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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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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.

"You come across a cave of orc children. Do you kill them?"

"They're Chaotic Evil? Yes."

"Yup. OSR."

That guy might or might not be trash, but he understands RPGs.

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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