The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Light DragonOk, you were putting words into his mouth-- much as the Lorax who speaks for the trees because the trees have no mouths.

Haha... something like that. Though I am not near as furry.

Quote from: NomadicHaha... something like that. Though I am not near as furry.

Urge to misinterpret on purpose rising...

To answer the original question: Does evil pay in my settings?
In the short run: yes. If you don't give a rat's arse about what people think of you and how your actions hurt others, you have a shorter and more direct way to your goal. The problem is: if you play evil in the sense of Dark Lord Stabhappy McDumbass, sooner or later you'll tick someone of who has the clout or the purse to get people to shut you up. If you are clever about it - no repercussions. Y'know, like in real life. ;)
IMO, the best game for moral "education" or conundrums is Dark Heresy. As an inquisitorial agent, you fight for mankind's survival. The question is simply how far you will go when there are few people who have jusrisdiction over you. "Power corrupts - absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Hmm.
I'm trying to distill something out of this thread.  SOmething like a rating or at least the proper way to scale the morality set of a setting, at least in terms of good and evil.
LD said something about how the Fireball The House example would be neutral in D&D.  This line also came up.

Quote from: still cool, howeverI do have to say, in a somewhat contrarian tone, that the 2 letter alignment codification that Gary came up with is incredibly useful and expository.  [/note]  I see often in writeups for religions whole paragraphs that describe everything else, but centuroes of moral codification, histories, parables, and jusdgement is reduced to a 2 letter code..."CG", or some such.
So moral behavior strictures and how PLayers should see the setting through the eyes of their religions is up to us, and maybe we don't look at it in that light often.  And we should.

Lord Vreeg-

The interesting thing about the Gygaxian morality code is that it actually mattered in the early games.

He built his cosmology around the 9 alignment directions-- that is why there was a plane for each alignment; and a struggle between Law/Chaos; Good/Evil. It was a fairly central aspect to the setting.

I think that might be why you think it is "useful and expository" but might lament when some people use the terms as a short-cut to designing a setting. Did I hit on a possible idea here?

Quote from: Lord VreegSo, in each of your games, does it pay to play evil?  Is there evil (or alignment)?

Do you set up the setting to be good-centric?  Is it a Points 'o' light setting, but still set up for good PCs?  

In most of my games I haven't used alignment. Consequently, I've had almost no PCs in those games that I thought of as good or evil. Just people. Which is not to say none brought moral codes to their characters, but they were personal codes.

If the campaign is going to involve fighting the forces of evil, I'm usually pretty clear up front about that. But even in those games, PCs are rarely purely good or evil. And being evil, if we had such a concept in the game or now applied one, didn't stop them from fighting a greater threat. As a player playing a relatively immoral former assassin explained in one such game, stopping the apocalypse is in his character's best interest for obvious reasons. Cooperating and trusting more noble characters is one way to do that.

QuoteOr do you carefully set the table so that every type of game can be met?  Or is the game made for some righteous 'good vs evil' buttkicking?  

How would you handle a priest of Jubilex, or another deity of a not-so-nice persuasion?  How about a real assassin?  How would they fit in?  

I've had some campaigns where anything goes, and some with a stronger main plot. In either case, I usually figured out what the players wanted, maybe even had them write backgrounds--and then wrote the campaign.

I had one game where three players played assassins, all of different natures. Two became heroes. One became a vampire and joined what another player termed "the dark side" (which by the end of the game consisted of almost exactly half the players).

If Jubilex is an evil god, then I think that's harder. Mainly because I'm not going to tell the other players they're characters have to deal with a character doing things they don't like. If it's a party-based game (and not all games are, but I will usually tell you in advance), it's the responsibility of each player to make a party-friendly character.

Quote from: Light DragonThis does bring up one issue though-- which is why many people do not take DnD or traditional fantasy/sci-fi seriously-- too often it fails to address the central questions of what makes people human; to attack traditional themes that are covered in mainstream classical literature.

Fantasy, and especially sci-fi, has a long tradition of exploring those questions. One of the main rationals given for it is that by dressing it up as something else, we become more free to explore the idea in depth without bringing as much baggage along for the ride.

Quote from: Light DragonLord Vreeg-

The interesting thing about the Gygaxian morality code is that it actually mattered in the early games.

He built his cosmology around the 9 alignment directions-- that is why there was a plane for each alignment; and a struggle between Law/Chaos; Good/Evil. It was a fairly central aspect to the setting.

I think that might be why you think it is "useful and expository" but might lament when some people use the terms as a short-cut to designing a setting. Did I hit on a possible idea here?

LD, I know Gygax's inspirations well.  I think it was central to how his game and class system worked.  But Too often, I see the terms, and the deities 'cut and pasted' into a setting, where it does not belong.  and these terms and the constructs need spuernatural foci to make them viable.