Yes, but it's easier for an army to handle prisoners than a party of 3-7 adventurers exploring deep underground.

Again it comes down to how you want to play the game.  If you (as GM) keep having prisoners escaping and sneak attacking the PCs, or Orc children to contend with, or all sorts of situations where there's no clear good + bad... then you might be better to run a game that isn't based on good + bad.

Quote from: Stuart;219180Again it comes down to how you want to play the game.  If you (as GM) keep having prisoners escaping and sneak attacking the PCs, or Orc children to contend with, or all sorts of situations where there's no clear good + bad... then you might be better to run a game that isn't based on good + bad.

Yes, but then why muddy that up with "No evil PCs"? The two are contradictory premises.

I'd suggest that if you have a big issue with treating orcs as quintessentially evil beings incapable of redemption, you're probably better off with something other than D&D.

It's a game of absolute morality, absolute alignments.  Orcs are inherently evil, orcish prisoners will either languish suffering in a dungeon or if freed will kill people.  They cannot be redeemed.  As such, killing them is closer to pest control than murder.

Now, it doesn't have to be played that way and most of us have played it otherwise, but I do think the game is set up with those assumptions.

The absolute morality is of course why many of us sought other games, and why many more others chose not to.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;219187Yes, but then why muddy that up with "No evil PCs"? The two are contradictory premises.

How is that contradictory?

Quote from: Stuart;219180Again it comes down to how you want to play the game.  If you (as GM) keep having prisoners escaping and sneak attacking the PCs, or Orc children to contend with, or all sorts of situations where there's no clear good + bad... then you might be better to run a game that isn't based on good + bad.

Agreed. This is all play style stuff.

-clash

Quote from: wulfgar;219178Yes, but it's easier for an army to handle prisoners than a party of 3-7 adventurers exploring deep underground.

We hardly ever went underground any great depth. Stripping the prisoners of weapons and gear and letting them go free works for me.

-clash

Silly me, whenever I see alignments or morality I want to throw it at the players and see what they do with it. Heroes, especially the good ones, have to deal with situations like that.

Quote from: Stuart;219190How is that contradictory?

If there's no clear good and bad then there are no "evil" PCs (or "good" ones) in the first place, and the ban is meaningless, except as a way for the DM to say "I don't like your decision, stop playing that character".

I mean, I really do play in a game where "good" and "bad" are unclear, if not completely meaningless, and I play a serial-killing undead master swordsman who kills helpless people all the time. But that doesn't seem to be the kind of play you're advocating.

So which is it? Do good and evil matter, even if they aren't objectified forces in the world as per stock D&D assumptions, or are they meaningless, with your PCs free to revel in their Nietzschean freedom?

Quote from: Balbinus;219189I'd suggest that if you have a big issue with treating orcs as quintessentially evil beings incapable of redemption, you're probably better off with something other than D&D.

I dealt with it by using alignments as rough guidelines or tendencies. Elves are good. Assassins are evil. There are elven assassins. That's from standard AD&D. That says to me that strict immutable racial alignments are a misreading of the text. The text actually says something to the effect that individuals of a race can be any alignment, but that certain races tended towards certain alignments. That's how I dealt with it. Things changed with 3.X IIRC. I have never run 3.X - it severely conflicts with my GMing style - and have only occasionally played it, so I'm not positive.

Anyway, I have already moved on to other games, so it's really fruitless to argue. OTOH, the initial point was about tasers, which are not part of most versions of D&D...

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;219172Every time they made an orc or hobgoblin or goblin surrender, they persuaded it to join them with better pay and food and medical treatment. By the end of the game, they had an army with which to beat the bad guy's army - mano a mano, their humanoids were healthier, better fed, and better armed. A couple of 12 year olds figured that out.

Sounds like your humanoids were just more primitive humans with some superficial differences in physiology.

In our D&D, if a monster is evil, it is genuinely evil. Not just a bit cowardly or bullying. Or prone to theft (the mischievous little blighters!), but evil in the sense of desiring to cause real harm for its own sake. So orcs aren't just a marginalized group of primitizes who can be taught loyalty and love if shown a bit of affection; they are monsters who relish killing, torturing, and eating humans.

And with rare exceptions, evil monsters are irredeemably evil by nature. That's certainly not a modern approach to behaviour and morality, but then we never saw any appeal in applying modern attitudes to our D&D.

Quote from: Saphim;219200Silly me, whenever I see alignments or morality I want to throw it at the players and see what they do with it. Heroes, especially the good ones, have to deal with situations like that.

People play D&D in all sorts of different ways.

We saw it more as part of the game to play your character within the bounds of the alignment you selected.  It has a mechanical affect on the game as well.  If your character is "good" you might not be able to take the same range of actions that the "neutral" character does -- but it means you can speak the Good/Lawful alignment language, and wield a Good/Lawfully aligned weapon.  You take a penalty for changing alignment in some editions too.

Between the illustration and the example of play in the Basic book we thought it was pretty clear that alignment was an important part of the game and that the specific example of what to do with prisoners was covered.

Once you get into "what does it mean to be good?", anti-heroes and villains in your games I think other systems are better suited for that.  Or even just D&D without a lot of the way alignment rules.

Quote from: flyingmice;219205Things changed with 3.X IIRC. I have never run 3.X - it severely conflicts with my GMing style - and have only occasionally played it, so I'm not positive.

3.x included descriptors indicating how likely a creature was to deviate from its racial alignment, so that yes, you could have good hobgoblins if you simply taught them a way of life other than robbing and raiding, but good drow were highly exceptional, and demons were always bad (unless, of course, the atonement spell was cast on them).

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;219202If there's no clear good and bad then there are no "evil" PCs (or "good" ones) in the first place, and the ban is meaningless, except as a way for the DM to say "I don't like your decision, stop playing that character".

I mean, I really do play in a game where "good" and "bad" are unclear, if not completely meaningless, and I play a serial-killing undead master swordsman who kills helpless people all the time. But that doesn't seem to be the kind of play you're advocating.

So which is it? Do good and evil matter, even if they aren't objectified forces in the world as per stock D&D assumptions, or are they meaningless, with your PCs free to revel in their Nietzschean freedom?

? :confused:

We played with good and evil in the game.  The Cleric (for example) was Good.  So was the Fighter.  The Wizard and Thief (again, for example) were Neutral.  The monsters were evil -- although you'd sometimes meet ones who were neutral or even good as well.

We didn't play to explore philosophies or the meaning of good + evil.  Vampire was a better game for that (or at least that's how it was pitched. )

Quote from: Stuart;219210? :confused:

We played with good and evil in the game.  The Cleric (for example) was Good.  So was the Fighter.  The Wizard and Thief (again, for example) were Neutral.  The monsters were evil -- although you'd sometimes meet ones who were neutral or even good as well.

We didn't play to explore philosophies or the meaning of good + evil.  Vampire was a better game for that (or at least that's how it was pitched. )

Ah, I think I misunderstood one of your previous posts. You seemed to be saying "Play without clear conceptions of good and evil" and "Don't allow evil PCs" at the same time, which is what I was taking issue with.