Angry John Brown noises

Idk, I think that might be a bit of an overreaction and a missed opportunity. He has a good point about being from that town and slavery being a normal part of his life growing up. That could've turned into an interesting in-character exploration of cultural moral standards: genuine confusion about what's wrong with being a "good" slave-owner, maybe a conversation about how easily freed slaves are re-captured, it could turn into a whole revelation for the barb that culminates in a quest to dismantle the entire slave trade.

Obviously we're missing some context, and it's possible that the player exhibited problematic behavior, but personally I don't think the scenario is itself that bad. Just sounds like a barbarian from a slave-trading society role playing their character. Some would argue that eating meat would be likewise incompatible with a good-alignment, but our culture sees no fundamental moral objection to slaughtering animals.

Every day I feel better and better about leaving reddit.

Now there's a rule the certainly totally didn't come from a ton of people playing "Chaotic Neutral means I get to be a 'lol so random xD' murder hobo" type characters at all.

Now I'm not really a fan of forcing people to play Good alignment characters, but my god if there was ever someone that wouldn't be allowed to play anything but Lawful/Neutral Good at my table it would be Mr. "I can just be a Good Slave Owner" over there.

The only way I could see purchasing a slave not being an evil act would be if they immediately freed them or funneled them to some kind of underground railroad. Wanting to actually keep them as a slave would be crossing the moral event horizon.

"like a good person in the pre-civil war era" is so darkly hialrious to me. I run in old setting, Mystara, where two biggest empires have legal slavery and are also bittere rivals. One, Thyatis, is based off Roman Empire and biggest hurdle to ending slavery is that whenever you try to argue against it, Thyatians point at other empire, Alphatia, and it's "pre civil-war south style slavery" and argue that next to this their (a.k.a. Roman) style of slavery is very humane.

And I still made it very clear that if any of my players try buying slaves, no god will save them from my wrath.

D&D has hell. It used to be that the fastest-reproducing races were also evil, sending more and more people to hell.

Looking it up, the creators were Christian, so maybe they thought real life was even worse, but D&D was always intended as a crapsack world. If you want to play one that isn't, great. Just be prepared to rewrite some major lore.

Which is on or under the ground as the situation dictates.

I've been edging away from the "storytelling game" (group or otherwise) framing of things for a while now. It's... well, it's not wrong, but I've found that the framing centres things like plot and even performance in everybody's mind, and that has had some perverse side effects. It negates the collaborative effort in peoples minds, linearising the game, and shifting agency away from the PCs and the table, and to the GM during prep.

It's the connotational difference between "telling a story" and "running an adventure", and it's mostly invisible.

Does that mean Rule Zero comes before Rule One?