Know Your Lore: The Old Gods

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

7-22-2010 @ 4:07AM

Zenith said...

I also think of Old Gods as the embodiment of chaos, but just now thought of something Blizzard may be trying to do:

Think of the D&D style of alignments, you have lawful, chaotic, good and evil on a grid. Old Gods would definitely be purely chaotic, Sargeras would be evil, the Titans are lawful/order(killing everything on a planet due to some corruption isn't very good) and the Naaru are good, although if you look at the power of the others they would be servants of some greater being(s).

This gives a 'pure' representation for each alignment, but also means that they are not necessarily allied with each other, we may see a time after the Old Gods and Sargeras are sealed away or defeated where the Titans decided Azeroth needs some nerfing, then we figured them with the help of the Naaru. Of course the Naaru can also have some hidden agenda where they want to blow everything up to become one with the light or something, so in the end it's better to maintain a balance between the forces

Now we also just need some purely neutral entity(Azeroth/well of eternity?)

7-22-2010 @ 4:14AM

Zenith said...

*then we FIGHT them with the help of the Naaru.

Silly predictive keypad

7-22-2010 @ 10:16AM

turtlehead said...

That AD&D alignment system was the mother of all kludges. It was idiotic when it was new, it's idiotic now. PLEASE let it die. I'm begging. If ever there was anything more damaging to role-playing, I've never seen it.

7-22-2010 @ 11:04AM

Boobah said...

Good lord. It's the GearScore argument, only older. Just because people misuse the tool doesn't mean it sucks or is useless. More to the point, in most D&D derived worlds, Good, Evil, Chaos, and Law aren't just concepts... they're actual forces (hell, neutrality is a force, too, although it's as often manifested as balance as anything else.) Knowing how your character relates to those forces is important.

7-25-2010 @ 6:21AM

turtlehead said...

@Boobah

"Just because people misuse the tool doesn't mean it sucks or is useless. More to the point, in most D&D derived worlds, Good, Evil, Chaos, and Law aren't just concepts... they're actual forces (hell, neutrality is a force, too, although it's as often manifested as balance as anything else.)"

Don't know if you were around when D&D was new, but even then people were becoming pretzels to make alignments work. Two Good human nations go to war. Good is hard baked into the mechanics so...now what? Both sides are now Evil for the duration of the conflict to the other but both still Good to all not in the conflict? What happens when a third nation enters a fight on one side. Is a switch thrown so they are now Evil to one side? What is party three to an uninvolved fourth party?

Alignments are nonsense bull[bleep]. The AD&D alignments were beyond nuts. Setting aside the mental gymnastics of neutral, putatively a solution; okay, one is lawful good and one is chaotic good. Now Good can fight Good. May as well have started naming things after vegetables. Pepper doesn't hate pepper, but now jalapeno can fight habanero. (The game Torment: Planescape did almost make it work; still in awe of that.)

It's the crippling of roleplay that really bugged me. Class + alignment was a lazy cheat sheet; twitches & cliches instead of creating a person.

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