host.

It precludes their existence outside of that brief window of time, which makes intergenerational societies almost impossible. This is what we've been debating for a while now. That's why I said earlier that only short-lived societies that can externalise (or ignore) child-rearing and other tasks that the psychopaths are totally unsuited for could survive, and even then for only brief periods of time.

If someone is magicking up orcs whenever the current crop is depleted, then there shouldn't be any orc women or children in the first place to slaughter.

Quote from: Sigmund;482202I think you're thinking more of yourself than me. I've actually shown that I've read the thread just fine, I was just giving you the benefit of the doubt, which perhaps I shouldn't have since you've shown your troll to be without merit or value.

You couldn't keep "omniscience" and "omnipotence" straight, even after I corrected you on it. Don't brag about how you're on top of things when you can't even keep that stuff straight when people point it out to you.

QuoteIf you want to challenge what I can and can't summarize, have at it.

I did challenge you to. Do it, you fucking pretentious twit.

QuoteNo where in there do I see John saying there were no moral consequences. In fact, by writing things like, "which was why it was grim" and "The carnage and how brutal it was was quite clear to all involved" I think John is making quite clear that while the fact that the goblins were known to be irredeemably evil in his campaign made such pretend slaughter less morally abhorrent in relation to D&D's alignment system, the players and by extension the characters still felt emotional turmoil by performing this act. This emotional turmoil is very much a moral consequence. In fact, quite often in the real world when folks do morally wrong things, emotional turmoil is the only consequence they suffer, so I'd argue that this emotional reaction is more "realistic" than being struck down by the Gods of Good. So either you can't read, or you're interpreting what's been written through the lens of whatever supports your own position best, which would not be the first time.

John is talking about a world in which there is a clear conception of what he calls "absolute good" and in which the Gods actively enforce this, and with Paladins and Druids who must uphold certain alignments. And to slay noncombatants in this world is not immoral (it would not cause a Paladin to fall). The players might have felt emotional turmoil, but the characters should not have based on what he claims. If they did, then it is simply because his moral theory is inadequate (a claim I've made numerous times).


The rest of your post is just butthurt. Go whine to someone who cares.

Quote from: John Morrow;482239Species don't last forever, nor do they have to be designed to.

I'm not an expert on evolution or ecology, but I don't think very many extinctions have occurred due to a parasite or predator wiping out its prey or host. Usually they live in local equilibria; if the host/prey species is wiped out, it's because of some external influence.

Quote from: John Morrow;482237The first thing I have to ask is, do you have similar verisimilitude problems with vampires in role-playing games?

No, but vampires aren't a species, they don't propagate by mommy & daddy vampires having baby vampires, and they're highly supernatural.

QuoteThe second thing I have to ask is, how do you think real world parasites that exclusively afflict a single species originate and sustain themselves?

Is this a rhetorical question? I'd appreciate if you'd actually take a stab at it yourself.

I'd speculate (and probably getting in over my head) that all parasites start as opportunistic generalists--either finding their way from one species to another that offers a similar "environment", or taking on a parasitic lifestyle after a host species offers an environment that adequately substitutes for predation. E.g., vampire bats according to one theory originally ate blood-sucking arthropods, then they moved on to cut out the middle man as it were.

The wikipedia article on parasitism says that parasites may become specialists, infecting a single species, due to the need to overcome the unique defenses of that species. However it goes on to say that parasites and their hosts "should" over time co-evolve to the point that the parasite is less harmful or even beneficial to the host, since parasites benefit when their hosts thrive.

What this suggests to me is that, like diseases, highly virulent forms of parasitism are most likely the result of recent, radical changes in the environment. E.g. the Black Death in Europe is associated with rapid urbanization; the decimation of the Native American populations by disease occurred as a result of contact with Europeans after long isolation of the two populations; Pericles died in an epidemic brought on by population crowding during wartime; the Spanish Flu was incubated in the trenches of WWI and spread by soldiers returning home.

Or consider extinction by predation: the common housecat wiped out several bird species, true, but only because cats were introduced into Oceania by westerners.

QuoteThird, one doesn't need to constantly kill to be evil, nor does one need to kill at all to be evil.

Oh dear, more psychopaths...I'm sorry, but I really don't see the relevance here.

QuoteFinally, I don't think they have to need to kill humans to the extent that, say, the Aliens do.  In my D&D game, evil often preferred to go after weak targets of opportunity not of their own kind.  In the absence of such targets, they might go after stronger targets or go after their own kind.  If given a choice, a goblin would sack human settlements and take captives to abuse and perhaps ultimately kill and eat but in the absence of humans that they could kill or have any reasonable chance of killing, they could satisfy their hunger and cruel urges by viciously killing animals like deer or even rats and by brutalizing others of their own kind weaker than they are.

This is a better argument, one that occurred to me. I'm not entirely sure how convincing it is, but I don't have a good answer either.

QuoteThink about all the real world atrocities one can blow off by dismissing it simply as being "mean".  Would you consider it fair to describe the crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka as them being "mean" to some women?

I don't give a damn, to be honest. If your orcs or goblins are naturally awful to each other as a species or as society (not as individual deviants), then I can point to real species where stuff happens that's pretty hard to stomach. For example, infanticide and cannibalism among chimps, infanticide among lions and gorillas, female preying mantises biting the heads off males, etc. As long as we're talking about natural behavior, I don't see how it turns the entire species or society into a candidate for extermination. Even in the case of social behavior among humans:, yes to stopping suttee if you're in a position to do so, no to killing entire tribes because "they're a bunch of animals who are better off dead".

QuoteScience fiction is also has plenty of examples of remorseless killing machines and The Terminator and the Aliens have both been mentioned in this thread.  Sometimes, they are literally machines but you can also find alien and transformed human, too.  There are also science fiction zombies such as those in 28 Days Later.  I'm not seeing the incompatibility.

I exclude zombies, vampires, and the like because, again, they aren't natural species. (Haven't watched 28 Days Later, do the zombies there breed and have kids?) It's not the evil of the Terminator, etc., that I question. I think I should have put it better by saying that once you start talking about species with a pretend scientific rationale for their psychology, ecology, and the like, it becomes harder to think of them as evil in an absolute sense since, first, nature just does what it does, and second, it becomes harder to rationalize genetically-inborn evil as being compatible with human characteristics such as sentience and sociality.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482259Yes, it is. If you are obeying an authority's commands because you fear or respect its power over you, it doesn't matter whether that is mundane or magical power.

"Magical"? Your atheism is showing if you can't even say Divine.  You see no difference between a command given by a man who could kill you and a god?  You need to use your imagination a bit more.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482259Protip: Our moral theories evolved in an intellectual context in which people did think God (or the Gods) manifested fairly regularly, and that his commands were well known and even obvious at times.

Protip: They were wrong about that, weren't they?  Our moral theories evolved in an intellectual context where there was no God to confirm or deny any supposition or theory put forth by man.

It's quite easy to say that the existence of a god is not rationale enough to obey him when there is no god.  Moral theorists and philosophers can believe in god all they want to, however, none of them ever had god's confirmation or were ever struck dead for claiming he doesn't matter.

Somehow, I think a real god just might make a wee little bit of difference in how people think about morality and how a culture's morality may have developed.

Thinking that there is no god, yet there is an inherent absolute moral Truth, is simply religion by another name, and one that may not apply to every cosmology.

Quote from: CRKrueger;482276"Magical"? Your atheism is showing if you can't even say Divine.  You see no difference between a command given by a man who could kill you and a god?  You need to use your imagination a bit more.

He sees no difference because there is none. On both cases you obey because someone holds a huge power over you. Actually, in real world, most self - defined believers regularly disobey some or all their precepts, but they would surely obey an armed man. God is not very persuasive

Quote from: Imperator;482288He sees no difference because there is none. On both cases you obey because someone holds a huge power over you. Actually, in real world, most self - defined believers regularly disobey some or all their precepts, but they would surely obey an armed man. God is not very persuasive

A fair point. In a historical context (gross generalisation alert, but I am mostly thinking greco-roman), a deity is placed at or near the top of a pyramid of people who hold power over you. The pyramid is a context within which a transactional flow of favours passes down and honours and service pass upwards in return. If honours and service do not flow upwards, it can be harm and punishment that is handed down rather than favours. The magnitude of power (= the capacity to help and harm) at some point tips into a level that is 'divine'. This tipping point is not fixed by a difference between 'mortal' or 'normal' and 'supernatural', although the ability to affect natural phenomena is a key indicator. Very powerful human rulers can nevertheless be paid divine honours, and supernatural signs can adhere to even mortal deities, as evidence of their extreme power.

The point is that the potential to reinforce the power relationship through violence is almost always part of the mix, and there is a fine line between worship and propitiation - but the normative peaceful social relations of service and loyalty in return for favour and support are common to both religious and social intercourse.

So...in my campaign the nearest equivalent to an evil race (called Orcs but always treated as human) does stuff that is evil (i.e. routinely harmful to other folk) because it's part of what they have to do to maintain harmonious relations with their gods. It's not an observation of how evil should be dealt with in all fantasy worlds, it's just the approach I have taken for mine.

Quote from: Iron Simulacrum;482295So...in my campaign the nearest equivalent to an evil race (called Orcs but always treated as human) does stuff that is evil (i.e. routinely harmful to other folk) because it's part of what they have to do to maintain harmonious relations with their gods.

Sure but I don't think this makes the orcs in your world irredeemably evil anymore more so than any real world groups or individuals who for whatever reasons fall under the sway of powerful or charismatic individuals.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Imperator;482288Actually, in real world, most self - defined believers regularly disobey some or all their precepts, but they would surely obey an armed man. God is not very persuasive

The scary thing is that some believers don't disobey any of their precepts and won't abandon them even on the orders of an armed man. That's power, Ramon....real scary power :cool:

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Iron Simulacrum;482295So...in my campaign the nearest equivalent to an evil race (called Orcs but always treated as human) does stuff that is evil (i.e. routinely harmful to other folk) because it's part of what they have to do to maintain harmonious relations with their gods. It's not an observation of how evil should be dealt with in all fantasy worlds, it's just the approach I have taken for mine.

Fully agreement here.

I don't see why a fantasy setting has to align with our own personal assessments of evil and good, or why it has to be subject to a thorough philosophical analysis. I mean I have my own ideas about what good means, how that relates to the existence/non-existence of god, etc, but I can imagine a setting where all of my assumptions and knowledge aren't meaningful. That is half the fun.

Quote from: David R;482219The only one here who is being elitist and one-true-wayist is you. Asking people like Dray ( and others) to leave the hobby because of their mockworthy ideas. Morrow's ideas about "sanitized" play could be construed as elitist just as much as jibba's or psuedoephedrine's ideas about "badly designed setting or my "murkier waters". Just because I may not agree with any of them does not mean I think they should leave the hobby, and none of them has asked anyone to leave the hobby except you.

I may not subscribe to psuedoephedrine's idea about "badly designed" settings but I do think his settings are  good examples of how his design philosophies infleunce his games. Just as I think jibba is wrong in saying that there's something inherently dark about the hobby that attracts fucked up people but I am sympathetic to some of views on setting design.

The conversation has moved (at least for some of us) beyond the ridiculous statements in the OP and I think it's rather disinguenuos of you to imply that just because you don't agree with some of the things we have said, we are some how defending the ideas in the OP.

Regards,
David R

Who asked Dray to leave the hobby? Are ya'all even capable of addressing something I've actually written? I don't remember mentioning you specifically either, so anything you're reading out of my post is in your head, not my post. I've already told Pseudo that I think he's a dang good GM and world-builder as well, but that doesn't mean he's infallible, and certainly not a pleasant person to discuss things with. I think he was addressing he bullshit to the wrong person though, cuz neither you nor jhkim actually read the words I wrote. Who's being disingenuous?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482259Yes, it is. If you are obeying an authority's commands because you fear or respect its power over you, it doesn't matter whether that is mundane or magical power.

No it's not. It's a matter of degree. It also plays into Dr. Twerski's Law of Emotional Gravity. A God is far more capable of punishing a transgressor, both while that transgressor is alive, and after they are dead.

QuoteHoly shit, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what reasoning does, as well as the history of moral thought.

What part of "fantasy game" do you not understand? Who gives a fuck about the history of moral thought when pretending to play an elf that's killing pretend orcs?

QuoteProtip: Our moral theories evolved in an intellectual context in which people did think God (or the Gods) manifested fairly regularly, and that his commands were well known and even obvious at times.

Protip: They were wrong. Our pretend orc would not be. His God can and would prove it.