Heads Up

[greyorm]

Boys, new thread, please.  Thanks.

[contracycle]

OK, the "which army" point is well made.  But lets say, this is what makes the alignements inexplicable; they are bones of contention which are invisible.  Look at the range of phenomenon associated with "goodness" or "purity" - eating or not eating certain foods, wearing or not wearing certain clothes under certain circumstances.  What gets lost in the abstraction of "good" and "evil" is this kind of cultural detail.  Where people start pointing fingers and declaring each other good or bad is often related to what the specific material practices are.  Even if one does not want to buy into the moral relativism idea, and instead want to assert a fixed moral standard, then I think a lot of the trappings, commandments, that sort of stuff need to accompany it (to some extent this belongs on the Magic thread too, since religion and magic are essentially the same thing).  Without this sort of signposting, Good and Evil are merely system attributes imposed ex cathedra by the designer or GM; and thats difficult to internalise and still suspend belief, IMO.


"Now immaculate conception in sterilised laboratories
How the vanity goes on
Or in the message of the preacher with his morals and obsessions
The wars that we wage upon ourselves
Purity is a virtue, purity is an angel
Purity is for madmen to make fools of us all
So forgive yourself my friend, all this will soon be over
What happened here tonight is nothing at all"

 - New Model Army, Purity

[Marco]

Didn't you hear the man!? He said NEW THREAD!

:wink:

Yeah--I agree with that. The alignment system is complete bereft of any cultural trappings ... maybe you're supposed to supply your own (after the PC's get finished killing their way through Dieties and Demigods they can supply *their* own). But yeah--the societal weight of alignments in AD&D is feather-light.

-Marco
...
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
--MATTHEW ARNOLD, Dover Beach