A question for Roleplayers about the web-comic
Goblins - Life through Their Eyes - Saturday, February 17, 2007 , which some of us read and which has been advertised here and there on the boards:
Quote:
"(Spoilers ahead!)
For those that have read and kept up with the Goblins comic that Hsing (i think) first linked to, I've got an interesting question for you. Paladins, as we all know, can detect evil. The goblin paladin Big Ears does this regularly. He's told us that the human guards around the city are evil, that the ranger Goblinslayer is extremely evil, and that the half-giant chap is extremely evil but that his axe is the most evil of all.
Now, Big Ears also discovered that Goblinslayer's pet Yaun-Ti is NOT evil. I haven't got the Monster Manual here at my disposal, but i'm quite sure that Yaun-Ti alignments are listed as 'Always Evil', though i can't recall if they're lawfuly or chaoticly so. Of course, goblins are always lawful evil... yet Big Ears is a paladin... lawful good. They're PC characters. They can break the mold.
But... are good and evil relative? I don't think we've had a definitive exposition on that in Goblins, yet, but we do know that the comic takes place in a game that includes at least the framework of the alignment rules. Goblinslayer certainly appears to be evil, based on what he's done... but is he evil from a human point of view...? Then there's that cursed dwarven paladin... he's amazingly evil (by my standards), but he's still got all his paladin abilities...
So, what's the assumption here? Relative belief in one's moral alignment/code overrides or, more likely, takes the place of any arbitrary universal definition?"
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