"Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies...

What you have to understand is the way d&d cosmology works. Most people never really 'get' it.

At its root is good vs evil. These are not just ideas but tangible forces linked to life and death. Every good act generates positive energy and contributes to the life of the universe. Every evil act generates negative energy and contributes to it's death. And because of how people work, there is almost ALWAYS much more death than life. That greedy shopkeeper who cheats his customers is not just being cruel and immoral, he is CONTRIBUTING TO THE DEATH IF THE UNIVERSE. Evil is a pestilence, a cancer, a choking vine. The paladin is the cure, the knife, the hatchet. Men are free to choose their own paths. Holy men often dedicate their lives to making sure they choose good ones. Paladins dedicate their lives to killing those who don't.

It's a matter of reduction. How much evil can a paladin kill without becoming evil themselves.

>I'm a trip and I think a healthy respect for justice makes you a shitty human being

I also assume you dislike Lovecraft because of his old timey racism? They're both a product of their times, get the stick out of your ass.

To be fair Ammurabi made the law "An eye for an eye" attemping to be Lawfull and Good since before his Code, people could start whole blood feud upon a scar.
So yes "eye for an eye" can be Lawfull and Good in the proper context.

Actually, I've been researching that some more just now, and it's a bit more complex than that. When D&D was made there was no alignment, and when Gygax added alignment was added it was entirely about law vs. chaos. Races generally could be in 2 out of 3 categories (i.e. neutral and either lawful or chaotic). There was a Detect Evil spell at this point, too; it worked in a way that made zero use of the alignment system.

Yes, and? What's your point?

Though that actually doesn't fit lovecraft. He was a remarkably virulent racist even by the standards of his time, or so I'm given to understand.

Don't be silly, he was just a man who understood black people were born from eggs and came to earth to rape white women

Try to live in New York during his time and you will be a virulent racist too.

>603 posts on your trip alone
You know it's not a username, right?

>or so I'm given to understand.

Most people where. He married a jew though, and by all accounts actually loved her deeply. It's like a casual "show up, complain about blacks, drink a few beers, and go home" KKK member marrying a black woman and treating her like a princess. Which makes him a flawed, but good guy. Everyone needs to vent somehow, unless they act on it they aren't really bad.

>hur dur, comics are historically accurate
Stupid fucker, aren't you.

You seem triggered user is everything ok?

That's because the original AD&D was designed around the concepts presented in the Elric and Hawkmoon sagas. Law and Chaos were the organizations that ran the universe, and choosing an alignment was aligning yourself with either law, chaos, or remaining neutral to both.

Paladins were also not present in OD&D. your research is pathetic.

>if there is the remotest of possibility that you might do something bad then you have already done it and should die.

This is the kind of thinking that gets branded as stupid retarded alignment. You might as well kill everyone at this point.

Judge Death alignment?

>How much evil can a paladin kill without becoming evil themselves.
Well according to gygax you can kill all of it without being evil.

It's not that I don't see that as a viable stance on the alignment topic? The stance of explicitly saying "this is not like the real world, this is a genre piece where good and evil are tangible forces tied into the fundamental workings of the world."

But that's not what *Gygax* said. Gygax cited nothing but IRL historical precedents and an old adage spoken by centuries of IRL child murderers who were performing genocide.

Also if you look at the OP post his response is explicitly saying LG paladins should execute people who have chosen the good path, because they were previously on the evil path and could "backslide".

Well, that was back before WASPs came up with "white people", so anyone who didn't have your background, you hated.

Lovecraft was basically the closest thing to Bill Dautrive from King of the Hill, as he's the last yet lame scion of a high class family that died before he was born. He was raised and had the mindset of a stuffy highborn New England elite, but with none of the monetary backing. He was racist in the way THEY were, not your average Joe Pobucker.

Remember, he wrote a story where all people from Appalachia were knuckle-dragging semi-humans who were only capable of near human sentience when possessed by an otherworldly being that was dying because it pained it to be trapped in something so inferior.

While the 'nits' line comes from a saying about child-murder, I don't think he meant to use it literally. More in the "spare a baddie, and he'll keep doing baddie things" sort of way. Like, Evil is a fact of nature, hence why orcs were Always Chaotic Evil; Nature.

Prisons didn't exist in ye medieval times. The concept of rehabilitation did not exist. Wrongdoers and criminals were punished and that was that. What the fuck is the paladin going to do, check them into his work release program? He's a killer.

Once a paladin becomes involved, it's moved beyond the point of saying you're sorry.

You know, when a prisoner repents to a priest in prison we don't let him go? In the eyes of God he is forgiven, but he still has to pay his price to society. Justice isn't always merciful, and in western civilization we have to accept that our society has a dual nature around the concepts of christian mercy, and civil justice. It colors peoples thoughts and perceptions on the subject, and even in the same denominations and civil factions we have differing views on what exactly those ideas mean.

Also prisons and the idea of serving time as penance for crimes is new.

I think that idiots who literally use comics as a true historical reference should be locked into barrels and force fed to Niagara falls.

Niagra falls is a waterfall user it can't eat anything

>Paladins are not stupid
Gygax doesn't know his average player

Hasn't it been stated that the only class that's been played the way it's suppose to are Rangers?

>mfw a smutposter tries talking about justice and the law

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/33354547/#33368214

Contrary to the popular belief that everyone on Veeky Forums loves dumb bait, most of us actually think that the world would be better off if everyone who baitposts suddenly died of a heart attack. Not that this stops us from replying to all the bait ever.

>expecting sensible moral principles out of an alignment system conceived of by a highschool dropout who just liked fantasy fiction a lot

Seriously Dagda, I thought better of you. If you want a consistent moral system in D&D that doesn't wind up utterly monstrous when you sit down and think about it too hard, rip one out of a major philosophy. There's lots you can steal from. Stoicism, natural law, platonism, confucianism, Kantianism, etc. all spring readily to mind.

There's a good fucking reason most game most retroclones even) don't include alignment. Because it's easily the second worst thing about D&D (1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition psionics is number one, paladins are number 3).

>this samefagging
Disgraceful.

>not checking the count of unique posters in the thread

That was my first post, asshole.

I've been around a while. What search function are you using? Sounds like it doesn't cover all of Veeky Forums's history, but still goes back quite a while.

Put it this way: If it was a matter of record that Lovecraft or Gygax repeatedly cheated on their wife, I wouldn't consider that fault really relevant to their creative output. By contrast, I do think it's notable that the song "All you need is love" was written by a guy who beat both his wives and abandoned one of his children. I think that's a thing worth bearing in mind when sampling the vision of the world that song offers.

If lovecraft was a shitty racist, that's worth acknowledging. How he compares to the others of his time is also worth acknowledging, for the sake of accuracy. Either way, there's no need to make excuses for him, nor is there much point to arguing whether he was somehow a "good person" or "bad person" in some broad-stroke overall way.

>I've been around a while. What search function are you using? Sounds like it doesn't cover all of Veeky Forums's history, but still goes back quite a while.
You know it's not a username, right?

>Either way, there's no need to make excuses for him, nor is there much point to arguing whether he was somehow a "good person" or "bad person" in some broad-stroke overall way.
Then why the fuck did you bring it up in the first place, you moron?

I also come from an old American family, except in my case we where professionals and yeomen in the south since the 1630's. Doctors, merchants, tobacco farmers. Wealthy enough to be respected, too poor to be gentry. The racism of old north elite is mostly harmless, they are the type to talk loud and brash among their own about separation of the races and how greedy the Jews are, but you'll find their friends with a good share of Jews and they wouldn't dream of walking the walk when the rope comes out. It's the racist equivalent of locker room talk. Real racism is something you know when it rears its ugly head, it's not pride in a flag or idle talk. It's them surrounding a house and demanding they hand over the nigger or they'll hang you next to them, and you knowing they mean. It's a hate that even when a fraction of it is directed your way, you learn to watch what you say to certain folk for fear of a fight or worse, and that's only because I belong to a religious denomination they happen to dislike. They reserve the real hate for other people.

It's also a hate that is exceedingly rare.

>If it was a matter of record that Lovecraft or Gygax repeatedly cheated on their wife

I don't believe you. Prove it.

Not him, but perhaps because understanding Gygax's mindset would be useful in understanding the work he created. Kind of how appreciating Otto Dix's art is helped by knowing that he was a seriously traumatized ww1 veteran.

So when Jesus said that it was preferable not to go straight for eye-for-an-eye, was that Chaotic Good or Neutral Good or what?

Are you retarded? Reread that statement.

Chaotic Good. Jesus actually rocked the boat pretty hard. He told people to be nice to the dregs of society that got hit the hardest, to not look for vengeance on your own and instead trust that justice will be done either by the legal authorities or by God in the end, to war sometimes and seek peace and others, and a bunch of other shit.

Also he ran out a bunch of tax collectors by screaming wildly at them and flailing around a whip, and there was that one time he cursed a fig tree because he was hungry and it wasn't bearing any fruit. Those are pretty CG to me.

Yeah, it seems like that could have been more his intent? Just trying to see if there's much evidence to be had one way or another. He doesn't address children in that particular response, don't think he says much on species either but haven't checked.

No disagreement here.

Because it's relevant context for the thing they created. The core concept of Lovecraftian Horror is that human beings can't survive the hideous realization that the true nature of the universe doesn't revolve around you or "care" about you in any way. I find it interesting that this concept came from a guy who was a huge racist growing up in a world that was leaving him behind.

Just curious what search function you're using. Is it 4plebs, notatrueending, or is there some other Veeky Forums archive I should know about?

What? Dude, your quote begins with "If". It was a hypothetical example to illustrate a point, I've never heard of either of them committing adultery.

I'm a paladin, you dick. My moral compass talks to me and gives me powers. If my job involves exterminating non-combatants then exterminating non-combatants is morally correct.

I'm glad they removed the LG requirement and fixed "lol ur paladin falls" curtailing everything a paladin does.

A warrior-priest with the direct backing and command of an actual extant capital-D Deity should be fucking terrifying and he certainly shouldn't be "lawful good."

"I never broke the law, I am the law" comes to mind. Why would I give a shit about what your scribes and judges say, I can get my laws direct from the source.

As for what Gygax said, I feel like it's more likely Gygax heard the saying somewhere and used it without knowing/thinking very hard about what he was implying, than that he advocates colonial genocide.

Since OP is an idiot and willfully went over a tangent hw practically made himself.

He was rascist, it did little to affect his works and somewhat managed to kept his rascist beliefs in private.
Done! He's an influential and great author who managed to create a new genre of horror.

Or are we also delving with tolkien's percistence analogous portrayal of blacks as monstronsities in his works?

>if you're not educated enough you're incapable of having a proper sense of right and wrong

Oh so that's why poor people commit so many crimes, thanks user.

>I need to figure out if Gygax goes in about the same category as H.P. Lovecraft. Someone where I can respect the significance of their creative output, while having to acknowledge that they were in some respects a really fucking shitty human being.
> Either way, there's no need to make excuses for him, nor is there much point to arguing whether he was somehow a "good person" or "bad person" in some broad-stroke overall way.

You're not even consistent in the same thread. Fuck off.

No, actually, killing people who will eventually try to kill you doesn't make you a 'shitty human being.'

I understand you're a leftist and have no sense of loyalty or responsibility, but if you ever step out of your ivory tower safe space, you'll find that in the real world, nits really do make lice, and killing them is a small price to pay to protect the people who actually matter.

This thread is populated with some defensive motherfuckers.

No, I'm sure Gygax had a sense of right and wrong. But like most moral systems people hold, it was probably mostly intuitive and sometimes contradictory, because it wasn't grounded in philosophy.

>The racism of old north elite is mostly harmless
False, just look at how any discussion of gun violence revolves around freak events like mass shootings rather then the colossal numbers of young black men slaughtered every year in ghettos over drugs, why do you think that focus exists? What about affirmative action which allows authorities to completely avoid ever having to deal with the horrific state of most majority black schools? These things both come from northern elites and they do horrific damage on black people.

>using divine powers to kill a tree because it's not the right season for bearing fruit

>good

Jesus was CN, basically a fae-changeling trickster god whose sense of humor is distressingly out of sync with that of his victims. Gnostic gospels reinforce that idea.

t. fat 28 year old who's been in a conflict that escalated past flailing

Thank you for being one of the sane ones. Seems like that's pretty rare these days.

>using divine powers to kill a tree, a non living entity without a soul or feelings, that highlights his humanity
>this single pointless action invalidates him being good

Gnostics are jokes, and the Gnostic gospels are a fucking joke. I could say Jesus was evil too if I wrote a bunch of fanfiction about him listening to Nine Inch Nails and shooting up a school. If you put stock into any of their batshit writings, then you should kill yourself as matter is evil and it doesn't matter what you do to your body.

t. numale

It's alright user I get that you need to somehow justify wasting all that time and money on a philosophy degree.

This coming from the guy who feels the need to defend his masculinity on Veeky Forums.

Don't worry, we were teenagers once too. You'll feel mighty silly about your opinions when you grow up (assuming you do).

>As for what Gygax said, I feel like it's more likely Gygax heard the saying somewhere and used it without knowing/thinking very hard about what he was implying, than that he advocates colonial genocide.
I think you're right, and think that might be the right way to view potential pro-genocide implications of the oldschool alignment implementations: Gygax wasn't thinking very hard about that kind of thing. But... well, I haven't found much yet that lets me discount the alternative as a (small) possibility.

Emphasis on "in some respects". You can be a murderous liar who'd never steal from someone poor or cheat on your spouse. If so, you're a good person in some respects and a shitty one in others.

The potentially shitty human being in this case would be Gygax IRL, if (seriously, IF) he consciously made a "LG kills orc babies" alignment system because he based his idea of LG on irl people who killed irish & native american children. Because those are the people his old nits & lice adage comes from.

As I've said earlier in this very post, I don't THINK that's the case. But I'm not 100% sure.

You don't know much about Gnosticism, do you? It's very strongly rooted in neo-Platonism (mind you, so is mainstream Christianity, just less so), and so killing yourself is counterproductive in the necessary enlightenment and transcendence of the material condition.

>trip
Kill yourself posthaste

Well, I've got to ask: what do you expect to accomplish with speculating on Veeky Forums? If you seriously want to figure this out, you'd need to research through the man's writings, see if you can find letters or journals, contact people who personally knew him, shit like that. You'd basically have to work as though you were doing research for a biography, because I can assure you, nobody here knows him well enough to tell you.

>implying they're not dead inside already
The punishment for being a tripfag is being a tripfag, pretty brutal if you ask me. Gygax would approve.

Hey Dagda, you ever gonna do a portrait thread again?

>hating on Dagda

You're literally just new.

Go back to Tumblr and never leave your college you sheltered white upper class pussy.

t. numale

Why would they ever leave college? It's not like they'd be able to get a job with their meme degree.

I'm doing that too. But this thread's had useful responses, and it seemed like something worth talking about.

Unikely; it's way harder to spam images nowadays, with the massive delay between posts & captcha. Contributing a dozen-odd pics is viable, but doing a big image thread by yourself takes forever.

I'm not new, I just have better taste than you do. KM is a namefag worth having around. This fucker is not. He should either kill himself, which is the option I would reccomend after seeing that he felt the need to create this thread or that he should drop the trip at all times unless it is specifically relevant.

>buttmad monotheist

Nothing about Jesus makes any sense.

>if jesus isn't 100% god then he's a blasphemer: "before abraham was I am"

>if jesus is 100% god then why did he forget on the cross: "my god my god why have you forsaken me"

This math isn't adding up. I think God might've evacuated his divinity and killed himself, probably because he foresaw you.

I'm going to take a guess and say you're a neverserved civilian and your closest experience to killing someone is shoving cheetos and mountain dew in your face while playing pretend.

I miss sergalfag, desu

Is touhoufag still around? I always enjoyed his analysis of system math.

Aw shit user are you a navy seal? Were you trained in a gorilla warfare? Nobodies impressed that you took part in war crimes for money faggot.

>Law and Chaos worldbuilding
IMO eye for an eye is about responding to violence with equal, impulsive violence. Following your instincts and your heart over your education and your brain. Which can be good, or it can be bad, but it's chaotic in its very nature, not lawful. Considering your options and settling on an appropriate punishment is lawful (and varying degrees of evil considering the specifics of the punishment.)

>Good and Evil morality
user, I also feel like Gygax's points are terribly wrong, but this is a matter of philosophy, not politics. For this reason, pretending the question can be answered confidently and conclusively like it's self-evident is fucking stupid.

Thanks for confirming for me, buddy.

Not the same guy I just found your post utterly pathetic.

Yeah, the creepy little weirdo is still ruining systems. He's gotten his hooks into Godbound.

Likewise, buddy. I'm sure mashing the update button desperately seeking validation made you feel better, though. Just remember that you've never done shit and never will do shit.

>lying
Yes your response definitely didn't strongly imply you were the same person.

>Just remember that you've never done shit and never will do shit.
Hey that's not true I managed to trigger you didn't I?

Seemed pretty clear that gygax was talking about "eye for an eye" as a formal legal code- the punishment for doing X to somebody is to have X done to the perpetrator.

What I found disturbing was the idea that gygax might have been in favor of colonial genocide and similar IRL. It's a pretty out-there possibility, just hoping I can track down something clearer from him on the whole child murder topic to say for sure.

>But... well, I haven't found much yet that lets me discount the alternative as a (small) possibility.

Why don't you follow the logical route here. You need to provide solid proof of your position. Have some? You are just guessing?

Then stop trying to be a typical white liberal who wants to virtue signal by being offended by something obscure.

>Was Gygax just ignorant as to the origins of that expression
No.

I'm pretty sure the guy you're replying to is the faggot from the is-bad-end-NTR-zombie-rape-okay thread who thinks it's edgy to insult war vets. Spend your time on something more productive, this guy is either actually retarded or baiting.

It's possible that Gygax just figured a fictional world with a fictional morality shouldn't necessarily reflect his own real world morals. As I recall he himself was some variety of protestant Christian, yet wrote a setting and game where polytheism is the encouraged norm. That alone should say that his real world morals didn't factor too much into D&D.

Is us or them user stop being a pussy and accept the truth. Do you thing that if Aliens ever come here they will be about Peace and Love? They will kill us all.

the real question is why would it fucking matter in any capacity. What he might have thought on the matter will have zero effect on how he is remember, the game he developed, or anything else of relevance.

I for one am glad that Gygax's paladins were reasonable and pragmatic rather than bowing to unsustainable and illogical modern ideas of morality.

>At its root is good vs evil.
At it's root is law vs chaos, good vs evil started when Asmodeus's angels were "poisoned" by demons

Are Jedis space paladins in the SWverse?

But Gygax's paladins are morally bankrupt on a philosophical level. When it came to moralistic philosophy, the guy didn't know what he was talking about.

>Was Gygax just ignorant as to the origins of that expression, and thought it meant something different? Because that old adage comes from real-life child murderers who were justifying actual genocide.
well so is he

you should be aware though he isn't saying you have to live by it to be LG, just that you can if you want to.

Except they aren't. He demonstrates utilitarian decision making, that doesn't make them immoral. This is doubly true in a fictional world where entire races are sometimes spawned by demons or dark gods.

youtube.com/watch?v=gqGL9B_TPTI&feature=youtu.be
the best kind of character development

First off, that's not utilitarianism. They're not out there to maximize happiness, pleasure, utility whatever. Second, utilitarianism has holes you could fly a plane through.

If anything, it's deontological, but he never clearly laws down the rules of his deontology, or what their moralistic basis is (as Kant does with his categorical imperatives).

Fucking seriously, don't try to defend the man's philosophy if you don't understand philosophy yourself.

How about "nits making lice" being an objective truth. Seriously do you try to make cockroachs repent and leave your house by asking them or you gas them? Because this is what most fantasy evil race are. Fucking cockroachs.

it maximizes safety, security, and in some cases, the destruction of entities that are fundamentally evil. That's why I said it's a pragmatic outlook, and it could be easily argued that leaving evil to spread and threaten others would be evil in and of itself.