PDA

View Full Version : Roleplaying Ethics in gaming



Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-15, 06:13 AM
EDIT: It's clear from the thread below that the blog post I made and this thread have gone in two very different direcitons. I'd really like to talk about meta-ethics, not alignments - that is, the decision about whether there are real tangible forces of good and evil in a game setting or not. That's what my blog post is about.

Alignment is only one frame to talk about ethics - there are lots of others - but the question of meta-ethics in a game setting applies no matter what system or lack of sytstem a game has to handle ethics.
I should also point out that in my linked blog posts, I don't restrict the definition of "alignment" to mean just the D&D systems. I explicitly state that I'm using the term to refer to all systems of personality measurement / categorisation - for example: the WoD Virtues and Vices.

Here's the original text of my OP:

I've blogged again, on one of those tricky RPG topics - again. (http://running-the-game.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/morality-reality-meta-ethics-in-your.html)

People hate alignment systems in games (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18791901&postcount=1), but I think they're missing a trick. I've surveyed this very forum about alignments before, (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?285316-Alignments-what-s-not-to-like&highlight=alignment) and got a mixed bag of results. Good and Evil in games are topics we need to consider when we're thinking about how a setting works. If you don't, you can end up with a muddle of opinions between players and GM.

My solution? Openly state your stance on in-game morality at the outset - it cuts through most of the tangle.

Because most games don't explicitly state how Good and Evil work in-game, players and GM try to apply their own ideas and get stuck. If we all know what we're dealing with at the start, then we'll play better together.

aspekt
2015-02-15, 06:17 AM
I think this good advice for a lot of questions that come up at a table. There has to be a community buy in to various things from the general setting all the way to spell components.

Comet
2015-02-15, 06:19 AM
Yeah, this makes sense. It makes sense with just about anything related to tabletop roleplaying: the whole group needs to agree on what kind of fiction they're going to be playing in. Sometimes the rules or the setting help with this and sometimes they don't.

johnbragg
2015-02-15, 07:30 AM
I tend to roll with the idea that, in D&D, capital-E Evil functions like a psychoactive drug with addictive properties. Intentionally causing sapient beings pain and negative emotions causes an endorphin rush. Like any addiction, many users seek larger and larger "doses."

This also explains why the high-level caster or king with quite a comfortable life is going to such lengths to DESTROY THE WORLD BWAAHAHAHA! Same reason that crack addicts perform sex acts for the price of a fast-food Happy Meal. Addiction creates its own parameters of what is and is not a good idea.

This gives you your Evil-phlogiston for your world-building--enough cruelty and sadism and blood sacrifice creates enough Evil-phlogiston to power whatever Evil spell-effect or object you care to have. How exactly Good balances that out (as it should in all well-designed magical cosmologies) is a different question.

oxybe
2015-02-15, 08:28 AM
For most campaigns the concept of what constitutes good and evil really don't matter.

I've never sat at a table and have the campaign put before me as "you are all good people doing good things" but rather "this campaign is about fulfilling [goal]".

D&D runs into issues with alignment because alignment is punitive. Very rarely do you get boons from being a given alignment, but rather you get punished for deviating from yours (divine characters falling) or being called out as specifically harmed or affected by certain effects (smite evil, protection VS good, Chaos Hammer, etc...).

Very rarely do you see "This spell gives you [benefit] but if you're alignment X, you get [benefit++]".

The other issue is that it ties all these punishment to your character's personality, which means you have little incentive to actually roleplay outside of your box. The vagueness the books also take on the matter don't help any: it gives small blurbs, sure, but many actions people do are hardly black and white in intent and effect especially if it revolves around personal morality and ethics.

This is why you get stick in the mud paladins and the LOLRANDUMB Chaotic Stupid alignment tropes, because players get backed into a corner via punishments and as such rely on extremes, hoping to gain favour and fly under the radar or use these extremes as excuses to try to allow disruptive behaviour to go unpunished ("It's what my character would do!").

When you set your game, you don't need to describe what constitutes good and evil unless those are key elements to your setting. If your setting is "a group of heroes from all walks of life join forces to stop the Evil, Tyrannical Lord Vorpal Von Hackenslash" then the focus is on the group of characters working together to overcome the villain:

The players will be making characters focused on working together. This mean while they will have their quirks, like some might be "good" and others "evil", the characters will be mindful enough to not be disruptive to each other because they actively want to cooperate and see each other succeed (which would mean the group as a whole works better and inches forward at their goal). I often play characters that are "evil" in D&D terms, but work just fine in a group environment because a group win is a win for them.

Alignment is a relic that really isn't needed anymore. I've long stopped paying attention to it and I find my gaming's been far better for it. You just need to make the intent of your game clear. You don't need to discuss ethics, you just need to say "Don't be a jerk to your party mates".

goto124
2015-02-15, 09:03 AM
When you set your game, you don't need to describe what constitutes good and evil unless those are key elements to your setting. If your setting is "a group of heroes from all walks of life join forces to stop the Evil, Tyrannical Lady Vorpal Von Hackenslash" then the focus is on the group of characters working together to overcome the villain

PC1: I can't let her take over the world, she's evil and will destroy it!
PC2: I can't let her take over the world, I must do it instead!
PC1: *eyeing PC2 suspiciously*
PC2: What? I'll do a better job than she does! Everyone will get free healthcare!

I agree with oxybe. Alignment is pointless. It's easier to have detailed personalities without alignment.

NichG
2015-02-15, 09:33 AM
Good and Evil in games are topics we need to consider when we're thinking about how a setting works. If you don't, you can end up with a muddle of opinions between players and GM.

Could you expand on this? It seems like a fairly strong assertion to make, since there are many games outside of D&D which don't actually give Good and Evil privileged status over other concepts.

johnbragg
2015-02-15, 09:34 AM
PC1: I can't let her take over the world, she's evil and will destroy it!
PC2: I can't let her take over the world, I must do it instead!
PC1: *eyeing PC2 suspiciously*
PC2: What? I'll do a better job than she does! Everyone will get free healthcare!

I agree with oxybe. Alignment is pointless. It's easier to have detailed personalities without alignment.

Alignment is training-wheels for roleplaying. Which is not pointless. Yes, if you're at the point where your characters have detailed personalities, then a two-letter code is not enough to describe them.

Do you want your guy to slay the dragon because it's a threat to the town, or because that's where the big pile of treasure is?
Do you want your guy to play by the rules all the time?

Two questions, with Yes-No-Sortof, generate the nine alignments and give rookie roleplayers some idea what they're looking at.

EDIT: Just because _you_ don't need it anymore doesn't mean they should take it out of the books.

Wardog
2015-02-15, 03:28 PM
Could you expand on this? It seems like a fairly strong assertion to make, since there are many games outside of D&D which don't actually give Good and Evil privileged status over other concepts.

Well, at the very least it would help to establish (before anyone does it) whether slaying a dragon and taking it's treasure, or dropping bad guy off a cliff after promising not to (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Commando) is an admirable act of heroism (for eliminating threats to society and ensuring karma is served), or an act of sociopathic thuggery (and racist bigotry, if you went after the dragon because it was a dragon).

If one player assumes the setting works according to the former principles, and another player assumer the latter, then you're probably going to get a lot of agro between them, and probably broken immersion too.

NichG
2015-02-15, 03:46 PM
Well, at the very least it would help to establish (before anyone does it) whether slaying a dragon and taking it's treasure, or dropping bad guy off a cliff after promising not to (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Commando) is an admirable act of heroism (for eliminating threats to society and ensuring karma is served), or an act of sociopathic thuggery (and racist bigotry, if you went after the dragon because it was a dragon).

If one player assumes the setting works according to the former principles, and another player assumer the latter, then you're probably going to get a lot of agro between them, and probably broken immersion too.

In something where good and evil aren't cosmic concepts, its possible for one group of people to view the act as an admirable act of heroism, and a different group of people in the same setting to view it as an act of sociopathic thuggery. That's kind of my point - in many settings, the setting itself doesn't judge either way, just the individual people within the setting.

Even in some D&D settings this can be the case. In Planescape, the factions care more about specific philosophical ideals than they do alignments. So to a Dustman, bringing someone back to life is an abominable act that forces them to experience more suffering and degrades their existence. But to a Sensate, that sounds like it might be a cool experience! A Godsman might consider the question morally complex, depending on whether or not the person's next reincarnation would have been closer to divinity (if not, then bringing them back is giving them a chance to fix their mistakes). To an Athar, its seizing a soul back from the clutches of the powers, so probably a good thing to do. And to a Bleaker, 'who cares?'

Vitruviansquid
2015-02-15, 03:57 PM
I think your blog post on the nature of good and evil describes a fine particular system that works for a particular setting.

Like the nature of gods, I think the nature of good and evil should be tailored to fit the particular tone of game you want to play. If I want to play a DnD campaign that emulates Grimm fairy tale ideas of good and evil, that wouldn't work for me. I'd rather play in a system where good and evil are determined at birth, and good people do good things, and are pretty, and wear shining white armor because they are good while evil people do bad things, and are ugly (or pretty and vain), and wear the black spiked armor because they are evil. Although conversion moments might happen or fall moments might happen in this setting, a person's deeds are emanations of their alignment, and not the other way around.

Or, if I wanted to play a game that has a certain Classical Greek setting in DnD, I would apply a different view of ethics, morality, good and evil. Things are evil which the gods find abominable, and you might be doing something you think is good, but which the Gods later inform you is evil, and cause your fall, or alternately, you might be caught in a situation where one god urges you to do one thing, and another god the opposite.

johnbragg
2015-02-15, 04:16 PM
Well, at the very least it would help to establish (before anyone does it) whether slaying a dragon and taking it's treasure, or dropping bad guy off a cliff after promising not to (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Commando) is an admirable act of heroism (for eliminating threats to society and ensuring karma is served), or an act of sociopathic thuggery (and racist bigotry, if you went after the dragon because it was a dragon).

If one player assumes the setting works according to the former principles, and another player assumer the latter, then you're probably going to get a lot of agro between them, and probably broken immersion too.

I don't know if it's so much "the setting works" this way, or that the dominant culture of the setting sees it that way. The rules might be silent on the question, but the NPCs around you will have an opinion.

I had fun in one campaign with a "Lawful Neutral" character whose alignment (by agreement with the DM) was "Lawful Conventional"--he judged things right or wrong--no, positively or negatively--based on whether they were something accepted by the society or a new and dangerous innovation. So the (lawful evil) Priest of Death who nattered on regularly about his ambitions to build a necromantic army of undead slaves--not a problem, it's what they do dontchaknow. Monk handwaved into an otherwise monk-less setting? (Had a poor sense of direction, got lost in the woods and stumbled into a portal)? Very suspicious. Tax evasion? Everybody cuts corners. Cult of psionic-powered characters out in the wilderness? They need to be put down hard.

mephnick
2015-02-15, 05:49 PM
I hate alignment, some people feel like it helps.

I just did a session zero last week where I repeatedly stated that I don't use alignment...everyone still chose and wrote an alignment on their sheet. It's a tool like anything else.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-15, 09:31 PM
As I usually do, I prefer palladium's alignment system. I find that it does in fact do a decent job of correcting for perspective bias and 'situational gray'. On the one hand it does provide some binary objective qualifications for good, while also leaving the one's that should be gray or subjective *as* gray and subjective. It in fact *uses* the times when you use 'subjective justifications' as a determinant.

It asks you objective questions, and when it receives subjective answers, it calls you on it and your justifications for subjectivity determine your alignment.

Eisenheim
2015-02-15, 11:23 PM
Ethics in gaming should work exactly like ethics in the real world, a difficult question, filled with grey areas and disputes between rational, well-meaning individuals.

There's no reason for a game to have moral absolutes that are clearly defined, and doing so just harms people's ability to fully inhabit the world by making it foreign to their experience of real life.

Segev
2015-02-16, 12:03 PM
There's no reason for a game to have moral absolutes that are clearly defined, and doing so just harms people's ability to fully inhabit the world by making it foreign to their experience of real life.

Be careful with this sentiment. While I think I know what you're getting at, it is possible to read it as "there is nothing that is truly good or truly bad, it's all relative." And that's not true in any setting.

"I'm going to rape and kill every woman in this village because that's how I get my jollies," is always an evil thing. "I'm going to put my life on the line to defend these women from that evil rapist, because nobody deserves what he has planned for them," is, by itself, always a good thing.

Please note that reasons for each are given in the examples; changing those reasons is changing the examples. (e.g. "well what if the guy's only protecting them so he can ahve them for himself?" is changing his motivation from what is listed: "because nobody deserves what [the bad guy] has planned for them.")

Eisenheim
2015-02-16, 12:21 PM
My point is that moral absolutes and the ethical choice is something that players and characters must find for themselves, the moral laws of the setting shouldn't be more well-defined than the moral rules of society, they shouldn't be enforced by game mechanics but rather by narrative consequences.

Mass murder is immoral, and people will almost certainly face punishment, horror and other negative consequences for committing it, but not because there's a rule against evil, because other people don't accept their actions.

The problem with alignment and other enforced morality systems is simply that they try to simplify and mechanize something that is complicated and lacks good hard-and-fast rules. An individual game may or may not want to deal with complex moral choices, but there's no reason to have the system trying to make moral judgments regardless.

If you want morality to be an issue in the game, have a narrative that highlights it, if you don't, don't, but either way you don't need, and I would argue are only hindered by, a mechanical system for morality.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-16, 02:02 PM
Be careful with this sentiment. While I think I know what you're getting at, it is possible to read it as "there is nothing that is truly good or truly bad, it's all relative." And that's not true in any setting.

"I'm going to rape and kill every woman in this village because that's how I get my jollies," is always an evil thing. "I'm going to put my life on the line to defend these women from that evil rapist, because nobody deserves what he has planned for them," is, by itself, always a good thing.

Please note that reasons for each are given in the examples; changing those reasons is changing the examples. (e.g. "well what if the guy's only protecting them so he can ahve them for himself?" is changing his motivation from what is listed: "because nobody deserves what [the bad guy] has planned for them.")

I'd like to combine goto's example with this example...

P1: I can't let that man rape and kill every woman in the village! Its a horribly evil thing to do!
P2: I can't let that man rape and kill every woman in the village! I must do it instead!
P1: *eyeing P2 suspiciously*
P2: What? I'll do a better job!

YossarianLives
2015-02-16, 02:41 PM
One of the people I game with doesn't like alignment so he writes his alignment as 'edible'.

Hiro Protagonest
2015-02-16, 03:09 PM
I don't like alignment. My stance on alignment comes from Exalted - nobody can please everyone, and nearly everyone is justified to some degree (there are a few pure evil beings in Exalted, but you can count them on one hand). When alignment does come into play and you try having morally grey "evil doesn't really mean evil" stuff, I call bull, it's just far easier to play that without alignment at all.

NichG
2015-02-16, 03:15 PM
Be careful with this sentiment. While I think I know what you're getting at, it is possible to read it as "there is nothing that is truly good or truly bad, it's all relative." And that's not true in any setting.

The difference is whether what is good or bad is a function of the universe (D&D), or a function of the societies and belief structures within the universe (other settings).

When morality is a function of the universe, then the potential issue from the player point of view is that it may be being imposed on the basis of the DM's OOC morality, because there's no character in-game to associate that viewpoint with. That means that if something they do in game which they think is okay is judged by the DM to be evil, there's the feeling that the DM OOC is calling them, OOC, evil, because OOC they (perhaps unspokenly) would not consider it such. Many people can separate themselves from that or can say 'well, this is just D&D's messed up alignment system', but that's part of what tends to make alignment debates so vociferous.

But if the setting itself doesn't hold a belief, just the people within the setting, then that's a way for the DM and players to accept whatever moral structures that exist as being less to do with their OOC beliefs and just 'what the people in this city believe' or whatever. Because its tied to NPCs, it's allowed to be wrong - if you can have a kingdom in the world that thinks slavery is perfectly fine, and another kingdom that is okay with murder under a particular dueling code, then if this one kingdom has a morality the player doesn't agree with OOC then instead of bickering with the DM the solution is 'take it up with that kingdom' in game.

Segev
2015-02-16, 03:24 PM
On the one hand, you're right; nobody likes feeling like the setting is just a soapbox for the DM to stand on and judge those who disagree with him religiously or philosophically. On the other...there comes a point where failing to expect certain standards of good and evil makes for either stupid or infuriating stories.

There is right, and there is wrong, and while you can find nuanced situations where many things can seem to shift their position on that axis, it doesn't change that you have to go to increasingly corner cases to make increasingly good things seem evil, and increasingly evil things seem good.

And people tend to recogize this.

Generally speaking, those who help others and seek to promote their freedom to seek their own well-being will tend towards good. Those who use and abuse others for their own benefit or amusement will tend towards evil. I make no comment as to law or chaos.

Pretending that there's no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, just because there are times when people disagree about specific things, serves nobody well.


Frankly, I tend to treat alignment in D&D as descriptive, rather than prescriptive. For NPCs of the alignment subtypes, I make exception, but that's explicit exception to what is otherwise the rule.

NichG
2015-02-16, 03:59 PM
On the one hand, you're right; nobody likes feeling like the setting is just a soapbox for the DM to stand on and judge those who disagree with him religiously or philosophically. On the other...there comes a point where failing to expect certain standards of good and evil makes for either stupid or infuriating stories.

There is right, and there is wrong, and while you can find nuanced situations where many things can seem to shift their position on that axis, it doesn't change that you have to go to increasingly corner cases to make increasingly good things seem evil, and increasingly evil things seem good.

And people tend to recogize this.

Generally speaking, those who help others and seek to promote their freedom to seek their own well-being will tend towards good. Those who use and abuse others for their own benefit or amusement will tend towards evil. I make no comment as to law or chaos.

Pretending that there's no good and no evil, no right and no wrong, just because there are times when people disagree about specific things, serves nobody well.


The point is, if you have a character who is alone in the wilderness and they come across a moral dilemma, what happens? In some games, the universe itself passes judgement on their actions - there is an intrinsic consequence to the choice they make. In other games, the only consequence is how they feel about themselves, e.g. their own internal morality. In games where the universe doesn't pass judgement, then any talk about 'good exists' or 'evil exists' is just an abstract OOC discussion to explain how one feels about the character's actions as external observers, because the universe isn't allowed to punish or reward them strictly on that basis. In other words, it becomes OOC soap-boxing.

Once the character enters society and talks about their actions or does other things, then there can be some form of judgement, because that judgement is arising from actors within the world rather than the world itself - and those actors are fallible: they can be fooled, they can have their opinions influenced, they can let emotions cloud their judgement, etc. And they can be different from eachother: if a character hangs out with a band of mercenaries, assassins, and thugs, his buddies aren't going to punish him for murders committed on the job. On the other hand, the city that they just sacked certainly would seek to punish him for that.

nedz
2015-02-16, 04:19 PM
Rather than My character has Alignment X therefore I do Y I prefer My character does Y therefore his alignment is X

Which is to say that rather than alignment being a straitjacket, it's a descriptive term which is occasionally relevant. Even in long running games I often have to ask my players, or guess, what their character's alignment is — but then I do run with lots of grey, or even orange, aligned NPCs.

goto124
2015-02-16, 07:13 PM
I'd like to combine goto's example with this example...

P1: I can't let that man rape and kill every woman in the village! Its a horribly evil thing to do!
P2: I can't let that man rape and kill every woman in the village! I must do it instead!
P1: *eyeing P2 suspiciously*
P2: What? I'll do a better job!

I laughed hard, thank you.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-16, 09:21 PM
He divested himself of his raiments and donned the apparel of his new station... Setting aside his sword of smiting, armed only with the bowtie of beckoning and codpiece of smittening and a rose in his teeth... under the auspices of helping his lord through the loss of many young warriors on the field of battle, P2 set himself thoroughly to the task creating a new generation of would be warriors for his king. They would be the product of the bravest and noblest lineage...

The Paladin of Pyung'Tang.

Segev
2015-02-17, 10:14 AM
The point is, if you have a character who is alone in the wilderness and they come across a moral dilemma, what happens? In some games, the universe itself passes judgement on their actions - there is an intrinsic consequence to the choice they make. In other games, the only consequence is how they feel about themselves, e.g. their own internal morality.I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the "universe passes judgment" thing is about whether or not, having gone out into the woods and slaughtered innocents, you can go back into town and have somebody who can Detect Evil sense your evil aura, despite you having done nothing but good and noble and upright things to anybody who has ever been anywhere near that town.

I should point out that, even if alignment is a 100% undetectable thing, your actions in those woods had consequences to more than just yourself and your victims. They impact the victim's families, friends, even acquaintances. They impact those who might have been depending on the victim's successful completion of whatever task sent the victim to cross your path.

Even "victimless" crimes or sins engrain patterns of accetpable behavior to you. Now, with a fictional character in a game, you have (barring failed will saves or other social mechanics) the ability to say that this pattern doesn't build up. It's a separation between reality and fiction, related to, in part, the difference between hot and cold judgment.

It's easy for a guy in a comfortable situation with no particular stimulus to say, "I'd never let some girl get me to leave my post while I was on duty;" many guys who would say that and believe it still might find themselves sorely tempted and even giving in if actively seduced. But a player of a PC - and none too few DMs running NPCs - in that 'cold' state and not the 'hot' state the fictional character finds himself - will find it easy to say "nope, his will's too strong." Similar examples can be given for whether or not you'd sell out a principle you hold dear in return for having any other craving satisfied or pain lessened. Hunger, addiction, torture... these do cause people to act in ways they say, in a 'cold' state, they'd never do.

But engage in behaviors in private, and "who you are in the dark" does evolve based on it. It changes you.

That said, barring extreme acts, singleton events are hardly going to change your alignment. The Lawful wizard who kills a deer in the forest because he thought it was an orc bandit, and then who decides not to report it because he doesn't want to pay the "hunting tax" on the venison, is breaking the law and committing a chaotic act. (Assume he knows of and subscribes to the system of laws applicable, here.) That's not going to make him slip towards Neutral unless he starts making a habit of it. But each time he does it, it becomes a little easier to justify "...but I won't get caught..." and that does change his own behavior if he lets it. Especially since, eventually, he might be in a situation where he and another person could agree to keep quiet about some infraction of the law, and both wouldn't get caught. And yet, now there's definitely somebody else who knows.

That others know what you've done and whether you can justify it to yourself doesn't change what you've done. Obviously, if you can justify it, you're going to feel okay about it. Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on what youv'e done. But the idea of objective morality is that moral actions lead to better overall outcomes for all, and cause harm to the fewest people. Whether you rely on your own judgment over all else or rely on an external system of laws to objectively analyze whether something is "good" or "evil" in that context is a matter of your L/C alignment axis, really.


In games where the universe doesn't pass judgement, then any talk about 'good exists' or 'evil exists' is just an abstract OOC discussion to explain how one feels about the character's actions as external observers, because the universe isn't allowed to punish or reward them strictly on that basis. In other words, it becomes OOC soap-boxing. I'm not sure I follow you. It's OOC soapboxing if the in-game universe doesn't pass judgment? Howso?



In the end, my core point is that actions have consequences. In games where the universe passes judgment by changing your alignment, that means that, to a degree, those who can sense alignment can get the gist of the kinds of things you've done even if you did them without (surviving) witnesses. Even in games where your alignment is completely undetectable and you have no gauge on your stat page by which to measure "goodness," there are consequences for your actions.

A game can ignore them; those random travellers through the forest your evil serial killer had his way with could have zero impact on the world by their absence, if their deaths are just there to showcase your evil when you're on your own.

But in reality, they were going somewhere. Somebody would have met them. Their goods would have gone somewhere, if they're travelling with anything to sell. The medicine they were here to buy will never get back to their sick little sister. Their children will now grow up without a father. Etc., etc.

And while a game can discount all of this - it can treat them as having spawned just "off screen" and as if they would have despawned "off screen" with no more impact on the world than being available for you to decide whether to kill them or not - failure to ignore it is not the DM "soapboxing."

As long as the consequences of actions are what cause the resultant effects on the world, it's less soapboxing and more just trying to simulate a world.

That said, there are always abstractions in any model. The GM cannot possibly simulate everything in the world perfectly, and how NPCs react will always be at least somewhat arbitrary. Possibly believable, especially to the GM, but arbitrary nonetheless. And thus, GM biases will creep in, no matter what.

Even choosing to discount consequences of actions allows it: by failing to have the evil PC's serial murders impact the world, the GM is tacitly condoning them as harmless.

That can be fine; if everybody's already saying, "yeah, he's evil," and the murders are just window dressing for this story because his more meaningful evil happens elsewhere, go ahead and have your window dressing. It does strain credulity, however, if the "window dressing" is the only evil actions taken, and the PC actually does only tons of good in the world in any meaningful sense. Whether this is "GM soapboxing" or just poor storytelling is a matter for interpretation, of course. I'd hope it's the latter, because soapboxing about how serial killing's okay if you're a hero to everybody else is definitely not something I want to listen to.

goto124
2015-02-17, 10:57 AM
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, especially the first few paragraphs. That cosmic alignment is a way to prevent players in a Good campaign from doing too many Evil things? I can see its usefulness, thought it is an OoC agreement for the most part anyway. It won't work as well in Evil games, or any game dealing with grey morality.

Segev
2015-02-17, 11:55 AM
No, what I'm trying to say is that, regardless of whether "alignment" is tracked as a mechanic in the game/setting, actions have consequences, and the players as observers, at the least, are able to judge a character. Moreover, even if there weren't semi-omniscient players/GMs observing these characters, their actions would still be quatifiably good or evil by their consequences to the world. Evil actions increase the suffering of the world as a whole. Good ones decrease it.

(And please, let's not get into the corner cases. "What if Hitler were that random traveller the serial killer murdered?" is a corner case, unless you wish to make the case that serial killing at a minimum net kills more people who'd cause suffering on a wide scale than it does those who would not. The moment we get into corner cases like that, it's moving away from the topic and into excuse territory. Nobody is denying that corner cases and moral gray areas exist; my thesis is that moral gray areas are not the rule, and that black and white also exists.)

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-17, 11:59 AM
A setting only needs clear definitions of Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, or Humanity and Bestiality, or what have you, if those are going to be major parts of a game's setting AND its mechanics.

If they're only important for the game's setting, your players don't necessarily need to agree or even understand what's going on. They can just play the game and not worry about it, because how the setting labels and reacts to Good and Evil is primarily shown through NPC reactions - and NPC reactions are already within the purview of GM control. Complaining about differing opinions is like complaining about arbitrary in-game weather - making arbitrary decisions like that is the GM's job when a game doesn't have ready-made rulings for such.

Now, when alignment is important both for the setting and mechanics, then the players need to be on ball with it, because they're usually expected to make meaningful choices about how to align themselves. Here, I don't agree with the notion that D&D's rules were ever as vague or bad as they're claimed to be - I can put 1st Ed AD&D PHB next to an elementary schoolbook on ethics and call out the nine alignments by the names of the real-world philosophies they represent. From a semantic and gameplay perspective, the rules were just fine - people disliked them because the rules didn't agree with their real-like viewpoints. I will note I've basically never had troubles with alignment when it comes to new players - they seem to understand it intuitively. All the alignment debates seem to happen between grown-ups who more or less use the in-game jargon as an excuse to wax on about their deeply-held moral beliefs.

Segev
2015-02-17, 12:10 PM
No question; alignment debates are morality debates as much as anything else, and people tend to argue about them either because they want to justify an unacceptable character in a game by claiming it meets the letter of the rules, or because somebody is trying to use it to dictate how they should play their character.

The two are neither mutually exclusive nor inclusive.

It usually comes up with Paladin's Fall threads, or with "This one guy's playing a jerk who does horrible things to NPCs and PCs alike, but is claiming he's CN" threads.

The other time I see it come up from anything related to actual game experience is if a DM is trying to get on a soap box, or a player has a soap box that the DM isn't letting him use to dictate the way the DM runs alignment. It can usually be resolved if the DM isn't also using it as a bludgeon just by letting the DM call characters whatever alignment he wants, and having the characters view themselves however the player wants them to.

It is a problem when the PC is required to maintain a specific alignment for mechanical reasons, when the PC's alignment is magically compelled, or when the DM weilds the rest of the world as a bludgeon to penalize behavior he's labeled as some alignment which is an "acceptable target."

(e.g. the DM who apparently runs every setting such that all magic items are automatically the property of the King, and failure to turn them over for no recompense makes you extremely Chaotic Evil and marked for death by every good person in the setting.)

Baxter Konrad
2015-02-17, 12:29 PM
The issue really is that morality is objective in the D&D universe; there are objectively good things and objectively evil things. There are entire PLAINS OF EXISTENCE dedicated to these extremes!

The real issue, I feel, is there is no connection to those extremes. Except Paladins, but they get a lot of flak as it is.

I guess the better example is Chaos in the Warhammr universe. You can do whatever you like in the name of Chaos and it means squat. But if you want real power, you've got to catch the eye of one of the Gods, and the Gods have very clearly defined interests. If you start performing magic in the name of Khorne, and Khorne actually starts paying attention to you, then you are in for a whole new universe of pain and suffering. On the other hand, if you please Khorne and he notices, you'll start earning his favour and become a big, bad-ass combat monster! But the key thing here is that you have to be noticed. Player Characters by definition are the sort of people who should be getting noticed by the Gods, but not necessarily early on.

So I'd say that a better way to handle alignment in D&D would be to ignore it early on, but as a player levels up and various supernatural entities start taking note of them, then they have to start thinking about whose favour they want to carry, and how they need to conduct themselves to do that. And there should be real benefit to that. That's when alignment stops being some arbitrary straight-jacket and becomes a trade-off, whereby the player agrees to an alignment in exchange for power and reward.

NichG
2015-02-17, 02:18 PM
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the "universe passes judgment" thing is about whether or not, having gone out into the woods and slaughtered innocents, you can go back into town and have somebody who can Detect Evil sense your evil aura, despite you having done nothing but good and noble and upright things to anybody who has ever been anywhere near that town.

I should point out that, even if alignment is a 100% undetectable thing, your actions in those woods had consequences to more than just yourself and your victims. They impact the victim's families, friends, even acquaintances. They impact those who might have been depending on the victim's successful completion of whatever task sent the victim to cross your path.


Certainly there are consequences, but the consequences are because of the chain of connections between things, not because of the innate moral basis of the action - at least in game universes which don't explicitly care about morality.

E.g. if my character kills a guy out in the wilderness in cold blood, then the consequence is 'that guy is dead, and all things which follow from that will now happen'. That consequence could be very little, because they guy was unimportant or very disconnected from the rest of the world. It could be positive for some people, because the guy was going to do various things which would make their lives worse, and negative for others. All of that comes from the specific context of that person, not from the fact that my character killed the guy in cold blood. If my character decided to call him out and have an honorable duel instead, that wouldn't change the consequences since as far as the rest of the world is concerned either the person lives or dies and the 'how' of it is invisible. If my character decided to kidnap him instead of killing him, or used mind powers to convince him to exclude himself from society and become a hermit, then the consequences to the rest of the world are going to be very similar to if he were killed (barring corner cases such as 'he has a tracking device' or 'someone scries on him and rescues him').

In terms of D&D Good vs Evil, those different ways of removing the person from the world have a different moral charge to them - e.g. in D&D it would matter whether Han Solo shot first. But in terms of the scenario, they are almost exactly the same barring corner cases and in games where there is no baked in morality, all consequences must flow from things that actually exist within the world.

The question of whether the universe cares is a question about whether or not any particular descriptors such as good or evil have consequences in their own right because they are given meaning by in-world structures (which, because they are in-world, are inherently context-dependent) or if those consequences are immutably baked into the way the world works.



I'm not sure I follow you. It's OOC soapboxing if the in-game universe doesn't pass judgment? Howso?


In character, their character can pass judgement all they want based on the knowledge they actually possess. But if the in-game universe doesn't pass judgement and OOC the players pass judgement based on OOC knowledge, then they're just projecting their own morality onto the game. That's what I mean by it being soap-boxing.



In the end, my core point is that actions have consequences. In games where the universe passes judgment by changing your alignment, that means that, to a degree, those who can sense alignment can get the gist of the kinds of things you've done even if you did them without (surviving) witnesses. Even in games where your alignment is completely undetectable and you have no gauge on your stat page by which to measure "goodness," there are consequences for your actions.

Consequences are different than to say that using the ideas of 'good' or 'evil' is an accurate simplification of the patterns of relationship between actions and consequences.

When you say 'evil actions have consequences' you're implying that disregarding other information about the action other than its goodness or evilness is a good approximation for assessing the consequences. E.g. a statement 'X happened because Y was evil' may not be perfectly true, but its more accurate than other comparable simplifications such as 'X happened because Y was too overt' or 'X happened because Y disregarded the motives of a powerful person'.

If its just down to NPCs and players, everyone can use whatever approximations they want to understand the world. If thinking in terms of 'good' and 'evil' helps you, that's fine. Someone else may instead think in terms of 'rational' or 'irrational', and get as much or more mileage from that basis set.

The question about whether the universe itself cares is a question about whether there is one canonically correct choice. If I'm in D&D-land, I could say 'I will think in terms of subtlety or overtness rather than in terms of morality', but because the universe cares about Good vs Evil then that is demonstrably inaccurate. Even if someone does something in perfect secrecy, the universe knows and applies consequences regardless.

On the other hand in something like Shadowrun, the universe doesn't care. So you can use 'good vs evil' to understand the behavior of Shadowrunners, but it may well be that in a given situation 'subtle vs overt' has more explanatory power. Or 'loyal vs subversive'. Or 'paranoid vs trusting'. And furthermore, because the universe itself doesn't care, the best approximation to use may be situational. When dealing with your lover 'paranoid vs trusting' is probably not a great metric to use, but it's a good one to have in mind when dealing with a megacorp who would kill you as soon as look at you, except that you have skills they can use before they inevitably betray you.

Segev
2015-02-17, 02:39 PM
I think the reason why corner cases muddy things is that the judgment of "good" and "evil" we all innately do is based on patterns and on what kinds of things lead to "better" consequences more often.

The reason judging a single action is so difficult is because whether Han shot first or not makes no difference to that specific instance. However, if Han hadn't shot first, and Griido shot and killed him, it would have made a difference!

On the other hand, if Griido shot and missed and then Han shot back...little different from what happened in the fan-favorite version.

But...what it says about Han and how he acts is relevant. If it weren't, nobody would care that Han shot first. Neither Lucas, to change it to make Han seem more "heroic," nor the fans, who hate that it takes off his rough edges.

If Han shot first, it implies that he may have done so before, in similar situations, and that he would do so again, in a similar situation. It implies a pattern of behavior, admittedly from just one refrence point (which could make it a bad indicator). So if he never acted that way again, and had never done so before, perhaps it was aberrant behavior. On the other hand, if it was part of a pattern, it implies he's more the "get the drop on them" and "assume they're up to no good" type who doesn't give chances to GET up to no good...and does so lethally.

That is not usually portrayed as "good" behavior because assuming everybody else is out to get you and killing them before they can kill you, as a habit, will tend to kill more innocent people than not. It causes more harmful ripple effects than positive. It is not optimal behavior in the perspective of caring about anybody but yourself, and is therefore not optimal behavior for maxmizing your opportunities when it comes to interacting with others (who will learn not to come near you and thus won't give you opportunities).

I do think that, even if you leave things like religion out of it, you can find an objective morality in the real world. It's strictly based on optimal behavior for maximizing one's own opportunities and, because they extend from that which your society can offer you, the success and security of your society. (This continue to extend outwards, at least as far as others who engage in similar enlightened optimization can be found. The iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us that naive blind trust is not a winning strategy if held to beyond one burn. Burn me once, shame on you; burn me twice, shame on me.)

NichG
2015-02-17, 04:34 PM
That is not usually portrayed as "good" behavior because assuming everybody else is out to get you and killing them before they can kill you, as a habit, will tend to kill more innocent people than not. It causes more harmful ripple effects than positive. It is not optimal behavior in the perspective of caring about anybody but yourself, and is therefore not optimal behavior for maxmizing your opportunities when it comes to interacting with others (who will learn not to come near you and thus won't give you opportunities).

This is a heuristic, an approximation of a more complex reality for sake of being able to make decisions faster or with less computation required. When 'good' and 'evil' are defined at the level of the universe, its no longer an approximation but instead its a statement of physical law.



I do think that, even if you leave things like religion out of it, you can find an objective morality in the real world. It's strictly based on optimal behavior for maximizing one's own opportunities and, because they extend from that which your society can offer you, the success and security of your society. (This continue to extend outwards, at least as far as others who engage in similar enlightened optimization can be found. The iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us that naive blind trust is not a winning strategy if held to beyond one burn. Burn me once, shame on you; burn me twice, shame on me.)

Making heuristics is reasonable - necessary even - but by their nature as approximations, they aren't an exact coverage of the entire space of possibilities. A heuristic is a local approximation given a context - given such and such a society, given such and such a set of relationships between people, given such and such an underlying psychology.

The point is, when 'good' and 'evil' aren't baked into the universe, those contexts can vary. Morality gives optimal behavior in a society which shares and reinforces that morality. If you have a society whose context is different - hunters and gatherers versus farmers, or even something subtle like farming wheat (which can be done in more isolation) versus farming rice (which requires networked irrigation systems and reinforces consequences for upstream behavior) - then the best approximation will be different. And then you have the wilderness situation, where the fact that you can hide your actions changes the optimal behavior.

This means that the best basis function to use to think about things is different depending on situation. For one city, 'good' vs 'evil' is a good heuristic. For another city, it isn't. The guy you meet at a trading post won't necessarily agree with your morality and reward it - they may even punish you for it, trying to reinforce their own values. E.g. the world is complex. Your heuristic will work 70% of the time, and its a different 70% of the time than the other guy's heuristic. The person who can figure out when and where to use each heuristic (e.g. 'when in Rome') will have a strategy that works 95% of the time, maybe, and will do better than both of the single-heuristic players.

kyoryu
2015-02-17, 05:07 PM
My solution? Openly state your stance on in-game morality at the outset - it cuts through most of the tangle.


Well this is just a generally good idea on almost every topic.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-17, 08:15 PM
When you break it down, the palladium alignment pivots on essentially 6 axes...

Actively interested in helping others? (good alignments do it to be nice, selfish alignments that do it for profit)
Actively interested in harming others? (some good alignments do it to bad guys, selfish guys do it for profit or self preservation, bad guys do it for fun or on a whim)
Actively interested in avoiding harming others? (Good guys sometimes do it, other good guys dont. some selfish guys do, some don't)
Actively interested in a 'sense of fair play'? (There are both good, bad, and selfish versions of 'honorable')
Will you kill an innocent? (diabolic folks here exclusively, even 2/3 of the bad guys might harm but wont kill innocents)
Are any of the answers to the above questions 'situational' as in 'I'm normally not interested in harming others, but I change my answer if the guy we're talking about kills innocents' or I'm actively interested in not harming others or playing fairly until I meet someone who kills innocents'


Essentially the 6th question is 'does your moral code hinge in any way on your subjective views of the situation or recipient'

As usually its presented somewhat clunkily, but it really gets the job done. I have yet to meet a person who wasn't very starkly one of the only 7 alignments you have to choose from, and there are no 'neutrals' since the pivots are pretty objective pivots for the most part. Hillariously even the most idyllic alignment's stance on 'is lying ok' is only 'I try to avoid it' so even the alignment that's supposed to represent 'Superman and Jesus' is still capable of lying when they have to. Everybody lies!!!

What makes this alignment system work is that since it acknowledges 'active interest in harming others' can be done by both good, evil, and selfish people... IF you WOULD take an active interest in harming people... your 'reason for doing so' and informs the alignment in one way, and your ability to 'change your mind' if 'the situation called for it' or if 'the guy i'm dealing with doesnt deserve it' informs the alignment in another way. The action itself doesnt determine your alignment. Your justification for your actions does. Thusly it can also distinguish between 'people who follow laws and people who follow personal codes, those that do both and those that do one or the other and those that do neither'... Because while everybody *might*... the *reason* is what counts in the end.

The reason D&D's system runs into problems is because Lawful Good can't distinguish between palladiums 'principled' and 'scrupulous'... Where one 'good' guy will kill you for murdering babies and see no problem with that, the other 'good guy' will not tarnish his value system and instead will still 'treat you better than you deserve'... He will not let you being a bad guy stain/tarnish how he carries out justice. When a player thinks his paladin should be fine being the 'murderin bad guys' paladin, and the gm thinks the paladin should be the 'I will not let the fact that you are a bad guy turn me into a murderer'... Thats when the trouble starts.

So what makes it cool is that it draws an even finer distinction between certain things, while in the end having only 7 possible alignments instead of 9. It seems to do a much better job of representing that its not 'what you do' but 'why you do it' and 'at what points do you change your mind' that counts.

You're totally free to 'play in the gray' of moral subjectivity, but *how* you choose to play within that gray is what objectively decides your alignment.

Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-18, 03:08 AM
Good grief! I had NO intention of starting ANOTHER bloody alignment debate.

No, what I was talking about in the OP and my blog is that when you're making a setting you need to decide whether ethics are Tangible Things that are hardwired into the setting, or just debateable moral topics, or some combination of those two.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-18, 06:17 AM
My resposes then could be characterised as 'I tend to prefer palladium, who's system allows for debatable moral topics while at the same time establishing some firm, objective standards that cannot be funged'

It is subjective about actions, objective about 'reasons' and 'reasons' are always subjective,
It thus works by 'categorizing' your subjective reasons objectively.
It is indeed, as you put it, a combination of the two.

Perhaps an easier way to think about palladium alignment is that its got a spectrum of 'I treat you better than I think you deserve, as well as I think you deserve, or worse than I think you deserve' and combines that with a spectrum of 'what I think you deserve matters to me a lot, a little, or not at all'. More generally good is labeled by the system as 'you do things because you think it will help people' and evil is 'you do things without caring who it hurts' or 'you do things specifically intending to hurt others'... Evil isnt about simply 'harming others for fun'... You can be evil simply by 'not caring who gets hurt, even if you think you have subjectively good reasons for doing what you're doing.' At least a scrupulous person 'cares' about the fact that he has to harm a bad guy to stop him.

The outliers in the system are in fact the one's that say 'no... My ideas of what I think you deserve do not factor into how I treat you...' both on the good and evil side of the spectrum. If you refuse to kill a mass murderer for any reason (even to save others!!!) or if you murder babies for fun... Those are the places where the system perhaps 'imposes its views of morality' on you.

Between those objective lines are all the subjectives: those that do bad things for good reasons, do good things for bad reasons, or only look out for number one, which cannot be abjectly labeled as a good or bad thing.

The one point I'd like to make personally is that I love alignment systems and only play tabletop games that have them is that tabletop gaming for me isn't just a game... Its a socialization and learning tool... It's whole purpose is to allow people to expore their own minds on a deeper level than any videogame ever asks them to do. Without alignments, I might never have explored the gray areas of morals and ethics, and might never have developed an interest in exploring the gray areas of morals and ethics so as to solidify my own personal reasons for making the decisions and judgements that I do.

We all laugh at the youtube videos that point out how even a game as basic as mario world has him abusing turtles with reckless abandon. He stomps on them when he could have easily just jumped over them... He kicks them off cliffs when they're hiding... Throws them at each other... Feeds them to his dinodonkey... These videos are funny because our deeper mind gets to see the game on a level it never asked us to and seeing that deeper level is in fact quite funny. The tabletop gamer will be able to say 'wait a minute now... he killed those turtles because their leader abducted his girlfriend... and mario isn't above being cruel to those he feels deserve it, in the interest of rescuing his girlfriend which is both arguably a 'good pursuit' freeing hostages... and a selfish one... he's got a personal interest in her specifically. For me these kinds of thought processes are 'part of the fun' that people who don't think about alignment or don't want to think of alignment are missing out on.

Of course there are going to be people who don't want to play a game that asks them to explore their motivations for moral or ethical consistancy... To each his own. Not everyone enjoys moral and ethical philosophy as much as I do... But I personally picked up D&D and Palladium games because they did invite exploration of the mind in those terms. I'm a bit of a philosopher and I enjoy the part of the game that is exploring my own and other's philosophies. I like these games better because they are about more than simply run. kill. win.

The reason these games are BETTER is that they tell you 'if you don't like a rule... if a rule isnt fun for you... get rid of it or change it.. no biggie'... For those that dont like moral and ethical philosophy, the game is still playable and encourages you to play without it if that suits you.

It is notable that the Erol Otus cover 'Moldvay' edition of Red Book of BECMI listed alignments as only Lawful Neutral and Chaotic... In red book becmi, they didnt 'label' good or evil. I think thats significant. If for no other reason than the fact that its predecessor, the 1978 version DID have good and evil on the alignment spectrum. The 1973 version did not. So oddly its something they created, then took away... Then put back in.

Hillariously the protection from evil spell existed in the moldvay edition, but simply protected from attacks from someone with the opposite alignment of the character. For a lawful person this was a 'protection from chaos spell' and for a chaotic person this was a 'protection from lawful' spell and for neutral characters it likely didnt provide any benefit at all. So strange. Even stranger, Detect Evil was there as well but in the text for the spell says 'talk about it with your gm because chaotic isnt necessarily evil'. Heheheheh.

But as to the notion of your subject line for this thread... 'Ethics in Gaming' is very important to me personally.
What's the quote... 'A life unexamined is a wasted one'?

On the subject of 'should such a thing have mechanical benefits', I'd say yes to that as well. Not only does the xp system reward 'doing heroic things', but I'm currently running a character with a 'karmic power mutation', so getting mechanical benefits based on 'subjective reasoning' is a significant part of the build. Sure it limits my options on the kinds of things I can do with him, but thats not a bad thing. Particularly if he wasnt planning on 'murdering babies for fun' in the first place.

Segev
2015-02-18, 10:49 AM
This is a heuristic, an approximation of a more complex reality for sake of being able to make decisions faster or with less computation required. When 'good' and 'evil' are defined at the level of the universe, its no longer an approximation but instead its a statement of physical law.



Making heuristics is reasonable - necessary even - but by their nature as approximations, they aren't an exact coverage of the entire space of possibilities. A heuristic is a local approximation given a context - given such and such a society, given such and such a set of relationships between people, given such and such an underlying psychology.Except when a heuristic becomes more obvious across multiple situations, it starts to suggest an underlying law of nature.


The point is, when 'good' and 'evil' aren't baked into the universe, those contexts can vary. Morality gives optimal behavior in a society which shares and reinforces that morality. If you have a society whose context is different - hunters and gatherers versus farmers, or even something subtle like farming wheat (which can be done in more isolation) versus farming rice (which requires networked irrigation systems and reinforces consequences for upstream behavior) - then the best approximation will be different. And then you have the wilderness situation, where the fact that you can hide your actions changes the optimal behavior.Again, there are generalized forms of behavior in all of those situations which, heuristically, consistently result in "better outcomes" for all involved.

The specifics may vary, and cause specific behavioral changes, but the overall principle that can be defined by mining these data sets full of heuristic rules remains identifiable: whether you call it "good" or "moral" attitude, or enlightened self-interest, or anything else, it remains that treating others with respect, seeking mutually beneficial solutions and exchanges of goods and services, and avoiding conflict that destroys resources (including lives) is overall going to increase the wealth and prosperity of the collection of individuals involved, and therefore the liklihood of wealth and maximum potential wealth of each involved individual.

Ideas like "charity" and "kindness" and "love thy neighbor" and the like are central to all of these approaches.

Conversely, "eye for an eye" is one of the oldest laws of retributive justice, and has actually been demonstrated in iterated prisoners' dilemma games to be an optimal solution to avoiding the former ideas - charity/kindness/neighborly love - making one into naught but a victim.

Of course there are corner cases where it is less clear, but even then the general principles identified by examining the heuristics for commonality will tend to guide towards narrowing options, identifying ones that are better than others.


For one city, 'good' vs 'evil' is a good heuristic. For another city, it isn't.No, it still is.


The guy you meet at a trading post won't necessarily agree with your morality and reward it - they may even punish you for it, trying to reinforce their own values.Just because somebody acts with sub-optimal behavior does not make the behavior more optimal. It changes your optimal response, but it does not change what would have been the optimal situation, nor that he had the capability of making choices which would have brought it about.

Consistent sub-optimal choices on his part will overall degrade his effectiveness and value, both to himself and others. Societies which elevate sub-optimal behaviors similarly tend to be societies which are either in decline or which are achieving less as a whole.


E.g. the world is complex.I think you mean "i.e.," as "e.g." is equivalent to "for example," while "i.e." is equivalent to "in other words."


Your heuristic will work 70% of the time, and its a different 70% of the time than the other guy's heuristic.Of course. But if one recognizes the inapplicability of the specific heuristic, one can still fall back on general principles - understood laws of nature (or at least human behavior) - to identify an optimal strategy. And, barring the necessity for "eye for an eye" retribution, typically responding with the standardly-accepted "good" behaviors will bring about optimal results.


The person who can figure out when and where to use each heuristic (e.g. 'when in Rome') will have a strategy that works 95% of the time, maybe, and will do better than both of the single-heuristic players.Obviously. But whether in Rome, China, the USA, Saudi Arabia, or the wildnerness far from any representative of any legal body, principles such as "don't kill people capriciously," "trade something they want for something you want rather than trying to take it by force," and "don't present an easy target to those who do not adhere to these principles," remain true.

And will tend to define what people would recognize as a "good person" if performed by ficitonal characters.

Therefore, I believe there is objective morality that is, if not "baked in to the universe," at least is baked in to humanity.

Lord Torath
2015-02-18, 02:53 PM
Good grief! I had NO intention of starting ANOTHER bloody alignment debate.

No, what I was talking about in the OP and my blog is that when you're making a setting you need to decide whether ethics are Tangible Things that are hardwired into the setting, or just debateable moral topics, or some combination of those two.Um, you do realize you're posting on the Giant in the Playground forums, right? This is what we do! :smallamused: At least until we veer into Morally Justified talk and a Mod shuts us down!

Vincent, I'll have to give Palladium's system a closer look. I've got most of the old Robotech books (loved that show as a kid, not so much as an adult), but I've never actually run anything in that system. Thanks for your input!

Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-18, 03:02 PM
Yeah - I had been thinking it was about time I gave up on this site.

NichG
2015-02-18, 03:31 PM
Except when a heuristic becomes more obvious across multiple situations, it starts to suggest an underlying law of nature.

The specifics may vary, and cause specific behavioral changes, but the overall principle that can be defined by mining these data sets full of heuristic rules remains identifiable: whether you call it "good" or "moral" attitude, or enlightened self-interest, or anything else, it remains that treating others with respect, seeking mutually beneficial solutions and exchanges of goods and services, and avoiding conflict that destroys resources (including lives) is overall going to increase the wealth and prosperity of the collection of individuals involved, and therefore the liklihood of wealth and maximum potential wealth of each involved individual.

Again, there are generalized forms of behavior in all of those situations which, heuristically, consistently result in "better outcomes" for all involved.

Ideas like "charity" and "kindness" and "love thy neighbor" and the like are central to all of these approaches.

Conversely, "eye for an eye" is one of the oldest laws of retributive justice, and has actually been demonstrated in iterated prisoners' dilemma games to be an optimal solution to avoiding the former ideas - charity/kindness/neighborly love - making one into naught but a victim.

No, it still is.

Of course. But if one recognizes the inapplicability of the specific heuristic, one can still fall back on general principles - understood laws of nature (or at least human behavior) - to identify an optimal strategy. And, barring the necessity for "eye for an eye" retribution, typically responding with the standardly-accepted "good" behaviors will bring about optimal results.

Obviously. But whether in Rome, China, the USA, Saudi Arabia, or the wildnerness far from any representative of any legal body, principles such as "don't kill people capriciously," "trade something they want for something you want rather than trying to take it by force," and "don't present an easy target to those who do not adhere to these principles," remain true.


All of these are assertions which require proof. Worse, because we're talking about game settings and not the real world, you not only need to prove that these are true in one world, but in all possible worlds that people might want to play a game about.

You're talking about things like 'iterated prisoner's dilemma', but those are all results associated with a specific payoff matrix. If you change the payoff matrix to a different universality class of game, you change the optimal strategy and therefore you change the emergent moral heuristics.

What you're saying amounts to the assertion 'all games are just forms of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma'. But that need not be the case in a tabletop RPG.

For example, just off the top of my head, you can have asymmetric games, games with a privileged actor, games with randomness, incomplete-information games, costly information-gathering or information-exchange games (e.g. 'honest communication' games), zero-sum games, multiplayer games, multi-objective games, games where probability of score-sufficiency rather than score maximization is the goal, etc. Undoubtedly there will be a smaller set of universality classes than the set of elaborations I've specified, but even in the symmetric, deterministic, etc, etc 2x2 payoff matrix case there's also the Hawk-Dove (or Chicken, or Snowdrift) game and the Stag Hunt game, for example.

If the world primarily consists of a biased set of some part of those games, then heuristics become useful. If the distribution of games is situational, then you have situational heuristics emerging. If the distribution of games is uniform, then the No Free Lunch theorem says you're screwed anyways.


Therefore, I believe there is objective morality that is, if not "baked in to the universe," at least is baked in to humanity.

Considering that even D&D is a game that involves 'not playing humans' to a large degree, that's a small subset of tabletop games one could expect to play.

Segev
2015-02-18, 03:43 PM
Most non-human things that would constitute PCable critters still act remarkably human, because it's what we, as humans, relate to.

That said, yes, with a sufficiently alien sentience/sapience/intelligence/whatever, these rules may change. The idea of "blue and orange morality" to describe things that truly cannot grasp "good" and "evil" as we do because they are too alien is a fictional trope for a reason.

However, I will also state that, if you operate on the assumption of humans acting like humans and other races being sufficiently human-like in mentality and needs to be considered similar to the standard fantasy setting, you will find emergent objective morality.


Moreover, even with sufficiently alien beings...there will emerge an objective morality for that universe. It may be different than ours or what we're used to. But I posit that it exists.

You're right; we can't prove it.


That said, I use the iterated prisoners' dilemma because it's hard to specify anything else as a general case. And the reward matrix suitably represents the kinds of rewards one expects between actors who have a choice to cooperate for gain for both or to defect for a chance at greater individual gain at the expense of the other(s).

The asymmetric games are not, I confess, something I have designed evolutionary players to execute and find optimal strategies, but they also represent situations which are built on already having accepted the results of the iterated prisoners' dilemma to build the basis for the new situation, if you're trying to model any societal structure within them. Social structures evolve because of the benefits of cooperation in the iterated prisoners' dilemma. Were it not so, we wouldn't have the structures required for the asymmetric games to begin wtih.

Geostationary
2015-02-18, 04:50 PM
emergent objective morality.

That word does not mean what you think it means. For a morality to be objective, it must be axiomatic and distinct from the system over which it governs. What you're describing is a morality predicated on what is optimal in a given system, where what is optimal is what you consider to provide the greatest common good (which is not always a belief shared by all). The thing about your "emergent objective morality" is that, as an emergent property of a system, what is optimal changes with the context of the system. To be emergent is to be inherently subjective.

NichG
2015-02-18, 04:52 PM
Most non-human things that would constitute PCable critters still act remarkably human, because it's what we, as humans, relate to.

That said, yes, with a sufficiently alien sentience/sapience/intelligence/whatever, these rules may change. The idea of "blue and orange morality" to describe things that truly cannot grasp "good" and "evil" as we do because they are too alien is a fictional trope for a reason.

However, I will also state that, if you operate on the assumption of humans acting like humans and other races being sufficiently human-like in mentality and needs to be considered similar to the standard fantasy setting, you will find emergent objective morality.

Moreover, even with sufficiently alien beings...there will emerge an objective morality for that universe. It may be different than ours or what we're used to. But I posit that it exists.

This moves very far beyond the OP's point, which is that if the DM is going to impose an objective morality they should discuss it with the players. Instead, what you're talking about here is an emergent strategy for the game.

And yes, I agree that for any game you put in front of the players, there will be strategies that work well and strategies that work poorly. But the distinction that is relevant to the tabletop game question at least is whether or not that difference is directly imposed (e.g. 'the universe will punish you if you choose to defect') or if it naturally emerges out of the details of the scenario.

It makes a difference, because if it comes out of the details of the scenario then it doesn't matter what the DM's views on morality are - a given choice of actions will either work well, or it won't. So its not necessary for anyone outside of the game to give an explicit exposition about their moral philosophy, because even if the DM believes that a player is performing 'evil' actions they are constrained to react to those actions as the agents in the world would react and not based on their personal morality (of course their morality and everything else about how they think about the world will feed in to setting up the details of the scenario, but the players can obtain information about those details and make their own judgements).

Even more to the point, it may turn out that the heuristics that emerge from play are things that no one at the table anticipated when the game began. For example, I've had a Tragedy of the Commons situation crop up in a tabletop game but get resolved beneficially only because one of the participants didn't care about their score and couldn't be bothered to be greedy; if not for the laziness of that one player, it would have been textbook.




You're right; we can't prove it.

That said, I use the iterated prisoners' dilemma because it's hard to specify anything else as a general case. And the reward matrix suitably represents the kinds of rewards one expects between actors who have a choice to cooperate for gain for both or to defect for a chance at greater individual gain at the expense of the other(s).

The asymmetric games are not, I confess, something I have designed evolutionary players to execute and find optimal strategies, but they also represent situations which are built on already having accepted the results of the iterated prisoners' dilemma to build the basis for the new situation, if you're trying to model any societal structure within them. Social structures evolve because of the benefits of cooperation in the iterated prisoners' dilemma. Were it not so, we wouldn't have the structures required for the asymmetric games to begin wtih.

I don't think you can support the claim that social structures evolve because of IPD in particular. IPD isn't the only simple game (symmetric 2x2) in which there are global collapses due to selfish rational behavior. The Hawk-Dove game, for example, is a game which has a symmetry breaking that creates something along the lines of division of labor, such that you have a mixed population where one set of players consistently plays Hawk and the other set consistently plays Dove. Without that emergent structure, the outcome is either globally less optimal (both players are Doves), or globally and locally catastrophic (both players are Hawks). The Stag Hunt game is similar to Prisoner's Dilemma, except that the structure means that cooperation and defecting are both stable Nash Equilibria without the influence of the iterated component.

And of course you have trivial games too - situations where locally optimal and globally optimal play are the same. In reality these are probably the majority of games, but we tend not to remark on them because they're so obvious as to not really qualify as 'games' to us. For example, a party of two adventurers goes into a dungeon and faces against two monsters. If they choose to attack a different monster each, then they are exposed to more attacks over the course of the battle than if they focus fire. So cooperation is a no-brainer: there is no advantage to not cooperating, and no disadvantage or increased risk to cooperating. It wouldn't make for a very interesting research paper though.

Segev
2015-02-18, 07:07 PM
For a morality to be objective, it must be axiomatic and distinct from the system over which it governs.
That's like saying "for gravity to be objective, it must be axiomatic and distinct from the universe's laws of physics."

"Objective" means "observable and not subject to how the observer feels about it." As opposed to "subjective," which actually does depend how the observer feels about it.

Whether that dress on that woman is beautiful or not is subjective. Whether she is wearing that dress or not is objective. Whether she is sexy or not is subjective. What her physical proportions are is objective.

If morality is objective, all that means is that you can determine it regardless of what the observer feels about it. If it is subjective, it varies based on the observer. For morality to be objective, therefore, it must be definable based on something other than how you feel about yourself after you obey or violate it. Because moral behaviors do have objective results, such that following them tends to elevate the overall well-being of the collection of individuals which does so, there is objective morality.

If that morality changes based on the group of people, then you have likely conflated situational things with your model of morality. But to reject the notion of objective morality, it is necessary to show that the morality of one society and the morality of another is entirely mutually exclusive, and that each society is equally successful.

NichG
2015-02-18, 07:30 PM
If that morality changes based on the group of people, then you have likely conflated situational things with your model of morality. But to reject the notion of objective morality, it is necessary to show that the morality of one society and the morality of another is entirely mutually exclusive, and that each society is equally successful.

Its not even necessary to show that they're equally successful, just that they're both stable with respect to each-other. The problem with doing it based on 'successfulness' is that measures of success can be subjective. From the point of view of an individual in the society, success could be their personal number of offspring produced. Or maybe how long they can live. Or how much wealth they accumulate within their lifetime. Or the breadth of the experiences they get to have. Or how many people they get to murder. So successfulness isn't a reliable metric.

For mutual stability on the other hand, I can't offer a general proof, but I can offer the observation that ecologically there are a large number of niches and in fact ecological dynamics give rise to niche-creation in some cases. Distinct ecological niches mean that multiple different types of organism can use different strategies for maximizing the amplification of their genome without actually wiping out the other. E.g. they're mutually stable with respect to each-other, because their strategies are optimized for different contexts, food supplies, etc which all exist in the world. A hummingbird isn't 'better' or 'worse' than a dolphin, they're just optimized to cover different mutually exclusive parts of the problem-space.

That suggests to me that its premature to conclude that societies would naturally only have a single universal niche.

NWA
2015-02-19, 04:47 AM
Some of the traits of Good are outlined in the Book of Exalted Deeds, which, basically tries to take a virtue ethics approach to the "morality question".

Personally, I think forcing people to choose the alignment at the beginning of the game is a bit harsh, because people certainly develop moral traits of their characters during the game itself. However, as insofar as it can help players with roleplaying their characters, the alignment mechanism can be useful. But even then I would ditch it in favour of a more elaborate stance on moral issues that each player has to decide for themselves.

Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-19, 08:24 AM
Could you expand on this? It seems like a fairly strong assertion to make, since there are many games outside of D&D which don't actually give Good and Evil privileged status over other concepts.

I think that your ongoing debate with Segev on this thread has answered your own request. :smallbiggrin:

The original prompt for my blog post was that an acquaintance of mine was trying to assert that a certain real-world religious text was evil, while I put forward the view that only the actions of the people who read and chose to act on the text could be good or evil, and that to say the inanimate text was evil was nonsense.
Now of course, in a fantasy game, we're quite able to have a good or evil objects if we want - but it's only fair to establish that this is or isn't the case before playing your game.

For example: If your game involved vampires, it might be a reasonable assumption that they are evil, and that good items and symbols repel or damage them (as in popular stories) - but that assumption needs to be confirmed or denied, at the very least in the GM's notes on the setting, so as to have consistency.

For different players groups and different game settings, the preferred stance will be different. There is no correct answer, any more than there is one correct game system.

Segev
2015-02-19, 09:52 AM
Hrm. I am not sure I can adequately discuss this without breaking terms of use, as it requires discussing real world examples. Even invoking Godwin's Law is risking violation, because it might still be considered offensive to make negative statements about nazis.

I was going to try doing so to discuss the question of whether a text can be evil.

Let's say a text espouses a philosophy which enjoins people who hold it to certain actions.

Abandoning debate about objective or subjective morality for the moment, let's say that you recognize anybody who holds and acts on a particular philosophy to be evil. (Say, "Blond-haired women must be made to birth the children of brown-haired men, whether they like it or not; the Flying Spaghetti Monster decrees it!")

Is the text which espouses and supports that philosophy evil?

I'd argue that it is, at the very least, a tool of evil. It is used to spread an evil belief and encourage (and justify) evil actions.

Whether the text itself is evil is an interesting question. Heck, in D&D, whether a text which merely states an evil philosophy can detect as an alignment is an interesting question.

Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-19, 10:03 AM
Of course, this thread isn't about the real world, it's about game settings - or at least, that's what my OP was about - so whether you believe a text can be evil or good in real life, you need to decide if that is also the case in game.

When we make game settings, they are fictional, and thus implicitly alternate realities - so the rules of that reality need to be established.

I suppose that what I'm saying is that, as a referee or author of a game setting, you need to be aware of these big philosophical questions and then supply actual answers to them for the purposes of the game setting.
That's not to say that you have to believe that the answer you use for your setting is really true in the real world, or that you need to believe that the question is even answerable in the real world - just that as a referee, you need to know the truth of the game world.

goto124
2015-02-19, 10:26 AM
Still, I don't understand the purpose of cosmic alignment in tabletops. If it's a guideline for newbies, then it's a, well, guideline. Not rule. If it's to make players behave, it's all OOC gentleman's agreement anyway.

Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-19, 10:46 AM
Still, I don't understand the purpose of cosmic alignment in tabletops. If it's a guideline for newbies, then it's a, well, guideline. Not rule. If it's to make players behave, it's all OOC gentleman's agreement anyway.

So does this gentlemen's agreement tell you whether demons can enter a church? Is a holy symbol inherently imbued with power to oppose evil? Is a book of nasty spells evil in itself, or is it only the act of casting those nasty spells that can be morally judged?

Those are the questions I'm talking about, not character alignment.

I will now keep a count of the number of times I have to explain myself on this thread. This makes 5.

Segev
2015-02-19, 10:49 AM
Still, I don't understand the purpose of cosmic alignment in tabletops. If it's a guideline for newbies, then it's a, well, guideline. Not rule. If it's to make players behave, it's all OOC gentleman's agreement anyway.

It serves as a tool for helping guide specific choices and give specific information. "Detect Evil" tells the Paladin if a target is likely up to no good. "Detect Good" can help the clergy determine if the claimed altruistic motives of an individual might be valid. Various spells can target things based on their alignments, allowing for Holy Word to be something the good guys use which does nothing bad to them but hurts all the demonic foes. Blasphemy similarly is a potent tool for the villains.

And it allows for some mechanical hooks for certain forms of mind control: the helm of opposite alignment turns good people evil, evil people good, lawful people chaotic, and chaotic people lawful. It's one of the few instances where alignment is prescriptive rather than descriptive, too.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-19, 11:10 AM
Still, I don't understand the purpose of cosmic alignment in tabletops. If it's a guideline for newbies, then it's a, well, guideline. Not rule. If it's to make players behave, it's all OOC gentleman's agreement anyway.

If youy don't understand it, play Ancient Domains of Mystery, a computer roguelike, and see all the various ways in which your cosmic relation to Law, Neutrality and Chaos affects how the game is played, and to a degree, must be played.

Hiro Protagonest
2015-02-19, 12:07 PM
So does this gentlemen's agreement tell you whether demons can enter a church? Is a holy symbol inherently imbued with power to oppose evil? Is a book of nasty spells evil in itself, or is it only the act of casting those nasty spells that can be morally judged?

Those are the questions I'm talking about, not character alignment.

I will now keep a count of the number of times I have to explain myself on this thread. This makes 5.

You don't need alignment for that. In Exalted, demons are creatures of darkness. They were pronounced creatures of darkness by the Unconquered Sun, who is not necessarily a good guy. There's also Axiomatic effects which are used by Alchemicals, the chosen of Autochthon, to fight Autochthon's disease, and would also work on the fair folk which are creatures of literal chaos.

Waker
2015-02-19, 12:17 PM
Alignment to me is one of the biggest wastes of ink in D&D. Though some might disagree with me on it's usefulness as either a roleplaying tool or being a useful mechanic, let me explain one of my biggest gripes with it. Think to all of the various arguments you've seen at gaming tables and forums like this one trying to clarify whether or not a given act a character did was Good/Evil/Chaotic/Lawful. Ok, got it? Now, chuck it out the window, cause it doesn't matter. In D&D at least, alignment isn't a matter of philosophy like it is in the real world, it's an aspect of reality itself. There are beings who are literally composed of Good or Evil. You can't argue about subjective morality with things like that and many players squirm at the notion of an objective morality (since it might be something that they vehemently disagree with), so what are you left with?
My approach to it is simple; are you mortal? Then you have no alignment. Because mortals can be so easily influenced, possess Free Will and are comprised of each of the alignments, they never have a notable alignment component to them. Characters can claim to be Good or Lawful if they want, but they never embody the alignment, even in the cases of Clerics or Paladins. All those spells and class abilities that specify alignment like Detect/Smite Evil? Change 'em to something more neutral like vanilla Smite or Detect Ethos (any alignment, so basically Detect Outsiders for the most part).
As for the roleplaying aspect, I just want a few explanations for a character. Not a whole essay on how they live their life, just a few expectations of how they carry themselves. Paladins or Clerics only fall when they violate some aspect of their faith, not from a blanket rule of all things Good.

The TLDR version is that Alignment is a thing of the cosmos and being with radically different thought processes than mortals. We can talk about it, but we can't fully understand it.

Altair_the_Vexed
2015-02-19, 12:19 PM
You don't need alignment for that.

Yes, I know that. That's exactly what I'm talking about!
But just because a game doesn't have an alignment system doesn't mean that the question of meta-ethics is irrelevant. We still need to have answers to those questions.

"Alignment" is not the original point of this thread - the title is "ETHICS in gaming". Sure, the most famous RPG uses alignment to record ethics, but if I wanted to just talk about alignments, I'd have used a different title - or maybe just lain down somewhere and pondered my dumb and pointless life, or something else more productive.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-19, 03:09 PM
So by talking about ethics instead of alignment, the question shifts from a discussion of good and evil to a discussion about right and wrong.

I'm on board with you so far... Removing for a moment the idea that most systems use alignment, no matter how poorly, for the purposes of hashing out the ambiguities of the why's of character actions... What in particular were you interested in exploring about meta ethics in gaming?

Projectivism is common?
Universal prescriptivism is bad?
Ethical naturalism only feels right until it doesnt? (heheheheh)
The only way to run a paladin successfully is through moral nihilism... 'I don't believe morals can be labeled as patently true or false'
Otherwise known as 'immunity to being judged in a good/bad/right/wrong way'?

Moral relativism is at best the sword of the seraphim... at worst a shield for a wanna-be paladin of murder.

My point about the palladium alignment system is that it does, to a certain extent, toy with moral relativity... There are good people who murder, and they do so 'for reasons they believe to be right'... which in the grand scheme of things cannot possibly avoid being moral relativism... So there's not really much to talk about other than 'does the system allow for it or not'.

I hope we don't want to have a discussion about moral relativism.. Those conversations tend to be somewhat circular... No pun intended.

If there's one nice thing I can say about moral relativism is that it's the gateway to moral nihilism, and that moral skepticism is basically 'doubling down' on moral nihilism... Not only can nobody's particular ethical view be objectively the correct measure of right and wrong... Moral skepticism is essentially saying nobody's particular view of the various possible factions of meta ethics can possibly be objectively the correct measure of how to measure right and wrong... Its relativism all the way down.

NichG
2015-02-19, 04:30 PM
Yes, I know that. That's exactly what I'm talking about!
But just because a game doesn't have an alignment system doesn't mean that the question of meta-ethics is irrelevant. We still need to have answers to those questions.

"Alignment" is not the original point of this thread - the title is "ETHICS in gaming". Sure, the most famous RPG uses alignment to record ethics, but if I wanted to just talk about alignments, I'd have used a different title - or maybe just lain down somewhere and pondered my dumb and pointless life, or something else more productive.

I guess what I'd assert is, the questions of meta-ethics may or may not be relevant depending on whether the game designer (or DM) chooses to elevate those questions to the level of cosmological forces. That doesn't mean that the questions don't exist if it isn't done, but it does mean that in that case the DM shouldn't actually provide absolute answers to the questions to the players. "Who knows?" should be the default answer in those cases, otherwise you're actually creating a system in which there is an objective truth and more to the point the objective truth is specifically and only the DM's chosen truth.

E.g. in Call of Cthulhu, magical texts are dangerous. They don't have to be good or evil, consequentialist or absolute, or whatever, because the underlying game mechanics say: when you read a magical text, you permanently lose a little bit of yourself. That's the game system's solution to that particular Gordian knot.

On the other hand, in Call of Cthulhu, if the DM answers questions about something like 'is all magic evil?' they're actually changing the game. Previously, that would have been a grey area - perhaps magic is self-destructive but can be used in a sacrificial manner to help others, or perhaps it just universally makes the world a crappier place, but the characters don't know the answer automatically, and finding that answer (or if there even is an objective answer) is something they have to deal with themselves. If the DM says 'the answer is X', then thats not explaining the rules, its actually changing the rules (because the rules had no definitive answer beforehand).

In that sense I think it's the DM's job to be impartial on meta-ethical questions that are not baked into the system.

NWA
2015-02-22, 08:22 AM
Because moral behaviors do have objective results, such that following them tends to elevate the overall well-being of the collection of individuals which does so, there is objective morality.


This does not follows. How do you measure the "result" of a moral judgement anyway?



If that morality changes based on the group of people, then you have likely conflated situational things with your model of morality. But to reject the notion of objective morality, it is necessary to show that the morality of one society and the morality of another is entirely mutually exclusive, and that each society is equally successful.


Why do I need to show that moral views of two societies are mutually exclusive? What if they are not? It does not mean that the truth-values of moral judgments are objective. What if two different societies belief that 2+2=5? Does that make it an objective fact?

Also, what does success has to do with it all?

Segev
2015-02-24, 04:39 PM
This does not follows. How do you measure the "result" of a moral judgement anyway?It isn't always trivial. But long-term observation can generally give an idea of whether a society is successful or not; whether it's thriving or stagnating or decaying.




Why do I need to show that moral views of two societies are mutually exclusive? What if they are not? It does not mean that the truth-values of moral judgments are objective. What if two different societies belief that 2+2=5? Does that make it an objective fact?

Also, what does success has to do with it all?If a society believes 2+2=5 and always acts on it, it will have fundamental consequences for their technological and economic development. Because it is not true, it will cause defects in anything that relies on mathematics, which will adversely effect their ability to develop and use technology, to perform any sort of economic transaction, and to generally function in any field which involves math.

If they hold it as a "moral" rule, such that people who act differently are considered "bad," then bad actors who act on "2+2=4" will be more successful, and will result in corruption (from their perspective) being more successful. The society will fall apart if it adheres to their "moral," or everybody will violate it to such an extent that it will fade as a "moral rule."

This is, incidentally, why black markets form in just about any society which tries to deny the basic fundaments of trade and property and ownership. Such interactions are a natural optimum. And that's why "no stealing" is a generally good moral rule.

dps
2015-02-24, 06:39 PM
The problem with alignment and other enforced morality systems is simply that they try to simplify and mechanize something that is complicated and lacks good hard-and-fast rules.

You think that's not also true of rules for combat, or barter, or magic?