Sunday: Quiet and Peaceful, with Moments of Hacking and Slashing.

[elfs]

Necco helps with laundry

Sunday was much more quiet. The ringing in my left ear remains, but it's coming and going, and it's hard to say how persistent it is. Omaha thinks it might be an inner ear infection, but it doesn't hurt and the odd clogging sensation has faded away, so I'm thinking it's temporary loud-noise damage. I had a similar experience after the Rush (the band, not the blowhard) concert.

I did a ton of laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and hacked on some code. I ended up going down a rabbit hole trying to convert my existing code to my current favorite toolchain.

In the evening, we had our bi-weekly D&D game, which was a lot of fun. There was fighting, and magic, and all the rest. The mage dropped an ancient magical weapon into a pit of lava, and all heck broke loose.

One of the things I've often chafed at in D&D is the moral clarity of it. The bad guys know they're bad guys. I guess that's fine when you're thirteen, but in our late 30s through 50s we ought to know better. I had an idea for a game played in the Aimeeverse, pitting our heroes against another group that likewise believes themselves to be the good guys. I don't know how well that would work as it goes against the grain of the entire alignment system, and the magic system seems to be dependent upon that.

Comments

magic vs. alignment

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure I agree with you - but I haven't played anything except modified 2nd edition in years. If the magic you are doing is good for your side, then it's good; and if it hurts your side, then it's bad. So if your group's $DEITY_1 and the other group's $DEITY_2 are in competition for a goal (think Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) then why not compete for it? The only place that "alignment" matters in this case is in detection spells - or am I missing some finer point?

Re: magic vs. alignment

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, I was thinking that, even in AD&D 2nd, there were a vast number of spells associated with your alignment. I mean, how meaningful is protection from evil when, in a world full of gods without a fundamental arbiter, both sides think of themselves as "good?"

Should we rename the spell Protection from those guys?.

Re: magic vs. alignment

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

Well, the bad guys have protection from good so effectively they already have

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Watching Game of Thrones is a good way to undermine classic D&D alignment systems for heroic fantasy and its quasi-medieval standard setting.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Would it work to have it work like a Romans vs Barbarians sort of thing, where the Romans believe wholeheartedly in "Might makes Right" and "The end always justifies the means" (deeply flawed in its own way, for sure), and the Barbarians believe wholeheartedly that insufficient human sacrifices will result in their destruction through the wrath of nature, and that cannibalism gives them the strength of their slain enemies.

In other words, a difference in philosophies where the choice is basically "Bad, and bad". The good and evil parts just come from which side you believe in. To the Barbarians, ritual human sacrifice is a *good* thing. To the Romans, cruelty to the weak is a *good* thing.

D&D vs Other Gaming Systems

[pandakahn.livejournal.com]

Alignment is one of the primary reasons that I feel I grew out of D&D and moved into GURPS. I never, even as a young teen discovering RPG's, liked the idea behind D&D's concept of morality. Why can't evil deities have their own Paladins? Never made sense to me at all.

MPK