Quote Originally Posted by Segev View Post
The difficulty with Team Jersey approaches to objective ethics and morality is that applying it arbitrarily manufactures MORE "muddy" situations, rather than clarifying the few that already exist. If it's "always good" to kill vampires (because they're always evil), then a vampire that is not hurting anybody, only drinks animal blood (or only takes blood donations from those who voluntarily give/trade it, without causing permanent harm to the donors), and is a good father-figure to his adopted family and possibly the noble protector of his town from a lantern archon-led bandit force that pillages and rapes (but is still doing good because they're following a lantern archon, and following archons is always good!)... that's incoherent to our definitions of "good" and "evil" in general.
That's the thing though: playing devil's advocate to Gary Gigax' original intent, in the tabletop game of D&D where the rules of morality are objective, an [Evil] Vampire should never behave good, and a [Good] Archon should never behave evil. Following an Archon is always good because Archons should never be presented as evil to players. If the GM makes a morally questionable Archon, he's literally playing the game wrong. A good character would view the very idea of resorting to an [Evil] spell as unthinkable, and should be played to do everything in its power to avoid it. Failing that enough, it should become [Evil] and start behaving accordingly. Such a system is self-coherent, but it requires the GM and players play by its rules, not the real world's.