Quote from: Dog Quixote;477797There being no real world equivalent situation it's a dilemma that is completely artificial to the game world.

You mean like magic, apes riding dinosaurs, elves, dwarves, fairies and FTL drives?

Quote from: Dog Quixote;477797For some reason I'm strangely reminded of the arguments about anti-immersive disociated mechanics in 4E.  For me there's something similiar going on when D&D throws up these kinds of situations.

You don't really understand the term then.  If things such as Absolute Evil are part of a game setting (like Middle-Earth), then actually dealing with the situations that arise from it is by definition associated.

Quote from: S'mon;477801It's because in games like D&D with Alignment there is supposedly only ONE 'Good' - and those Kobolds ain't it.  Pre-4e they register as Evil on the Evil-o-meter (Paladin Det Evil in 3e, Know Alignment previously).

Well this is true, of course. One reason why I tended to dislike the alignment system anyway. In fact, I can't remember any time in D&D it ever really came into play except for using it as you described, to locate "the enemy".

I'm waking up and have read everything so far in this fascinating discussion. However, I have also realized one very important thing.

In 30+ years of gaming, most of it D&D, nobody in-game has ever brought up the question of whether or not monsters are anything more than protagonists. This only seems to happen on the internet because everyone else seems to get that this is just a game where we are suppossed to be having fun.

I give Benoist a 10 out of 10 for this thread.

Quote from: jeff37923;477808I'm waking up and have read everything so far in this fascinating discussion. However, I have also realized one very important thing.

In 30+ years of gaming, most of it D&D, nobody in-game has ever brought up the question of whether or not monsters are anything more than protagonists. This only seems to happen on the internet because everyone else seems to get that this is just a game where we are suppossed to be having fun.

+1. And this reminded me that while I'm really into getting into the mindset of the bad guys and working out what makes them tick, that's not so I can confront the players with the moral ambiguities their characters are dealing with. It's not really for the players at all. It's for me. It's how I come up with the plot.

Quote from: S'mon;477767I think genocide is an important part of Tolkienesque D&D.  It's not really 'colonialist' though - that's a misapplication of cultural Marxist terminology - because the Good Guys are rarely colonial empires conquering the analogue Americas/Africa/Australia, they usually have the Evil Hordes right on their doorstep and are typically fighting to defend their own lands from being overrun, as in Tolkien.  

Actually the good guys were colonists. From Numenor. And the later years of the second age treated the mainland cultures pretty bad and descendents were known as the Black Numenoreans.

I am just teasing a bit, I agree with the main point of your post.

QuoteNo, it's not okay to believe that every creature of a race that looks different than you is automatically bad, subhuman, worthless, and destined for a quick death. Just because I can make that fact true in the game world doesn't make it less okay.

Okay, so he's saying that holding a particular belief is somehow morally wrong even in a case where said belief is true. Things like this are why I do not believe in morals, full stop. Believing a true thing is never morally wrong, and any system of morality contending otherwise is, simply, stupid.

QuoteI would like to think that my friends and I aren't yearning for a world where we can just solve all of our problems with a fireball.

Same here. But then again, I try not to design my campaign worlds as places that players would yearn to be, since those places aren't usually good places to find adventure in. D&D campaign worlds are, generally speaking, terrible, awful places that would be dreadful to live in, because nice happy places aren't much fun to play D&D in.

QuoteBut why would we do that? Why do we need to pretend that? And if we did want to explore that, wouldn't we want to walk away from the table with the same feeling of disgust I get when I watch Hotel Rwanda?

As far as why we would do this: because it's a game, it's supposed to be fun, and apparently enough people have decided that games about this sort of thing are fun to make such games popular. There's no need for more than that.

As far as why you don't walk away in disgust, I think that's a matter of perspective.

When you watch a movie like that, you're watching it from your own perspective - that of someone who probably lives in a first world country, and is probably educated and modern in outlook.

On the other hand, role-playing games are role-playing games: you play a role, and view things from that perspective.

To make an analogy to something else the poster'd mentioned: you, the poster, may view Hutu's killing Tutsis as worthy of disgust, but when viewed from the perspective of the Hutu doing the killing it probably IS an act of heroism.

Similarly, when you play an adventurer killing evil orcs, that's something best viewed from your character's perspective, not the player's, and the character probably would regard it as heroic.

Yes, if you're not role-playing well and are viewing things from your own perspective, things will probably get uncomfortable, but that's a problem with what you're doing, not with the game.

QuoteThird, DMs should reward morally admirable behavior, or at least not punish it.

The thing is, the behavior you go on to describe is not behavior that the character themselves would likely regard as being morally admirable.

If you reward them for this, you are rewarding them for acting out of character, and I don't see how rewarding people for role-playing poorly is ever good in a role-playing game.

If, in the game world, orcs are viewed as being uniformly evil and deserving of death, then killing them IS the most morally admirable way to handle them from the perspective of people in the game world and letting some live would be an immoral act. If the characters are intended to be heroes, then they should be rewarded for acts that would cause other people in their world to regard them as heroes.

QuoteThe complex moral issues that arise during play when heroes face a culture of intelligent "humanoids" can be interesting in their own right.

Can't disagree with you there in the least! Situations like that can definitely lead to interesting roleplay. But: orcs aren't the humanoids you're looking for in this particular case.

You can have both inherently evil and not inherently evil humanoids in your worlds. There's nothing wrong with you going off and making a species of hostile-but-not-necessarily-evil humanoids to use in your own game or in material you're publishing. But... making them doesn't mean you have to take away the ones that ARE inherently evil.

Go off and make your morally complex antagonistic humanoids - if you publish them and I like them, I may even use them sometime. But don't take away our orcs.

Quote from: bombshelter13;477815Okay, so he's saying that holding a particular belief is somehow morally wrong even in a case where said belief is true. Things like this are why I do not believe in morals, full stop. Believing a true thing is never morally wrong, and any system of morality contending otherwise is, simply, stupid.

No. He is saying that when you create the parameters of the world in the game or story you are creating, that you are morally responsible for the moral truths your parameters advocate. If you make a story where hypotheses that would be morally objectionable are definitively true, then your story is morally objectionable on the same grounds.

RaHoWa is a real game. In RaHoWa, Blacks and Jews are objectively evil. This makes RaHoWa morally objectionable. It makes the writers of RaHoWa morally objectionable, and it makes people who play RaHoWa unironically morally objectionable.

Interestingly: Tolkien himself noted that treating Orcs as inherently and irredeemably evil was itself morally objectionable, and that's why he explicitly disavowed that interpretation. He stated publicly that Orcs weren't inherently evil, and in the afterward stuff the post-Sauron Orcs like settle down and farm and shit.

-Frank

I had to deal with this when I was writing up Red Tide. The setting is intended to be old-school friendly, but one of the core conflicts in the setting is between the native orc-equivalent Shou and the human refugees who've arrived in the island archipelago. It's possible to run the Shou as born-to-be-vicious ravagers deserving only of a quick death, but I thought it was more interesting to emphasize the inevitability of conflict in the situation given Shou and human cultures.

The Shou are almost exclusively hunter-gatherers, and despise farming as slave work. The human population is steadily growing, and the available land supply on an island archipelago is strictly limited. It doesn't matter if the Shou are all saintly pacifists and the humans are noble-minded paragons of virtue, somebody is gonna have to die. There just isn't land enough to support the growth of both populations, so in the end, it doesn't really matter whether the combatants are good people or bad people. All they have to be is people disinclined to see their families starve and as a result, there's going to be genocidal warfare.

There are ways to solve the fundamental conflict, of course. Someone could invent a farming method that vastly increases human output, or the Shou could become convinced that farming was honorable and thus survive on vastly decreased amounts of land, or the apocalyptic extraplanar invasion that consumed the rest of the world could be driven back so the human refugees could go home again. But barring such a resolution, the only way for humans or Shou to survive long-term is to wipe out the opposing group.

I think such situational conflicts are a lot more interesting than resting the game on alignment-based disputes. Yes, the Shou are racist xenophobes who spend more time fighting each other than humans, but there are human cultures on the isles who are zealous devil-worshipers. Neither side has a monopoly on bastardliness, and both are equally subject to the brutish cold equations of food supply and population growth.

Quote from: estar;477814Actually the good guys were colonists. From Numenor. And the later years of the second age treated the mainland cultures pretty bad and descendents were known as the Black Numenoreans.

I am just teasing a bit, I agree with the main point of your post.

Well I was thinking about Lord of the Rings obviously, not The Silmarilion, which is written at such a remove the reader isn't expected either to identify with Numenor nor worry about the Orientalism inherent in the Numenorean sociopolitical Weltanschauung.

Quote from: bombshelter13;477815Okay, so he's saying that holding a particular belief is somehow morally wrong even in a case where said belief is true. Things like this are why I do not believe in morals, full stop. Believing a true thing is never morally wrong, and any system of morality contending otherwise is, simply, stupid.

But an author, including an RPG author, can invent a world where the beliefs of any ideology are Literally True.  That doesn't make it uncriticisable.  Personally I have no problem with Orcs, but I would have a problem with say RAHOWA (Neo-Nazi RPG), no matter that in that world the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real, Jews really do drink the blood of Christian babies, etc.  I've played a German soldier in a WW2 RPG, but I wasn't going to accept that in that universe Hitler & co really were The Good Guys.  Likewise I'd play one of Fidel & Che's Communist revolutionaries, but that doesn't mean I'd accept that in that universe Communism was objectively good & right, no matter what the author of the game nor the GM told me.

Jesus.

The bloke is taking things far too seriously (if he's being honest and the entire thing isn't just trolling bullshit).

You can't just say "It's just a game" ?

Actually, you can. I just said it. Orcs are evil, so slaughter the fuckers. Many people are happly to play like this. It doesn't make them unthinking racists. It means they are people who enjoy a straightforward game of D&D.

Does that mean you can't explore the morality of Orc/Human/Elf/Dawrf conflict? Of course not. As has been pointed out, that can lead to interesting moral dilemas and alternative ways of resolving conflict rather than drawing steel. This is likely to prove difficult, but there is the challenge.

These are just different ways of playing the game. People who play the first way are not automatically arseholes. People who play the second way are not automatically morally superior or nicer people. They just like their fun in different ways.

Perhaps he should just play a Sword and Sorcery game, where everyone is human aside from demons and the undead, and the evil bastards are clearly the sorcerers and their minions.

Or perhaps he not someone who is thinking too much about a wonderful pastime but is just a trolling wanker.

The kind of line he appears to be pushing is similar to the self-regarding idiots who say that anyone who enjoys pulp games (like me) is a closet white supremiscist fascists because all the pulp writers were. Tossers!

Quote from: bombshelter13;477815Okay, so he's saying that holding a particular belief is somehow morally wrong even in a case where said belief is true. Things like this are why I do not believe in morals, full stop. Believing a true thing is never morally wrong, and any system of morality contending otherwise is, simply, stupid...

...you, the poster, may view Hutu's killing Tutsis as worthy of disgust, but when viewed from the perspective of the Hutu doing the killing it probably IS an act of heroism.

Is it ok in your view to make and play Interahamwe: The RPG  where Tutsis are inherently and absolutely evil, and for the Hutu PCs killing them is an act of heroism?    I would say no, same as RAHOWA, same as FATAL.

Maybe it's a small offence, God knows there are plenty of morally disgusting books and movies out there, plenty of them seem to be advertised on the London Underground on my way to work (yaay torture porn movie ads on public transport, not).  That Brett Easton Ellis or Oliver Stone can do more harm in an afternoon than an RPG writer can manage in his whole life doesn't make it ok, though.  

YMMV.  And I like Orcs.  

Quote from: SineNomine;477817I had to deal with this when I was writing up Red Tide. The setting is intended to be old-school friendly, but one of the core conflicts in the setting is between the native orc-equivalent Shou and the human refugees who've arrived in the island archipelago.

Given your themes, why did you make the Shou 'Orcs' rather than Humans?  Isn't making them 'Orcs' going to be a big "Bad Guy Here: Please Kill" sign over their heads?

Normal person objects to story-game, rpgsite rallies.

Normal person (th ones in my game and people elsewhere) objects to the way dnd presents moral dilemmas in a game format largely about killing things and taking their stuff -- socialist spoon-fed liberals with white guilt! *shakes fist*

Sorry guys, but if you're going to defer to the "normal" people for strengthening your own moral arguments, at least be consistent about it.  The truth is that encapsulating those sorts of moral dilemmas in the context of dnd is not fun for most people.  Perhaps in another type of game, but not one where you get xp mostly for killig and looting.

But you know, poisond is just a game, too.   See what a great argument that makes for?

Unless somehow dnd players are immune to the same sorts of rigorous judgment you put storygamers through.