Alignment in 5E still causes arguments

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 1:57 am

Obviously, thinking about something terrible should not be a crime. When you read of a crime that actually happened, most people can imagine performing it - at least to the point to say 'I could never do that'. But in order to get to that point, you have to consider it.

But equally obviously, the intent to do a heinous crime is, at some point, a crime in itself. I'd prefer to see someone driving a truck full of explosives arrested before detonating it at a school.

Not directly related, I do not have anyone on ignore. I have seriously considered putting both ISP and Occluded Sun on ignore multiple times through this thread. I have decided that I will put ISP on ignore unless he does one of the following:

1) Post with each of his accusations and at least one quote from a 'regular denner' (basically anyone other than himself or Occluded Sun that has participated in this thread would be sufficient for me) supporting his characterization of their position or

2) An apology admitting that he has deliberately fabricated falsehoods to discredit other posters because he has lost this argument badly.

I fully expect that ISP will have the dubious honor of being the first, and potentially only person I have ignored.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 2:03 am

deaddmwalking wrote:Obviously, thinking about something terrible should not be a crime.

The Ministry of Love has noticed your thought crime. Please stay where you are and do nothing.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 2:45 am

Deaddmwalking's ultimatum is like the end of an era. In his endless string of battles with shadzar, I always thought to myself how odd it was that he didn't just put him on ignore and be done with it. In some ways it's fitting that now, after shadzar has been banned, so too does deaddm's own streak of never ignoring anyone come to an end. He was a holy warrior dedicated not to a specific cause, but to doing battle with a single foe. With his nemesis forever banished from our shores, he goes off to become a normal denner who puts irritating people on ignore rather than endlessly engage them.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 2:51 am

Occluded Sun wrote:
nockermensch wrote:Oh right, you get to laugh at us right now because you possess a Revealed Truth telling you that your own moral truths will survive until the universe ends. Because they're evolutionarily perfect.
I don't even have the words to express how stupid your purported characterization of my views is. It's... I am left speechless.

In any case, it's more like a person who understands evolutionary theory laughing at the Creationist bumpkins and their pathetic misrepresentations of the actual concepts.

Y'all are hilarious. Please, continue.

Friendly reminder that Occluded Sun is a dimwit who's on record here making the following claims:

1) The US has been curtailing private freedoms and increasing political powers for more than a hundred and fifty years now;
2) Human beings, nay, sentient beings, have some inherent rights;
3) The Universe itself agrees with (2) and enforces it by extinguishing cultures that have opposing views;
4) Smoking will eventually be wiped out by natural selection;
5) Honeycombs are hexagonal because bees evolved to build them in the most efficient way;

He certainly said more ridiculous things, but these five are a good sample for the vastness of his failure.

The sad thing here is that both ISP and Occluded Sun are libertarian morons, but while ISP revels in trolling (and almost certainly posts while drunk). Occluded Sun likes to flaunt his intellectual superiority, as seen by the creationist comparison.

Really ironic, because his views were demonstrated as being a mix of ignorance with unsupported magical thinking.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 2:57 am

What's more efficient for storing honey and raising grubs than a hexagon?

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:01 am

There doesn't seem to be one, but it's moot because bees make circles.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:04 am

OgreBattle wrote:What's more efficient for storing honey and raising grubs than a hexagon?

It doesn't matter, because Bees don't build hexagons. They build circles and the stress of the weight crushes the cells into a hexagon, just like it would any structure of circular cells of similar density and malleability made by any creature.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 3:06 am

OgreBattle wrote:What's more efficient for storing honey and raising grubs than a hexagon?

The point is that bees make round cells that then become hexagons by surface tension forces. Bees didn't evolve to use the the most efficient shape.

EDIT: Damn, double ninja'ed.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 11:14 am

OgreBattle wrote:What's more efficient for storing honey and raising grubs than a hexagon?

5 foot squares obviously.

Or to quote wikipedia for a more serious answer:

In 1965, László Fejes Tóth discovered that the trihedral pyramidal shape (which is composed of three rhombi) used by the honeybee is not the theoretically optimal three-dimensional geometry. A cell end composed of two hexagons and two smaller rhombuses would actually be .035% (or approximately 1 part per 2850) more efficient.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:16 pm

nockermensch wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:What's more efficient for storing honey and raising grubs than a hexagon?
The point is that bees make round cells that then become hexagons by surface tension forces.

'Surface tension forces'? Surface tension isn't a factor with beeswax, nockermensch. It's a factor with fluids with strong inter-molecular binding forces. Beeswax is a solid.

Moreover, it would be entirely possible to construct other packing configurations. It is certainly true that, if you stacked tubes atop each other, they would form a hexagonal pattern. But bees don't build individual tubes and stack them together, they construct a network of chambers from the ground up.

Even if the implied argument here were true, that bees don't work to make a space- and resource-efficient packing solution and that the result is merely a consequence of geometry, wasn't the argument you people made in the previous thread that bees weren't destined to make hexagonal cells and they might easily have chosen some other pattern? Now you're arguing that the laws of physics make the hexagonal pattern inevitable more directly than going through the process of evolutionary selection.

Isn't that a bit of a consistency problem?

In any case, we were discussing alignments. In D&D. Remember? Given that 'Evil' in the alignment wheel doesn't necessarily match what various people think 'evil' means in reality, I see no reason why species in our fantasy gaming worlds shouldn't be predominantly Evil. Just as there's no reason there can't be predominantly Good races. In neither case would either be obligated to have anything to do with general moral and ethical definitions of good and evil.

Alignment is an excellent gaming tool, when used by people who are thoughtful about its definitions and applications. I am perfectly willing to believe that it's a detriment in the games of people who don't think carefully about the terms. I don't agree that's a valid reason to remove it from the game, though. It might be a valid reason to remove people from playing the game. Hard to see how that could be accomplished, though.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:35 pm

Occluded Sun wrote:
nockermensch wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:What's more efficient for storing honey and raising grubs than a hexagon?
The point is that bees make round cells that then become hexagons by surface tension forces.
'Surface tension forces'? Surface tension isn't a factor with beeswax, nockermensch. It's a factor with fluids with strong inter-molecular binding forces. Beeswax is a solid.

Dude, just stop.

actual scientists wrote:As a result of the surface tension of this bridge, a negative pressure is created in the junction, which in turn leads to a tensile state of stress in the cell walls (figure 2b). The walls are thus continuously stretched during this process. The adjoining walls progressively fuse together increasing the contact area between them and straightening. In theory, this process can continue until the entire curved walls become planar minimizing the surface energy and thus creating an array of hexagonal cells with sharp corners. But as will be proved below, that would take an infinitely long time. In practice, therefore, an array of hexagonal cells with rounded corners will be formed in a limited time.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:39 pm

You know, other people are going to address the bees thing. At length. And I'm going to enjoy watching. But since you want to make a big deal about what the "real" discussion is...

A Club is a metal weapon, with a handle in the middle and two long blades, one on either end of the handle.

No, no, it doesn't make sense for you to be upset about this! "Club" is a game term, so it doesn't need to mean exactly the same thing as in the real world. Just because historically a lot of people in the real world used Clubs and called them swords doesn't change the fact that that's what it means in the game world and that Clubs are a common weapon in-game.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 12:21 am

This website says that Hungarian guy is right from a purely mathematical perspective, but when you take into account the wax used to create the combs...

http://www.archimedes-lab.org/monthly_puzzles_72.html
"In 1965, the Hungarian mathematician László Fejes Tóth discovered that a cell end composed of two hexagons and two smaller rhombi (see fig. opposite), instead of three rhombi, would actually be 0.035% (or approximately 1 part per 2850) more efficient. But, frankly, this difference is too minute to measure on an actual honeycomb, and irrelevant to the hive economy in terms of efficient use of wax, and because the honeycomb walls have a definite thickness, it is not clear that Tóth's structure would indeed be an improvement... In that respect, the honeycomb is more like a wet foam than a dry foam. Several years ago, the physicist D. Weaire and his colleague R. Phelan undertook to construct two-layer foams with equal-sized bubbles, and they found that the dry foams did take on Tóth's pattern. But when they gradually added liquid to thicken the bubble walls, something 'quite dramatic' happened: the structure suddenly switched over to the three-rhombus configuration of a honeycomb (it seems, then, that the bees got it right after all!). The switch also occurs in the reverse direction as liquid is removed."

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 1:19 am

In regards to the tiefling preview in the 5e thread:

So, basically, is 5e going to be "Original Sin, you're an evil sinner and you will burn in Hell if you don't accept Heironijesus as your lord and savior (and probably even then because you're an evil sinner)" edition?

Orcs get Original Sin bullshit, Tieflings get original sin bullshit... Hell, it's starting to look like any race which wasn't part of the Fellowship is going to get saddled with this shit, or at least any of the races that were written because Gygax needed evil things that could hold a sword.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 1:36 am

Evil is just what we call things that we don't like. Or which are incredibly badass. (Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, because I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley.) Bonus points if the latter is played by Ron Perlman.

Evil is also a sense of fashion. Because really, if you can't be good then you should at least look good. Heroes can get away with rocking the loincloth. Bad guys have to dress snazzy.

So logically, if Orcs are innately evil as a race then they all need to dress in immaculately tailored Armani. The savage horde look is so last millennium. Early last millennium.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 1:49 am

Prak_Anima wrote:In regards to the tiefling preview in the 5e thread:

So, basically, is 5e going to be "Original Sin, you're an evil sinner and you will burn in Hell if you don't accept Heironijesus as your lord and savior (and probably even then because you're an evil sinner)" edition?

Orcs get Original Sin bullshit, Tieflings get original sin bullshit... Hell, it's starting to look like any race which wasn't part of the Fellowship is going to get saddled with this shit, or at least any of the races that were written because Gygax needed evil things that could hold a sword.

I despise this tiefling crap a lot. It should simple be a half page title Human Variants: Exotic Backgrounds wherein you trade some ability bonuses for one off spells and abilities that no one gives a shit about. There are seriously hundreds of sapient races in D&Dland, and no reason for anyone to give any shits about horns, ears, weird eyes or any trait that might show up in Star Trek. Some of your ancestors swam in a wider gene pool or you were cooked up in Archmage Sparkle's EZ Bake Golem Oven. No one cares, and you are not the prettiest princess. Grab some shit abilities, crap out a bullshit background and get on with the murder hoboing.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 2:29 am

nockermensch wrote: Dude, just stop.

I particularly enjoyed the frequent references to 'hot nurse bees'. While I think I know what they mean from the context, I prefer to imagine these scientists really enjoying their research.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 4:08 am

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension

So, in materials science, "surface tension" means surface stress, or surface free energy.

In other sciences, "surface tension" refers to a simplification of the surface energy equations that only apply to ideal liquids. Materials science doesn't deal with liquids that way, so doesn't care, but this is the TV-science level that most people know, and now we know more.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 4:13 am

I swear, the curse of 5e is that it will always lead to a more interesting tangent. 5E should just come with a 3.X cheat sheet folded into center of the PHB.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 7:39 am

Occluded Sun wrote:'Surface tension forces'? Surface tension isn't a factor with beeswax, nockermensch. It's a factor with fluids with strong inter-molecular binding forces. Beeswax is a solid.

I want you to go grab a candle and hold it in your hand. That's wax. It probably comes from petroleum refining instead of bees, but chemically it's similar enough that we don't care. 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.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 5:45 pm

DSMatticus wrote: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.

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

To return to the topic:

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.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:17 pm

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

Still false. Bees reject hexagonal designs to. They build in circles.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:18 pm

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.

A bullshit and simplistic morality play isn't necessary (or useful) to have antagonists, enemies or minions. All you need are opposing goals, which can be as simple or complex as the situation warrants. A tautology of black hats because black hats is for ignorant religious fanatics- it should be innately unsatisfactory for anyone with a brain.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:24 pm

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

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:29 pm

Voss wrote: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.

A bullshit and simplistic morality play isn't necessary (or useful) to have antagonists, enemies or minions. All you need are opposing goals, which can be as simple or complex as the situation warrants. A tautology of black hats because black hats is for ignorant religious fanatics- it should be innately unsatisfactory for anyone with a brain.

You have to balance this, though, because players want to fight bad guys. Fighting bad guys feels good.

I once ran a campaign where the villains were a small splinter group off of an entirely reasonable and believably political movement. Sure, the villains were extremists, but only in their methods: their desired end goals were utterly reasonable and were the sort of thing that many of the players could easily see themselves believing in.

Many of my players said afterwards that they felt somewhat let down by it, because although the villains had been evil and satisfying to defeat, they hadn't actually saved the country from any particularly evil fate.