Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
Yeeeah, the only reason videogame rpgs get away with this "kleptomaniac killer" thing is gameplay and story segregation: most rpgs don't acknowledge the hero is going around stealing things from random containers, nor do they talk about random encounters all that much. the story often assumes they're moral people and focuses on the important fights they do rather questioning the morality of every single encounter. this is partly because the game needs mechanics to support a gameplay loop and there is only so much dialogue you can put in due to work
You also shouldn't understate how bad of an idea calling one side explicitly "Good" is. It's a lot easier to avoid questioning your life choices in World of Warcraft or Fallout when you don't have "you are Good and Lawful for killing all those Orcs" shoved in your face. People can mind caulk a lot of you don't insist on drawing their attention to difficult questions. For the most part, of you want to do Hack 'n' Slash, you can just... do Hack 'n' Slash. Combat tends to be fun, and people are (perhaps disturbingly) willing to accept fairly minimal narrative connective tissue between fight scenes (see: most action movies).

Edit: so....yeah, DnD as always, has a bit of identity problem. its gameplay loop of going into dungeons, killing monsters and acquiring loot contradict its alignment system.
D&D's problem is that it's a weird mix of Iron Age, Medieval, and Age of Exploration tropes, which results in a moral setup that is... not well-aligned with the moral sentiments of most people. Layer the idea that the side of "basically conquistadors" is objectively Good on top of that and you get some real issues.

why? because adventurers going around killing things in dungeons is actually the least effective way to solve things using objective morality. the logical moral conclusion of the alignment system is that evil should be redeemed, because killing them sends them to the lower planes where they lose all hope of redemption, empowering the lower planes.
I'm not actually convinced that's true. The planes are supposed to be infinite, so it's not entirely clear if you can meaningfully increase or decrease their power. Insofar as D&D seems to abide by the "Gods Need Worship Badly" paradigm, it seems at least plausible that if you were to kill off all the mortal followers of Orcus, that might be a more effective anti-Orcus strategy than trying to persuade them to get on board with Pelor. Which doesn't really address the underlying "holy crap that's awful" of things, but I'm not convinced the overall thing is quite as bad as you say.