Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
Whether or not selfishness is evil in the real world, it's consistently portrayed as evil in D&D.
Is it?

Your talking about a wider world than you think. the game's protagonists entire goals are: acquiring material possessions and gaining power until they are level 20 through violence. that is Greed and ambition viewed as the default motivation for anyone playing, with long lists of potions, magic items, treasures, details of kind of features you gain as you level.

This tendency to do the acts of selfishness often remain even on Good characters. If literally acquiring anything material and immaterial to become more powerful and killing anyone in your way to do so isn't selfish, I don't know what is. its what the game is known for, its core gameplay loop

Ah! but here is where someone jumps in with "oh but its some alien form of good that doesn't match entirely to we want good to be". and somehow this makes it beyond criticism. It doesn't. Why? Because DnD is many things, but what it isn't, is a game successfully portraying an alien culture and morality. Its too shallow, all these reasonings that somehow its portraying an objective morality universe and a bunch of alien things that come with it and its tropes....are headcanons at best, giving the universe way too much credit.

The detect evil and smite good features that is harped on as being "vital" aren't even a universal ability- they are an ability specific to paladins or clerics. entire campaigns can be played without these abilities even coming up, because no one even has them because they are neither of these classes. if alignment were as important as everyone says it was, wouldn't more classes get the ability to discern and make use of it? you could replace the cleric's party role with a druid and it would serve just fine. its perfectly possible to play without the ability to discern alignment even in 3.5, and some players on this very forum have gone on record to state that they'd rather not play with a paladin because of their morality.

thus the level of focus on morality people in this thread speak of, has always been optional, at best. only clerics and paladins have ability to even play out this "use alignment as a tool for this or that" mentality being talked about, every other class needs to use more relatable moral decisions to make things work, and they are no less DnD or less moral for doing so. these spells and abilities of smiting and detect evil were never vital, they were just denoting a focus that one can easily ignore, and is ignored even now, more than ever. you aren't even morally penalized by the alignment system for not having them or not focusing on it. you can easily be good without involving such matters, as DnD itself admits. all these mechanics get you is extra damage and distrust/paranoia, the latter of which DnD players already have in spades from going through dungeons where literally anything might kill you.