To dispense with the obligatory RPG joke, my parents weren't even contemplating character creation when D&D first came out. My father sometimes told stories of playing it in college, and when my brother and I were old enough to find the AD&D books on my father's shelf, my mother curtailed our forays into the roleplaying world.

When I did begin to read the books and ask my father about his experiences, I discovered a set of rules that would allow a talented Game Master to create a colorful and complex world. If every character was motivated solely by greed and murderous rage, the game experience would be flat and boring. Instead, players would usually bring characters to the table with a wide variety of characters with conflicting stories, motivations, and goals. The heart of the game was figuring out how such a disparate band of adventurers would overcome the challenges created by the DM without tearing each other apart.

Far from being devoid of morality, the game's handbooks offered a vivid landscape of "alignments" players might select for their characters. They could choose where their character stood on the axes of Law versus Chaos and Good versus Evil, with several flavors of each being possible. A character might see the value in helping others, but hold governmental authority in disdain. An evil character might have no compunction about hurting others to achieve his goals, while steadfastly obeying his group's code of conduct.

Characters of these opposing alignments might even be forced to deal with each other by circumstances of the story. The resulting conflict required players to come up with solutions their characters could live with, or risk the consequences of violating their alignment (which are very real in the D&D system).

I've participated in a number of roleplaying games where players were called upon to deal with moral dilemmas like the one posed in the article. If every member of the party elected to slay the orcs and take their possessions without protest, the game experience would be lacking. I'm sorry if this was the author's experience, but I wanted to say that the possibilities are only limited by the imaginations of the participants.