Alignment in 5E still causes arguments

[John Magnum]

Okay, Laertes, but what does that have to do with the question of making certain entire races wear the Evil tag? You can make a faction have arbitrarily evil goals and methods without requiring that everyone in their species be Evil.

[sarcasmoverdose]

Nope. They exude the wax from specialized glands, which immediately hardens into wax scale. They then chew the wax to soften it enough for it to be molded onto the comb structure.

You can try to force them to build according to alternate geometrical designs, but they'll reject them in favor of the hexagons.

Why do you keep fighting science?
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... 30299.full#
"We report that the cells in a natural honeybee comb have a circular shape at ‘birth’ but quickly transform into the familiar rounded hexagonal shape, while the comb is being built. The mechanism for this transformation is the flow of molten visco-elastic wax near the triple junction between the neighbouring circular cells. The flow may be unconstrained or constrained by the unmolten wax away from the junction. The heat for melting the wax is provided by the ‘hot’ worker bees."

"Italian honeybee (Apis mellifera Ligustica) comb cell at (a) ‘birth’, and at (b) 2-days old, scale bar is 2 mm."

Those of you who object to Evil races, do you also object to Good ones? What exactly are you seeking in terms of playable races? Do you want the moral status of playable races to be undefined in any terms, and the default enemies to be invading interdimensional demons or something? It's not clear what you're looking for.

Pre-judging the morality of the various characters by the writer's standards is a bad idea. Having the players and other NPCs judge the characters within the setting is a better idea.

[Occluded Sun]

In theory, the bees could build cells in vertical stacks. Why don't they?

Okay, Laertes, but what does that have to do with the question of making certain entire races wear the Evil tag? You can make a faction have arbitrarily evil goals and methods without requiring that everyone in their species be Evil.

But if they want to have species that are Evil, the same way they have species that are Lawful or Chaotic?

[Laertes]

Okay, Laertes, but what does that have to do with the question of making certain entire races wear the Evil tag? You can make a faction have arbitrarily evil goals and methods without requiring that everyone in their species be Evil.

Good worldbuilding requires that entire races not wear the Evil tag, as you and many others have pointed out. However, a lot of players like to go out there and play in a morally simplistic world in which they can be the unambiguous good guy. To be honest, I like doing that. Don't get me wrong, I love my morally grey, noirish stories in which there are no good guys and bad guys... but there's something utterly satisfying about fighting for Team Good against the serried ranks of Team Evil which is lost elsewhere.

I think it's part of the human condition: we want to belong to a tribe, and we want to fight for that tribe against other tribes. However, we're morally advanced enough to feel uncomfortable unless we have some propaganda which we can use to convince ourselves that our tribe is morally in the right and therefore all the mooks other side deserve to die.

It's just a balance you have to keep in mind. No player wants to be reminded that the guy they just shot six times in the face had children and was the only person who watered the plants back at base. We feel better when our enemies can all wear a convenient Team Evil t-shirt. But too much of that and you descend into stereotyping and pathos.

For me, I find that the best solution is to have all conflicts be small-scale; have it be person-on-person or political-movement-on-political-movement. Nation-on-nation wars should probably be told through a very different, much more Wilfred Owen lens.

[Occluded Sun]

So you don't want cosmic forces to be visible presences in your game, then?

[Cyberzombie]

It's just a balance you have to keep in mind. No player wants to be reminded that the guy they just shot six times in the face had children and was the only person who watered the plants back at base. We feel better when our enemies can all wear a convenient Team Evil t-shirt. But too much of that and you descend into stereotyping and pathos.

Well, ultimately D&D is a game about killing stuff, and it sort of sucks if you have to feel guilty about everything you happened to kill. When you kick the door down into someone's dungeon, most people want it to feel like heroic fantasy rather than home invasion.

[Occluded Sun]

Well, ultimately D&D is a game about killing stuff, and it sort of sucks if you have to feel guilty about everything you happened to kill. When you kick the door down into someone's dungeon, most people want it to feel like heroic fantasy rather than home invasion.

Just like the Phoenix Wright games are really nothing like actual court proceedings and what lawyers actually do... because no one wants to play a 'game' where they behave like actual lawyers in actual trials.

As for actual cultures not fitting into the D&D alignment categories... that's just nonsense. The ancient Aztecs were clearly Evil in the D&D sense, until they were defeated by an even more Evil society. In terms of how they related to other cultures and societies, the vast majority of civilizations (past and present) have been quite Evil. What's the problem?

[DSMatticus]

I'm not going to bother to finish describing the rest of this hypothetical experiment because it exists purely as a rhetorical device for mocking you so here's the tl;dr wax melts you moron (actually quite easily).

Bees build their cells by heating wax with their bodies.

Nope. They exude the wax from specialized glands, which immediately hardens into wax scale. They then chew the wax to soften it enough for it to be molded onto the comb structure.

First off, you just fucking described the process in a way that makes you right by cutting out the parts of the process that would make you wrong. Read the links for fuck's sake. Bees heat the wax with their bodies. Please stop being so completely impervious to information you don't like. It makes you useless in every discussion ever.

But second: why do you think the mechanical action of chewing wax softens it? Not only is it contact with a warm living creature, it's a mechanical action that generates heat by friction. You can actually soften (but not melt) beeswax by holding it in your hand. Given that wax is a fat and insoluble in water, saliva is unlikely to play any important rule in creating liquid wax.

Edit: oops, forgot I wanted to address this.

What about demons and angels and similar entities? Are you also opposed to slaad and modrons?

This thread is fucking excruciating. Apparently talking about racism instantly makes everyone stupid and illiterate, I don't fucking know. So instead of me trying to knock down an endless parade of non-sequiturs, strawmen, false dichotomies, and other bullshit, we're going to start over from square one.

Hi, my name is DSMatticus. I do not think orcs should be automagically blackhats who are justifiably kill on sight. There are a number of reasons I hold that to be the case, and literally all of them have come up in this thread, but here they are again:

1) WoW happened. Elder Scrolls happened. A bunch of other stories in which orcs are just green people and potential protagonists happened. And even without that, people have been wanting to play orcs since forever. People want to interact with orcs in a way that does not involve indiscriminate murder or attempting to delay indiscriminate murder. Orcs are just another funny human like elves and dwarves now. That's the direction the genre's gone. And that's fucking fine. This is not a clock that needs rolled back.

2) Related to above, orcs have been thoroughly and completely humanized. They live like humans. They breed like humans. They communicate like humans. They think like humans. And that means that when you declare that they are automagically blackhats, the correct "solution" to an orc tribe is to genocide a bunch of orc women and children. And if your response to that idea is "what kind of horrible DM drops a bunch of orc women and children in front of the PC's and forces them to tackle the moral quandary of whether or not to kill them, instead of just dropping armed and villainous orcs in front of them who clearly deserve a visit from some murderhobos," then no shit sherlock that's the point. If you're only going to drop orcs in front of the players that the players are already justified in killing, why are you inventing in setting justifications for killing all those orcs you aren't going to make them kill because it would be the biggest buzz kill ever?

3) The Stormfront worldview is that certain racists are different-colored beastmen of inferior intellect and incapable of moral decency. Declaring that orcs are different-colored beastmen of inferior intellect and incapable of moral decency is telling them that this is a fictional setting in which their worldview is 100% correct. As a general rule, if a neo-nazi is pleased with your setting's approach to race, that should give you pause.

Note how absolutely zero of the above arguments involve convincing you that orcs are any specific race. Even point 3 only involves the rather obvious claim that the setting's description of orcs ("beastmen of inferior intellect and incapable of moral decency") is equivalent to the Stormfront narrative about non-white races in the real world (all non-white races, usually), and not a comparison to any specific race. So if you find yourself saying, "but orcs obviously aren't black people," punch yourself in the fucking mouth.

At its core, the argument is that you add a racist subtext to your game and it gives you absolutely nothing in exchange and also cockblocks a bunch of potential stories. And if you wanted to respond to that argument, you would need to demonstrate that the in-setting description of orcs looks nothing like the real world narratives of racists (hint: you can't, because it does) or describe the benefits of having all orcs (including orc children) be justifiably stab on sight (very little success so far on this front, because color coding the baddies is pretty easy).

So, are we all on the same page yet about what the argument actually is? Because there is no reason for this to be this goddamn difficult.

I dunno. How does the argument above apply to abyssals, infernals, celestials, battletoads, and magic robots, most of whom AFAIK spawn out of their environment fully-formed and/or are reincarnated from ordinary dudes who happened to have that alignment in life and/or have some other weird and distinctly non-human lifecycle?

Or more interestingly: is a game better or worse because it can't tell stories about angels who are assholes? There definitely should be room for examples which defy alignment expectations, even if the vast majority of individuals do not. The specifics of that are up for grabs, but it's still a categorically different beast than the orc discussion, for the reasons above.

[Wiseman]

We already went through this in another thread, didn't we? Anyways, it's certainly worse.

In canon there have been evil angels and good demons and heck, even a chaotic modron i think. I like to think that since angels and demons are made of pure good or evil, they are very strongly inclined to do such, even if it might not be in their best interest. (For example a group of demons who betray their allies at stupidly inopportune moments). Other times their instinctive urges to do good or evil might lead them to draw different conclusions on what's actually necessary. Like Trias who was convinced that Celestia didn't do enough about the blood war and tried to get a group of fiends to attack them to open their eyes.

Also, nowadays, its totally cool to have an archon disillusioned about the heavens or a succubus who discovers true love. It's just that these things are rare and not entirely the result of their society and are actually built on nature.

[hyzmarca]

Since both concepts are equally stupid for the exact same reason, obviously. Enemies should have real motivations, not default ones. Having Orc raiders because they're hungry is a motivation. Having Orc raiders because 'Ebil' is a caricature.

Obvious Orcs raid because its their thing.

[Voss]

What about demons and angels and similar entities? Are you also opposed to slaad and modrons?

What about them? Am I opposed to divine servitors that actually reflect the nature of their slavemaster? Not particularly. Am I opposed to <giant frog> and unthinking polyhedron-creatures? Yes.

But if they want to have species that are Evil, the same way they have species that are Lawful or Chaotic?

Then they're dumb. You can totally have evil antagonists without descending into wholesale stupidity. Just like you can have more organized bands, and bands that have constant infighting for who gets the top seat that day.

'There's been orcs in these parts for as long as anybody can remember, and sometimes one side or the other steals some sheep or sets fire to something. But lately, things have been getting bad with the ones that come down from that mountain over there. Old One Eye, the local ranger even says that even the other orcs don't like 'em, because they raid everybody, and take captives back to the mountain to sacrifice to some demon god or other. We'd be much obliged if you 'venturers could go up to that mountain and put a stop to this whole mess afore it gets any worse.'

Done. You've got an unabashedly evil group to beat face on and no simplistic excuse for genocide by the good guys.

[TiaC]

We already went through this in another thread, didn't we? Anyways, it's certainly worse.

In canon there have been evil angels and good demons and heck, even a chaotic modron i think. I like to think that since angels and demons are made of pure good or evil, they are very strongly inclined to do such, even if it might not be in their best interest. (For example a group of demons who betray their allies at stupidly inopportune moments). Other times their instinctive urges to do good or evil might lead them to draw different conclusions on what's actually necessary. Like Trias who was convinced that Celestia didn't do enough about the blood war and tried to get a group of fiends to attack them to open their eyes.

Also, nowadays, its totally cool to have an archon disillusioned about the heavens or a succubus who discovers true love. It's just that these things are rare and not entirely the result of their society and are actually built on nature.

"When a demon comes into being, they know all that is evil and nothing that is good." Basically, demons start out with the worst nurture possible for becoming good.

[deaddmwalking]

And obviously the potential for orc allies against orc antagonists... Much better than 'monolithic evil'.

[Wiseman]

We already went through this in another thread, didn't we? Anyways, it's certainly worse.

In canon there have been evil angels and good demons and heck, even a chaotic modron i think. I like to think that since angels and demons are made of pure good or evil, they are very strongly inclined to do such, even if it might not be in their best interest. (For example a group of demons who betray their allies at stupidly inopportune moments). Other times their instinctive urges to do good or evil might lead them to draw different conclusions on what's actually necessary. Like Trias who was convinced that Celestia didn't do enough about the blood war and tried to get a group of fiends to attack them to open their eyes.

Also, nowadays, its totally cool to have an archon disillusioned about the heavens or a succubus who discovers true love. It's just that these things are rare and not entirely the result of their society and are actually built on nature.

"When a demon comes into being, they know all that is evil and nothing that is good." Basically, demons start out with the worst nurture possible for becoming good.

Yeah, but they're still sentient creatures who can be exposed to new ideas, form their own opinions, and make their own choices. So while their nurture is all evil, they still have the potential to become good, and vice-versa for celestials. It's just extremely rare because overcoming their fundamental nature is insanely difficult.

[TiaC]

That is where I was trying to go, yes.

[Wiseman]

That is where I was trying to go, yes.

Sorry, i wasn't sure if you were agreeing with me or not.

[tussock]

It's not clear what you're looking for.

Ideally one should not have a clear goal in mind when exploring problems. You just keep finding problems and solving them as they arise, and eventually there's no more problems you can find. Then you show everyone and they find more problems, and so it goes.

The goal isn't even to have no problems, it's just to deal with the problems you're noticing right now, trying to take clear notice of all of your problems, and trying to not make bigger problems as you go. Plus the odd time when you find yourself in a hole and have to stop digging, get into some basic structural work and start over.



Is alignment a bottomless pit of problems? I don't think so, not as a descriptive thing with obvious singular points of differentiation. Having them naturally opposed to each other is a convenient shorthand for which team people will tend to drift onto. So CE Humans have no real problem with using Trolls and Vampires as war machines, that's useful.

[Voss]

Is it? I'm not clear on what would stop Le, ne, or cn from doing the exact same thing, or how anyone else using ents or djinn for the exact same roles makes any difference.

I wouldn't say alignment is bottomless pit of problems, because it has a really simple solution, but it is a bottomless pit of useless suck.

[Omegonthesane]

Is it? I'm not clear on what would stop Le, ne, or cn from doing the exact same thing, or how anyone else using ents or djinn for the exact same roles makes any difference.

I wouldn't say alignment is bottomless pit of problems, because it has a really simple solution, but it is a bottomless pit of useless suck.

I don't think "excise entirely" counts as a solution to the problem of "alignment is not working as advertised". At least not an interesting one that hasn't been discussed at length already.

[Voss]

Is it? I'm not clear on what would stop Le, ne, or cn from doing the exact same thing, or how anyone else using ents or djinn for the exact same roles makes any difference.

I wouldn't say alignment is bottomless pit of problems, because it has a really simple solution, but it is a bottomless pit of useless suck.

I don't think "excise entirely" counts as a solution to the problem of "alignment is not working as advertised". At least not an interesting one that hasn't been discussed at length already.

I don't see why not. In my experience it is the functionally superior option in every single edition, since the entire concept is about as useful mechanically as the electrum piece. In fact it's worse, as detectable and interactable alignments choke out story options. The game is in all ways worse for being able to sniff out red dots and green dots.

[ishy]

"When a demon comes into being, they know all that is evil and nothing that is good." Basically, demons start out with the worst nurture possible for becoming good.

Why do Demons need to start evil?

[Laertes]

"When a demon comes into being, they know all that is evil and nothing that is good." Basically, demons start out with the worst nurture possible for becoming good.

Why do Demons need to start evil?

If you write a game in which there are things called demons, people already know what that word means and so are going to become confused and annoyed if it means something substantially different here because they have to relearn that bit of nomenclature. In English, "Demon" means "evil supernatural creature." That's what the word means. If people come into your game and see a demon, and then you say "oh yeah, demons in this game are actually just another species except they live in a different place" then people's logical first though will be "then why do you waste that perfectly good word to describe them?"

You can use "daimon" or "daemon" and have some wiggle room there because most people don't use those very often. But "demon" is a real English word, like "dwarf" and "giant." If your game has dwarves who are not short, giants who are not tall, and demons who are not evil, then your game has unnecessarily bad terminology and you should sort that shit out.

[darkmaster]

What about... Youkai?

[Wiseman]

They're considered more fey than demons.

[darkmaster]

So? If you want "creature that supernatural but not evil and just lives somewhere else" Youkai is a perfect fit for just that reason.