Alternate names for "Lawful" and "Chaotic&quo

[scott]

How can anything be deeply-seated for a newcomer?

[xtifr]

Do the number of people who do find "lawful" and "chaotic" perfectly satisfactory (and I'm one) function as working proof that the idea is deep-seated?

[Dave]

Personally I still like units having alignments that are lawful/neutral/chaotic.

This reflects the deeply-seeded Wesnothian belief and outlook that the day is governed by forces of law and order, and the night by chaos.

Dave,

Does the number of people who find it unsatisfactory function as a working proof that the idea is not so deep-seated?

It's not a deeply-seeded belief among people who play the game, it's a deeply-seeded belief in Wesnoth itself.

i.e. the people of Wesnoth - Elves, Dwarves, Men, and so forth, believe in night being governed by chaotic forces and day being governed by lawful forces. This is the explanation for why 'lawful' and 'chaotic' are appropriate terms.

In the real world there is no such belief, however imo any other term is likely to be just as confusing, and the current terms used sound better. I think it's reasonable for people to have to do a little learning to understand how the world of Wesnoth works.

David

[Assasin]

I still like good guy/bad guy better, its much easier to understand then your 'World of Wesnoth'

What about lawful/lawless, or how about Republican/Democrat, or maybe righteous/[censored], or maybe even genius/twat??

[Rhuvaen]

I still like good guy/bad guy better, its much easier to understand then your 'World of Wesnoth'
...how about Republican/Democrat...

I find the world of Wesnoth much easier to understand than your election system.

And anyway, Wesnoth really doesn't differ much from medieval beliefs, or fantasy standard fare. So who's off the track here?

... or maybe righteous/[censored], or maybe even genius/twat??

Or extrovert / introvert, sun-tanned / sunburnt, night-blind / infravision...
We can come up with any number of pairs of attributes that might explain the daytime/nighttime bonus, but they have connotations that are not compatible what Wesnoth's theme is about!

[markus_2]

Count me among those who hate the current system. I'd prefer something like diurnal/nocturnal for the simple reason that it does not create the odd discrepancy between the current alignments and the good guys/bad guys distinction.

Ok, maybe the reason why I hate is relevant after all: The moral absolutism implied bugs me in itself, but that is a minor quibble. What is troubling IMHO is that it does not match the moral shades of gray which are currently part of Wesnoth through the campaigns.
Second, it is a - IMHO - bland copy of concepts which might be useful in DnD, but have little relation to their Wesnothian equivalents. The alignment system is unrelated to the day/night cycle. If there was a bonus for fighting a unit of opposite alignment, that would be different. But currently moral terms borrowed from another game are used to describe a wholly different affect, which does not even have anything to do with morals. And on top of that, they are missapplied: lawful/chaotic has nothing to do with good/evil in DnD, and the connection even has to be construed in the English language (yes, it is possible to justify it after the fact, but no one is going to convince me that chaotic naturally evokes the association of "evil" (or nocturnal) to anyone outside of Heritage Foundation. ((A case might be made for lawful, where DnD and its successors have indeed changed the meaning slightly, in that the rigid adherence to rules which is implied in the DnD usage is not part of the normal English meaning of the term. In that respect, DnD would have been better off using "pedantic" or similar))).
To sum up: it violates KISS by having terms unrelated to their game effects; it causes confusion when one is trying to apply it both to the day/night implication and the good/evil connotation (saurians!); it is does not clearly convey the medivial good/bad implication some people would like to keep in the game;

[jonathantan86]

I have no problems with the terms Lawful and Chaotic, actually.

The first time I encountered the terms Lawful and Chaotic was in Nethack (which was based on DnD) and as the Nethack Guidebook says, lawful and ethical do not always coincide. I think it's not very difficult to learn two new terms which might have different meanings in ordinary English to play games like Wesnoth and DnD.

And there are many instances (in stories) where the "Law" is bad and the "Chaos" is good, say, the Liberty campaign or in the original Star Wars trilogy.

[Disto]

I still think the terms need changing.

[js138]

It's a fantasy world populated with DnD-like creatures. I have no problem with lawful and chaotic in line with it, and nethack, and heaven knows how many other derivative works.

I'll note that DnD had lawful evil and chaotic good - i.e. good and evil was an orthogonal axis

I'll also note that it's rarer for people who prefer things as they are to speak than it is for those who are unhappy, so any presumption about numbers of each is just that.

[markus_2]

Not to single you out, especially since I agree with you overall, but the quote nicely illustrates something which - as far as I can see – keeps getting mixed up in the discussion:

... as the Nethack Guidebook says, lawful and ethical do not always coincide.

Neither do they in DnD: there's:
Lawful Good – Pedantic and nice - Paladin (required alignment in DnD)
Neutral Good – Generally respecting the law, but willing to go outside of it, if doing good makes it necessary.
Chaotic Good – Robin Hood types.
... Neutral is a bit tricky to describe ...
Lawful Evil – Evil, but honourable. Respects (evil) authority.
Neutral Evil
Chaotic Evil – Selfish, greedy, prone to infighting among themselves.

In DnD, the lawful-chaotic axis is supposedly orthogonal to the good-evil axis. So we're actually dealing with three sets of concepts here: day-night as per game effects, good-evil as per pseudo-medivialism and reputation of various races, lawful-chaotic as per relation to law and order, also: general conduct/modus operandi. Currently the game is using the words from the third set of concepts, these are apparently pressumed to be understood as the second set of concepts and their in-game effect is that of the first set.

[Simons Mith]

My last suggestion: take a leaf out of the German translators' book and use day-fearing and night-fearing.

Despite this suggestion, and all the earlier ones I've seen, I still tend to think the current lawful/neutral/chaotic is the best (or if you want to be negative, the least bad) of all the choices anyone has suggested If anyone could come up with anything /significantly/ better, I'd say change. No-one has. This suggests to me we should stick with the current system and put up with the grumbles.

The terminology problem is not unique to Wesnoth, after all. DnD's been mentioned, but RuneQuest too has chaotic and lawful/order as traits of creatures. And the Gloranthan setup is quite radically different again.

[Eponymous-Archon]

There has been the quite reasonable suggestion not to use adjectives, but nouns (day/night), or diurnal/nocturnal.

It seems to me that the lawful/chaotic axis isn't prevalent in the game (e.g., thieves come to fight with Konrad), and that's the source of the "grumbling", as you put it, which is long-standing.

[Darth Fool]

There has been the quite reasonable suggestion not to use adjectives, but nouns (day/night), or diurnal/nocturnal.

It seems to me that the lawful/chaotic axis isn't prevalent in the game (e.g., thieves come to fight with Konrad), and that's the source of the "grumbling", as you put it, which is long-standing.

I would argue that the lawful/chaotic axis as defined by Dave is prevalent in the game (as fighting with a chaotic unit at night is very different from fighting with one during the day), but rather that in wesnothian society, especially during a period of turmoil such as is created during a rebellion, is not aligned purely along the lawful/chaotic axis. This seems perfectly reasonable to me as interesting times often produce strange alliances.

edit: if people don't like lawful and orderlyhow about chaotic/ordered?

[tephlon]

My last suggestion: take a leaf out of the German translators' book and use day-fearing and night-fearing.

Not at all particularly directed at Simons Mith, I'd like to clarify the German and Swedish translations of chaotic. The Swedish translation used a direct translation of chaotic at first, but after being inspired by the German lichtscheu we changed it to the Swedish counterpart ljusskygg. Now, this can be translated directly to "lightshy", as ott wrote it in this thread; this is the literal translation. However, this meaning is not why it was chosen, at least not in the case of the Swedish translation. Ljusskygg, and I guess lichtscheu as well, has also the connotation of someone being fishy, shady, asocial. In fact, this word is pretty much reserved for the moral context; if a Swede was to say that someone was afraid of the light, she wouldn't say ljusskygg.

Well...so it's not as simple as it sounds

[Shadow]

My last suggestion: take a leaf out of the German translators' book and use day-fearing and night-fearing.

Not at all particularly directed at Simons Mith, I'd like to clarify the German and Swedish translations of chaotic. The Swedish translation used a direct translation of chaotic at first, but after being inspired by the German lichtscheu we changed it to the Swedish counterpart ljusskygg. Now, this can be translated directly to "lightshy", as ott wrote it in this thread; this is the literal translation. However, this meaning is not why it was chosen, at least not in the case of the Swedish translation. Ljusskygg, and I guess lichtscheu as well, has also the connotation of someone being fishy, shady, asocial. In fact, this word is pretty much reserved for the moral context; if a Swede was to say that someone was afraid of the light, she wouldn't say ljusskygg.

Well...so it's not as simple as it sounds

Yes in german "lichtscheu" also has an moral context and it means not the best.