Rolling Six Feet Deep

R.I.P Gary Gygax
6/27/38 - 3/4/08

I want to blog about Dungeons and Dragons in honor of Gygax's life. It's not a typical Christian blog on D&D because I've already made my decision on its relation to Christian life and I believe it's OK. I find him a phenomenal genius who constructed amazing world building rules which are, honestly, very foundational to how I see the world in many ways. 3rd Edition more than 2nd Edition because I think THAC0 was a disaster just like 2nd Edition's multi-classing rules.

At any rate, I want to blog on an obscure element that rarely gets addressed and that is the construction of the alignment system. Game worlds operate in moral absolutes and I find that odd considering how game worlds are almost always polytheistic with any Uber-deity acting as a stand-offish clockmaker. AO in Faerun, for example, fits the bill.

Pelor, Correllon, Moradin, Yondalla and Garl Glittergold are deities on the side of "Good" while Nerull, Gruumsh, Kurtulmak and Llolth are evil-aligned deities. I wonder how they can make that judgment call in absolute terms given the lack of an Over-God in most gameworlds.

Gruumsh, god of Orcs for example could really be the result of bad press. As his mythos goes, the various racial deities drew lots and Gruumsh was left with no home for his people. He then stabbed his spear out and said that he would conquer other lands to make a home. Now, in this particular case, is this a particularly evil act? From an Orc perspective it is simply a matter of being able to self-determine a national destiny. An Orc, sociologically speaking, is lawful good or chaotic good in Orc society but chaotic evil in human lands.

The greater problem is any attempt to posit a morality without the existence of an active moral Uber-deity. As D&D clerics can draw power from "principles" like "Justice" (lawful neutral), "mercy" (neutral good), "freedom" (chaotic good), "tyranny" (lawful evil) and so on and so forth, it might be tempting to think that having mere "discoverable" moral absolutes would answer the question. It doesn't for morality posits, by necessity, a value system, namely that good is better than evil and should be chosen.

When morality is reduced to principles, randomness becomes the inescapable conclusion. They may be socially beneficial but that is just an opinion of science. Further studies may prove the opposite. Also, why should "socially beneficial" be privileged over "individually beneficial" and how do they interact with each other? Adam Smith has one answer and socialism another. Which is good and which is evil?

The Gygaxian world's morality is incapable of answering these deeper questions. Not that we should have expected it to but it is for me one of the great annoyances of the game (especially as my favored class is an Aasimar Paladin that puts all his points in CHA so that he can later take the Divine Might feat and then have the bonus apply to dual wielded weapons... but that's something else altogether.)

Back to morality.

As far as I can see morality cannot itself be supreme otherwise it becomes arbitrary. Morality itself must always be secondary to something else. In a Christian sense, I often wonder if anything is supreme, is it also arbitrary, in this case, God.

If God's supremacy serves as the basis of morality, his fiat being the sole determinant of what is good and what is sin (as I believe the Bible substantiates) then the question "Why follow God?" still applies doesn't it? It may offer a whole host of benefits such as "reconciliation with the Creator," and "living by the principles with which we were meant to live with," and "suffusing your life with the presence of a truly Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent being" and all that but that I don't think would be appealing (or even sensible) to vast tracts of humanity.

And these questions aren't asked in terms of apologetics or with an evangelistic purpose in mind. I am well aware that eventually God transforms the heart of the elect to believe and worship His person and that it is not cognitive decision-making that precedes regeneration.

The best answer I can have for this is that the most basic states of a dualist universe are best expressed in internet vernacular.

God = win
~God = fail

In the end God has all the win and everything opposed to God is the fail. You might even say it's Epic Fail.
All internet humor aside, I cannot think of any other possible metric which would make one system preferable to another. Even God's supremacy seems arguably arbitrary. His qualities may demand more respect, awe and adoration and all of that should factor into a person's calculus but aside from win-state or fail-state I can't see any other metric that would elevate a system or a being above arbitrary.

And I hope my readers, both of you, can see that even with win-state and fail-state logic, I have still have some reservations about its ability to separate anything out of arbitrariness.

So I guess this post = fail. : (