Quote from: FrankTrollman;478086If you can't consistently define your absolute good and evil, you don't have an absolute good or an absolute evil. And then you're just a cafeteria christian - picking and choosing the segments of your book you will kill people for and refuse to discuss rationally and ignoring the rest or waving it off as a metaphor. A metaphor for... something... mumble...

What a ridiculous and irrelevant argument. Good/Evil, absolute or otherwise, are whatever your DM says it is at any given time of day.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;478224If you presuppose racist treatment of a group, the conclusion had fucking better be that the treatment of the group was racist. Otherwise you fail at logic.

Thanks, Mr. Spock. Now I get it.

:worship:

Quote from: austinjimm;478225What a ridiculous and irrelevant argument. Good/Evil, absolute or otherwise, are whatever your DM says it is at any given time of day.

That is both retarded and empirically untrue.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478227That is both retarded and empirically untrue.

No it's not.

Quote from: MDBrantingham;478210Ho now wait a minute.  If in my campaign orcs are irredeemably evil, like they are in... oh let's say Middle Earth for example.  That doesnt make the designer of the setting (e.g. me or JRR Tolkien) "kind of a shit DM" unless I require you to do some particular thing.

Protip: Tolkien is not a DM. He is an author. Confusing the two completely distinct roles is another, unrelated sign of a shithead DM, as well as of someone with a tenuous grasp of reality.

Bonus protip: As Frank pointed out, Tolkien didn't consider orcs to be irredeemably evil.

QuoteIt's hilarious to watch you trying to make yourself a victim when what is really happening is that you're beginning to see the point.  The orcs are evil and they have to be killed. You arent required to slit orc baby throats if that makes you "uncomfortable."  That's roleplaying.  You figure out what you do based upon the facts of the setting youre in.  Unfortunately for you, the facts of some campaigns force you to confront evil and have to make a real choice.  In the case of the poor little "orc babies" that's a hard thing to do and not everyone is up to it.  But, when your character hears about the next orc attack in the area a few years down the line - that might factor into the ongoing debate in his mushy conscience.

If you think I am trying to portray myself a victim of something here, you are even stupider than the above comment about Tolkien being a DM makes you appear.

If the DM changes the definition of Good and Evil even once, then the definition of Good and Evil were not at any time absolute. Once you've defined morality relative to something, even relative to the DM, then you have a relative - and thus not absolute - moral system. That is what the fucking word means.

There is another issue, which is that if the moral system in use is subject to the unknowable and changeable whims of someone who isn't the person making moral choices, then neither the moral choice nor the moral system has any meaning. You might as well be spinning the Wheel of Morality at that point.

-Frank

Quote from: austinjimm;478228No it's not.

Dunning-Kruger strikes again!

Quote from: Peregrin;478203Say there was an evil race.  And some sort of...crystal...feeding their power.  But if you completed a certain quest, you might be able to rid the world of pestilence...hmm...

No.  No that would be too ridiculous.

At this point, other than a handful of posters (Frank amongst them), this thread is full retard.

Let's go down the full retard list:

1) Morrow pretending to be a psychologist / moral philosopher rationalising a society of psychopaths, something that has never actually existed
1a) Someone mentions the Arabs / Muslims in relation to this

2) Misuse of the term "moral relativism" as a pejorative against some moral position the writer dislikes despite it actually being a more universal or absolute principle than the writer holds

3) Irrelevant fulminating against LIBRALZM and "white guilt"

4) Consistent confusion of authoritative citation of source material and facts with whims, desires, dreams & half-memories, also what you can find on the first page of Google that seems like it kind of supports what you said

5) A flood of low-post-count posters with indistinguishable and ignorant opinions jackal-wanking one another

6) Laziness, ignorance and stupidity deriving from privilege & the exploitation of the hard work of others are valorised by people too unimaginative to even make up sensible or interesting imitations of the world. The valorisations are used to explain why their laziness, ignorance, and stupidity are wonderful, and actually a sign of discerning taste & skill.


Yeap, it's a full retard thread all right.

Also, it's super-hilarious to see a bunch of Christian posters in here arguing that innately evil people & species need to be killed to be dealt with.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478233Yeap, it's a full retard thread all right.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478234Also, it's super-hilarious to see a bunch of Christian posters in here arguing that innately evil people & species need to be killed to be dealt with.

My irony meter just redlined.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;478230If the DM changes the definition of Good and Evil even once, then the definition of Good and Evil were not at any time absolute. Once you've defined morality relative to something, even relative to the DM, then you have a relative - and thus not absolute - moral system. That is what the fucking word means.

There is another issue, which is that if the moral system in use is subject to the unknowable and changeable whims of someone who isn't the person making moral choices, then neither the moral choice nor the moral system has any meaning. You might as well be spinning the Wheel of Morality at that point.

You do understand that Dungeons & Dragons is a *game,* right?

Who is truly the supreme being in any D&D game? Is it the dice? Is it some list of statistics written in your notebook? No. It is the Dungeon Master. The DM possesses the supreme power variously referred to as "DM fiat," "referee's discretion," et. al. In a good D&D game, the DM creates the entire cosmos that his players explore, populates it, and brings its denizens to life. The DM is truly God with a capital "G" within the context of his game. (Remember now, it is a *game.*)

As the DM in my game, I'll let you in on a few key *facts.* In my game orc babies eat people. Orc daddies enslave humans and rape women (of all types). Orc mommies make stew out of human babies.

All of these things take place off-camera, so to speak. However, the orcs don't do these things because they are misunderstood or discrimnated against. They do it because they are fiendish sociopaths from birth to death.

As the DM I choose, for the present, to define these creatures as evil (as do the rules of the game-- remember this is a *game*). It is not their behavior that makes them evil, it is their nature, for that is what the DM decrees.

If my players want some pussy-ass-liberal-star-trek version of D&D they are free to seek it elsewhere. After all-- it's just a game.

The entire premise of Christianity is that everyone is wicked and redemption is available for everyone. That is the entire point of the religion. So any time a Christian says that someone is genetically wicked and thereby excusing doing something final to them, they have already broken the irony meter. Because premise 1 of their religion is that being wicked from birth is the default state of absolutely everyone. Therefore being wicked from birth does not - and cannot - justify treating any person different from any other person.

It would be like executing someone "because he has thumbs". Only more so, because there are actually people who for whatever reason don't have thumbs. But everyone is born sinful. No (non-deity) exceptions.

-Frank

Quote from: austinjimmYou do understand that Dungeons & Dragons is a *game,* right?

Can the DM create a rule he can't override?

Look, the fact that it is a game doesn't allow it to include logical impossibilities. If morality is malleable, it's malleable. That means it isn't absolute. Because absolute morality means morality that is not malleable.

You said that absolute morality didn't stop the DM from changing the definition of Good and Evil at different times of the day. And that's wrong. If the morality is absolute, it can't change at different times of the day. If morality can be changed over the course of the day, it's not absolute.

Your statement was logically inconsistent with itself. You can have morality that the DM can change or you can have absolute morality, but you can't have both. By definition.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;478237The entire premise of Christianity is that everyone is wicked and redemption is available for everyone. That is the entire point of the religion.

Dang! Your an expert on Christianity, too!
:rotfl: