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2021-04-11, 01:45 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2017
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2021-04-11, 01:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
I suspect you are remembering Durkon apologising to Vaarsuvius.
But I might be wrong.
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2021-04-11, 04:41 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2009
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2021-04-11, 05:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2020
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- massachusetts
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2021-04-11, 06:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2017
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
Thank you for reading 623, and for taking the time to reconsider (especially given the sheer weight of my rants on this topic). The latter especially is an unmerited gift. (^_^)
I've made too many long posts to fairly expect people to read them all, so just a heads-up: I've clarified in other posts that I'm talking about this having happened previously (specifically wrt surviving Azure City). I have absolutely no doubt V has earned immense externally-judged guilt over the Familicide.
(segue)Thinking about how to respond to your post helped me figure out something: Is it just me, or are V's responses to the two different types of internal guilt an incisive commentary? V's (false) survivor's guilt resulted in disaster, far more than it led to anything good. V's recognition of their (true) earned guilt has resulted in good more than it has in bad.(/segue)
Thank you for the affirmation. The driving force for my re-tangent was having previously seen people imply/assert that V should feel guilty (i.e. bears guilt) for surviving Azure City, but this was part of what brought it to mind.
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
Spoiler: collapsed for spaceNot at all sure, but we might define Good, Neutral, and Evil similarly... for brevity, my grossly-oversimplified version would be
Good: Tends to put others' needs ahead of their wants
Neutral: Can go either way, heavily depends on the situation
Evil: Tends to put their wants ahead of others' needs
I'm a big believer in my own version of horseshoe theory, though... the farther you go toward any extreme pole of a spectrum, the more likely* it is that the results of the behavior will end up being the same. For example, by my definition it would nominally be a Good motivation to do terrible harm to yourself in order to make sure your family has the money to buy a fancy TV. But the actual results would be to hurt them badly, especially if they found out the motivation. And on a subconscious level, such a martyr complex might actually be an Evil motivation: In order to feel righteous, you badly hurt other people.
* - Absolutely not a sure thing. For example, someone sacrificing their life to save thousands is an extremely-Good motivation with extremely-Good results.
Which is why I'm not sure whether V's survival is a Neutral act. V did all they could to make sure the soldiers knew V couldn't save them, shy of letting themself be killed to prove it. If V lets themself be killed just to avoid the unfair condemnation of the soldiers and provide one of them with one more round of life, that harms V's loved ones (who will probably always hope against hope that someday V will return).
Probably just me, but the more I think about the alignment spectrum the more I wish the word "Neutral" could be replaced by "Ambiguous" or just a blank space, and a separate category created for "Moot" (e.g. a non-sentient tsunami killing thousands, or a non-sentient sun providing life for an entire planet full of organisms). In my alignment system a "decision" where the complexity has been functionally reduced below the level where sentience is required to respond would be "Moot" -- such as an animal deciding whether to stay hidden or to jump out into the jaws of a predator, if there's nothing to be gained or lost by so doing (aside from its own life).
And deeds that no verbal apology** will ever make better, like the Familicide.
** - In some cases, YMMV if even subsequent deeds will ever be enough of an apology.
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2021-04-11, 09:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2018
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
Hmm... if this is something you really need to figure out, perhaps it would help to reply directly to the post by the person who said this, and directly ask the specific person who said it to give an explanation of their thinking?
Because if some poster has submitted the hypothesis that V is "guilty" (in a factual sense) of some wrong or immoral act in Azure City, I don't think 99.99% of us have any idea what evidence that poster might believe they have.
By all accounts, V is just suffering perfectly normal and completely valid survivors guilt. Survivor's guilt usually has nothing to do withy any action anyone took (except in the apophenia sense).Last edited by Dion; 2021-04-11 at 09:43 PM.
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2021-04-11, 09:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2017
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
I agree that trying to ask this particular question was probably pointless from its inception despite being sincere, but for different reasons* than you give. I can't think of any other productive way to respond, so I'll leave it there.
* - a handful, but primarily "undue optimism"
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2021-04-12, 10:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2021
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
Our thoughts on alignment do seem pretty close, though with a little variation that I find interesting. I got to the same point when it comes to things like tornados, but by a different route.
Basically, I've seen some interpretations at times that things like "having a value system" or "caring about things" are aligned in themselves. Sometimes it leans towards Good alignment, as in "well he's a tyrant but he's doing what he believes is best for the country" and sometimes it leans in another direction like "well he saved all those people but he cared about some of them so it's not really Good." I don't think that really works, because "having values" and "acting on them" is instead what allows an alignment system to exist at all. They are the stuff that alignment is made of. And tornados don't have it.
However, I'm not really sure I follow your point about V in Azure City because whether or not the soldiers knew that V was out of magic didn't strike me as an important aspect in the first place. I will think about that some more.Last edited by Good Coyote; 2021-04-12 at 10:07 AM.
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2021-04-12, 11:40 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2017
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
If they thought V might save them, it could be argued V had a duty to warn them that wasn't true so they could keep running (in case it helped, which seems unlikely). V had already done so, back in 452, and speaking up in front of the hobgoblins chasing them would have been like yelling "I GOT A 4!" on your Move Silently roll.
Personally, I think their decision to stand around waiting for V to save them was 100% on them -- and that V felt (if not feels) otherwise, but did (does) so in error.
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2021-04-12, 12:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2018
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
Yeah, now we’re back to Apophenia again.
It’s very very common for people to second guess things after the fact, and say “if I had done this, or you had done that, or they had done the other thing, then...”
It’s all just a way for human beings to maintain the false illusion that we control what bad things happen to us.
They wouldn’t be dead if the hobgoblins hadn’t killed them. The blame for their murder lies on the murderer.Last edited by Dion; 2021-04-12 at 12:19 PM.
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2021-04-12, 12:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2017
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
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2021-04-12, 07:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2005
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
If anything, the stern, hard-working, hard-drinking dwarves seem more stereotypically German. Even then, it's not like Germans generally live underground.
A fantasy culture may borrow most heavily from a particular historical culture, but that doesn't make the former a stand-in for the latter. (I believe someone mentioned apophenia?)
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that dwarves were primarily if not exclusively the source of amazing, frequently magical items (such as Thor's Hammer). Rather like James Bond's Q, including typically not being heavily involved in most of the "onscreen" action. While one would expect a dwarven civilization to excel in warfare due to the unsurpassed excellence of their weapons and armor, that requires dwarves to have a civilization. I don't think that they were even clearly a race instead of just a bunch of exceptional item-crafters. Fleshing dwarves out into a race with a civilization was Tolkien's innovation, to my understanding.
Consistent fidelity to the source material is an obstacle to creating an interestingly original fantasy world. Sometimes the source material doesn't even have enough to go on to do much. Dwarves, if I've got things right, were an example of this. They're standardized now because Tolkien did a great worldbuilding job to the extent that we can just copy his work and instead innovate in other, neglected areas that haven't been successfully expanded on already.
That said...
Fantasy more often than not is based on either real things or preexisting fiction. A typical setting is an "alternate Earth" with all sorts of familiar flora, fauna, environments, societies, etc. I don't see how borrowing Earth's general layout is any lazier than is entirely usual. It's not like a more original map can't be fairly slapped-together.
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2021-04-17, 07:55 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2020
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
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2021-05-23, 04:28 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2005
Re: OOTS #1230 - The Discussion Thread
But, like, do they ever have baby dwarves? I remember hearing that dwarves sometimes have daughters but it's not clear that these are also dwarves, nor that there are female dwarves.
I don't see a super clear line between "holding someone to account" or "censure" and "punishment" or "prohibition" or "censorship". If one arranges negative consequences for speech of some sort in order to prevent that sort of speech, well, that sure seems like punishing speech one disapproves of in and an attempt to control what people say. The punishment may be more proportionate than other potential consequences, and the control less iron-fisted, and those are important distinctions, but there very much are comparisons as well as contrasts to be made here.
The classist origins of your choice of terminology seem appropriate to your sentiments. The very concept of someone being "excluded from polite society" brings to my mind the idea of a privileged elite sneering at those whose mannerisms are, presently, out of fashion. Active hostility -- even restrained hostility -- towards others' ways of speaking and even ways of thinking is liable to provoke much the same in response. You can attempt to spin what you oppose as being hostile, but those charges won't necessarily stick. If a quote really is obviously bad, then correctly attributing it should be sufficient. And people who don't think that a statement is obviously bad aren't likely to change their minds because you denounce that statement, rather than because you argue effectively against it. Censure seems useful mostly for preaching to the proverbial choir to me. But it works by setting yourself up as someone's enemy. It's not conducive to an open-minded exchange of ideas between people with different points of view. If that's your goal, then trying to understand others' motivations is a good idea. But starting by assuming that their behavior is meant to be hostile probably isn't the best way to go about that.
This post was hard for me to follow. If I understand correctly, you think that values are aligned, despite seeming at the start to present that as an idea that you disagree with, and what you disagree with is that the idea that values in general are all one specific alignment or alignment component (e.g. Good). Is that right?
Bit confusing, in no small part because I don't think that I've ever seen anyone claim that caring about things is inherently Good or non-Good. You seem to be arguing against a rather obscure extreme minority position. Or, frankly, quite possibly just a misinterpretation on your part. As with the idea that Vaarsuvius should be blamed for abandoning the soldiers at Azure City, I'm skeptical that anyone actually meant to express that sentiment. (Difficulty getting across what one intends to be arguing against seems like supporting evidence that one interprets some of the relevant language unusually.)
But a character having values at all does seem to be treated as an excuse to call a character Lawful sometimes.
Man, what? Something that makes a character engage in behavior that she doesn't want to engage in is a mind-affecting compulsion, not a code of conduct in the normal sense.
And a code of conduct can totally have one principle take precedence over another all the time. The Three Laws of Robotics is a classic example. So what's left is whether someone's priorities have some sort of consistency at all, which is basically the same as whether someone is well-characterized.
We can, I suppose, distinguish between characters regarding their own priorities as "rules to be followed" and not, but whether or not one thinks of one's highest priorities as rules makes about as much practical difference as a gnat's fart, so it's downright silly to call that a difference in alignment. A difference in alignment should correspond to a difference in priorities.
Regardless, in the case of the Order of the Stick's bard, Elan's devotion to narrative convention is rather less than zealous, so I'd hesitate to call that Lawful even under the absurdly broad "personal code" standard. ... On the other hand, he's not really Chaotic either, is he? Like, Elan doesn't seem to have any sort of general issue with authority and is quite happy to do whatever Roy asks most of the time from what I can remember. Huh.
Words mean different things in different contexts. In the context of the alignment system, causing suffering for its own sake is Evil. In real-world modern discourse, calling something "evil" is understood to include condemnation of said thing, so of course one doesn't normally see someone both endorsing something and calling it "evil". In a D&D world where "evil" is used in the alignment system's sense, the word probably doesn't carry that connotation. But that's a linguistic difference. It doesn't mean that people in the real world are never pointedly malevolent in any way to any extent; they just don't usually use the word "evil" to describe it.
Again, popular Evil is usually part of an overall non-Evil philosophy favored by at least some non-Evil people. Favoring Evil in general really is fantastic. But that's not even remotely common in D&D! The various fiends are extremely partial to their own favored brands of Evil. The Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commission are very much weirdos for working together for The Greater Evil, and even them I fully expect to each have several possible betrayals lined up, if only in case one of the others tries something. They didn't get to where they are by ever trusting their peers entirely. And I strongly doubt that Qarr has ever seriously sacrificed his own personal advancement in the service of Evil.