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Cuntellectual posted:I still can't tell if all these years later, people misspell Xykon's name as an intentional joke or what. Isn't Xyklon specifically the name Tarquin uses?
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Nov 4, 2019 04:19
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Cuntellectual posted:I still can't tell if all these years later, people misspell Xykon's name as an intentional joke or what. It is what every phone autocorrects to, which is probably the main cause
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Nov 4, 2019 04:50
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Taciturn Tactician posted:Isn't Xyklon specifically the name Tarquin uses? No, he uses a Z instead of an X. "Sub-boss Zykon"
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Nov 4, 2019 05:27
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So in my 5e D&D game, I'm a thundersmith artificier (so I have magic revolvers), my characters background is a dragonborn who was in the military during a big war in the past and has PTSD. I consider my character Lawful Good, because he believes in hierarchical authority and following lawful orders from said figures, and is good because the country is good and just and any orders that come down from the Emperor are automatically good and just. We were sent on a mission via contract, so we're like PMC's (aka fantasy Xi/Blackwater) to go steal stuff from a rival country. In that country as we're extracting ourselves we're in a town and technically are wanted fugitives from stealing stuff. Some knights come visit the tavern me and another party members were staying in, and discover us and try to ask me questions; but they also demand me to put down my weapons and are approaching me. So rather than put the mission at risk and let them interrogate me for information I kick up the table and shoot them in the face. Some of the other players reacted with sheer dismay at the idea I could still be lawful good for "shooting a cop in the face". But he wasn't a cop from my country, and they were putting the mission at risk, I was defending myself and the mission and my party members who are in the trenches with me so to speak. Is that not lawful good? As a point of comparison that's thread relevant, Roy generally tried to follow the laws of Tarquin's Kingdom to a point because he defaults to the idea it's a legitimate nation with legitimate laws but largely because doing so was convenient for the overall goals. I don't recall Roy ruling out having to fight Tarquin's goons if it came down to it.
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Nov 4, 2019 06:10
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Who cares, as long as it's consistent with your character up to then. e: which honestly, from the way you describe it, it does sound like a bit of a swerve. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 06:50
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You monster. Short answer, it really depends on the cops in question. What were you expecting them to do? Were they crooked cops, looking to torture any confession from you, or were they representing a respectable (by whatever setting standards) legal system which might try and imprison your for the crimes you legitimately did commit? Resisting a legitimate authority and refusing to play by someone else’s rules isn’t exactly lawful, and killing someone who’s only doing their job and happening to inconvenience you isn’t particularly good.
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Nov 4, 2019 06:53
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It's not very lawful good, no.
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Nov 4, 2019 06:56
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Were the knights quite obviously representatives of the king? Or just some random dudes in armor?
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Nov 4, 2019 07:38
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Raenir Salazar posted:So in my 5e D&D game, I'm a thundersmith artificier (so I have magic revolvers), my characters background is a dragonborn who was in the military during a big war in the past and has PTSD. I consider my character Lawful Good, because he believes in hierarchical authority and following lawful orders from said figures, and is good because the country is good and just and any orders that come down from the Emperor are automatically good and just. You know, conveniently, Gygax actually wrote a lot on what is Lawful Good, and even cited some specific examples from history. Let's see what he has to say: https://twitter.com/FreyjaErlings/status/1180544774723571712 Oh. Oh no. Oh no that's not even the worst part of it he keeps going. Based on what I have read, immediately murdering perceived enemies is arguably in line with Gygax's vision of Lawful Good. And the paladin from Goblins is the alignment perfected. (Alignment is terrible. Also no, shooting people in the face out of nowhere is not a very good thing to do. Your character comes off as dangerously paranoid at the least, and just a murderer who'll kill at the drop of a hat at worst.) Edit: Though, counterpoint, ACAB, so one could argue that your actions were indeed Good. Roland Jones fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 07:46
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Hoooooooo boy.  That was... spectacularly awful.
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Nov 4, 2019 08:23
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In that particular situation, I think a truly lawful good person would have tried as hard as possible to get out of it peacefully. LG is like the hardest alignment to role play since people end either being a total rear end in a top hat (apparently in line with Gygax's idea though) or else drifting closer to neutral good.
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Nov 4, 2019 11:27
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I knew Gygax was sort of crusty, but wow, those forum posts are something else. I always figured the colonialist/imperialist subtext in D&D was an accident of someone imperfectly adapting Tolkien to a universe where it was heroic to kill things, but like, he's literally out there admiringly quoting the man responsible for the Sand Creek massacre (where peaceful Native Americans, adults and children, were killed and scalped on their own reservation) while posting phpBB LOL emotes. What a total scumbag. I'm glad he's dead and also, gently caress him.
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Nov 4, 2019 11:38
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Tolkien was a fan of Franco and stated support for the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, so I wouldn't be so sure about "imperfect" adaptation.
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Nov 4, 2019 11:46
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Oh word? All I know of Tolkien’s politics is that he wanted to tell Nazi Germany to eat poo poo when a publisher asked him if he was Aryan. His editor ended up stopping him which is a bit of a letdown, but I definitely hadn’t heard of him being pro-Franco, wth
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Nov 4, 2019 12:09
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Literally Hitler was a bit too much for him, and Tolkien was more of a clericalist/traditionalist who liked the general right-wingness of fascists, but wasn't fond of their power struggles with the religious right. In Spain, the fascists lost that particular power struggle.
my dad fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 12:12
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my dad posted:Tolkien was a fan of Franco and stated support for the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, so I wouldn't be so sure about "imperfect" adaptation. I mean, LotR has plenty of messed up themes itself, but it never reaches the level of Gary Gygax explicitly endorsing genocide while comparing Native American babies to lice. Let me put it this way: I think D&D's colonial themes are both worse and more explicit than LotR's - mostly because the heroes in LotR are trying to return an object to a place, while the heroes in D&D are running around looting and killing things to gain power. Both stories feature dehumanised monster-figures that stand in for real world foreigners and ethnic minorities, but D&D's assumed protagonists interact with those figures in a way that's far more violent and exploitative. I always figured that was the unintended result of adapting an already subtextually dubious narrative into a combat wargame where players need an objective, but it seems like Gygax was actually just a big fan of genocide. Grim!
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Nov 4, 2019 12:28
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I'm going to go ahead and not research Dave Arneson's politics, and continue my blissfully ignorant beliefs that he was just the Wozniak to Gygax's Jobs.
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Nov 4, 2019 13:28
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Gygax was also a notorious misogynist
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Nov 4, 2019 14:29
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Raenir Salazar posted:Some of the other players reacted with sheer dismay at the idea I could still be lawful good for "shooting a cop in the face". Killing any sort of cop is a good act, yes, but is it lawful good? Still yes.
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Nov 4, 2019 15:04
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Shugojin posted:In that particular situation, I think a truly lawful good person would have tried as hard as possible to get out of it peacefully. Well I did, under the assumption this was like a wild west sort of situation where we were in a seedy inn and were already wanted fugitives for robbing the local duke on behalf of the empire. We did commit the crime and they were investigating it. But it was a crime we were ordered to do and we already fought knights like this at the castle we robbed. So I was like, I'm not the guy you were looking for but the DM forced by hand by having the guards get too close for me. I would've tried to talk out of it, and was preparing to do so, but they were preparing to tackle me. my dad posted:Literally Hitler was a bit too much for him, and Tolkien was more of a clericalist/traditionalist who liked the general right-wingness of fascists, but wasn't fond of their power struggles with the religious right. In Spain, the fascists lost that particular power struggle. Okay this is a little inaccurate based on the wikipedia article. He wholly repudiated and condemned national socialism and their racial theories; "a bit too much" implies a degree of overlap that I don't think exists or requires more proof. It says he "voiced support" for the nationalists during the Spanish Civil War but portrays it as being mainly out of anti-communism because he heard that they were burning churches and killing priests and nuns. However he also rejected the interpretation that his work is any kind of anti-communist allegory. He was a devout Roman Catholic, old fashioned, but also seemingly anti-imperialist. I don't think its fair to say he supported fascism. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 15:19
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Tolkien probably supported the Carlists, who were Franco's natural allies, rather than the Falangists directly.
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Nov 4, 2019 16:01
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Random Stranger posted:Totally agreeing with the sentiment that Durkon is totally in the right here. It's understandable why Sigdi is refusing and as an old, stubborn woman Durkon isn't going to move her, but the message "It's okay to let go," is something she needs to hear. There was a quote from the TV show Arrow that sums this up. I occasionally reference it to people at work. (Also wow. I always thought it was a season 1 quote from Diggle. Turns out it's a season 2 quote from the bad guy.) Sebastian Blood: Sooner or later, we all go through a crucible. I'm guessing yours was that island. Most believe there are two types of people who go into a crucible. The ones who become stronger from the experience and survive it, and the ones who die. But there's a third type. The ones who learn to love the fire and choose to stay in their crucible because it's easier to embrace the pain when it's all you know anymore. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3126168/quotes?item=qt2047405
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Nov 4, 2019 16:18
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I'm a little more confused about how your LG character ends up running Blackwater heists for profit as opposed to his reactions on being cornered by the law.
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Nov 4, 2019 17:23
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Lots of really awful things were/are quite legal and lawful. Good is relative. Are your actions going to be Good for your side? It hurts The Other Side, but they are The Enemy anyway. Helps us, hurts them, that's good!
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Nov 4, 2019 17:27
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Ashcans posted:I'm a little more confused about how your LG character ends up running Blackwater heists for profit as opposed to his reactions on being cornered by the law. Because that's the campaign I joined? We're all like retired military or down on their luck adventurers taking contracts from the government, essentially letters of marque/license to kill i.e James Bond and MI6 to do covert operations on behalf of our government but with plausible deniability. We're like Wagner. Russia's little green men infiltrating other countries.
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Nov 4, 2019 17:34
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Johnny Aztec posted:Good is relative.
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Nov 4, 2019 17:57
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I always treat the law/chaos axis as a level of trust in social structure. A Lawful person believes that they can accomplish their goals through the mechanisms of society, while a Chaotic person thinks individual action is preferable. This isn’t rigid, though. A Lawful person can break laws in the service of a greater Law, much like a person can do bad things for a greater Good. A paladin, for instance, could fight to overthrow a corrupt kingdom so that it can be returned to the rightful rulers of the land. Similarly, I’d put a mob boss as Lawful Evil. Law-breaking, yes, but doing so through the use of a large organization and with the intent of growing or maintaining that organization. The cop-shooting example is just player character shenanigans and you can come up with any rationalization for it. “Nothing matters but the mission”? Great, Lawful (though Good is stretching it.) “The situation triggered my PTSD and I panicked”? Sure, no higher moral judgement there because no higher reasoning was made. It ultimately doesn’t matter unless your DM is an rear end in a top hat, because unless there’s alignment restrictions on spells or class features, alignment is just a couple of letters written on a page.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:07
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Raenir Salazar posted:As a point of comparison that's thread relevant, Roy generally tried to follow the laws of Tarquin's Kingdom to a point because he defaults to the idea it's a legitimate nation with legitimate laws but largely because doing so was convenient for the overall goals. I don't recall Roy ruling out having to fight Tarquin's goons if it came down to it. IIRC, by the time Roy first met Tarquin, he'd already learned that Tarquin's kingdom was sentencing people to death-by-arena for petty crimes like public urination and entering via magic, and his first actual encounter with Tarquin involved Tarquin saying he was going to fake Roy's death because he thought the gladiatorial execution was a waste of Roy's skills. So he didn't exactly have a high opinion of the laws there. Even if they were actually Lawful, it was clearly Lawful Evil. Another thread-relevant example would be how the party dealt with Miko. Even though she was an agent dispatched from a distant city that had no jurisdiction whatsoever over them, Roy and Durkon both thought that accompanying her back to Azure City to hear the charges in person wasn't a completely ridiculous idea. And while they both had other reasons in addition to "she's a Good paladin who says we broken the law" for their decision, Durkon actually refused to fight her at all, standing by and watching as she attacked and subdued the entire rest of his party. On the other hand, alignment is a continuum rather than a simple binary state. Roy and Durkon are both Lawful Good, but Roy's always been a lot more flexible in that than Durkon was. Compared to his dwarven friend, he's long shown a tendency to bend the rules and rationalize away various immoral acts he believed were in service of some justified purpose - something that was specifically called out by the celestial bureaucracy when he died and spent some time in the afterlife. But even though Roy's always been very flexible on the "Lawful" part, they still let him into the Lawful Good afterlife anyway, although they noted that he could just as easily have been sent to the Neutral Good afterlife. Raenir Salazar posted:Well I did, under the assumption this was like a wild west sort of situation where we were in a seedy inn and were already wanted fugitives for robbing the local duke on behalf of the empire. We did commit the crime and they were investigating it. But it was a crime we were ordered to do and we already fought knights like this at the castle we robbed. So I was like, I'm not the guy you were looking for but the DM forced by hand by having the guards get too close for me. I would've tried to talk out of it, and was preparing to do so, but they were preparing to tackle me. I think you're focusing too much on the fact that it was a mission and following orders, and not enough on the underlying morality. If your mission was something like stealing the plans for a doomsday device from a fascist evil empire that wants to destroy the world, then killing their state enforcers might very well qualify as Lawful Good, although straight-up murdering them out of nowhere without even giving them the chance to decide to attack is a bit much. If you're just doing it because it was an order and following orders is what you do even if it's morally ambiguous, then the "Good" part might not be a perfect fit for your character. If there's no moral dimension to your crime beyond "I was ordered to do it and orders are automatically Good", then I'd say that sounds a lot more similar to Lawful Neutral rather than Lawful Good. If orders are absolute, then you're just plain Lawful. Adding the "Good" or "Evil" on there implies some kind of personal moral judgment beyond just following orders. To put it another way, someone who's Lawful Good or Lawful Evil reserves the right to occasionally say "hey, I think this lawful order from a recognized authority is too Evil or Good, I'm not going to follow it" if they have a solid moral reasoning for it. If you're not making moral decisions about your orders or how you carry them out at all, and are just obediently doing whatever it takes to fulfill those orders, then you can't really claim to be Good or Evil - you're just neutrally following the orders of someone who might be Good or Evil. If you're playing a game in a more complicated moral setting than "heroic good guys go out to beat the cartoonishly evil villain who idolizes evil for evil's sake", alignment probably works better as an out-of-character evaluation of a character's actions and value set rather than an in-character evaluation of how they think of themselves. After all, plenty of people have committed horrible crimes while thinking of themselves as "good" and their crimes as justified and moral, and "just following orders" has become a notorious defense of evil deeds. There's plenty of cases where someone might think of themselves as good while committing deeds that others see as evil, which is part of why fantasy works that aren't trying to portray moral ambiguity often make the bad guys actual monsters with a clearly inhuman value system.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:32
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Main Paineframe posted:Durkon actually refused to fight her at all, standing by and watching as she attacked and subdued the entire rest of his party. That is Lawful Good.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:38
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As long as we're in the alignment 9 hells, here's my awful take. Law-chaos is your default reaction to those more powerful than you Good-evil is your reaction to those less powerful than you
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Nov 4, 2019 18:39
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ikanreed posted:As long as we're in the alignment 9 hells, here's my awful take.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:40
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Raenir Salazar posted:Because that's the campaign I joined? We're all like retired military or down on their luck adventurers taking contracts from the government, essentially letters of marque/license to kill i.e James Bond and MI6 to do covert operations on behalf of our government but with plausible deniability. Okay, let's put it another way. MI6 or "Russia's little green men" or most any spy organisation that exists to covert operations on behalf of a government are, broadly, not lawful good, although some of their individual members might be. As organisations go they are almost certainly Lawful or Neutral Evil. Certain incarnations of James Bond might just squeeze into LG, since his missions involve a lot more time spent fighting evil billionaires who want to poison the world's water supply for money than they do shooting innocent people in the back of the head after kidnapping and torturing them in a dingy basement as part of an overall scheme to subvert a foreign government. If your campaign occurs in a world where the black-ops poo poo your retired military/adventurers do is all pretty morally upstanding stuff on the lines of James Bond's less rapey adventures, then... sure, that seems fine overall. Surely you could've just, like, beat the cops unconscious and tied them up rather than killed them, though? If your campaign's world is a more gritty/realistic about what being part of a government's secret crime squad actually means, then joining such an organisation isn't something a good person would do unless they were very naive, misinformed, working to take it down from the inside, or had some sort of other actually good reason.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:47
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I've always wanted to do an antagonist based on cat herding principles. Made almost entirely of chaotic good individuals, but the arcane rules to keep everyone working towards shared goals makes the organization functionally lawful evil. The PCs keep meeting people with good goals causing evil side effects.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:53
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I think it's weird to think of yourself as blackwater in a fantasy setting, since what's notable about blackwater isn't that they're an amoral band of people who kill for money and have a tendency to make whatever they're involved with worse. It's that they're all that in an era where that is no longer considered acceptable in the mainstream. Specifically, if you go back just 400 years, not even all the way to the medieval period that most fantasy settings nestle in, Europe was crawling with mercenary groups making war for paychecks, and for whom it was standard practice to extort villages for loot just while passing by, to say nothing of what they did when actually on the offense. Armies in those days would have to forage for food wherever they went, which meant just as much stealing from locals as it did hunting or gathering. People didn't like it, but that was the deal with war, and modern concepts of peaceloving or pacifism did not hold much political sway over the romanticism of war and combat. That's how the classic RPG murderhobo party is plausible in the first place. And speaking of the classical romanticism about war, a lot of that went into D&D, and without even getting into the particulars of how natives would've been depicted in media during Gygax's formative years, the base concept that there are people out there where the best solution is just to murder them dead without even building up a narrative around it is a fairly loaded concept. The concepts of "these are bad people so they must be killed by the heroes" and "these people were killed by the heroes, therefore they must have been bad" are closer than you'd think.
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Nov 4, 2019 18:57
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I use blackwater as an example because when you have a D&D campaign by a DM who is a modern person they don't really like have a history degree to contextualize the story in a way remotely accurate, so analogs serve as stand ins. But mercenary bands like the kind HEY GUNS from the milhist thread participates in reenactments as makes sense too.
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Nov 4, 2019 19:07
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I hope rich is OK
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Nov 4, 2019 21:53
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ConfusedUs posted:I hope rich is OK All comics in the archive will be replaced with the alignment grid. You will suffer
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Nov 4, 2019 22:01
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To me it's all about what the case worker said to Roy in the afterlife. The important thing is you're trying.
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Nov 5, 2019 00:06
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Fuego Fish posted:Killing any sort of cop is a good act, yes, but is it lawful good? Still yes. What if the cop is that guy from The shield that kills other cops? Is double lawful good++ an alignment?
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Nov 5, 2019 00:35
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But also, like, my character is good because he self sacrifices all the time. I keep getting downed in combat or taking a lot of hits I don't otherwise would receive because I go out of my way to guard the NPC hirelings attached to the party and spend resources on keeping them alive; like doing the "jump on a live grenade to protect them" thing, because that's what a good comrade does. For the Greater Good! In the end the rogue hireling got petrified and died to a basilisk so I kept his head and I'm currently doing research to frankenstein him back to life as a warforged follower. Because I CAN'T LOSE ANOTHER FRIEND!!!
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Nov 5, 2019 02:11
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