Recent content by pemerton

I agree with @Crimson Longinus on this. It makes no sense. It's like positing that, in my fantasy world, some circles are square.

The issue of what it means for things to be "objectively evil" is a fairly complicated one in metaphysics and philosophy of language. I'm going to try and keep out of it in this thread! But the idea that putting milk in tea in Tuesday in July might be the epitome of evil seems ridiculous to me...

This claim is controversial. As I posted not far upthread, I think a majority of contemporary English language moral philosophers would disagree with it.

I know what it means to be saturated with water. So I can follow the metaphor in a loose way. But what does "being saturated with thought stuff* really mean? Imbued with will? Or are these like "stickers" stuck to the thing? I agree with @Clint_L that ultimately this does not make sense.

In my view the problem is not the lack of coherence, but my points (i) and (ii). Trying to play a righteous knight errant in a dungeon crawl is absurd, doubly so if - as is the case for most D&D games as best I can tell - the assumed cosmology is nihilistic rather than providential. (I know that...

I'm pretty sure that a majority of real-world mainstream English-language moral philosophers (the one's you find in philosophy departments) are moral objectivists. This is mostly because defending some sort of subjectivist, relativist or expressivist position requires overcoming some challenging...

Here we disagree. I think Gygax's PHB and DMG are more coherent than 2nd ed AD&D. As I posted upthread, they identify a contest between law and chaos as to the best means to achieve good. (And as I also noted, good is taken to be something we're already able to identify. Gygax's alignment system...

These two posts seem to be in tension with one another.

I agree with @Aldarc. I don't find 4e D&D to be lacking in style or flare. It makes me imagine how things would work out in play.

I'm probably a bit late to this party, but I wanted to respond to this. I tend to agree with some others that, if there isn't such a thing as most participants taking on the "player" role, making moves in the game by declaring actions for their PCs, then it's not quite a RPG, as they are not...

I think AD&D's alignment is quite coherent, but not suited for the apparent purpose many want to use it for. It takes for granted that we can tell what is good and what is evil, and raises questions about law vs chaos as means to the good. But a lot of people seem to want to use alignment to...

Well, I'm a professional thinker (in the sense of an academic philosopher and lawyer, who is published on moral and political philosophy). You can get my musings for free right here on ENworld!

One of my Burning Wheel PCs is Thurgon, Knight of the Iron Tower: As per his lifepaths, Thurgon was a religious acolyte, a page and a squire, and is a knight of a holy military order. And, as per his traits, he is Faithful. This is about as close to a paladin as can be built in BW. He...

In my Cortex+ LotR/MERP game Gandalf's player tended to cut loose more than Gandalf as written by JRRT. The upshot was that the Doom Pool grew, and I (as GM) was able to end scenes in a way that meant the Orcs escaped carrying the palantir, etc. This was broadly genre-appropriate, but I'm not...