Re: what is it about angels?

In article <1170258907.355251.35270@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
psychohist <psychohist@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>I don't really agree with your [Erol's] reasoning, though.  I think that
player
>characters will, in general, only be reminded about alignment by
>encounters such as this if they lose.  If they win, they'll generally
>just feel that they did the right thing, irrespective of what they
>defeated.  The strength of the encounter is not the reminder; the
>result is.

I think I'm with Erol here.  If the ideological Good can always win by
sheer power, that doesn't so much impress me that it's Good as that
it's fiat--something I as a player am "not supposed to" disagree with.

I don't know how the PCs would have felt if Charis had won.  (I know
how they would have felt if they'd jumped it en masse and won--
that would have seemed like cheating to them.)  I don't think they
would be any more convinced that they'd "done the right thing" than 
they are now.  Charis' ability to win or not so clearly depended
more on her equipment purchases than on her moral stature.... The
moral outcome that was really im****tant was not that she won or lost,
but that she agreed to fight and to abide by the result.  But that
works better for me, emotionally speaking, if the result is in some
doubt.

(Certainly it was technically possible that she could win, but I'd put
the chance at less than 1/100.)

They would, however, have gone away feeling much less bitter:  they
are inclined to think at the moment that the forces of ideological
Good have gone bad en masse, which is too big of a problem for them to
solve, and rather demoralizing.  It doesn't help that the definitely
bad-guy critter who was with them (and whose presence they did not
try to defend) then simply tele****ted past the angel, underscoring the
"honor is stupid" theme.

I'm not as annoyed by this encounter as I was when it happened; at the
time I think I shared a lot of the PCs' annoyance.  But in retrospect
it worked on a lot of levels.  I still think there is no good excuse
for the lame CRs, though.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]