In article <1170186638.896529.194610@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Will in New Haven <bill.reich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>On Jan 30, 1:29 pm, mkkuh...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Mary K.
>Kuhner) wrote:
>> The PCs were confronted by a leonal who demanded that they leave the
>> Evil members of the group behind.
>Why would non-evil hang out with evil? Even early in my gaming career,
>I found it hard to fathom what exactly these alignments were supposed
>to mean. If they mean anything really im****tant, the angel wouldn't
>have to demand this. Since they cleaerly don't mean anything
>im****tant, why use a strong word like "evil?" I remember when the only
>alignments were lawful and chaotic, before AD&D. L and C hanging out
>together was easier to visualize.
Why Grehalia was there (she is not a party member) is complex.
She and the PCs have a mutual enemy; the PC leader feels (perhaps
wrongly) that she is not wholly committed to wrongdoing; and he also
feels that even if she is, she has virtues which make him reluctant
to kill her out of hand. And he felt his only choices were to kill
her in cold blood or ally with her.
Lots of things going on inside his head there. He's been juggling
plates trying to save Grehalia's life (from the other PCs, mainly!)
for over a week now. It's intense.
Alliances among people who are not ideologically compatible happen
all the time in the real world, and seem like fertile ground for
gaming conflict too. I'm quite liking this one, actually. I don't
feel hampered by the alignment system even though it turns out that
the PCs mostly disagree vehemently with it.
I think Grehalia is also serving as a symbol of two of the PCs'
internal demons, as it were; if they condemn her, they are in some
sense condemning themselves. (I'll be surprised if the paladin
continues to be a paladin for more than another session or two;
she is going to be driven up on the rocks of this issue soon.)
>> But now he really wants to kick some angel butt, and I fear will be
deeply
>> frustrated.
>This is bizzare and I blame the alignment system. If there were no
>alignments and someone, say, burned an orphanage and killed everyone
>who came out, you'd judge him by his behavior. But there are
>alignments and someone who evidently hasn't done anything that you
>know about has to be dumped so this character is treating rather
>simple words as complex ideologies.
I don't think it's that simple. It may be that simple for the angel,
and that is why the PCs and the angel end up in conflict; it's not that
simple for the PCs.
They do judge Grahalia by her behavior. She is not a burner-down of
orphanages herself but she was certainly complicit in the theft and
sale of orphanage children. She knew what she was doing, too; there's
no argument that she was misguided or duped.
On the other hand, she is a potential ally in a conflict of paramount
im****tance to the PCs: they may decide that her potential to do them
good outweighs the known harm she's caused. And they may also feel
that her willingness to help suggests a willingness to change her
ethics. It's pretty clear that she's a bad person from an environment
calculated to produce bad people; would she change if placed in a
different one? (I don't know. Probably Fritz is kidding himself. But
this is what he's thinking.)
There's also the honor question: they accepted the alliance, is it okay
to repudiate it when it becomes inconvenient? Fritz had enslaved
Grahalia and was keeping her prisoner, but one of the demons they
fought broke the spell. Grahalia and the PCs each had about
five seconds to deal with that. Grahalia offered her parole, and the
PCs took it. Maybe they were in the wrong, but having done that, one
could
argue they were bound by their word. Grahalia kept hers; they wouldn't
want to see themselves as morally inferior to her!
And the PCs are themselves assassins and murderers in cold blood;
it was in fact mainly by accident that they captured Grahalia.
They were trying to kill her, having (rather questionably) turned
a chance to talk with her into an ambush.
Fritz *likes* her. (His girlfriend would suggest the wording "is
infatuated with".) He has a history of making friends with bad people,
of which this is the most spectacularly troublesome example.
When he is King of the World, he thinks, he needs to find some way for
people with Grahalia's evident appeals to continue to exist, without
having
them buying and selling little children on the black market.
A real-world example of this: even if someone were strongly convinced
that sale and use of illegal drugs was evil, he might also feel that
draconic measures to get rid of sellers and users would be even more
evil, and that individual drug users or even drug pushers could be
potentially okay (maybe "on condition they stop pu****ng", maybe not).
I'm not defending (or attacking) this view on the real-world issue, but
it seems realistic and not too bizarre to me.
Anyway. This is not a bug for me, though I can see it would be for
you; it's actually one of the more interesting parts of the game. I had
never seen that "desires a balance between Good and Evil" rhetoric as
defensible, and I'm surprised and pleased to see it actually playing out
in a way that makes sense to me.
It was a pain in the ass to have to break up that neat roleplaying scene
for another collision with the system mechanics, though. *That's*
what really bugged me. What is it with these challenge ratings? They
aren't just wrong, they're systematically wrong. Any given angel will
beat the crap out of its supposedly equivalent demon or devil, as far as
I can tell.
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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