Alignments

>enslaved working class
>marxist
GET OUT OF HERE TANKIE

>and most dwarves
I can get gold dragons as they are ancient, inhuman monsters who I would expect have very different thought paths than humanoids. Paladins I can get, as it is a vocation specifically for individuals of that alignment (IE being LG makes you more likely to be a Paladin, as opposed to vice-versa). Dwarves seem out of place, here. I get that it's not impossible to have racial biases towards certain moral philosophies, but it seems like those should be cultural rather than biological in nature; is there any detail on WHY dwarves are usually lawful good, compared to their more evenly-distributed peers? What is it about dwarves that gives them this tendency, and what other effects does this have?

I meant literal slaves in the antebellum south, hence "Ye Olde Dixie"

>chronic onanism?
you're lucky I don't know what that means.

>>implying that an individual can be allowed to be TN by their aligned peers
yes I would imply that.
>if i was pressured into a LG act and in my private homelike i may engage in any action i please does not mean i have changed my fundamental character
>nor does it imply that my these people have such great pressure over my life that i would consume my character after it has been shaped.

The only other part of western society that shared dixie's views at that point was Brazil.

the fact that in real life, dwarves are sneaky, angry, mean alcoholic drunks.

It's cultural for the most part
there are breeds of dwarves that are indeed evil and individuals that are evil within common dwarves

I apologize.
I am not lettered in American history nor am i an American

If that's the case, shouldn't it be more "Characters from X region or Y societies (which may have a higher Dwarf population) tend to be Lawful Good"? The way it's stated seems to imply that it's the fact of being dwarven that makes them inclined towards LG.

Well Foucault would argue that the dominant theory of knowledge, alignment here, would cause all individuals and institutions to insist that an individual acts according to that theory or be ostracized and possibly institutionalized. Thus an individual living in a LG (or just L, or just G) society cannot act TN without their peers pressuring them into acting LG. And as to your point about maintaining a LG facade while remaining TN, Foucault would argue that it is impossible to function in a society dominated by a theory without adhering to it. This idea comes from his work on sexuality where he argues that hetero, homo, bi, ect labels are all fictitiously created as a system of organization (much like alignment) when in reality individuals just do a set of things which are later compressed into a label. You may act as a merely sexual being, taking part in the kinks/fetishes that interest you and not the ones that don't, but the society that follows of a labelled theory of sexuality (or alignment) will continuously force labels upon your actions until you bend or break. Imagine a D&D campaign where your party all agrees to play without caring about alignment but then every NPC you come across asks you bluntly whether you're Good or Lawful. Eventually you must tell them something, it's unlikely that you'll continue to try and skirt the question by the 100th time you're asked and now you're part of the system.

>he way it's stated seems to imply that it's the fact of being dwarven that makes them inclined towards LG.
That's not untrue.
>this group has a distribution of Traits that results in this behavior. And this group excludes the sub-groups that tend not to be good (evil dwarves, duengar what have you) because they have their own category.

Okay, what are these traits? Are they listed or defined? What are the other effects of these? Having an entire race biased towards a particular alignment seems like a really big deal; that's how you end up with things like "Orcs are the malicious village-destroying race, because they're way more likely to be Evil".

I'm not much of a fan of this due to how much it generalizes members of a race to having a single broad philosophy. If you're going to have something like that, you at least ought to have a pretty good reason why that's the case (Orcs don't understand the concept of pain, or believe that all material wealth belongs to them and thus seek to reclaim it, etc.). Simply having "LG race" and "Evil race" is boring.

>what are these traits
Whatever Gary or others came up with, they abritated that this race has a distribution of traits that predisposes them towards this sort of behavour.
I'd assume it's traits humans would innately like and are good for cohesion.

>I'm not much of a fan of this due to how much it generalizes members of a race to having a single broad philosophy.
no it doesn't, it does indicate that their society produces a population that in aggregate have these traits. It does not preclude examples of people failing to exemplify any or all of those traits nor does indicate why a person does this.
Now you could place this in the hands of their social grand narrative.
Or divine influence or biological factors or any combination there in.

>if you're going to have something like that, you at least ought to have a pretty good reason why that's the case
speaking to your orc example
It could be a culture that has a great Darwinian narrative underpinning it's society, a "it's okay to kill the weak" sort of thing.
But also on a biological level it could be a development of the brain that fundamentally tends to produce a species that is more aggressive and risk driven and a reduced pain response (or increased over response), thicker skin and thus require greater food stocks than solely hunting allows.
Perhaps ork are entirely carnivorous on top of all of that.
(On that note i often wonder how giants feed themselves and how they are able to maintain a non-inbred population, supernatural is usually the answer.)
So you have a race can only consume meat, requires a great deal of food, a greater aggressive tendency. All of that is resource intensive which results in a disregard for the weak and infirm because of the waste of resources.
As a result they attack other races for food and kill their elders, keeping their culture's growth retarded

My point was that if you're going to have a race be slanted towards a given alignment, you should give reasons why. You provide plenty of good possibilities (social grand narrative, divine influence, biological factors, Darwinian narrative, etc.). What's important is that the setting creator PICKS SOMETHING. Shrugging and going "because reasons" does not make for an interesting race.

>No it doesn't
I wasn't trying to say that all dwarves ever are LG, but rather that I dislike how this tendency means that dwarves as a race will likely be viewed as a LG race due to this tendency. Some orcs are Good, some Dwarves are CE, there can be interesting deviations from the norm. However, having to be a deviation to be interesting fundamentally limits character options and makes the race as a whole feel less colorful.

Humans, as a race, have no strong tendency towards any alignment. Significant portions of their population fall into each of the nine categories, making humans an interesting and varied race, with plenty of room for internal divides and differences of opinion. Having a race have any strong tendency fundamentally limits this potential variety and thus limits the potential detail within the race.

The problem is this fact of dwarves tending to be LG is being introduced in a core rulebook for an RPG with a dozen or more settings, and the reason probably varies among them if it's even true among all of them.

That's from 2E though, which had a far more nuanced approach to goodness.

It is.

It sometimes is.

If your personal ethical code aligns with the personal ethical code of Pelor or Sarenrae or Zarus or whatever, then you're good in that god's eyes.

So when it comes to Orc babies - is your god okay with ganking orc babies? Then gank them. Are they not? Then don't. Are you full NOGODSNOMASTERS? Make your own fucking decisions fuck

>What's important is that the setting creator PICKS SOMETHING. Shrugging and going "because reasons" does not make for an interesting race.
I don't entirely agree. While i do believe it is valuable to maintain a degree of depth (for lack of a better word) of motivation. It may not be necessary for sake of narrative and it isn't entirely necessary for someone to know why someone engages in a behavior.
It's sloppy writing but there is a time and a place for that.

>but rather that I dislike how this tendency means that dwarves as a race will likely be viewed as a LG race due to this tendency. Some orcs are Good, some Dwarves are CE, there can be interesting deviations from the norm
It's a matter of trends i think you are falling into your own grand narrative here.
And I'm going to struggle to explain it.
At what point to you arbitrate that someone is no longer LG? you can see when someone goes over but there are a great many traits that can be removed and a person could still be LG.
You could have a selfish greedy dorf (inb4 /pol/) but still have him being LAWFUL and GOOD because traits x/y/z.
We can even great lapses in morality, where do those people pick themselves up after that?
Do they cease to be moral if they pick themselves up and try to atone?
I believe in this case it's your unwillingness to see depth in motivation because you believe that it must be a binary outcome.
Furthermore Even if in your example they are CE or LG respectively they still will retain an identity shaped by their placement within that society.

>have no strong tendency towards any alignment. ...
I disagree, humans are Lawful (because all communities need a tendency toward law to be sustainable) and have a preference towards good. they merely lack as great a correlation as other races might. Or individual freedom which is generally considered a good is a major trait among them compared to other races. And thus a LG society would allow pluralistic ideas

>Someone who tries to be nice
Not "nice", "kind". There's a difference.

There's also the fact that in later DND editions (including PF) law, chaos, good, and evil are all physical substances, but the physical substance is distinct from the ethical and moral outlooks law/chaos and good/evil. So you can end up with fallen angels who are absolute cunts (so, like, CE) but still physically composed of good, and retaining their racial features like DR/Evil and Aura of Good.

Asmodeus' 3.0 backstory involved him being a fallen Solar or something, which means it took untold millennia to convert his good-substance into evil-substance, but he was a cunt the whole way.

>then you're good in that god's eyes.
Evil gods only think of you as good at being bad. They think it's great that you're so bad.

I meant "good" as in "you're a'ight churchwise". Not that Zarus actually wants people to do Good.

He's a cunt.

p sure individual freedom is chaos, with good/neutral/evil depend on what is being done with it

>humans are Lawful
If you refrain from crime for fear of punishment, is that being Lawful or a coward?

>p sure individual freedom is chaos, with good/neutral/evil depend on what is being done with it
I believe you should explain how this fits into the argument, and what you are responding to.
Your train of thought is hard to follow.
>If you refrain from crime for fear of punishment, is that being Lawful or a coward?
It is necessary for orderly group cohesion. it does not matter if someone is doing it out of fear of reprisal or out of aspirations to be moral unless in a time of chaos.
Even then retribution is a deterrent and there will be people who will risk it, just as there will be people who will when faced with death or sacrifice of ideals will die for the sake of them.

>If you refrain from crime for fear of punishment, is that being Lawful or a coward?

A stupid, ignorant question. You can't be Lawful or a coward. Lawfulness is automatically cowardice. It is to take refuge in other people's decisions and call it "stability"; to hide behind a wall of reified nonsense and call it "society".

Real men - the ubermen - eschew society's "law" and make their own. They define ethics and morality.

It is a philosophy elegantly known as

>DURR HURR HURR HURR WE'RE FREE

Or maybe you could agree with them and not be a retard?
I haven't been on this site long enough to tell whether this is bait or not. Or maybe I've been here too long, who can say?

You don't understand, user. Without "law", anything goes. You can lie, or cheat... what's to stop you from becoming a god?

>have a preference towards good. they merely lack as great a correlation as other races might. Or individual freedom which is generally considered a good is a major trait among them compared to other races

I was responding to the idea that individual freedom is a "good". Leaving people to do what they will being "good" is usually justified by the idea that people are naturally good, or at least decent. If you don't believe that (ie Hobbes) then freedom isn't necessarily good, just chaotic (and evil, because the people are).

No one is implying anything. That's EXACTLY what it is, and anyone who thought otherwise is a wilful idiot.
>How was your first week of arts degree, user?

>fluff outright tells us that law and good are cultural
>NUH UH LAW AND GOOD ARE TOTALLY REAL THINGS

Spoken like a true kek

I have literally never even heard of an actual game where that was true, I've heard your response to this question a shit ton though. Making Good and Evil two sides in a morally grey conflict is, in my personal opinion, a bit asinine. It's like when people make weird eldrich abomination creatures and name them dragons, why use an established term for something not even remotely similar to the connotation/denotation.

That's why you use Law and Chaos, like Moorcock and OD&D

This would interesting to play around with in a game, but it verges on the "muh unwritten novel" DMing

Amazingly enough, 4e completely lacked this nonsensical situation because good and evil were distilled to broad ethos of selflessness v selfishness, order v disorder, and didn't punish you arbitrarily or mechanically because you made a decision that wasn't in line with X.
This changed if you were a divine class, and that was more with upholding the ethos of your particular god, not alignment.

It's a very archaic way to say 'compulsive masturbation'.

Basically he's saying you do nothing but play with your dick all the time.

Yeah. Looking at the source fiction (Three Hearts and Three Lions, Moorcock's work) for law and chaos, I can't help but imagine it was meant to be as such, but even as early as B/X you see alignment (then just law and chaos) as a representation of your personal ethical and moral frameworks rather than cosmological allegiance.

I'm not sure if it was different with the white box set, but if it did change from that, it changed very early in D&D's run. Considering the version of the game that was primarily Gygax's baby (AD&D 1st) including paladins and the two axis alignment system, I'd wager Gygax had always intended it to be a personal ethical/moral compass.

Wow, you make pretending to be retarded look really easy.
Can I try?

>Alignments
>implying they're aligned
>implying they're mints

Hey that *was* easy.

That may be a bit of the rub.
I'm not describing an anarchic system, I'm describing a liberal/republican/democratic system.
There are still laws, there are just no absolute figures and little to no compulsion outside of law that is not moral morays.

Time for me to point out something that I ended up talking with a friend just yesterday about.

If we take the most developed version of the alignment system in terms of in world understanding about it, planescape, there is both in world objective and sub objective ethics. Alignment are the objective element if it. The objective element is also when viewed by mortals who understand AS BEING IN THE WRONG.

That is a hard thing to warp most people head around because it conflicts with the nature of what a objective system of morality is. The thing is that mortals live messy lives of full of white lies that make functioning in our society possible.Mortals have a very hard time trying to measure up to D&D's objective system of morality we are imperfect being living among other imperfect beings.

Outsiders are far closer to perfect then most mortals ever could be. Outsider try to live by alignments because in may cases they made alive by alignments. Outsiders, even NG ones, are harsh. Start the video on 14:10

youtube.com/watch?v=zVoWnxObHkQ

I only came to understand this after reading some Moorcock and looking back.

The whole thing implies that dwarves are genetically likely to be conformist scum.

>dwarves are genetically likely to be conformist scum