I actually did that in 5e’s Tomb of Annihilation! Thankfully, it’s not an instant-kill deathtrap as it was in the original Tomb of Horrors.
Ha, ha, ha.
No.
Aah, you’ve read the uncomfortable truths thread…
Well, that particular aspect of how skills work carried over to, at least, 3rd edition, if not further.
Maybe 95% of people are NEUTRAL, but being good aligned means making personal sacrifices to aid others (just because it’s the right thing to do, not because of social pressure or family ties or w/e). I think very few people are actually Good, and there are definitely more people who are Evil than Good, but the vast majority of people are Neutral.
My headcanon is that alignment is altruistic vs. predatory, and spontaneous vs. planned.
The good/evil axis describes how willing you are to give up benefits to yourself on behalf of other people. If you dedicate your life to making other lives better, that’s altruistic. If you constantly make other folks’ lives worse to make your own life better, that’s predatory. If you’re like most folks–not spending much time helping others out, but shying away from preying on other folks–that’s neutral.
The law/chaos axis describes how much your actions are dictated by a plan. If you have a pretty set code that dictates how you act at most times, that’s planned/lawful. If you tend to make decisions based on what’s currently going on rather than on your code of behavior, that’s spontaneous/chaotic.
This means an anarchist who reads lots of Kropotkin and practices mutual aid is lawful good, whereas a judge who sentences defendants according to her momentary whims or beliefs as to what will advance her career is chaotic evil.
At first I was confused by what you meant by this. I think you mean that there are skill ranks in 3E and you add your relevant ability modifier. From that standpoint, yes, I suppose it’s true. My quibble with this involves a deeper dive into Alternity, which I won’t do. Suffice it to say, I think Alternity did more to show the differences between naturally talented (high ability score) and skilled than what 3E does but it’s nit picking so I won’t go into it.
Thanks for the discussion!
That’s what most folks do on the daily, just by existing as they do, with the consumption and the environmental degradation and the unthinking breeding and the consumption and the sprawl and the monkeysphere thinking and the consumption and …
Okay The Good Place.
It would be racist to say that 95% of halflings are good, but I don’t think that the rulebooks have ever said that. Some of the “main” races are said to have overall good tendencies, but the books are always clear to point out that members of those races who defy those tendencies are far from rare. And humans are explicitly said to not even have tendencies towards any alignment.
That one is a tough call and I knew of one DM using that as a Paladin trap- if he killed the babies, that was evil, and he lost his Paladinhood, but if he let them live he was committing a chaotic act, so fell anyway. Bullshit. Of course if you don’t kill the babies but kill all the adults, the babies will die horribly of neglect and starvation. The only way to avoid this dilemma is to not have Goblin babies in the dungeon. It’s bad choices all the way around.
We had some young (say teen?) goblin kids and one pulled a knife and critted my character, whereupon my PC killed him. The DM said that was an evil act. Fuck that shit.
I have never seen that in all my 30+ years of playing, but one DM did play some elves as flamboyant gays. However, since the DM was gay, I just shrugged and let it go. He id it fairly well to give him credit.
If ridiculous notions like “95% of people are good” are even considered, in a world where just as one input, somewhere between 10-25% of men are rapists, you can bet your ash this is definitely the forking Bad Place.
Well, you have to agree on what “good” means and how it fits into the context of your game. There are people who generally believe something like “most people are basically good.” That’s not a ridiculous starting point for a fantasy world.
You could also say that “most people are basically neutral.”
Either one is a fine starting point, so long as you are defining your terms.
You can make a fantasy world like that, but it read to me like a reference to the real world, where that is distinctly not the case…
People, right? Fuck ‘em.
Well, most of them.
I don’t think I’m a misanthrope, far from it. I like the idea of humanity a lot, and am quite social, with lots of time and love for what I consider good people. If I am a misanthrope, it’s a tender one.
I’m just way more a realist about the size of that set than a 95%-er naïf.
The whole paladins killing baby whatever thing was always a trap stemming from an asshole DM. I’ve heard about such situations my entire gaming life, but I’ve never actually encountered it in the wild. I’ve played other games where I’ve put characters in morally difficult situations, but not D&D, because to me D&D is about heroic actions.
Yep. This one time I heard about it from a player in my game who was in another game, but I read about it several times on the Paizo boards.
Many years ago I was at DragonCon in the main gaming room. I saw a table and thought it was a drop-in game and asked them if I could join. They were nonplussed, and I realized that it wasn’t a drop-in table at all, but then they said sure and I awkwardly joined what turned out to be a group of buddies just playing in the public game room.
Then the “kill the goblin babies” situation came up, and I noped out of that table and left.
Me either–I was intentionally exaggerating to show what the other end of the spectrum might look like. I have sat at tables with folks doing things almost as offensive, though, and I’ve left those tables because life’s too short. Overt misogyny is more common in pickup games than overt racism, in my experience.
Well since the alternatives are either celibacy or bestiality… yeah.
Just be sure you’re not one of those people saying, “I just tell it like it is,” while in reality they’re meaning, “I’m an asshole.”
when I bought the short-lived dark sun online game the girl at the counter said "they made a Conan/Gor D&d game? game