Alexander 'Lex' Williams

I suppose it's time to actually show people my work. Running Breathless is a game about being chased and dealing with problems along the way, sometimes not even your own. squidlord.itch.io/running-breath… Maybe you're a psychic kid who's escaped from the hospital or the school for unusual talents. Maybe you've made the heist of your life. Maybe you're the worst kind of criminal scum. Maybe they're right behind you. Catch your breath when you can. Go to ground if you find someone you can trust or a big enough sucker. The one thing you're guaranteed to do? Run. Running Breathless is a TRPG for one to five players, GM optional, based on the Breathless SRD. Check it out. It's pay what you want, which means you can pay absolutely $0.00, and I won't be mad. In fact, I encourage you to do so. It runs pretty quickly, so you can even throw it up on the table while waiting for other players to arrive for your main game. It's fast, a little bit cruel, and you should have about 50-50 odds of getting away with it. Whatever it was you did. The chasers know.

My trek through the *1001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die* continues with *Wonderful Rainbow* by Lightning Bolt. I'm proud enough of this one to actually share it publicly. There are reasons. You'll find out. music.youtube.com/playlist?list=… --- This one is supposed to be a very challenging listen, so we'll see how it goes. I might not actually do a track-by-track commentary. I have to say that the suggested classification of "noise rock" is not promising, especially since *Wonderful Rainbow* is referred to as Lightning Bolt's most accessible album. We'll see. Right up front. First track. *Hello Morning*. I can see how this is going to go. It's going to go with pain and suffering and regret. A pile of electric guitars thrown into a random stack with some kick drum, large amounts of distortion and feedback. Oh yeah, 56 seconds of that is exactly what I needed to get into the right headspace. Thanks guys. I appreciate it. Track Two, *Assassins*. I have never wanted to pull an Oedipus Rex on myself, except using the ears rather than the eyes, more than I do right now. At least I don't have to complain about the lyrics, because while there is some incomprehensible stuff shouted through a really bad loudspeaker in the back, there's absolutely no chance of making out what it actually is saying. Normally, this is where I would point to some excellent instrumentalist work, but the only person putting in any effort at this point is the drummer, who is just going off and doing his own thing, which in fairness is kind of what I wish I could do right now. The rest is repetitive upwards arpeggio, and not a very good one. We've made it all the way out to *Dracula Mountain*, and I have to ask, what the fuck is this shit? I think I've figured out their play, and I'm not excited about going through another seven tracks of it. Basically, they grab a relatively simplistic melody, play it over and over and over and over and over with a gross amount of distortion on it. Maybe at some point, they drop out the background and have the guitar riff on that for about five seconds, and then go back to just layering completely messy garbage while playing the same riff over and over and over and over and over again. That's it. That's their compositional style. Oh yes, and have somebody incoherently yelling into a loudspeaker, which itself is ridiculously distorted at some point. If that's the entirety of this album, the music industry and I are going to have some words. We've fetched up at the bottom of *Two Towers*, and I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. It's seriously seven minutes and nine seconds of the band playing two different riffs over and over again, only speeding up a bit in the last couple of minutes of the song. There was a good four-second section about 40 seconds in that I thought they were going to do something interesting and establish a baseline. I was curious as to where they were going, and then they went the exact same place over and over and over again. I'm not pretentious enough to say that this shouldn't be called music, but I am pretentious enough to say that if you paid money for this experience, perhaps hiring a dominatrix would be more satisfying for your masochistic urges. *On Fire* almost is a song. It does have some dynamism, which none of the preceding four tracks had even a hint of, so it has that going for it. There's a little bit of progression. There's a little bit of something adjacent to a melody. It's not a real melody, but it can see one from where it's standing. Lightning Bolt can't maintain it, and they revert to their old ways three quarters of the way through a 4-minute, 43-second song. That's disappointing performance no matter what you're doing. The thing that pisses me off here is I can see flashes of near competency for a couple of chord changes or 15 seconds of drumming, but it's like they catch themselves and have to fuck it up aggressively to keep their street cred. It's agonizing. At this point, I wish I could make incomprehensible noises through a loudspeaker into this review, just like the lead singer of Lightning Bolt, because *Crown of Storms* engenders that kind of response. Great, awesome title. You had my attention. It almost has some dynamism, like *On Fire*. Somewhere in the middle it shifts a bit and we get incomprehensible drunken loudspeaker noises being used as more of a tone wash and melodic component, which I didn't expect, but that doesn't make it good. I'm pretty sure that we are just listening to the guitarist run through his "Learn to Play Guitar in 30 Days" exercises during the recording. That someone got paid during any part of the production of this album so far should be a violation of the United Nations directive against inhumane treatment. I have a sad admission to make. The rest of this album has been so absolutely terrible that *Longstockings* was my favorite track. It starts out pretty decent. It's a short riff, but it'll work. We've got a lot of distortion. It's not cycling quite as hard, and the drums come in at an appropriate time to help shake things up. Make things lively. Even the incoherent mumbling/ranting on the loudhailer is almost charming, given the relative cleanness of the rest of the song. I was even starting to get into it, but then they hit the two-thirds of the way mark, and it literally descends into ridiculous cacophony with all the instruments just being beaten and the vocalist screaming incoherently. Then finally it all collapses into nothing but screeching feedback at the end. It's like they showed that they could perform music, and then just when you took a step closer to the stage to listen to it, they whipped out their dicks and pissed right in your face, which may have been their intention in putting this song together. I'm starting to think it might have been. I hate this. I hate it here. Finally, we get to the title drop of the album *Wonderful Rainbow*. You know what? This doesn't entirely suck. Is it repetitive and uncreative? Oh yeah, absolutely. Is it still sounding like the guitarist is going through his pick exercises and not actually trying to play music? Absolutely, no question. Is the lyricist making nonsensical baby noises into the loudspeaker in the background? Perversely, yes. But the guitar isn't heavily distorted. It's actually a reasonably clean acoustic, and there's this sort of dreamy wash reverb happening on the guitar part. Honestly, get rid of the vocalist, probably by setting them on fire and laughing as they burn to death, and this might be a good fragment of a song. A seed, a starting place. We'll get back to this idea later. Is it good? Oh, fuck no. Is it good for this album? It's the best we've got so far. I get it. *30,000 Monkies*. I get it. You are literally trying to embody the idea that 30,000 monkeys banging on 3,000 typewriters for an infinite amount of time would turn out the entire works of Shakespeare and every other piece of creative art ever created in the history of mankind, seen from the perspective of the end of the universe and heat death. That's exactly what you manifested by just banging on your instruments with no rhyme or reason for three minutes and 50 seconds. An endless cacophony that's only punctuated in the middle by an accidental return to the guitarist not being able to be that fully incoherent for that long and returning to his pick exercises. Everyone involved with this should not just be painfully executed, but we should find out their producers and torture them until we find out where they hid the money. Their screams would still be better than this track. You know what? I was wrong. *Duel in the Deep* is my favorite track off of this album, mainly because I don't entirely hate it. Does it do exactly the same thing as every other track? Sure. The guitarist is playing the same riff over and over again. They've got a wash of distortion and reverb. It's mercifully mostly free from shouting through the loudhailer, so it's got that going for it. The thing that sets it apart from the other tracks is that it feels like it's going somewhere. It doesn't actually; it's an illusion. But because of the way that the background elements are washing through, it feels like there's a certain amount of kinesis, that there is some dynamism, that things are changing and evolving. It's not real. The song goes on for way longer than it has to, and that's only partly because the last minute and a half is just distortion and screaming feedback. Look, I love punk music. I've seen punk bands live. I've listened to a ton of punk bands, and the one thing they have in common is that even though they are totally about the DIY and instrumentality is not the first thing on their minds, and that they love screaming into a microphone, they would look down on Lightning Bolt as not good enough musicians to be a punk band. Not even that annoying high school punk band that was trying so hard to be edgy in mom's garage. Those guys would turn their nose in the air at these sad, pathetic excuses for musicians. The most frustrating thing about this album is that it feels as though each of the tracks could have been a real song. They are unfinished, incomplete, incoherent because someone didn't spend the time to make them whole. They needed editing, an actual melody, some crafting of the mix. You know, everything that shows that you care about your work and you want people to enjoy it. I won't go so far as to say this is anti-music, but I can say that the band members all need to be beaten severely until they can get themselves properly composed. Also, give that drummer a real job with a prog rock band, because I think he could handle it. He just needs to have somebody demand more of him. Jesus Christ, this was a trial.

There are many ways that "diceless" RPGs function. Some of them just dispose of dice and use other sources of randomness, like playing cards or flipping coins. Some of them remove randomness altogether and are pure resource allocation systems or resource bidding systems. Never get hung up on the idea that a role-playing game requires any particular mechanism for resolution. All that they really require is some architecture for creating the experience of surprise in the case of a conflict of imagination or in an environment of risk. There is nothing more surprising than human behavior. You don't need dice to get that, though dice are incredibly convenient.

I just read about “diceless” TTRPG”s? Not to ruin anyone’s fun, but how does this even work? This is so counterintuitive to everything role playing games are to me. Anyone play this way?

That depends entirely on what you conceive of the reason for the gameplay to be. If you just want something that people already know and are likely to sign up for, sure, keep Mothership and Call of Cthulhu. If you want to introduce them to new things because you think they'll show up for you and trust your taste, then there's a whole raft of interesting horror games out there which would be intriguing and bring attention to them. But first, we need to know what your intent is.

This will be my old school fantasy game of 2027. Classic traveller will be my Sci-fi. What should I slot in for horror? Or do I keep Mothership and Call of Cthulhu in the Core Four?

GURPS was a game engine, not a setting, so no more gonzo than a typewriter. Rifts was absolutely kitchen sink and, in fact, pretty gonzo by nature. Spelljammer is not, inherently, gonzo, though it's gonzo-adjacent. Gonzo is a mode. Gonzo is a mood. Anything can be approached through the lens of gonzo.

Was Spelljammer the most gonzo thing ever? Was it RIFTS? Or maybe GURPS? Or are these all just different flavors of extreme gonzo?

I want someone to find and show me one of these people who don't have the time or capacity to make home-cooked meals. Just one. I have a significant physical disability. It's not an easy one like being confined to a wheelchair or something. It's an actual upper torso involvement problem. Grasping, fine manipulation, the works. Do you know what I like to do? That's right, I like to cook. Not every night, because I'm lazy, but every other night for sure. Whether it be some tikka masala and nice fragrant jasmine rice, or baked beans with some nice juicy baby back ribs. Whatever the mood strikes. All it takes is thinking about how to solve the problem, figuring out what components I need to solve the problem with, and then actually executing the plan. Now, what do I do every other night? I summon something from DoorDash because it's easier than trying to go through the overhead of getting dressed, jumping in the car, driving a place, having a meal by myself, and driving home. Instead, I can just wander to the door in my lounge pants and give someone money in exchange for providing a service, like the entire rest of the economy is based on. I don't know what the problem is with people on both sides of this argument, but apparently they're all retards. But I damn well want to see the people who are supposedly unable to cook at home, because I don't believe they exist. I believe they are a convenient shibboleth for one side or the other to invoke whenever it's convenient, and not a single goddamn person has met one of them. Not even one of them. You know what? I like having the option to give somebody money in exchange for providing a service, and I'm perfectly capable of cooking my own food. These things are not exclusionary. I would like people to stop getting up their own ass about removing choices from other people.

It takes me 1 hour on a weekend to prep 10 meals for 30 bucks. Seriously, the legitimate issues about the economy are going to fall by the wayside because people are just self reporting how awful they are with money.

@ChubbyFunsterGC @GrampsToolshed So really no change from the theoretical experts then. If ever we had an observable source that proved the mimicry is perfect, that's it.

@GrampsToolshed It will sound right at first, then slowly start to bend towards its hidden bias

It is kinda creepy that AI can emulate people's persona, but now I'm tempted to have it explain everything to me from the point of view of Victor Davis Hanson or Thomas Sowell..... 🤔

I have a truly unwholesome love of Spelljammer, which, given my taste in RPGs, is borderline ridiculous. But I just love everything about it. The fact that it is so over the top and so going everywhere. You can do everything from slapstick comedy heist to grimdark terror. And it all fits into the same world. Even given that I'm no fan of D&D, I'm a huge fan of Spelljammer, and make no bones about it. Though these days if I were going to play it, I'd probably use Sundered Isles (tomkinpress.com/pages/sundered…) to do so. Does it have all of the varied races and bits of tech that Spelljammer does? Not pre-made for you. But it's so simple to do, and there's so much of the core game loop that just works that there's no way I could resist it. It's on The List©™ of things that I intend to do at some point.

#RPGstuffdaily #dnd Spelljammer, AD&D 2nd Edition If you’ve never taken a spelljammer helm in hand and blasted off into the Crystal Spheres, you’re missing peak old-school gonzo. Fantasy ships that sail the void between worlds, powered by magic and captained by everything from grizzled dwarf helmsmen to mind flayer merchants. Giant space hamsters. Space galleons battling beholders. Crystal spheres enclosing entire solar systems like cosmic snow globes. It’s swashbuckling pirate action, Age of Sail exploration, and high fantasy all smashed together in the black — and yeah, it delivers exactly what it promises. And we're not talking about that 5e weak sister Smellpampers. Some folks today clutch their pearls and call it “too silly.” Come on. How is a galleon flying through space any sillier than your standard Tolkien-elf setting with immortal pretty boys living in tree mansions, talking trees that shepherd forests, or halflings who treat second breakfast like a sacred rite? Fantasy has always been ridiculous the second you stop taking it deadly serious. Spelljammer just leans all the way into the ridiculous and has the stones to make it fun. Swashbuckling in space isn’t a gimmick — it’s the genre at its absolute peak. Give me cutlasses, boarding actions, and starlight duels over another generic “orcs in the hills” slog any day of the week. And man, the support. Spelljammer had a ridiculous number of modules, adventures, supplements, and sourcebooks for its era. Lost Ships, Rock of Bral, Practical Planetology, The Astromundi Cluster, Under the Moons of Krynn, Heart of the Void… the list goes on. You could actually build out a full campaign that felt lived-in instead of one thin setting book and a prayer. TSR was firing on all cylinders. Speaking of which — AD&D 2nd Edition was the apex of D&D, full stop. The Player’s Options books and the whole line of Complete Handbooks (Fighter’s, Thief’s, Wizard’s, etc.) gave you real customization depth without turning the game into a spreadsheet. Kits, proficiencies, specialties, the works. The support across the board was massive: campaign settings done right, monster manuals that actually expanded play, and adventures that respected the referee instead of railroading everyone. 2e had the perfect balance of structure and freedom before the later editions started overcomplicating or watering things down. Spelljammer thrived in that environment. If you’ve got the itch for classic D&D with a side of void-pirate madness, dig up those old boxed sets and modules. Give it the full Law Dog treatment — crank the gonzo, keep the lethality high, and let the players sail their ship straight into trouble. You won’t regret it. Fair winds and full spheres, mates.

The 10th anniversary *Warhammer Skulls* promotional event is probably one of the best put together and most interesting video game trailer pimping platforms of the last 10 years. Far better than the VGA, up there with the Triple-I. They actually have some interesting stuff coming out. What kind of universe do we live in?

Absolutely. Though they may forget to come by and pick it up for a hundred years, even after you acknowledge that you owe it. When they do, they'll bring a handful of genetically uplifted demigods and a legion of guys with t-shirts and flashlights who don't know who you are and don't care. Not a single one of them will help out because they'll arrive 25 years after the planet has been turned into a blasted desolation. They'll still blow up a couple of mounds of rocks just to say they were there. Just after they leave, the ork spores will begin sprouting.

@squidlord @Ochadoji999 You forgot that the same Adminsitorium is still requiring your Tithe and that your extention period is past so you owe 40 years of back tithes

"Welcome to Warhammer 40k!" Be the Imperium of Humanity in Warhammer 40k. You receive word of a Chaos incursion upon an Imperial world. Immediately declare a Crusade, send in everything you can: Imperial Guard, Space Marines, artillery, vehicles, even a titan or two. After 80 years, which might be considered a surprisingly short period of time for such an occasion, you finally do it, you manage to expulse the evil forces of Chaos from the planet. You've taken enormous casualties, the civilian population is basically extinct, and the Death Korps of Krieg have officially declared that this is their new favorite place, but the minions of The Enemy have been denied their prize. Then the ground beneath your feet shudders unnaturally. The planet is a Necron Tomb-World. Your Crusade has roused them. Now you have to confront the Necrons. At the same time, a space hulk comes crashing down through the atmosphere to impact upon what used to be a very important manufactorum. It's an Ork Rok. A WAAAGH!! comes pouring out of it. Now you're facing the Necrons AND an Ork WAAAGH!! In the end the Space Marines are called away because the Chaos warband you just drove off-world? It's just struck a neighboring planet, and THAT one's a Forge World, so the Adeptus Mechanicus are DEMANDING that the Astartes be present. The last titan you had got taken out by a pair of Ork gargants. The Necrons have relentlessly slaughtered the Imperial Guard to almost a fraction of their former numbers. Orks are overrunning your positions. After some brief deliberation, it is decided that there is no real reason or purpose for this world to exist anymore, as it is no longer useful to the Imperium. The Order to evacuate the planet is given. Few actually receive this order. They're too busy fighting for their lives. Exterminatus is declared. The planet and everything on it burns. Humans, Orks, Necrons, everything is utterly annihilated utterly. The world is now a desolate dead rock in space. You declare it a victory over the enemies of humanity and go on to see how the Space Marines are doing liberating that Forge World. WELCOME TO WARHAMMER 40K.

I noticed you conveniently sidestepped the issue of morality, though. It has nothing to do with having a choice. They didn't have a choice. Their behavior gave rise to Slaanesh. What happened after that was survival. I also noticed you sidestepped the opening question that I provided, which would have been useful and indicative. I'm pointing out that your philosophy of distinction is inane and poorly considered. Though if we get back to the Craftworlders and the Drukhari, it's worth pointing out that they exchange population all the time. Eldar go from being Craftworld to Drukhari, and Drukhari go from Drukhari to being Craftworld on a regular basis. That's actually a defined part of the setting. So it turns out that sometimes they literally do go, "Wait, maybe those other guys had a point. Let's go join them," in both directions. Which really puts a double underline beneath a very simple understanding: The 40K universe is not a moral universe. It is not a universe, a setting in which morality is absolute and axiomatic. It's not even necessarily observable. It's a setting which does not reward moral thinking. In fact, often it punishes it. Thus the quote "grimdark." This makes characters who actually do behave in a way which we would find moral within our personal frameworks distinct and interesting to watch, knowing that their universe does not care about morality one way or another. Inducing morality in order to put white hats and black hats on characters and settings in which that is explicitly nonsensical is just simplifying it so that you can wrap a tiny brain around it. Don't do it. Stop it. Read it for what it is, not what you want it to be.

@squidlord @Ochadoji999 They just said eff it, and kept it going. Still love them tho, they were the second army I learned to play after guard

WARHAMMER 40K: You want a 'better tomorrow'? FUCK OFF, THIS IS THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FUTURE WHERE THERE IS ONLY WAR!! YOUR SORRY ASS DOESN'T EVEN -GET- A TOMORROW!! You get to fight a to-the-death battle that will have practically ZERO real impact upon the literally GALAXY-SPANNING CONFLICT that ravages innumerable planetary systems, and your sole consolation is that when you die - and oh, you ARE most definitely going to die - you will die in the knowledge that you didn't go gently, that in your last moments, you raged against the inevitable dying of the light. THAT is what WARHAMMER 40k is about. Utopia died with the Dark Age of Technology.

You might get savages. You might get a highly functional advanced social group which formed under long-term population and resource pressure for several hundred years and are just more advanced than the folks that left later with more high-tech drives. You might get a ghost ship inhabited by the digital echoes of the crew and population who discovered a way to perfect uploading along the way and abandoned their bodies. There are so many good things you can get that I think we need to start working on that right now. I'll even volunteer to go. It's for the best, really.

LOL! Do you want Savages? Because that’s how you get Savages.

So you would suggest that a group of serial rapists who gathered together for mutual protection and are pursuing a course of scorched earth violence and degradation against those hunting them for the betterment of society would be morally good? Yes, I have deliberately chosen the most extreme possible question. Having done so, I have put you in a position to declare that the Drukhari, the mass rapist torturers who live for thousands of years, every moment in terror of their soul being consumed by Slaanesh, are morally good for their pursuits and their fascinations, because ultimately it serves to rage against that dying of the light. For context, I love the Drukhari. They're some of my favorite characters in the setting. I love the Necrons, those cold, insane, omnicidal maniacs and their petty little squabbles. I love the Tyranids and their endless hunger and desire to not dominate but merely consume. I think the Tau are actually kind of boring, but find their hypocrisy kind of refreshing. But I don't think any of them are the good guys, nor do I need them to be, nor do I want them to be. I don't need things that I enjoy to be morally objectively good. I don't even need them to be slightly objectively good or relatively good. I just need them to be interesting and fun. I am not my armies. I am not my characters. By your measure, technically everyone in 40k is a good guy. They are all rage against the dying of the light, including the Tyranids, who know what happens if they stop eating. They starve. They die. The entire raison d'etre of the Necrons is they didn't want to die of space cancer. Thus the sellout to the Star Gods and the Necrodermis. The Orks live for certain death. That's the best fight. You've set up a situation in which everybody is the hero and the good guy in a world setting in which everyone commits atrocities upon one another continuously by the nature of the world and their position in it. Congratulations. In your search for a hero, you've made everyone a hero. To paraphrase a greater man than I, "When everyone's a hero, no one is." Good job, hero. You broke it with the shallowest possible thinking available. 👍

@squidlord @Ochadoji999 To me, raging against that dying light when the alternative is certain death, even if that death is inevitable, is morally good for even the slimmest possibility of making out to the other side. That’s why the imperium is the good guys, and Iyanden, and farsight

Objective morality can exist in the setting without making alignment a bad roleplay tool. If alignment is an actual law of the cosmology, then it certainly can explain why a character lies, obeys, forgives, or justifies harm. It's not lazy to depend on the elements of the setting to inform your character's reactions, any more than it's lazy to depend on the elements of the setting to inform your character's actions in combat. I think the overall position is still stated too broadly, and it takes off the table an entire ocean of narrative possibilities, mostly centered around: what if morality was part of our axiomatic cosmology? What would a world look like in that case? What if orcs are actually, objectively, ontologically evil? What if halflings really are little bundles of chaos, and in order to be anything other, they either have to be somehow special or be investing vast amounts of work. What if good is an actual detectable trait in the world? What would that lead to characters making decisions on? I don't want this to be part of every setting or even most settings, but it's fine for D&D. It is intentionally a heroic Northern European fantasy; moral subtlety is a relatively modern innovation in that genre (and when I say "it's fine for D&D" I mean it's fine for the Forgotten Realms, which is only one shard of D&D. It's not necessarily okay for Dark Sun or Eberron or anyone's personal take that's darker and more murky than bog standard out-of-the-box D&D). In my own Starforged campaign, the Milky Way galaxy was abandoned by as many as could take ships out of their because of the rise of the Great Old Ones. In the generation ships, which fled to a new, more raw, less forgiving galaxy. One of the central social axioms is that large organizations are deeply distrusted because religions were some of the first things to be co-opted by the Great Old Ones. There are no religions in this new setting, and there's a deep concern about remnants and ties to the old world—even as FTL and hypertech is tied intimately to a material which is made and can only be made by old world processes: "black iron", a chitonous excrescence from a paradimensional fungus. Would alignment be useful in this setting? No, absolutely not. The themes of good versus evil and chaos versus order just aren't important to any of the stories here, and there's no need for them to be axioms of the world. It's not a setting that is inclined to alignment. Now, in the sketches for a series of scenarios I'm writing called Starfall to Swords, where a spaceship and its crew (the PCs) crashes on what is effectively a fantasy world, and they have to or probably want to get their ship up and running while getting embroiled in local situations and potentially global. In order to get bits to fix the ship, it might be interesting to introduce alignment as a universal axiom, which the PCs originally arrive untethered to and unaffected by, but who find it creeping in within themselves and definitely evidenced in the world around them. I'm not sure that will make it into that write-up, but it's certainly an interesting idea and could lead to some excellent story potential. Basically, what I mean is that whether alignment is useful or interesting to a particular story can be considered and judged. However, whether it's useful or interesting in general, or whether it's harmful for people's roleplay, is not really a sensible debate to have. This goes back to my objection to so much of public discourse: All things are not one thing. All people are not one people. All stories are not one story. All games are not one game. Any pretension otherwise is foolishness and ultimately self-destructive when it comes to understanding and bettering your understanding. Morality can be absolute in a story. Cosmology can be psychology. Alignment can be innate. None of these things invalidate a story or make role-playing more or less interesting. They just build context. Just play the game. Or to quote one of my favorite pieces of indie advice over the last 20 years, "Play to find out."

@squidlord Objective morality can exist in the setting without making alignment a good roleplay tool. Cosmic Good and Evil define metaphysics. They still don’t explain why a character lies, obeys, forgives, or justifies harm. Cosmology is not psychology. But yeah, that's just D&D.

You're either engaging in the fallacy that imagining D&D is every RPG, or you're failing to imagine that there are other stories in which alignment makes perfect sense, including quite a lot of the core narrative architecture of Dungeons & Dragons. It's perfectly reasonable for moral agency to be something that is fictively defined. A world with actual, definable, universally constructed morality is certainly within the capacity of humanity to imagine. I'm imagining it right now. I don't imagine it's the world we live in, but I can imagine a fictional world in which it exists, in which good and evil are literally manifest, just as chaos and order are, one in which there are gods which literally represent and embody those forces, in which there is a near scientific understanding of how to detect and counter their influences (as magic often does with Detect Good/Evil, etc.). That's not to say it's a setting that you would enjoy as much as the alternatives, but you've overstepped when you say "shouldn't." That's a failure of imagination, not a recognition of patterns. It's a dictation, not an observation, and it's wrong.

If you're in a setting where morality is specifically and clearly one of the natural pillars of axiomatic truth in the setting, then it's not a roleplay shortcut for character morality. It literally is the cosmology of the world. It defines the framework within which moral actions can be easily, even transparently, judged. Characters with even a modicum of understanding of the world around them should be aware of those rules and that framework. They themselves may be limited in free will, which they can express based on accidents of birth, constrained to only exist within certain expressions of morality and ethics by forces beyond their control, save in extremely rare situations. There are billions of stories to be mined in that particular field. Perversely enough, for all my objections to old school D&D, it was designed to literally explore that particular narrative space. It did come up with some pretty fertile grounds. You are provided a vast number of cosmological constants which you can use to explain your character's behaviors and keep consistency with the rest of the world, even when not being consistent with it. The ancient lich may be constrained in his motives to those of evil. However, evil is defined in this cosmological architecture. His agency depends on how much individual consciousness that he has, which allows him to reason about his lack of agency and what could be done to increase it. Or his attitude that it needs no increasing, that it's perfect where it is. Choice at the table should fall out of the obvious questions: What does the character want? Why can't they have it? What are they going to do about that? Insofar as those questions touch on issues of cosmology, they are affected, but that is purely about choice at the table. Frankly, I don't see what the problem is. Your objection boils down in my eyes to the fact that some people are shitty role players and have the imagination of a thimbleful of warm piss. Because of their incapacity, then any ideas that challenge them to move beyond it should be eschewed. I find that foolishness. I would suggest quite the opposite, that these people need the equivalent of imaginative exercise. But being so unused to working their moral body in such a way, they're going to need a few guidelines to hold on to as they go into the deep end of the pool. They are not free divers yet. Let the cosmology guide them along the way of possible lines of evolution, different ways the story can play out. Give them the chance to read the patterns of tension so that they can best be aware. Now, my personal preferences are better expressed by the game *Fantasy World* (unplayablegamesrpg.itch.io/fantasy-world), particularly when it says: "The gods are silent." There is no external good or evil, no metric for the same, which is imposed from above. This really simplifies a lot of issues and opens up a lot of avenues, but quite a lot of the current fantasy gamer population is not ready to play at that level. A sad admission, but the truth. So instead, we give them lesser freedoms to go on the town with, as it should be.

@squidlord Cosmic morality can exist as setting physics. That’s not my objection. My objection is using that physics as a roleplay shortcut for character morality. Once Good/Evil are detectable forces, you’ve defined cosmology. You haven’t solved motive, agency, or choice at the table.

@entropy11 @Fat_Electrician That's an entirely different concern, but not what he said.

@squidlord @Fat_Electrician Of course what Fat Electrician is getting at here is people want to be entitled to doordash even when they can't pay for it, which is something other than gainful commerce.

We are unironically moments away from people legitimately declaring DoorDash is a human right.

Point of order. Nihilism is the belief that there is no meaning to the universe or to human experience. It makes no claims about the existence of the universe, subjective experience, or beliefs. Now, to be a nihilist does require that you believe that meaning could exist. It's just that it doesn't. Otherwise, do carry on.

@Seano299 @squidlord You can, indeed, be anti-belief. What do you think Nihilism is? It’s still a belief system predicated on not believing anything.

Worldbuilding applies to every story in existence, whether you like it or not. It’s in your romcoms, your court dramas, and your hallmark cheesy romances. Establishing any rules of how a world or plot is working is worldbuilding. Sorry, you don’t get to discount it because you think it’s for nerds.