(In the game THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM , the player encounters the Dark Brotherhood, a group of assassins for hire, and is given the choice of joining them and becoming an assassin, or killing them and destroying the Dark Brotherhood.
Joining gives you several extra quests and some of the game's best gear, while defeating them is a fairly brief quest with a large but one-time gold reward.
In this thread, people are debating the merits of getting the extra stuff vs. staying true to their/their character's morals, and the ethics of the Dark Brotherhood itself. Then this guy pipes up.)
i think the main problem here is atheism, atheists are far far more likely to join the dark brotherhood because they lack a lot of morals that people that accept god as their creator, god is true, i assure you that, ive talked to him myself, not with my lips, not with my mind, but with energy. lets face it, a lot of roleplayers are atheists and are gonna go to hell. i can go through this thread and tell you who is 100% a atheists but i wont but the majority are atheists so its only natural the majority are in the dark brotherhood..
20 comments
Given that the Christian God doesn't exist in Skyrim, I'm amazed the guy ever played it.
" i can go through this thread and tell you who is 100% a atheists but i wont "
I fucking dare you, John.
I did the Dark Brotherhood quest line once to see what it was like - and get the achievements, of course - but saved beforehand so I could go back. My main playthrough(s) always destroyed them.
My Dragonborn was happily married to his ex-werewolf husband, too. Really can't see the draw to Mr Floras for this particular game.
While I am a Christian, that itself has nothing to do with me choosing to destroy the brotherhood in the game. It's just that I don't particularly care for being abducted and then forced to kill one of three people who I don't know at all. And while their background story is kind of cool, and some of the jobs they do are kind of helpful, none of that changes the fact that they are all cold-blooded murderers who worship (more or less) evil itself.
Bethesda kind of screwed up by not at least making the "Destroy"-Quest more interesting, but that's another discussion entirely. The point is: You are an idiot Floras and I don't even understand why you play this game (this quest was definitely NOT the most morally difficult one in the game btw).
@ChrisBP747 :
It's just that I don't particularly care for being abducted and then forced to kill one of three people who I don't know at all.
This atheist agrees with you. The quest line is started by the Brotherhood recruiter abducting you and giving a loyalty test saying you must kill one of these 3 tied up people based on nothing more than her say-so and no chance at all to confirm any evidence at all of what they allegedly did. Just believe her and pick one. She kept saying there are three people in the room and you must choose one to kill.
Then I said to myself, "No, actually there's 4 people in this room I could choose from", and proceeded to kill her instead, which seemed to be the only other way to get the game to let you out of the room.
Trying to map the morality decisions in Bethesda games to real life decisions is dumb because 90% of the time the only reason the decisions are hard in the first place is because Bethesda keeps refusing to implement any content for the smarter more morally acceptable choices, and instead makes you chose between one of two equally evil choices when in reality there would be plenty of third options less stupid, but they don't "exist" in the game setting if Bethesda doesn't implement them.
In that Dark Brotherhood room, my character, despite being a master thief, an expert brawler, etc, could not leave the room at all unless someone was killed. Not for any real reason that makes sense, but because the programmers didn't implement any other way to get out and move on with the rest of the game. Plenty of more moral choices were simply not implemented, like fight to submission instead of to death, tie up the suspect, then go warn the authorities that you found the head of the dark brotherhood. Or heck, even bust the door down or break open that glass window you can see. Nope. Just to force a false choice on you, they just don't implement the smarter, less evil solutions.
>'Dark Brotherhood'
>"Skyquim" set in a completely different world
There's an extremely good reason why certain films start with 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ...', you know.
Also why Darth Vader - in the very first of said films - says 'I find your lack of faith disturbing'.
2B can 'pray' for a dead android to be temporarily reanimated instead of taking it's assets in "Nier: Automata". 2B says to 9S 'Emotions not permitted'.
Is Dr. Samuel Hayden or the Doom Marine a Tier 3 Advocate in Dr. Olivia Pierce's cult in id Software's "DOOM IV", Johnnie Wipethefloorwithyourarse...?!
Or - and stay with me here, this takes us down the rabbit hole a ways - some of us, oh maybe 98% of the human animal, can compartmentalize our video-game morality with our RL morality. While I do tend to side with the DB (cuz, y'know, money and lootz), it doesn't mean that I'd actually kill someone in RL. Likewise, I'm neither a master thief, a mercenary brawler, a dragon reincarnated in a man-suit, nor a spoony bard. To quote JRR Tolkein, 'The genre's called fantasy; it's meant to be unrealistic , you myopic manatee!"
Atheist here, while I admit that the first time I played Skyrim I joined the DB, It was mostly because I was curious and didn't know I could betray them (you can't do that with the others). Regardless, I refused to continue their questline when it became obvious just how evil they were, and in my second playthrough, I instantly chose the destroy option and felt very good about it.
My point being that John here is full of crap and probably can't recongize a true atheist when his life depends on it.
Also, I fail to see how Christianity is at play in a fantasy world with numerous gods. Some of which are good, some are evil, and some are in-between.
Sithis in the Elder Scrolls is quite possibly the origin of everything, as close to a maker as anything in the Elder Scrolls Universe. Killing in the name of Sithis is akin to killing in the name of the judeo-christian god, something both religions have not been shy about.
On the other hand, in my playthroughs, I tend to destroy the Dark Brotherhood and buy a nice house with the bounty.
I know one guy at work who is Christian and always played the Dark Brotherhood. In his defense, he had no idea you could oppose them. He probably figured the game had Astrid flagged as essential. When I told him how simple the quest for destroying the Dark Brotherhood was, he said he'd stick with joining them.
But yeah, if Bethesda wants to pretend to offer complex choices, they could start by allowing you to show mercy to defeated enemies instead of having them always come back for more.
What the fuck are you doing playing a game with Witchcraft and Unchristian gods?
At least FFG was straightforward in their hatred of the game.
Edit: I dunno, judging from some of his later posts this might actually be a poe.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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