Quote from: Sigmund;479313IMO individual actions is how alignment was always meant to work anyway, at least for PCs. The player would play the character any way they want, but certain actions would result in alignment drift. Drift too far and you're getting a new team jersey. The divine and semi-divine (which includes infernal) work differently, being embodiments of certain ideas/ideals. Gah.... I wasn't supposed to care about this topic Well, I am human after all:)

I suppose what I meant was I don't worry about what a character's alignment says on his sheet and I don't pay too much attention to the distinction between LG, CG, etc. For my purposes I rarely need to worry about alignment at all. The only time it comes up is when I run something like Ravenloft where evil and good actions have some kind of significant consequence.

This can be a bit harder to do though if you are using 3E, where alignment comes into play mechanically alot (with some weapons being keyed to specific alignments for example). When I used to run 3E, I just used the alignment system (but with a great amount of leniency) so I didn't have to worry about that stuff when it arose.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479250I don't have to read your mind; you've said it in the past, you dishonest troll. You probably don't find it parochial and stupid, but it doesn't require telepathy to characterise your shitty, self-serving, ignorant worldview as such.

You weren't characterizing my worldview.  You were speculating on why I hold it, practicing the same sort of "telepathy" you can't tolerate other people directing at you.  Hypocrisy or is this the typical elitist attitude that the rules that you apply to others don't apply to you?  

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479250You also continue to utter statements that align with it, so I see no reason to believe that you've changed your mind.

I continue to provide the sources for the information informing my opinions.  Perhaps if you want to change my mind, you should explain what's wrong with it or why it's not applicable.  At the very least, tell me why I should believe that spending years of my time studying philosophers who have spent centuries speculating about how humans make moral decisions and how morality should work yet have never produced any sort of consensus agreement about it will give me a more informed and accurate understanding of how humans make moral decisions than looking at the research of scientists who are performing brain scans and other tests on people making moral decisions to see how human brains actually make moral decisions.  

I ask this especially in light of the fact that more than one of those brain scan studies report that the self-reported explanation for those decisions varies significantly from what the brain scans show happening, both in terms of sequence and influence, to the point that some researchers argue that people subconsciously make decisions first and then rationalize them after the fact.  I also ask this in light of the game theorists who also try to identify optimal human decisions but who are frequently surprised that real human choices bear little resemblance to the choices they believe people should make and can't understand why the two differ.

Contrary to apparently popular opinion here, mean girl ridicule doesn't change minds.  Yeah, it makes the choir that already agrees with you shout "Hallelujah!" and it can feel great to finally be the bully after years of being abused in high school hallways for being a D&D geek, especially since nobody is going to reach through the screen and slap you silly, but it really doesn't change minds, except perhaps the weakest minds looking for approval from the mean girls to be part of the in crowd.  And, ultimately, it leaves people here looking no better than the denizens of Tangency, who are only slightly more subtle at bullying those whose opinions they don't like.  

The way you get rid of ignorance is to educate, the way you deal with inaccurate ideas to to take the effort to prove them wrong, and the way you get people to pay attention to what you say is to say something useful.  You can find evidence of all of that at play in this thread.

Quote from: David R;479328Psuedoephedrine's settings are some of the most interesting around. I'm including them with published "professional" settings. I reckon' it's because it's informed by what he has read.

It's the impression one gets from his own posts.  The man draws upon an encyclopedic knowledge of historical, cultural, and linguistic sources.  Philosophy also.  It's like standing next to the light.

And more impressive to people on my side of the tracks...he can sling vulgarity with the fucking best of us.

Quote from: John Morrow;479336You weren't characterizing my worldview.  You were speculating on why I hold it, practicing the same sort of "telepathy" you can't tolerate other people directing at you.  Hypocrisy or is this the typical elitist attitude that the rules that you apply to others don't apply to you?

Last night my PCs fought an obsidian space ooze that flailed around less than you are right now, Morrow.

Your post is just demanding things that we've already covered. Your "sources" are ones that it has been shown time and time again, on thread after thread, that you don't actually read. I know this because back when I took what you said seriously, I used to go and read them, and they would almost always mean something radically different than your summary claimed.

You should learn more so that you don't look like a fool when you ramble about it others. I've already wasted enough time taking you seriously and explaining the problems with your asinine beliefs. Unless you're going to start paying me tutor fees, I'm giving you exactly what you deserve: contempt, derision and ridicule. You may not like that, and I won't claim to be a saint, but it's not like this is the first time, and it probably won't be the last. Don't pretend we haven't talked out this shit at great length several times before now.

Quote from: David R;479328Psuedoephedrine's settings are some of the most interesting around. I'm including them with published "professional" settings. I reckon' it's because it's informed by what he has read. Kadish went down pretty well with my crew, a classic (for us) ending, with the last surviving PC realizing too late that the prized box of treausre they had schemed and fought over from the beginning of the campaign was actually an IED, switched by another PC he had just perished. What would you expect from a campaign titled, Land Without Pity.

I am incredibly eager to hear about how the campaign went, and equally glad that you have returned after a long self-imposed exile.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479284So long as you're handing out gold and XP and other accomplishments for doing things and not for doing other things, you're encouraging and discouraging certain kinds of behaviour. Best way to handle it is to embed it in the world. So it's not the DM just handing out magic candy, but authority figures, or allies, or whatever in the world.

Honestly, what my character does or doesn't do is generally not based on gold or XP.  

With the notable exception of my D&D campaign (because the players asked for RAW experience points awards as part of the D&D experience), my group normally handed out a standard amount of experience points that vary from session to session, if it varies at all, based on how long and complex the session was, not based on what the players accomplished or didn't accomplish in the game.  What the people I've role-played with do (with one notable exception) is simply role-play their characters as if they were real people in their setting.  As such, they make all sorts of non-optimal decisions because doing so is what the character would do, regardless of what the mechanics encourage or discourage.

I've had a character die feeding an addiction to magical energy in a game with no mechanics for addiction and no reward for it.  Another player in that game played a character with a split-personality, again, with no mechanics to support it.  The same game also had Fudge points but the players rarely used them because the players were too busy just playing their characters.  

I've had a character experience paranoia as the result of a telepathic rewrite of the character's memory without any mechanics telling me that should happen.  Heck, I didn't even understand why the character was paranoid until I gave it some thought out of the game.  I simply role-played through it thinking in character and that's how it played out.  

In the D&D 3.5 campaign that I played in, my character was Fighter who rarely fought and I basically took my character out of the campaign before I had a chance to ever use the feat cluster I'd been building toward because that's what made sense in character (he essentially betrayed his friends to save them, which is one of the reasons why I have trouble equating betrayal with evil, even though the character would argue that his betrayal was worthy of execution).  

I don't need a reward or punishment to make me want to role-play my character in character.  It's the whole reason I'm there.  It's like offering to pay me to watch a movie I already want to see or eat a food I already want to eat.  It's like getting coupons for things I already buy and can afford.  If I played a character that worshiped an idol who hungered for the hearts of others, I wouldn't need experience points to make me want to feed that hunger any more than I needed addiction rules to make my character want to feed his addiction.

Do people really need to be bribed to role-play?

Fun is an incentive too, bro. One of the guys in my Emern game (a druid who had all of his skin burnt off when the rocket exploded and then had it replaced with a silver space suit; he's the guy cutting out hearts and talking to the crystal skull) went and talked to some monkeys last session. He got pelted with fruit, and ended up finding the grove of bananas the monkeys had been eating. It didn't give him any XP or gold, but it was a fun scene, and it was certainly an incentive for him to keep doing that stuff, whereas if I'd just shut it down or abbreviated it - truncated the fun - it's less likely he would do it again in future.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479339I've already wasted enough time taking you seriously and explaining the problems with your asinine beliefs. Unless you're going to start paying me tutor fees, I'm giving you exactly what you deserve: contempt, derision and ridicule.

Those are tutor fees I doubt he could afford - poor ignorant wretch that he is.  Course I share his lot, not understanding the wisdom of incentives.  But at least I am a fool that knows he is one.  No need to tire your arm on me.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479339Your "sources" are ones that it has been shown time and time again, on thread after thread, that you don't actually read. I know this because back when I took what you said seriously, I used to go and read them, and they would almost always mean something radically different than your summary claimed.

And I've followed plenty of sources and Googled plenty of information on the basis of comments that people have made here and in reply to me and often have the same reaction.  Yes, there are cases where I think people have legitimately pointed out that a link or claim that I've made was not accurate, but I think I've acknowledged when I'm wrong more than many people here who prefer, instead, to simply drop the subject when they are proven wrong, like you did with the Atonement spell in this thread.  

In most cases, people respond with a claim that the source is wrong or doesn't say what I claim it says without actually pointing out what the problem is.  There are no specifics.

And no doubt a big part of the problem with why people don't find each other's sources persuasive is confirmation bias all around, a point I fully understand but I'm not sure you do.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479339You should learn more so that you don't look like a fool when you ramble about it others. I've already wasted enough time taking you seriously and explaining the problems with your asinine beliefs. Unless you're going to start paying me tutor fees, I'm giving you exactly what you deserve: contempt, derision and ridicule. You may not like that, and I won't claim to be a saint, but it's not like this is the first time, and it probably won't be the last. Don't pretend we haven't talked out this shit at great length several times before now.

While you may think I'm being dishonest or pretending, I find the vast majority of your replies and criticism are precisely like this one is, long on certainty and condemnation but short on details and examples, sometimes being little more than "I'm right and you're wrong."  I'm not trying to goad you into more detailed responses to waste your time but because I think you've made good points when you've bothered to make them.   I have learned things from you when you've made serious attempts to provide a detailed reply.  Your contempt, derision, and ridicule?  It reduces you to being a yappy dog to me.  Whatever.  Feel free to yap.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;479345Fun is an incentive too, bro. One of the guys in my Emern game (a druid who had all of his skin burnt off when the rocket exploded and then had it replaced with a silver space suit; he's the guy cutting out hearts and talking to the crystal skull) went and talked to some monkeys last session. He got pelted with fruit, and ended up finding the grove of bananas the monkeys had been eating. It didn't give him any XP or gold, but it was a fun scene, and it was certainly an incentive for him to keep doing that stuff, whereas if I'd just shut it down or abbreviated it - truncated the fun - it's less likely he would do it again in future.

Absolutely, but it doesn't need to be incorporated into the setting or rules as anything other than GMing advice.

Quote from: John Morrow;479350And I've followed plenty of sources and Googled plenty of information on the basis of comments that people have made here and in reply to me and often have the same reaction.  Yes, there are cases where I think people have legitimately pointed out that a link or claim that I've made was not accurate, but I think I've acknowledged when I'm wrong more than many people here who prefer, instead, to simply drop the subject when they are proven wrong, like you did with the Atonement spell in this thread.

Yeah, yeah, you don't like me being mean to you. It doesn't take that many words to say it.

The only part of your post that's worth responding to is this.

I didn't drop it, I answered it. I'll flesh out my answer, since it may not have been clear:

Atonement probably won't work if you just say, cast Dominate Monster on an evil monster and then command it to atone. But there are plenty of spells that alter one's attitudes enough that one could truly wish to atone without holding it as a magically-caused belief.

As I said earlier, Charm Person is one. Charm Person makes you temporarily someone's best friend (actually, the spell most of the time that I've seen is worded so that it's unclear if the creature's attitude converts back even at the end of the spell without provocation - the duration of the spell can be considered as the length of time that the amity is magically enforced even in the face of contrary evidence - this is how I adjudicate it at the table, btw).

Now, having a best friend doesn't automatically make you want to repent of your wicked ways (I'm sure even Hitler had a bestie), but I'm sure a suitably high charisma PC who had prepared some good points could cause their new best friend, Ziplo the Raper Orc, to want to change his ways and receive the gift of righteousness, etc. It might not be automatic, but a Diplomacy roll or something like it would certainly be appropriate under the circumstances. That to me would qualify as a truly held belief, even though the attitudes that opened the character's mind to that possibility were magically induced at some point.

Actually, for a psychopathic creature which is normally incapable of feeling this kind of intimacy, friendship is probably an overwhelming feeling it is emotionally unequipped to bracket and restrain. One could imagine it hungering after the feelings of affection and respect like a regular human hungers after the intimacy of sex. Think of it like a human child when they leave the pre-moral stage of early development and begin craving love and affection.

Alternately, one could polymorph the orc into a human, where it is presumably no longer irredeemably evil, rehabilitate it, atone it, and polymorph it back (or just polymorph it into something that is genetically identical to the orc it once was except for whatever neurological or physiological quirk causes it to act in an evil way).

Basically, there's tons of shit you could do here to induce a "truly held" desire to repent.

Quote from: John Morrow;479351Absolutely, but it doesn't need to be incorporated into the setting or rules as anything other than GMing advice.

Sure, but why not provide a concrete incentive, especially if there's decent, readily available explanations in the setting?

Quote from: Sigmund;479185I take "Team Left" to refer to the left wing, or liberal side, of American politics.

Adressing this because to me the nuance is important. By saying Team Left I do not mean merely "left wing". I mean someone who let's his imaginary belonging to a "team" of politics cloud every position he takes, every opinion or POV he can come up with. Being part of the team is more important than truth or fairness. It's about holding the position first.

And yes, there is a Team Right as well.

Quote from: Imperator;479238Dude, you know Gareth loves everyone


Indeed. man, I miss the game.

Restarting VERY soon. Next week if some internet issues I've had are solved for good - strong chance of that happening, though I could find myself cut off Sunday. Working it out.

Quote from: CRKrueger;479279Yeah, wasn't really implemented well (spells of detection, bonus against "evil" etc..) and carried with it too many problems.

People keep saying that, but I actually never had alignments issues at an actual game table. Ever. It's typical internet ramblings born out of slanted "I don't like this" POVs and theoretical scenarios, as far as I'm concerned.