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It's interesting and sad. I can't argue with any of the things that you've said. The game is woke in some weird and unnecessary ways. The romances are awkward and don't really land. And the morality is downright stifling.
The last one is especially odd to me as within traditional D&D there was always a lot of complaining about the alignment system and how good and evil aren't so clear cut, but at least you had the lawful and chaotic axis to shade the decision making. Maybe the lawful good Paladin supports the right of the Druids to exile the Tieflings as their lands have been intruded on and trains the tieflings in arms so they can become a law unto themselves? But in this world, no. Immigrants unmitigated good. Druids fascist. Tiefling child who attempted to steal a powerful magical artificated is an underserved minority and the druids are outright wrong for punishing her.
And so on and so forth.
Yet all that said, it's still the best game I've played in a long time. It's a DM who is pleasant and has his shit together even if his ideas are pretty stupid, it's still fun to sit down at the table and play "yes, and".
There are a few places like this which really stuck out to me. At the beginning of Act III, some refugees are squatting in a merchants house, and you come across him asking his guards to clear out the house. The situation is presented as a moral dilemma, which is immediately undermined when you read the merchants mind and find out he's smuggling terrorist bombs into the city, okaying your inevitable slaughter of the guards and the man.
Seems to shirk away from any actual dilemma: if an apparent conflict between the players incentives (XP + GOLD) and morality arises, there's always an out so you can satisfy your desire to be good and still get the cash.
As I've come to learn later this is even more true of the original Emerald Grove story than I knew as if you take certain acts you learn that the Kagha is actually a... SHADOW DRUID.
So not even a mere nationalist concerned that her sacred grove has been overrun by helpless refugees recalcitrant to contribute, but actually some sort of evil insurgent. There is no situation presented where well-meaning people could be on opposite sides of a dilemma. It's all very fucking gay.
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I haven't played a lot of D&D in person but I've always understood the alignment system as reactive rather than prescriptive. Like yeah, I guess if you have a moral code or society has a moral code, and you sum up all the major things you've done in your life, good and bad, you could put yourself into some position on the alignment chart. I don't necessarily think that would be a valuable exercise, but you could.
The problem is when it becomes prescriptive - here's the lawful good choice, here's the chaotic evil choice. Then it feels ridiculous and unrealistic.
I thought it was supposed to prescriptive, the idea being you are playing a role, and part off the fun is playing a character who's personality is not necessarily like yours. It gets even more prescriptive when you're playing a cleric or paladin, and have to stay in your god's favor.
If you want to cast yourself in a fantasy setting, you just pick the appropriate alignment (which is always chaotic good for some reason).
This is one of the classic debates in RPGs. I mean, it's probably a subset of the gamist/narrativist/simulationist schema, which continues to confuse people who are expecting different things from their games.
That guy might or might not be trash, but he understands RPGs.
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I suppose, I'm not saying I just put myself into the fantasy setting, but when I create characters for RPGs their personalities tend to be more complex than alignment wheel, it's more of a web of different traits and ideas about the world than it is about their morality, since I don't think most decisions are made after consulting a moral compass.
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