The Gaming Den

I would not be sad at all if the game suddenly stop being supported by Dungeons and Dragons.

I don't know if Weis and Hickman repudiated this message in their books and if they did then I apologize, but seriously, the moral message in it is abhorrent. The Balance of Good and Evil is one of the absolute worst messages that you can push--which wouldn't be so bad if Dragonlance was intentionally grimdark and used it as a parody of heroic fantasy (but considering that they're the ultimate example of this, it's more than a little hypocritical but whatever) but this is supposed to be a good thing.

The white wizards and clerics of good are arrogant, selfish little snots who won't lift a finger for people. As much as I hate Raistlin, he actually had a very good point when he mocked these 'good guys' for not using their power to make the lives of the people better and that he was going to do something about it. Unfortunately, rather than using this as a redeeming factor for his character and make me stop hating them, they use this statement as a sign of his hubris.

I mean, if the 'good guys' were pricks because they were pulling the wool over peoples' eyes that would be one thing, but Dragonlance flat-out says that the Cataclysm happened because there was too much good. For fuck's sake, what does that even mean?


Now granted, Dragonlance's message isn't as morally reprehensible as Exalted. The authors are actually pretty subtle about their disapproval of the characters' latent racism without beating you over the head about it or sugarcoating it--so they get some brownie points there. And aside from the Balance of Good and Evil crap there really isn't anything objectionable about the setting compared to other heroic fantasy.

But that one message is just so godawful that if I had the power I can't in good faith allow putting the Dungeons and Dragons label on a product like that for any longer, even if it was a moneymaker. If I had my druthers, I'd issue an ultimatum: either exorcise that 'message' from your products and explicitly rebuke it or you get cut off from the IP.

I mean, honestly.

I can understand there being a Balance of Good and Evil because Good and Evil have reached a stalemate and are exerting a lot of effort just to maintain.

But I'm with you on how dumb it is that Team Good decides there should be some evil in the world. If the whole setting wanked off to Balance, it should have been Gilean going around and being a screwball to the heroes, not Paladine.

Maxus wrote:I can understand there being a Balance of Good and Evil because Good and Evil have reached a stalemate and are exerting a lot of effort just to maintain.

That's not a Balance Between Good and Evil. That's just a standard good vs. evil conflict where the forces of good just aren't strong enough.

Presumably if team good got an advantage in such a setup they wouldn't (at least if they still wanted to be called good) give it up to go back to the stalemate. They'd be fighting to the gates of hell for all they could get.

Note that this still doesn't change if you add an outside factor like 'Neo-Bahamut will blow the world up if there's too much tolerance or peace'. That's still not a Balance of Good and Evil, that's just an Evil force blackmailing the world.

I think we need a separate D&D rant altogether about how neutrality in D&D often means 'evil' or 'works to help evil'.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I mean, if the 'good guys' were pricks because they were pulling the wool over peoples' eyes that would be one thing, but Dragonlance flat-out says that the Cataclysm happened because there was too much good. For fuck's sake, what does that even mean?

Some of the other authors retconned it into yet another brand of evil insidiously hijacking the trappings of good, so the good gods were powerless to stop the Cataclysm and the conventional evil was going to get fat from evil deeds associated with a drop in life quality. Mechanically, Dragonlance had heathen priests with limited clerical magic; presumably, by author fiat it is possible to harness moar, which is what the King-Priest did.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The authors are actually pretty subtle about their disapproval of the characters' latent racism without beating you over the head about it or sugarcoating it--so they get some brownie points there.

They aren't getting any from me. I am tired of every character being a racist, even if they are rebellious indie freethinkers, glorious leaders and "inspiration for us all". Goblinoids are stupid and draconians are human-hating mutants, that much is understandable, and it seems Team Evil's oppression of elfs is in fact grounded in reality, due to author elf wank ("such noble people will never turn to evil"). But I never understood the rampant racism of Team Good. Elfs are Paladine's creations, why the fuck Solamnics hate them? And "My 1/12 human blood compels me to do X."

Also, who the fuck wrote Dragons of a Vanished Moon? The quality of writing is atrocious. (No, it wasn't "always like that, it's time you noticed.") Did the retard who had ghostwritten it ever had an editor? I mean, I tend to like Weis and Hickman's books and not notice bad writing in English (e.g. I didn't notice anything wrong with Harry Potter 7, aside from the boring plot, and I can hold my breakfast listening to Freedom Call), but this was something.

Do you have similar gripes about Michael Moorcock's books? He's the granddaddy of "there must be Balance" books, although he suggests (at least in the Corum books) that the world is better off with no gods at all.

And its not Good against Evil, but Change (Chaos) against Non-Change (Order).

Whenever I hear about "Balance", I feel urge to kill rising. Since Moorcock this shit never served any other purpose but to keep settings grimdark by locking them into a perpetual bloody conflict*. Moorcock can be excused, because making the setting grimdark was exactly the point and the goal, others, like DL, aren't. Also, like in DL, notions like this are among the primary culprits for reducing good and evil to the banner colors.

*As a side note, in Moorcock's books Chaos was just a pretentiously-sounding stand-in for Evil, and Order was mostly not active enough to be relevant to the plot. So again, the whole setup was just for grimdarkness.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Maxus wrote:I can understand there being a Balance of Good and Evil because Good and Evil have reached a stalemate and are exerting a lot of effort just to maintain.

That's not a Balance Between Good and Evil. That's just a standard good vs. evil conflict where the forces of good just aren't strong enough.

That's not a good vs. evil conflict where the forces of good just aren't strong enough. That's a good vs. evil conflict where the forces of evil just aren't strong enough.

Edit: Also, remember the first Dragonlance book where the party goes to Elfland and the elves all but shun Raistlin because he's a red robe, and they view red as being a step away from black?

Yeah, you're starting to remind me of that, Lago.

Anyways, having a balance (note: not a Balance) between good and evil in a game setting does help, you know, make a game. A set of Team Evil wants to stir up a war, get a ton of corpses on a battlefield because they've hit a big supply of onyx and obsidian that they could use to make a necromantic army and kick the asses of both the recently-exhausted armies and get a bargain on some nations--two for the price of one, so a set of Team Good is trying to thwart them. Or a nation on Team Good is building some enormous McGuffin of Light, and a party on Team Evil has an adventure (or campaign) preventing it from happening.

FatR wrote: *As a side note, in Moorcock's books Chaos was just a pretentiously-sounding stand-in for Evil, and Order was mostly not active enough to be relevant to the plot. So again, the whole setup was just for grimdarkness.

Disagree, strongly.

You remember those worlds where Order was supreme? Fucking deserts, no life...

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The Balance of Good and Evil is one of the absolute worst messages that you can push--... this is supposed to be a good thing.

No, it's supposed to be a Balanced thing. That's kind of the point.

The white wizards and clerics of good are arrogant, selfish little snots who won't lift a finger for people. As much as I hate Raistlin, he actually had a very good point when he mocked these 'good guys' for not using their power to make the lives of the people better and that he was going to do something about it. Unfortunately, rather than using this as a redeeming factor for his character and make me stop hating them, they use this statement as a sign of his hubris.

Right, the Moral value of something in D&D land, and even more specifically in Dragonlance, is completely divergent from its alignment value. The white robes are aligned with the Good deities and use the magic provided by the powers of Good. The black robes are aligned with the Evil deities and use the magic provided by the powers of Evil. The thing is, they have no real moral system other than "do what my deities tell me to do". It's actually a pretty good representation of the "morality" of just about every real world religion.

I mean, if the 'good guys' were pricks because they were pulling the wool over peoples' eyes that would be one thing, but Dragonlance flat-out says that the Cataclysm happened because there was too much good. For fuck's sake, what does that even mean?

It means there were too many people using the powers of the Good Deities and following the dogma and doctrines of same. It has no bearing the actual moral landscape at the time of the Cataclysm.

At least, that's how I remember it from the few DL books I read back in, oh, 1992, so I may be wearing rose-tinted goggles:

It is actually quite good Protestant theology of the Evangelical/Pietist variety. See eg Bonhoeffer on the distinction between faith and revelation.

http://www.religion-online.org/showchap ... 737&C=2490
Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Dallas M. Roark

"The first chapter is foundational. It poses a chasm between Christian ethics and other ethical systems. Other ethical systems aim at coming to a knowledge of good and evil but say nothing about why this should be a particular emphasis in ethics. Christian ethics has a knowledge of why other ethical systems concentrate on the knowledge of good and evil, but rejects this goal as being a false one. The goal of Christian ethics is the new man, the restored man, the reconciled man, the man in God. When other ethical systems set up the goal of a knowledge of good and evil, man immediately becomes the arbiter of that knowledge and assumes the role of God who alone has this knowledge. "Instead of knowing only the God who is good to him and instead of knowing all things in Him, he now knows himself as the origin of good and evil."

It can be also expressed in postmodern terms - Heideggerian postmodernism is actually quite similar to Evangelicanism in many aspects.

In RPG terms, Pietists/Evangelicals are hardcore Narrativists ("magic tea party"), and accuse their opponents of liking D&D 4ed ("it is a boardgame!").

Also, it seems to me that many members of this list dislike religion. Why no one does enjoy seeing the Pope and Rome getting nuked by God for being the Whore of Babylon?

baduin wrote: Also, it seems to me that many members of this list dislike religion. Why no one does enjoy seeing the Pope and Rome getting nuked by God for being the Whore of Babylon?

Because the main point of the first trilogy is that the heroes are bringing back the gods to the people, and the people are once again supposed to love them. Any pleasure you might derive from watching the Kingpriest get a mountain dropped on him pales in comparison to that and the justification the gods give for doing this.

Korwin wrote:
Disagree, strongly.

You remember those worlds where Order was supreme? Fucking deserts, no life...

I don't. That's the point. Even if there were descriptions of such worlds somewhere, they were a few plot-irrelevant lines. Gods of Chaos fucking with inhabited worlds for the lulz was the reason why plots of the most books happened at all.

Now, I know this is going to give me a net loss of den coolness factor, but I have to pipe up.

The Cataclysm in DL was caused because the church was not in fact good, unless you count magical Nazi Germany good. Just before the gods dropped a big fucking rock on a lot of innocents to deal with some seriously bad apples (a la Sodom and Gomorrah) the priestly caste was doing basically what Catholicism was doing in the dark ages, but with some mind-reading and death based on those thoughts. They even had a secret police force just for that purpose.

Granted, the message is still that a guy wanted to be a god, and the priesthood was corrupt, so THE GODS MUST STRIKE HIM DOWNAH! But it wasn't like they were saving to many kittens from crush flicks for the gods to let them continue...

The problem with Dragonlance is that all the gods are douches, and Good, Neutral, and Evil actually wear different colored clothes (no seriously... be a Wizard and get a White, Black, or Red uniform). Most of the cultures are pretty douchy too with racist elves who enslave other elves and racist dwarves who enslave other dwarves, and humans who just suck in general.

The morality is trying to be grimdark and black and white, and failing at both.

Plus, if any god can decide that cracking open a continent so hard that it creates a new ocean just to stop a single corrupt organization is acceptable and then do it, then you aren't in an playable RPG universe..... you are in a game of Populous and you aren't one of the players.

And let's not forget Kender. God, I fucking hate Kender.

I was always puzzled by Paladine.

Paladine walks the fucking earth as an extremely elderly mage and sets his hat on fire and mumbles a lot and acts like an old man purely for his own entertainment, and to keep people thrown off the trail.

So -why- didn't he descend down to the Kingpriest and tell him to knock it off? Seriously, he shows up when he wants to. Why did he bother with the portents and warnings instead of just slapping the fool around the head?

Korwin wrote:And its not Good against Evil, but Change (Chaos) against Non-Change (Order).

And the Chaos-worshipping people did a bunch of evil stuff and the Law-worshipping people never did. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Korwin wrote:You remember those worlds where Order was supreme? Fucking deserts, no life...

Right -- that's where you get the dubious "too much Good is bad, too!" message, just like with Dragonlance.

The Kingpriest had forbidden all mages from his court, if I recall correctly. Fistandantilus got special hanging about privileges for reasons unknown. If Fizban had shown up, the Kingpriest would surely not have listened to him and would have done his best to remove the nuisance. Likewise, all of the true priests left on Krynn just before the Cataclysm would have been dismissed - possibly even labeled heretics - if they had done anything to thwart the Kingpriest's plans. At the end, he was a paranoid, delusional megalomaniac who had built a cult of personality around himself and was in the process of taking over the entire world.

Of course, the gods took stupidly over dramatic measures. A group of adventurers could have assassinated the Kingpriest and then worked to spread rebellion in the upheaval following his death. But I guess that doesn't sound nearly as 'awesome' as dropping a meteor on top of the offending party.

If I was going to write a society that fell because of too much good, I'd write one that was either very dominant in its early days or very secluded.

What would happen would be that since all everyone knew in the society was kindness and cooperation and stuff, they would eventually forget how to fight (The military would be mostly consist of the ruler's honor guard, police would simply be in charge of making sure public celebrations were organized and no one got hurt, and so forth). And when they were sufficiently soft enough a raiding party of hobgoblins/orcs/bugbears/drow/your mom would take over very easily and enslave them all.

I really have problems with a nazi-like regime the result of "too much good" on a moral level. I am aware how the setting justifies it, I still have problems with it.

Pixels wrote:The Kingpriest had forbidden all mages from his court, if I recall correctly. Fistandantilus got special hanging about privileges for reasons unknown. If Fizban had shown up, the Kingpriest would surely not have listened to him and would have done his best to remove the nuisance. Likewise, all of the true priests left on Krynn just before the Cataclysm would have been dismissed - possibly even labeled heretics - if they had done anything to thwart the Kingpriest's plans. At the end, he was a paranoid, delusional megalomaniac who had built a cult of personality around himself and was in the process of taking over the entire world.

Of course, the gods took stupidly over dramatic measures. A group of adventurers could have assassinated the Kingpriest and then worked to spread rebellion in the upheaval following his death. But I guess that doesn't sound nearly as 'awesome' as dropping a meteor on top of the offending party.

It gets better.

Soth was supposed to avert the Cataclysm by finding a rod from a tomb and forcing it into the Kingpriest's hand. He found the rod, and he was promised that each time he was killed--and he was warned he would be--he would rise again. And he was told to keep trying, and eventually he would succeed.

Except Soth ditched it after a while, and the gods went to Meteor Drop mode.

Pixels: it would of course make an awesome published adventure. "Players, its your job to make history by assassinating Dick von Cockendongs. You will be changing the setting and averting disaster/keeping sand out of the gods' collective vaginas thus preventing them from hurling a bitchfit over it."

Sadly they didn't go with that path. There needs to be more published "You, the players, get to fuck this setting up/cause the actual events that made the setting what it is today."

Count Arioch the 28th wrote: What would happen would be that since all everyone knew in the society was kindness and cooperation and stuff, they would eventually forget how to fight (The military would be mostly consist of the ruler's honor guard, police would simply be in charge of making sure public celebrations were organized and no one got hurt, and so forth). And when they were sufficiently soft enough a raiding party of hobgoblins/orcs/bugbears/drow/your mom would take over very easily and enslave them all.

That could work. Then you have more of a "These are the consequences of suddenly introducing a threat to something that has grown comfortable too long (see: any time someone brought a new animal to Ausfailia). But YOU can stop it!"

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:If I was going to write a society that fell because of too much good, I'd write one that was either very dominant in its early days or very secluded.

What would happen would be that since all everyone knew in the society was kindness and cooperation and stuff, they would eventually forget how to fight (The military would be mostly consist of the ruler's honor guard, police would simply be in charge of making sure public celebrations were organized and no one got hurt, and so forth). And when they were sufficiently soft enough a raiding party of hobgoblins/orcs/bugbears/drow/your mom would take over very easily and enslave them all.

Sort of like how the Corum books start, I suppose.

Maxus wrote:
Soth was supposed to avert the Cataclysm by finding a rod from a tomb and forcing it into the Kingpriest's hand. He found the rod, and he was promised that each time he was killed--and he was warned he would be--he would rise again. And he was told to keep trying, and eventually he would succeed.

Except Soth ditched it after a while, and the gods went to Meteor Drop mode.

Except he liked Elven tang more than the world.

Personally, I understand.