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[D&D] Alignment
#1
If evil people rarely ever see themselves as evil, won't "Good" tend to be defined according to the individual's ethos?

And if so, doesn't that mean that any arbitrary "by-the-book" game definition can't truly be the "by-the-book" alignment in spirit, except perhaps by accident?

Shouldn't there be some sort of non-arbitrary way to deduce alignments?
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#2
(08-02-2015, 08:45 AM)Lunamancer Wrote: Shouldn't there be some sort of non-arbitrary way to deduce alignments?
If you are willing to accept that Good and Evil are a part of the "physics" of the D&D universe, then the Good/Evil axis isn't arbitrary. If you want your campaign's Good and Evil to remain abstract concepts, then no.
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#3
(08-04-2015, 05:48 PM)Oedipussy Rex Wrote:
(08-02-2015, 08:45 AM)Lunamancer Wrote: Shouldn't there be some sort of non-arbitrary way to deduce alignments?
If you are willing to accept that Good and Evil are a part of the "physics" of the D&D universe, then the Good/Evil axis isn't arbitrary. If you want your campaign's Good and Evil to remain abstract concepts, then no.

And I get that. I played the game many years like that. Of course, you always get those cases where the "evil" God or "evil" magic just happen to do something that's massively beneficial to humanity as a whole. And I'm not talking about "Okay, this happens 1% of the time, but he's still 99% evil," but rather what I'm driving at is there is often a sizable gap between one's intent and the results of the actions.

It's harder for me ignore when it comes to the Law vs Chaos axis. For example, I've observed often enough that when a traffic light is not working, traffic flows more smoothly and orderly through the intersection. Even though the purpose of the traffic light is to bring order to the intersection, it seems to have the opposite effect. I could name countless examples of this. And that would absolutely include literal laws. Alcohol prohibition created a lot of chaos even though it sought to clamp down on chaos-inducing drunkenness.

Call it a blowback principle for lack of a better term. It's really a bit more sophisticated than that. But I think on the Law/Chaos axis, instances or the Chaos guy producing order, or the Law guy producing chaos are not just freak outliers but rather the general trend where sentient beings are involved.
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#4
I would see the gods of D&D style fantasy universes as being very fallible. Thus an evil god could very well be manipulated into a good cause and a good god could cause evil actions.

To be honest, most of the time alignment only came into play when items of power changed your alignment or were attuned to certain alignments. That and the Paladin.

One thing I noticed is in games that lacked alignments, players tended to be more mercenary and less heroic no matter how many times they paid for it.
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#5
(08-07-2015, 12:20 AM)Lunamancer Wrote: I've observed often enough that when a traffic light is not working, traffic flows more smoothly and orderly through the intersection. Even though the purpose of the traffic light is to bring order to the intersection, it seems to have the opposite effect.

That's because traffic lights aren't intended to bring order to an intersection but are intended to disrupt the flow of traffic. More so now that traffic citations are becoming a bigger part of a municipality's revenue stream.

Also, where do you live that people don't freak the shit out when a traffic light isn't working? The idiots around here have no frickin' clue what to do.
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#6
(08-09-2015, 11:16 AM)Oedipussy Rex Wrote:
(08-07-2015, 12:20 AM)Lunamancer Wrote: I've observed often enough that when a traffic light is not working, traffic flows more smoothly and orderly through the intersection. Even though the purpose of the traffic light is to bring order to the intersection, it seems to have the opposite effect.

That's because traffic lights aren't intended to bring order to an intersection but are intended to disrupt the flow of traffic. More so now that traffic citations are becoming a bigger part of a municipality's revenue stream.

Also, where do you live that people don't freak the shit out when a traffic light isn't working? The idiots around here have no frickin' clue what to do.

Guess drivers are a little different everywhere. I remember humor columnist Dave Barry, in the wake of ballotgate back in 2000, said of course the ballots were misleading. Anyone who's ever driven in south Florida knows no one there can follow arrows. Here, drivers are affectionately characterized as "Massholes" but I find we do tend to be far better drivers than most of the rest of the country because we have to do it on crazier roads. Connecticut drivers are by far the worst as I observed on a road trip from Springfield, MA to Sayersville, NJ which included driving among Massholes, right through New York City, and half way across the state for which the Jersey barrier is named.

But really when I see chaos ensue is whenever people drive through a parking lot. People have trouble doing anything but following a straight line. Give them two dimensions, and they break down. One has to wonder how society is going to handle 3 dimensions when we having flying cars.

Anyway, I agree with you 100% on the true purpose of traffic signals. Maybe it's just a modern brain bug. But when people seek to solve the problem of bringing order, like to busy intersections, they almost always start thinking in terms of top-down solutions. Whereas my education in computer science, in particular how operating systems manage resources or network traffic, that the best solution to orderly and efficient flow is a sort of de-centralized "politeness" algorithm.

Perhaps in the absence of a modern, scientific society--not to mention modern politics--the typical person's thinking may very well be that of bottom-up order. This would be something players would just have to wrap their heads around. Maybe in a sword & sorcery world, nobody in their right mind would ever believe law springs forth from a king's decree, rather it would be more like common law, where practical solutions to disputes become widespread and standardized over time.

And that would actually get right at answering the question I was asking. "Lawful" doesn't mean just whatever a GM or a game designer thinks, and it doesn't refer to the "laws" as determined by the ruler of a particular land. Rather it's this naturalistic thing, and that literally written laws to be imposed from the top down actually represent chaos, associated with the warlord and usurper.

I haven't mentioned, but have in the back of my head, that BD&D only used the Law/Chaos axis, not the good/evil axis, and those of the chaotic alignment were thus the "bad guys." So what would this mean for "Chaotic Good" characters in AD&D. Most people seem to conceive of CG as being champions of "the good" who sincerely believe that if they could collapse society constructs they deem somehow "oppressive" that a new society without oppression will rise from the ashes like a phoenix. However with the law=bottom-up perspective, the Chaotic Good character is one who perhaps seeks power, a sort of usurper, intending to use that power for good, but whose plans are consistently frustrated creating a chaos.
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