# The 'Wonderland'-Inspired Faces of the RAGE OF DEMONS



## Nebulous (May 7, 2015)

That is AWESOME.


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## Banesfinger (May 7, 2015)

Nebulous said:


> That is AWESOME.




Seconded...awesome.


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## steeldragons (May 7, 2015)

Those are pretty amazing.

I've got Yeenoghu [Guess who's coming to dinner? Ye Know Who. ;P ], Grazzt, Orcus, Baphomet, Jubilex, and DG...and that poor poor sap of a hero for scale reference...yeah, he's toast before breakfast.

Stumped on the red female-appearing one (Malcanthet?...if I'm remembering/spelling her right...the Queen of Succubi, whatever her name is. Or maybe Zuggtmoy? Since Underdark, mushrooms/fungi is obviously going to be a thing) and the smaller winged toadie-looking guy.

Who do we think they are?


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## jamesjhaeck (May 7, 2015)

I love love LOVE the Society of Brilliance.


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## steeldragons (May 7, 2015)

Oh yeah! And the Society of Brilliance, I'm going with Derro, Mindflayer and Orc, obviously...but that third guy...I'm kind of at a toss up whether he/she might be a trog, yuan-ti...or maybe they're going to reintroduce ye ole Ophidians as a new race? ...though they weren't inherently evil, as far as I remember. Troglodyte is the most likely, I guess.


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## CrusaderX (May 7, 2015)

GLABBAGOOL rocks.  Great name, great concept.


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## pming (May 7, 2015)

Yay! Saturday morning cartoon-level caricatures with silly names! Now I don't know about you, but this _screams_ "terrifying underdark story involving demons and mad villains" to me.

Add in Drizz't and I'm pretty sure this will be the most awesomest of awesome $60 story-books the world has ever seen!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

PS: In case you missed it...that whole post was _SARCASM._ Just FYI. In other words, I am not a fan of this new "multi-media story" thing they're doing. Ick.


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## raphaelus (May 7, 2015)

Thumbs up!


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

These have the kind of whimsy that I associate with DiTerlizzi's work in _Planescape._  Kudos to all involved.


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## Trickster Spirit (May 7, 2015)

pming said:


> Yay! Saturday morning cartoon-level caricatures with silly names! Now I don't know about you, but this _screams_ "terrifying underdark story involving demons and mad villains" to me.
> 
> Add in Drizz't and I'm pretty sure this will be the most awesomest of awesome $60 story-books the world has ever seen!
> 
> ...




See, you say you don't like it.

But adding Saturday morning cartoon-level caricatures with silly names _makes it at least 1000x awesomer_, that is just objective science.


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

Trickster Spirit said:


> But adding Saturday morning cartoon-level caricatures with silly names _makes it at least 1000x awesomer_, that is just objective science.



And really, you can't argue with science.


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## Thyrwyn (May 7, 2015)

Sounds good to me. For Pete's sake, names can be changed, and Drizzt can be expunged...


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## wedgeski (May 7, 2015)

Love it. LOVE IT. Glad to see they're varying up the tone a bit.


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## I'm A Banana (May 7, 2015)

I am actually kind of friggin' in love with this stuff.

It reminds me - in the most delightful way - of DiTerlizzi's stuff. They have LOADS of personality, they look like awesome _characters_, critters I want to know more about. Their bodies are distinct, and it's not all "grr argh I am spooky scary monster snarl rar." 

THE PUDDING KING is my favorite. I mean, you say demon princes in the underdark and I'm like "Yeah, like friggin' always," but you say that it includes a character called THE PUDDING KING and I'm like "Tell me more of these demon-tunnels of which you speak..."


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## Wrathamon (May 7, 2015)

VERY


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## Von Ether (May 7, 2015)

This might be the 5e adventure that I run. My table tends to be run a little tongue and cheek


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## Mercule (May 7, 2015)

"Awakened gelatinous cube"? That's actually pretty awesome, but I feel really, really bad for him. It would really suck to be sentient Jell-O.


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> THE PUDDING KING is my favorite. I mean, you say demon princes in the underdark and I'm like "Yeah, like friggin' always," but you say that it includes a character called THE PUDDING KING and I'm like "Tell me more of these demon-tunnels of which you speak..."



I'm actually more afraid of his father, the Puddin' Pop.


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

Mercule said:


> "Awakened gelatinous cube"? That's actually pretty awesome, but I feel really, really bad for him. It would really suck to be sentient Jell-O.



"Of course you can join the party!  There's always room for J-E-L-L-O."


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## Werebat (May 7, 2015)

This...  Looks promising.  My group isn't sure what to do after we finish the Lost Mines of Phandelver, and I might pitch this to them.


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## I'm A Banana (May 7, 2015)

TwoSix said:


> I'm actually more afraid of his father, the Puddin' Pop.




Wasn't he devoured by that giant comedian sometime during the '80s?








			
				TwoSix said:
			
		

> "Of course you can join the party! There's always room for J-E-L-L-O."




That settles it. This is a cross-brand promotion with Kraft Foods, and they will be making GLABBAGOOL - flavored packets to turn into perfect green cubes (with grapes floating in them). To truly experience the entire story, you'll need to collect all the stickers on specially marked packets and assemble them to spell out the secret phrase.


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## doctorhook (May 7, 2015)

This is pretty interesting! Alice in Wonderland reskinned as an underdark adventure against demon princes? Well, it's already sounds a damn sight more creative than it did yesterday! Great artwork too.


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## Louis Brenton (May 7, 2015)

I love the art direction & the characterizations.  I DO NOT like how that first picture of the purple Kuo-Toa is looking at me.


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## Trickster Spirit (May 7, 2015)

Thyrwyn said:


> Sounds good to me. For Pete's sake, names can be changed, and Drizzt can be expunged...




Better yet, _change nothing_, and just have Drizzt be eaten by Glabbagool.

It would be beauteous, and I don't even hate Drizzt.


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## Parmandur (May 7, 2015)

pming said:


> Yay! Saturday morning cartoon-level caricatures with silly names! Now I don't know about you, but this _screams_ "terrifying underdark story involving demons and mad villains" to me.
> 
> Add in Drizz't and I'm pretty sure this will be the most awesomest of awesome $60 story-books the world has ever seen!
> 
> ...





Since this post is clearly correct when taken at face value, I shall ignore the sarcasm: a Saturday morning cartoon along these lines is precisely what D&D needs!  I love the level of humor that is being brought to this adventure, perfectly reminding us how *weird* the Underdark is.


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## I'm A Banana (May 7, 2015)

Trickster Spirit said:


> Better yet, _change nothing_, and just have Drizzt be eaten by Glabbagool.
> 
> It would be beauteous, and I don't even hate Drizzt.




GLABBAGOOL FOR PRESIDENT.


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Wasn't he devoured by that giant comedian sometime during the '80s?



Unfortunately, there's no response I can make here that wouldn't cross the boundaries of good taste and board rules, so just imagine I'm thinking something inappropriate in response. 



Kamikaze Midget said:


> That settles it. This is a cross-brand promotion with Kraft Foods, and they will be making GLABBAGOOL - flavored packets to turn into perfect green cubes (with grapes floating in them). To truly experience the entire story, you'll need to collect all the stickers on specially marked packets and assemble them to spell out the secret phrase.



Why sell miniatures when you can make edible miniatures!

Glabbagool has 10 times the crossover potential of Warduke, that's for sure.  I already pretty much want the adventure to be "Glabbagool and the Real Demonhunters."


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## Parmandur (May 7, 2015)

doctorhook said:


> This is pretty interesting! Alice in Wonderland reskinned as an underdark adventure against demon princes? Well, it's already sounds a damn sight more creative than it did yesterday! Great artwork too.





Don't think the plot will be very Alice in Wonderland like.  It seems that Perkins meant he was going for a feel of bizarre otherworldliness and off-kilter humor inspired by Carroll: or perhaps, Gygax (not known as the most serious or grimdark of DMs...).


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## edutrevi (May 7, 2015)

I prefer the art style of the core rulebooks...


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## Mercule (May 7, 2015)

TwoSix said:


> "Of course you can join the party!  There's always room for J-E-L-L-O."



Grandma Zuggtmoy is always trying to stick a bunch of carrot shavings, pearl onions, and sour cream in the poor guy.


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## Mercule (May 7, 2015)

edutrrevi said:


> I prefer the art style of the core rulebooks...



As do I, over all. I'm okay with the idea of individual books, especially adventures, having somewhat different art that evokes the intended mood.


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## Mistwell (May 7, 2015)

Wow. NOW I am totally incredibly interested in this adventure book.  This is awesome stuff!


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## stinkomandx (May 7, 2015)

I LOVE IT.

My original post entirely mixed up Oz and Wonderland, but I like how reminiscent some of this stuff is compared to the scarier parts of Oz too.


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## Trickster Spirit (May 7, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> GLABBAGOOL FOR PRESIDENT.




WAIT.

A wounded Drizzt, left near death after facing a horde of demons and barely escaping with his life, stumbles into a gelatinous cube's tunnel, where he is devoured. All the magical crap he has on him reacts strangely with the acid and the result is GLABBAGOOL, THE GELATINOUS CUBE WHO THINKS HE IS DRIZZT DO'URDEN.

All future Salvatore novels stare Glabbagool, who is completely oblivious to the fact that he is not a dual-scimitar wielding dark elf, and any Drizzt appearances in the AP will have the players interacting with the delusional ooze.

That is so excellent, it doesn't matter if it only ever shows up in my home campaign, it is now officially canon in all D&D campaigns throughout time and space.


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## doctorhook (May 7, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Don't think the plot will be very Alice in Wonderland like.  It seems that Perkins meant he was going for a feel of bizarre otherworldliness and off-kilter humor inspired by Carroll: or perhaps, Gygax (not known as the most serious or grimdark of DMs...).



Meh, I'm still okay with it. What I want are quality adventures, so a strong theme is a good step. (I'm still feelin' the sting from Tyranny of "Arbitrarily-parade-through-the-Sword-Coast-and-fight-the-most-iconic-wyrms-evar!!1!".)


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## Lidgar (May 7, 2015)

Topsy and Turvy = Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum?
















This looks fun. As in, I think I want someone else to DM it so I can play it!


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## Nebulous (May 7, 2015)

See, the artwork is so evocative it is already inspiring campaign ideas in people without reading a word of the plot!   Well done, Wizards.


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## neobolts (May 7, 2015)

This looks fantastic! The gonzo Friday night with an open bar kind of gaming I love. The right mix of dumb and dangerous!


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

Trickster Spirit said:


> All future Salvatore novels stare Glabbagool, who is completely oblivious to the fact that he is not a dual-scimitar wielding dark elf, and any Drizzt appearances in the AP will have the players interacting with the delusional ooze.



"That's not a dark elf, that's a gelatinous cube!"

<theme song>
Glabbagool, what's the matter with you?
You don't act like the other cubes do
You wear a disguise to look like dark elf guys
But you're not a drow, you're a gelatinous cube
<end theme song>


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 7, 2015)

That's pretty cool. I'm stealing glabagool-drizz't for my next Underdark episode.

I like this direction.


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## Sword of Spirit (May 7, 2015)

steeldragons said:


> Oh yeah! And the Society of Brilliance, I'm going with Derro, Mindflayer and Orc, obviously...but that third guy...I'm kind of at a toss up whether he/she might be a trog, yuan-ti...or maybe they're going to reintroduce ye ole Ophidians as a new race? ...though they weren't inherently evil, as far as I remember. Troglodyte is the most likely, I guess.




Troglodyte

And I'm thinking grimlock rather than orc.


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## I'm A Banana (May 7, 2015)

Trickster Spirit said:


> A wounded Drizzt, left near death after facing a horde of demons and barely escaping with his life, stumbles into a gelatinous cube's tunnel, where he is devoured. All the magical crap he has on him reacts strangely with the acid and the result is GLABBAGOOL, THE GELATINOUS CUBE WHO THINKS HE IS DRIZZT DO'URDEN.


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## darjr (May 7, 2015)

What slimy mule bones!? That's a panther! Rwarrrrr!


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## The Grassy Gnoll (May 7, 2015)

I love the idea of an awakened gelatinous cube! And the Society of Brilliance. And and and.

WANT!


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## DMZ2112 (May 7, 2015)

Wow, I am so pleased to see the community rally behind this idea.  This looks like it is going to be a lot of classic D&D fun.  If the story and characterizations are entertaining enough, I might even buy the book irrespective of my usual expectations regarding worldbuilding content.

But the overarching concept of the storyline does mean that I am still wondering when we are going to see a /Forgotten Realms/ storyline set in the Forgotten Realms -- rather than a Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and now a Planescape storyline set in the Forgotten Realms.  Really, what is happening?


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## TwoSix (May 7, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> That's pretty cool. I'm stealing glabagool-drizz't for my next Underdark episode.
> 
> I like this direction.



View attachment 68270


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## I'm A Banana (May 7, 2015)

TwoSix said:


> "That's not a dark elf, that's a gelatinous cube!"
> 
> <theme song>
> Glabbagool, what's the matter with you?
> ...


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## Trickster Spirit (May 7, 2015)

View attachment 68271

EDIT: Damn, ninja'd by TwoSix with the same joke. That'll teach me to take my sweet time making memes on my lunch break.


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## Shasarak (May 7, 2015)

TwoSix said:


> And really, you can't argue with science.




Of course you can argue with science.  However it is even better when you use science to argue with science.


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## Raunalyn (May 7, 2015)

An awakened gelatinous cube?

Oh, how that inspires me!


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## Mirtek (May 7, 2015)

Morrus said:


> This post was generated by a news article which your device or browser is not displaying directly. You can view the article directly here.



Please somebody tell me this is a late April fools joke. When I heard an Alice in Wonderland inspired adventure path was comming I thought "cool". When I heard RoD was comming I thought "so the AiW path will come after that".

But RoD is supposed to be the path inspired by Alice in Wonderlond? And we get cute funny monsters and demonlords? Does ... does Orcus have tusks????

No, given the cover art released by Wotc I refuse to believe that the art inside the book can be this .. this, well just this


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## redrick (May 7, 2015)

This book looks fun. Nice change-up. Might actually look for a way to run this with my group when it comes out. Or at least portions of it.


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## darjr (May 7, 2015)

I had an NPC who turned himself into a gelatinous cube with his last spell slot. Cubes don't sleep.......


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## ehren37 (May 7, 2015)

Raunalyn said:


> An awakened gelatinous cube?Oh, how that inspires me!



I'm wracking my brain trying to remember where I've seen this before. It was either an intelligent gelatinous cube or gray ooze that ran a thieves guild. One of the Freeport supplements/adventures maybe? Makes sense as this is also by Green Ronin.I really like the whimsical nature of the art, but its strange to have such a wildly different style than the cover. I think the cover is just fine, but would have preferred it be consistent.Also this will be fun to see what Gale Force Nine comes up with for their official minis.


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## Zaukrie (May 7, 2015)

I have no idea how to feel about this ..... will really need to see the book.


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## Nebulous (May 7, 2015)

Raunalyn said:


> An awakened gelatinous cube?
> 
> Oh, how that inspires me!




It's the crazy google eyes that does it, if i had thought "awakened jelly cube" I don't think it would have come off quite as gonzo.  But i love gonzo.


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## Mercule (May 7, 2015)

ehren37 said:


> I really like the whimsical nature of the art, but its strange to have such a wildly different style than the cover. I think the cover is just fine, but would have preferred it be consistent.



It is consistent... with the covers of the other books on my shelf. That's actually how I'd prefer it.


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## Parmandur (May 7, 2015)

My guess is that this concept art, probably from the story bible identifying key NPCs.  Given the uniform nature, seems more like a lineup than RPG book art.


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## Kramodlog (May 7, 2015)

It is amazing to witness the impact of an awaken gelatinous cube.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 7, 2015)

Sword of Spirit said:


> Troglodyte
> 
> And I'm thinking grimlock rather than orc.




Grimlocks don't have eyes.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 7, 2015)

Yeah the pic of Demogorgon we have here is way too different from the pic of him on the cover and the one of him fighting Drizzt so this is probably concept art.


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## jayoungr (May 7, 2015)

Not really seeing the Alice connection.  I don't know whose illustrations those are modeled after, but I can't see any of Tenniel in them (and as far as I'm concerned, he's the One True Illustrator for Alice).

That said, they are still pretty cool.  Just not what I was expecting when they announced a "Wonderland" vibe.  Maybe they were thinking of Tim Burton's version??


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## Trickster Spirit (May 8, 2015)

jayoungr said:


> Not really seeing the Alice connection.  I don't know whose illustrations those are modeled after, but I can't see any of Tenniel in them (and as far as I'm concerned, he's the One True Illustrator for Alice).
> 
> That said, they are still pretty cool.  Just not what I was expecting when they announced a "Wonderland" vibe.  Maybe they were thinking of Tim Burton's version??




No, it's not the artwork (which may or may not be what appears in the book itself), it's the characters the artwork is of that definitely trip all of my "Alice in Wonderland" detectors. 

They were driving home the "madness" bit in the Tweets and actual AP write-up - I'm thinking they meant the line "the insanity that pervades the Underdark escalates" literally and that some kind of sanity effect is taking place in addition to the demon invasion. So adventure looks like it's going to be Underdark faction-heavy, with the players having to diplomatically navigate between insane NPCs in order to accomplish their mission of getting rid of all the demons. 

Sure, it's not a talking caterpillar with a giant hookah, but just imagine... twin were-rat svirfneblins that PCs will inevitably find every bit as obnoxious as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. A meeting with the quite mad "Mensa of the Underdark", where the Illithid member is what he eats (discerning palates find that the brains of intellectuals are of course the most decadent), and become an academic himself, getting too caught up in scholarly debate with the wizard to remember to actually flay any minds. _A Quaggoth who thinks he's a high-elf noble_.

And the myconids... well, the myconids are probably tripping balls per the usual. Still sounds like plenty of fun, though.


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## Sword of Spirit (May 8, 2015)

MonsterEnvy said:


> Grimlocks don't have eyes.




Ah, good point. It just _should_ have been a grimlock then.


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## skugga (May 8, 2015)

TwoSix said:


> These have the kind of whimsy that I associate with DiTerlizzi's work in _Planescape._  Kudos to all involved.




Exactly, my favourite era of D&D art.

I was interested when the title and theme were announced (could take or leave Drizzt). But after seeing this I'm all over it.

If only I hadn't just wound up a demon focused Planescape campaign with my group .


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## chibi graz'zt (May 8, 2015)

Win.


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## Psikerlord# (May 8, 2015)

This art looks BRILLIANT. I don't see any Alice in wonderland connection myself. I think I will be using this adventure for my next campaign. In the meantime,,,...start winding down the current one!


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## bpauls (May 8, 2015)

This artwork, the Underdark setting and the "Alice in Wonderland" influences have me _far_ more excited about this release than I was for either "Tyranny of Dragons" of "Princes of the Apocalypse." In fact, I don't think I have been more excited about an upcoming WoTC adventure...well, ever.


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## Leatherhead (May 8, 2015)

This reminds me more of The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth than Alice in Wonderland.

Unless they are talking about American McGee's Alice.


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## Jhaelen (May 8, 2015)

These look awesome!


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## Mhyr (May 8, 2015)

NICE! Good start for this storyline!!


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## Ravenheart87 (May 8, 2015)

Ok, this is awesome.


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## JWO (May 8, 2015)

This looks so awesome!


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## S_Dalsgaard (May 8, 2015)

There's a kind of awakened cube in Scott Kurtz's Table Titans comic - http://tabletitans.com/comic/mines-of-madness-page-16


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## delericho (May 8, 2015)

Great images. And nice to see them try something new (in that it's a big shift in tone). I do hope they get rewarded for this, rather than punished - a WotC that feels comfortable trying experiments is definitely preferable to a WotC that does not.


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## HobbitFan (May 8, 2015)

I like the "dark whimsy" of some of this art.  
I don't see how this intersects with the art on the module cover...very different tone.  

I guess we wait and see how it turns out in the hardback.


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## JeffB (May 8, 2015)

delericho said:


> Great images. And nice to see them try something new (in that it's a big shift in tone). I do hope they get rewarded for this, rather than punished - a WotC that feels comfortable trying experiments is definitely preferable to a WotC that does not.




The art reminds me of Urban Arcana, which is a big turn-off for me , BUT, I am with ya on the last sentence.


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## JohnLynch (May 8, 2015)

So how do you think a group (looking to embrace the gonzo aspect) should approach this? With similarly gonzo characters? Or straight laced characters in an alien world?

I'm imagining a drow from a post apocalyptic future whose travelled back in time to save a little girl whose gone down into the Underdark as she'll turn out to be the messiah that saves the world from the golems that will one day gain sentience. Or a Pit Fiend who knows that the demons are up to something and he's here to stop it. Only problem is he's somehow ended up in the body of a gnome (fire themed of course) sorcerer. As he progresses he slowly. Still he's got a whip that he keeps on him at all times. And a human whose from an illithid ruled world. He was bringing supplies when his spaceship crashed.

Or not. What do people think? I don't typically run light hearted campaigns.


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## I'm A Banana (May 8, 2015)

JohnLynch said:


> So how do you think a group (looking to embrace the gonzo aspect) should approach this? With similarly gonzo characters? Or straight laced characters in an alien world?




It'll be more remarkable if they're normal characters injected into the madness (they are Alice, this is Wonderland). But y'know, if someone decides to play a svirfneblin or a drow or whatever, maybe they're connected.


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## delericho (May 8, 2015)

JeffB said:


> The art reminds me of Urban Arcana, which is a big turn-off for me , BUT, I am with ya on the last sentence.




Aye, I certainly wouldn't want to adopt this style for everything all the time. 



JohnLynch said:


> So how do you think a group (looking to embrace the gonzo aspect) should approach this? With similarly gonzo characters? Or straight laced characters in an alien world?




Either can work. In the Alice stories, she's definitely more of the straight-laced sort, so that clearly works. But, on the other hand, the players may well have more fun playing gonzo characters.

One thing that may be key, though, is moderation - if you're playing for several months (in a 1-15 campaign), any bad jokes will very quickly wear thin. So go for quirky rather than cringe-inducing.


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## WackyAnne (May 8, 2015)

I am terribly, terribly excited by the release of these character sketches and story hints. At long last, there will be the perfect adventure for a pair of characters I've been mulling ever since I got back to the tabletop. Bob the Beholder, a spectator librarian whose amnesia acquired over centuries of guarding a wizard guild's arcane library has convinced him he's both human and a wizard. And his only companion through the centuries, the janitorial gelatinous cube with rounds-as-regular-as-clockwork Mr. Jigglesworth. How soon can I get the statblock for an awakened jello? I could just cry with happiness!

The artwork reminds me of the character sketches Jeff Carlisle did for the first hardcover AP, 3.5's Shackled City (also the brainchild of Chris Perkins' storytelling genius). I love the touch of Alice in Wonderland hinted at (with Topsy/Turvy tweedle twins, etc.), my favourite children's story. As I'm sure you can tell from my superlatives, I'm very eager to jump down the rabbit hole come September...


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## Lancelot (May 8, 2015)

Put me in the "excited" camp for this one. I wouldn't want to see this style for every release, but it's an incredible breath of fresh air. As others have commented, it reminds me of diTerlizzi's work on Planescape, which I loved.

Plus, the characterizations, even without the art, are so evocative. This sounds like a FUN module with NPCs who really stand out. Bring it on!


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## Krypter (May 8, 2015)

So now we know why Pendleton Ward was visiting WOTC: this is going to the Underdark Adventure Time! story that Perkins was teasing last month. 

http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2547-Adventure-Time-supplement-or-setting-for-5e

I do hope the insanity-inducing faerzress gives us some sapient candy people and Wizard City.


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## The Hitcher (May 8, 2015)

Amazing! I'd given up hope that the official adventures would offer anything but po-faced, "save the world, yada yada yawn". D&D is an inherently silly game, IMO. I'd LOVE it if all of the official stuff went down a route inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Terry Pratchett and Planescape.


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## Trickster Spirit (May 8, 2015)

Krypter said:


> So now we know why Pendleton Ward was visiting WOTC: this is going to the Underdark Adventure Time! story that Perkins was teasing last month.
> 
> http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2547-Adventure-Time-supplement-or-setting-for-5e
> 
> I do hope the insanity-inducing faerzress gives us some sapient candy people and Wizard City.




That thought had crossed my mind, but I'm not convinced - one, I think they would have name-dropped him in the initial announcement if he was even remotely attached to the project, and two, they _just_ met for their planning session. I really doubt they settled on a finalized campaign skeleton / cast of characters after that one meeting.

No, it's either the _next_ AP, or, hoping against hope, a D&D cartoon.

Is it obvious yet that I _really _don't want to let go of that D&D cartoon dream, no matter how unlikely it may be?


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## TwoSix (May 8, 2015)

Leatherhead said:


> This reminds me more of The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth than Alice in Wonderland.
> 
> Unless they are talking about American McGee's Alice.



View attachment 68281


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## Beleriphon (May 8, 2015)

S_Dalsgaard said:


> There's a kind of awakened cube in Scott Kurtz's Table Titans comic - http://tabletitans.com/comic/mines-of-madness-page-16




Also in Rusty and Co. Well not awakened per se...

http://rustyandco.com/


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## TarionzCousin (May 8, 2015)

Everyone said:
			
		

>



Me, too! 

This looks very interesting.


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## Trickster Spirit (May 8, 2015)

TarionzCousin said:


> Me, too!
> 
> This looks very interesting.




View attachment 68284


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## 13garth13 (May 8, 2015)

Colour me torn....I loved DiTerlizzi's work for Planescape....MOST of the time.  Whenever he was drawing faerie folk, or the upper planes, or generally whimsical weirdness, he was superb (not surprisingly, he and Brian Froud share similar sensibilities, IMHO, and there are definite similarities between their styles).  But (and it is a big "But", which I like and I can't deny it) anytime he had to illustrate something  of a dark/horrific/lower planar nature, his work came across as the complete ANTITHESIS of ominous and scary.  In fact, it was typically so appallingly *unthreatening *that it took me right out of the mood of the sourcebook/adventure.  His fiends were damned near comical in appearance and I never, EVER showed those illustrations while DMing a Planescape game, because at some moment that should be filled with _gravitas_ and grim import/impending danger of a most lethal kind, my players would have rolled their eyes/laughed, and I wouldn't have blamed them in the slightest.

So, like I said....sometimes whimsical images that look like they should have been concept art for _Labyrinth_ (1986) are great and convey a wonderful sense of strangeness....but if the fiends and dangerous predators of the Underdark all look like that that, then it's gonna seriously kill the mood, like reciting a Monty Python sketch in the middle of a horror movie.

I'll remain on the fence; hopefully this concept art reflects only some of the moods/themes of the adventure, and not the whole of it, because darn it all, any adventure in the Underdark has to live up to D1-3 and The Night Below in terms of evoking strange, otherworldly menace and bizarre subterranean monstrosities.  So, my personal preference is something a little closer to _Descent_ (2005) and not so much Froud/DiTerlizzi.  

To reiterate, I'll remain cautiously optimistic (I love Underdark adventures, and I love fiends/horrific creatures, so I am really hoping Green Ronin can deliver {if it had been one of their own books, I wouldn't be hesitant at all.....I LOVED The Book of Fiends, I just don't trust that WOTC's design goals/specs will be entirely as malevolent/nasty as Green Ronin's in house works}).

Cheers,
Colin


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## I'm A Banana (May 8, 2015)

Personally, I think that DiTerlizzi's lower planar creatures still being "whimsical" helped me to understand that in a _Planescape_ game, these were characters - personalities, individuals, with beliefs and convictions - more than monsters. They were there to talk to, and occasionally to slay, but they weren't creatures who were just scary and evil - they had an identity beyond that.

That doesn't work for every game, but it worked really well for PS and I think it'll work well here.


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## Krypter (May 8, 2015)

Trickster Spirit said:


> That thought had crossed my mind, but I'm not convinced - one, I think they would have name-dropped him in the initial announcement if he was even remotely attached to the project, and two, they _just_ met for their planning session. I really doubt they settled on a finalized campaign skeleton / cast of characters after that one meeting.
> 
> Is it obvious yet that I _really _don't want to let go of that D&D cartoon dream, no matter how unlikely it may be?




Perkins has been dropping hints about his project since December, he met with Ward in April and the adventure is supposed to come out in September. Seems like the appropriate amount of time for consultations and design work. 

(but I'm hoping for a D&D cartoon too!)


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## 13garth13 (May 8, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Personally, I think that DiTerlizzi's lower planar creatures still being "whimsical" helped me to understand that in a _Planescape_ game, these were characters - personalities, individuals, with beliefs and convictions - more than monsters. They were there to talk to, and occasionally to slay, but they weren't creatures who were just scary and evil - they had an identity beyond that.
> 
> That doesn't work for every game, but it worked really well for PS and I think it'll work well here.




I dunno....guess we'll have to agree to disagree (which is unusual, as I usually see eye-to-eye with you, KM).  To use an example from film/novels, the character of Hannibal Lecter, whether portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, Mads Mikkelson, or Brian Cox, always has a depth of character (regardless of how realistic a depiction of sociopathy/psychopathy he is); there is the wit, intelligence, and "character", but also a capacity for utter evil whether subtle and Machiavellian or over-the-top, frenzied slaughter.  He most certainly has all of the depth of personality of a good villain, but you always get the impression of the sheer depths of wrongness/willingness to do vile things inherent in him.  

I don't get that from DiTerlizzi's fiends.  At all.  I get the "I'm a real character with personality" bit from his art (it sure does have that nailed down!), but to my eye he fails to convey any of the black, eternal horror of a being from the lower planes.  And that has always been crucial to my games, ESPECIALLY my Planescape games.  I believe it was his art booklet for the Hellbound boxed set which really, REALLY let me down completely....there are some really grotesque scenes/characters in those adventures (I think it was Squaring the Circle, which had a really demented tower in the Abyss) and the artwork just fails to get the nastiness across at all.

*Shrug*

It's cool; different strokes and all that.

Cheers,
Colin


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## Trickster Spirit (May 8, 2015)

Krypter said:


> Perkins has been dropping hints about his project since December, he met with Ward in April and the adventure is supposed to come out in September. Seems like the appropriate amount of time for consultations and design work.
> 
> (but I'm hoping for a D&D cartoon too!)




Right, but Perkins has been working on the next seven years of D&D storylines. The question is, was the meeting with Ward in April the first he'd been brought on-board, or had they had been working on Out of the Abyss previously?

I don't think it's a matter of Ward throwing out some character concepts for quirky Underdark denizens, that seems like a misuse of his talents. He's a big name, probably bigger than any RPG celebs - even if he doesn't get listed as an author, you better believe they'd throw in a "Produced by Pendleton Ward!" mention when talking about it. It's quite a feather in their cap.

No, I think it's far more likely to be something they're still working on. Most likely the _next_ AP.

I could be wrong, though.


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## I'm A Banana (May 8, 2015)

Yeah, I'm cool with different strokes, I just think the dark whimsy was often intentional - PS wanted you to see demons from the abyss as people with complexity and motives, not as just nefarious villains. Hannibal Lecter had character, but he was never NOT a horrible, horrible villain. PS likes a more moral grey area, where your baby-eating demons might not be so bad if you're fighting, I dunno, Harmonium thought-police or something. 

Presuming you're supposed to talk to the Pudding King and not just chiv him 'till he stops twitching, that'll be a good choice here, too.


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## Rejuvenator (May 8, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> PS wanted you to see demons from the abyss as people with complexity and motives, not as just nefarious villains. Hannibal Lecter had character, but he was never NOT a horrible, horrible villain. PS likes a more moral grey area, where your baby-eating demons might not be so bad if you're fighting, I dunno, Harmonium thought-police or something.



Except that demons/devils have been described frequently as *evil incarnate*, and Hannibal is an evil human (not even evil incarnate). To make demons whimsical is a paradox I cannot reconcile. FWIW, PS described a lot of things about the multiverse and then failed to walk the talk IMO.


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## Mouseferatu (May 8, 2015)

Heh. To me, PS humanizing the fiends was one of the setting's biggest _missteps_. There are plenty of evils that can be humanized, but the fiends shouldn't be. Ever. They are literally evil incarnate.

But we're getting off-topic. I like most of what I'm seeing here; as others have said, I wouldn't want this style to become the norm, or even a common exception, but as a now-and-again thing? Absolutely.

I hate that there's a mind flayer as part of the cabal, as I prefer to think of the illithid as so freaking alien that they're no more capable of working with "normal" creatures than Cthulhu's spawn would be. (They can dominate others, be worshiped by others, but their goals and even thought-patterns don't allow for alliances.) But that ship sailed long ago in most of the D&D published settings, so I'll suck it up and deal.


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## Parmandur (May 8, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> Except that demons/devils have been described frequently as *evil incarnate*, and Hannibal is an evil human (not even evil incarnate). To make demons whimsical is a paradox I cannot reconcile. FWIW, PS described a lot of things about the multiverse and then failed to walk the talk IMO.





Bit of a sideline here, since you are really talking about 90's Planescape art; but it is worth noting that the whimsical characters in this art are *not* Outsiders.  The Demons do not look very whimsical; the denizens of the Underdark, however, look twisted and alien, albeit not supernaturally so (or no more supernatural than the PC Dwarven Cleric pr Elf Ranger).


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## I'm A Banana (May 8, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> Except that demons/devils have been described frequently as *evil incarnate*, and Hannibal is an evil human (not even evil incarnate). To make demons whimsical is a paradox I cannot reconcile.




Yeah, PS was full of those. Part of its charm.


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## jamesjhaeck (May 8, 2015)

All of this art looks like the concept art that was commissioned for _Princes_ and to guide the PHB art in early development. To people worried about the art being this over the top and sketchy, I doubt this is indicative of the final product. My guess is that it's just to inspire the "mood" for the final interior pieces.


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## HobbitFan (May 9, 2015)

You know what it may be is that the Underdark "friendlies" you encounter in the adventure and games will be "dark whimsy" themed to underline how the Underdark is different.  
That seems one way of the adventure have dark whimsy and ultimate evil in one package.


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## Hussar (May 9, 2015)

I have to admit, I'd LOVE to see some weird come back into D&D.  I miss the early days of Otus art and the like where D&D was just ... well... weird.  Sometimes silly, sometimes downright scary, but, always weird.  Not all the time.  That's cool.  But, D&D lost its sense of humour for years, and I'd love to see some of that come back.


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## Sword of Spirit (May 9, 2015)

Hussar said:


> I have to admit, I'd LOVE to see some weird come back into D&D.  I miss the early days of Otus art and the like where D&D was just ... well... weird.  Sometimes silly, sometimes downright scary, but, always weird.  Not all the time.  That's cool.  But, D&D lost its sense of humour for years, and I'd love to see some of that come back.




Yeah. I always find that attempts to make storytelling (in any medium) feel more believable by making all of the elements "serious" eventually lose something. Overly-serious isn't believable. Real life has humor and silliness in it.


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## Rejuvenator (May 9, 2015)

Mouseferatu said:


> Heh. To me, PS humanizing the fiends was one of the setting's biggest _missteps_. There are plenty of evils that can be humanized, but the fiends shouldn't be. Ever. They are literally evil incarnate.



Agreed... If evil incarnate is more evil than Hitler (Godwin!), and the media generally doesn't "humanize" Hitler, I wouldn't play a serious game of D&D that humanizes fiends.



Mouseferatu said:


> But we're getting off-topic.



Oops  Well, then to tie it back, a Wonderland pocket dimension where everyone is mad as a hatter and the usual conventions go out the window sounds fun to me for the odd game.


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## Jeff Albertson (May 9, 2015)

Hussar said:


> I have to admit, I'd LOVE to see some weird come back into D&D.  I miss the early days of Otus art and the like where D&D was just ... well... weird.  Sometimes silly, sometimes downright scary, but, always weird.  Not all the time.  That's cool.  But, D&D lost its sense of humour for years, and I'd love to see some of that come back.





I agree, at some point D&D started taking itself far too seriously, I would like a return of some whimsy.


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## Curmudjinn (May 9, 2015)

It wasn't long ago when the Alice in Wonderland rumor dropped and nerdrage commenced with some even declaring they give up on the future of 5e and WotC.
Now, it seems to be nearly as anticipated as the core books. With Green Ronin(that's ro-neen) behind the curtain; I can't see this being anything but great.

Cross your fingers for Cubicle 7 writing a future horror-based release.


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## Parmandur (May 9, 2015)

HobbitFan said:


> You know what it may be is that the Underdark "friendlies" you encounter in the adventure and games will be "dark whimsy" themed to underline how the Underdark is different.
> 
> That seems one way of the adventure have dark whimsy and ultimate evil in one package.





I agree; the clever part of what they've shown so far is using the Abyss as a foil to make Underdark nasties "enemy of my enemy" strange bedfellows for the PCs.


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## transtemporal (May 9, 2015)

steeldragons said:


> Who do we think they are?




You'd expect Demogorgon and Pazuzu to make an appearance surely. How about Lloth? Or she on everyones shitlist?


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## MonsterEnvy (May 9, 2015)

transtemporal said:


> You'd expect Demogorgon and Pazuzu to make an appearance surely. How about Lloth? Or she on everyones shitlist?




He was talking about the Demon Lords in the picture.


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## steeldragons (May 9, 2015)

Yeah. I meant those two figures particularly...though the toadie winged one...maybe...could be Pazuzu. S'got wings.

The other, female figure...could be Lolth, as much as it could be anyone else..and we are talking Drow/Underdark. I think Lolth showing up in the mix somewhere is a foregone conclusion.


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## Mouseferatu (May 10, 2015)

steeldragons said:


> I think Lolth showing up in the mix somewhere is a foregone conclusion.




Probably true--which makes me just a bit sad. I'm _so_ bloody sick of Lolth.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 10, 2015)

Mouseferatu said:


> Probably true--which makes me just a bit sad. I'm _so_ bloody sick of Lolth.




She's never really shown up in too many adventure's and it's unlikely she will have big role as she is a God and thus can't get to the Material Plane unless a complex ritual is used now.


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## Mouseferatu (May 10, 2015)

I don't know how many adventures she's in, but she's _all over_ the fiction. I'd really like to see her put on the shelf for a while. Not forever, but a good long time.

But then, I kind of feel that way about the drow, too. I don't expect I'll see either actually happen.


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## The Grassy Gnoll (May 10, 2015)

Well, it's missing the queen of hearts character, so maybe she'd fit.


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## TarionzCousin (May 10, 2015)

G. Barrelhouse Esq. said:


> Well, it's missing the queen of hearts character, so maybe she'd fit.



How about the Demon Queen of Succubi, Malcanthet?


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## The Grassy Gnoll (May 10, 2015)

TarionzCousin said:


> How about the Demon Queen of Succubi, Malcanthet?




Phwoar


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## Hussar (May 10, 2015)

Reading that Wiki blurb, yeah, I thought so.  Malcanthet is a pretty new thing and was pretty much exclusively a Paizo Dungeon beastie.  I doubt they're going to use her in a WOTC module.

Zuttgmoy (sp) would be cool though instead of Lolth.  Ah well, Underdark=drow=Lolth, so, yeah, foregone conclusion.


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## Irennan (May 10, 2015)

Where are people seeing anything that even remotely resembles Lolth in the drawing? Even assuming that they are not portraying her as half spider half drow, I still see nothing resembling a drow female there  

Also, with the Sundering, by Ao's edict FR gods can't directly meddle anymore,  so I don't see that happening. Zuggtmoy is way more likely to be in the AP, IMO.


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## Jeff Albertson (May 10, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Reading that Wiki blurb, yeah, I thought so.  Malcanthet is a pretty new thing and was pretty much exclusively a Paizo Dungeon beastie.





She actually debuted in the WotC 3rd Ed D&D book, Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss.


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## The Hitcher (May 10, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> Agreed... If evil incarnate is more evil than Hitler (Godwin!), and the media generally doesn't "humanize" Hitler, I wouldn't play a serious game of D&D that humanizes fiends.




Ultimate evil is such a tedious concept to me. I don't think it fits in a serious narrative. Characters who do stuff for the sake of being evil are cartoons. It's characters I can relate to doing evil things for human reasons that are really scary.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 10, 2015)

The Hitcher said:


> Ultimate evil is such a tedious concept to me. I don't think it fits in a serious narrative. Characters who do stuff for the sake of being evil are cartoons. It's characters I can relate to doing evil things for human reasons that are really scary.




One problem with the whole "ultimate evil" thing is that you can't plausibly give them followers, because human nature is such that followers need to see themselves as the "real" good guys. Nationalism, revanchism, bigotry, and entitlement all make better "villain" motivations than "evulz for the lulz." If you have a big bad evil demon, it works better if he tells his followers that the throne of God is his by right and it was stolen by undeserving cretins out of jealousy, and that they will be righteously rewarded when he reclaims it. That's still pretty cheesy of course, and an even _better _villain is someone like Szeth son-son-Vallano from the Stormlight Archives who actually has _sympathetic_ motives, but either one is still better (IMO) than "we worship Orcus because we're evil." Gotta have a little bit of self-righteousness to make the villain truly hateful...


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## Mouseferatu (May 10, 2015)

The Hitcher said:


> Ultimate evil is such a tedious concept to me. I don't think it fits in a serious narrative. Characters who do stuff for the sake of being evil are cartoons. It's characters I can relate to doing evil things for human reasons that are really scary.




When it comes to humans (or other mortal creatures), I agree. But we're talking about demons and devils here. We're talking about creatures that, by their very nature, _are_ evil-for-evil's-sake. That's what _makes_ them demons.


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## I'm A Banana (May 10, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> One problem with the whole "ultimate evil" thing is that you can't plausibly give them followers, because human nature is such that followers need to see themselves as the "real" good guys. Nationalism, revanchism, bigotry, and entitlement all make better "villain" motivations than "evulz for the lulz." If you have a big bad evil demon, it works better if he tells his followers that the throne of God is his by right and it was stolen by undeserving cretins out of jealousy, and that they will be righteously rewarded when he reclaims it. That's still pretty cheesy of course, and an even _better _villain is someone like Szeth son-son-Vallano from the Stormlight Archives who actually has _sympathetic_ motives, but either one is still better (IMO) than "we worship Orcus because we're evil." Gotta have a little bit of self-righteousness to make the villain truly hateful...




...and thus you have why PS was pretty OK with dark whimsy for the demons and devils. 

I don't think it's a better-worse choice, I just think it's a choice that kind of defines your villains. PS wanted moral ambiguity in a world of heavens and hells and alignments, and the art style is part of how that was communicated. That's not something you want from your demons all the time, so it's fine to have the red lazers vs. blue lazers, too. It's just one of the ways in which PS isn't just D&D On The Planes, but its own distinct setting.  

Here, the dark whimsy seems more interested in communicating the "insanity" theme, which is cool, too. Dark whimsy is cool. More things should be darkly whimsical in life. 

But it does convey that those two goblins, for instance, probably aren't just for mugging in some tunnel (even if they may ALSO be for that).


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## Von Ether (May 10, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> One problem with the whole "ultimate evil" thing is that you can't plausibly give them followers, because human nature is such that followers need to see themselves as the "real" good guys. Nationalism, revanchism, bigotry, and entitlement all make better "villain" motivations than "evulz for the lulz." If you have a big bad evil demon, it works better if he tells his followers that the throne of God is his by right and it was stolen by undeserving cretins out of jealousy, and that they will be righteously rewarded when he reclaims it. That's still pretty cheesy of course, and an even _better _villain is someone like Szeth son-son-Vallano from the Stormlight Archives who actually has _sympathetic_ motives, but either one is still better (IMO) than "we worship Orcus because we're evil." Gotta have a little bit of self-righteousness to make the villain truly hateful...




I get that, but I've been playing serious/realistic villains for so long, that it's actually a break from the same old, same old to have a cackling lich (how do you cackle without vocal cords?) with orcs on the payroll.

http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff69/4uk4ata/poster53205764.jpg


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## Mouseferatu (May 10, 2015)

Note, too, that there's a _huge_ difference between "cultist of demon" and "demon" when we're talking motivation. I agree, the humans need to have _some_ motivation to worship Demogorgon, even if it's purely selfish or sadistic. But Demogorgon _himself_ needs nothing more than "Because I'm evil," because that's literally what defines his very existence.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 10, 2015)

Demogorgon is not even popular for worship by humanoids. He mainly worshiped by giant manta ray creatures. Orcus is most poplular as he has the entire undead them going and lots of guys see becoming sentient undead as a reward because they will become immortal. Along with this many undead worship him.

Anyway it's unlikely that Demon Cults are involved in the Adventure. It sounds like Gromph made a mistake with some magic and opened up a bunch of Abyssal portals that the Demon Princes and Lords decided to come through.


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## Mouseferatu (May 10, 2015)

Heh. I was using Demogorgon as an example, since I happen to be a fan. But yeah, feel free to replace him with Orcus, Graz'zt, Malcanthet, Dagon, or whoever else in the example.

(That said, and slightly off-topic, he _does_ have some substantial humanoid worshipers in my campaign, since I've sort of tweaked Demogorgon to be one of the primary faces--perhaps _the_ primary face--of Nyarlathotep*. He represents the savage wild, yes, but also the crumbling of civilization through inner corruption and destructive prosperity. I sometimes forget that that's my own twist and not part of most people's canon.  )

*Not necessarily under that name, for all practical purposes. I haven't decided if the _name_ "Nyarlathotep" exists in this setting. But Randal Flagg or the central figure in Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand" would be avatars/incarnations of Demogorgon in this setting.


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## Zarithar (May 10, 2015)

I absolutely love this.


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## Irennan (May 10, 2015)

The Hitcher said:


> Ultimate evil is such a tedious concept to me. I don't think it fits in a serious narrative. Characters who do stuff for the sake of being evil are cartoons. It's characters I can relate to doing evil things for human reasons that are really scary.




Totally agreed. And yes, while I agree with the people here saying that demons don't need motivations to be evil, that doesn't really make them narratively interesting. They are fascinating in the same sense the whole outer planes/creatures are: being embodied concepts. However, as main villains, they don't really bring more than ''muahaha I'm evil/I'll conquer the world/I'll destroy everything/I'll make people suffer, because evil!!1!''.


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## jace (May 10, 2015)

Just have to say that I LOVE this character art and the names. I agree with an earlier poster that said it reminded them of DiTerlizzi's work on Planescape and I think that's an excellent thing.


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## The Grassy Gnoll (May 10, 2015)

https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY


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## Henry (May 10, 2015)

TwoSix said:


> And really, you can't argue with science.




She blinded me with it, you know.


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## Abraxas (May 10, 2015)

jace said:


> I agree with an earlier poster that said it reminded them of DiTerlizzi's work on Planescape and I think that's an excellent thing.



The art work reminding me of DiTerlizzi's work is why I don't like what we're shown here. I honestly can't think of a single illustration by him that I like - something about the tall skinny look everything has. Plus these images (except the mind flayer, myconids and gelatinous cube) don't make me think of the races they are supposed to be (the purple Kuo-Toa in particular - Slaad maybe, but Kuo-Toa?. Never would have guessed that it was a Kuo-Toa in a million years)

While I really do like the concept of a dark alice in wonderland - I  don't see anything in this art that suggests it to me here - like another poster noted, this art seems reminiscent of Dark Crystal. Is there a larger version of the group demon picture somewhere? There is so little detail in the one I see here, they may as well be outlines.


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## Henry (May 10, 2015)

I'm in a wait and see mindset with this adventure book. I was not impressed with PotA, and if I hadn't bought it with Christmas gift cards might have been disappointed with the purchase. The concept paragraph blows both the dragons storyline and Elemental Evil stories out of the water, but too much DiTerlizzi  or Ward inspiration is going to sour me on it. I'm one of those rare fools who was totally turned off by planescape back in the 90s.


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## JeffB (May 10, 2015)

Henry said:


> I'm one of those rare fools who was totally turned off by planescape back in the 90s.




You are not alone. 

But I will give it a looksie when it comes out like I did with TOD and Princes to see ff there is enough goodies to hold my interest/yoink for my game.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 10, 2015)

Also the Demon Lords in that Picture have all been confirmed. From left to right they are

Yeenoghu, Graz'zt, Orcus, Zuggtmoy, Baphomet, Juiblex, Fraz'urb-luu, Demogorgon, Random Guy to show how big they are.


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## steeldragons (May 10, 2015)

FRAZ! That's who I was forgetting!

Thank you [MENTION=6706188]MonsterEnvy[/MENTION] 

I feel SO much better now. hahaha.


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## Corpsetaker (May 10, 2015)

Abraxas said:


> The art work reminding me of DiTerlizzi's work is why I don't like what we're shown here. I honestly can't think of a single illustration by him that I like - something about the tall skinny look everything has. Plus these images (except the mind flayer, myconids and gelatinous cube) don't make me think of the races they are supposed to be (the purple Kuo-Toa in particular - Slaad maybe, but Kuo-Toa?. Never would have guessed that it was a Kuo-Toa in a million years)
> 
> While I really do like the concept of a dark alice in wonderland - I  don't see anything in this art that suggests it to me here - like another poster noted, this art seems reminiscent of Dark Crystal. Is there a larger version of the group demon picture somewhere? There is so little detail in the one I see here, they may as well be outlines.




This right here!

I find this quirky and silly art to be off putting. I also agree that this doesn't inspire an Alice in Wonderland theme. 

If they wanted to do an "Alice in Wonderland" theme then they should have used the Feywild. They also didn't need to use the quirky art to give the impression.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 10, 2015)

Fun fact this is concept art.


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## JeffB (May 10, 2015)

MonsterEnvy said:


> Fun fact this is concept art.




Thats what they said about the halfling art pre-phb, too. And we know how that turned out.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 10, 2015)

JeffB said:


> Thats what they said about the halfling art pre-phb, too. And we know how that turned out.




They used different art and it was a in a different style from the concept art. Pretty much it's unlikely this art will be used in the book, It will likely look more like the cover. I like the new halfling art anyway.


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## Abraxas (May 10, 2015)

MonsterEnvy said:


> Fun fact this is concept art.



Fun fact - this concept art doesn't inspire me or give me an alice in wonderland vibe - so it's a failed concept, for me at least...


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## Hussar (May 10, 2015)

Abraxas said:


> Fun fact - this concept art doesn't inspire me or give me an alice in wonderland vibe - so it's a failed concept, for me at least...




What's the difference between The Dark Crystal and Alice in Wonderland as far as whimsy goes?  I'm thinking they're both in the same wheelhouse.


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## Parmandur (May 11, 2015)

MonsterEnvy said:


> They used different art and it was a in a different style from the concept art. Pretty much it's unlikely this art will be used in the book, It will likely look more like the cover. I like the new halfling art anyway.





Don't care for PHB Halfling art...but partly because it is different from the concept art, so you are right.


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## JeffB (May 11, 2015)

gigantic fat heads, teeny feet. Looks pretty much the same to me

View attachment 68304


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## MonsterEnvy (May 11, 2015)

JeffB said:


> gigantic fat heads, teeny feet. Looks pretty much the same to me
> 
> View attachment 68304




The artists and art style are different. The big heads and tiny feet are how they look now and I like it.


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## Leatherhead (May 11, 2015)

Hussar said:


> What's the difference between The Dark Crystal and Alice in Wonderland as far as whimsy goes?  I'm thinking they're both in the same wheelhouse.




The difference between "the heroes journey" as played out by soft puppets and a grotesque fever dream.


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## Rejuvenator (May 11, 2015)

The Hitcher said:


> Ultimate evil is such a tedious concept to me. I don't think it fits in a serious narrative. Characters who do stuff for the sake of being evil are cartoons. It's characters I can relate to doing evil things for human reasons that are really scary.



I agree that ultimate evil is often tedious, especially for mortal villians. On the other hand, I don't see Lucifer, Dracula, Grendel, or Sauron as being cartoony just because they are Ultimate Evil. It's a traditional fantasy of morality in black and white.

Yes, I have sometimes seen renditions of Satan (in fantasy, not religiously) in very dark shades of grey, protrayed as a narcissist who felt unfairly treated for getting kicked out of heaven and thus is somewhat humanized. That character portrayal is still evil and manipulative, but it also suggests he is still a victim of circumstance, instead of having evolved into absolute evil.

I guess, from a world-building perspective, if fiends are pure incarnations of evil on paper (as described officially in many monster manuals and accessories) and yet this meanders in actual play or Planescape whimsy, then where is the For Real Incarnate Evil? I mean, if Sauron and Satan are not ultimate evil and just slightly misunderstood, then who is Ultimate Evil in a classic D&D setting?


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## I'm A Banana (May 11, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:
			
		

> Yes, I have sometimes seen renditions of Satan (in fantasy, not religiously) in very dark shades of grey, protrayed as a narcissist who felt unfairly treated for getting kicked out of heaven and thus is somewhat humanized. That character portrayal is still evil and manipulative, but it also suggests he is still a victim of circumstance, instead of having evolved into absolute evil.




Hell, if _Paradise Lost_ counts, that's a treatment of Satan Hisself that's EXCEPTIONALLY relatable (but still, as it is a text written by a good Christian, in the wrong). 



> I mean, if Sauron and Satan are not ultimate evil and just slightly misunderstood, then who is Ultimate Evil in a classic D&D setting?




In most of D&D, and probably in this adventure, the demon lords are ultimate evil bad guys who are horrible people and also kick puppies or whatever. D&D is like pulp adventures or _Star Wars_, its villains aren't exactly nuanced, even when they're grandiose and compelling in their awfulness, and you know who the Bad Guys are. But likely in this adventure, characters like goblins and derro and perhaps even the occasional mind flayer or ooze or kuo-toa or whatever are not just there to be monstrous, but there to be characters you interact with. It's an adventure taking place in the underdark, not everything you meet is going to want to kill you, probably. So a little more "character" in the "monsters under the earth" (that in many games are irredeemably evil and corrupt monsters). 

In Planescape, the _fiends_ are not just there to be monstrous, but are there to be characters you interact with, since it's a setting that uses hell itself as a stomping-ground on occasion. Because these are in most D&D games the epitome of debased, horrible evil, using them as shopkeeps (A'kin), patrons (Shemeska), informants (Rule-of-Three), whatever, and by depicting them not as all Gothic horror and HR Geiger unsettling weirdness, but as DiTerlizzi's "dark whimsy"...that's part of how PS tweaks D&D into something a bit morally greyer. Even an epitome of debased evil might not be such a bad dude....or maybe he is...it's really an individual consideration, and you can't approach them all the same way. 

As others have said, it's not ALWAYS the most appropriate take - sometimes your mind flayers are not wizened old intellectuals, and your gelatinous cubes are not always awakened potential allies, and your fiends are not always shopkeeps. But it works for certain circumstances - like if your adventure is about madness in the underdark and the PC's are going to need to do something other than kill all humanoids, or if your campaign setting is about mortal morality in a world of angels and demons and the PC's are going to have to deal with a devil in a non-soul-risking capacity. 

And in PS, at least, I'd say that the *ULTIMATE EVIL* is largely a matter of who your characters think it is, not who the game tells you it is.


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## pemerton (May 11, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> I agree that ultimate evil is often tedious, especially for mortal villians. On the other hand, I don't see Lucifer, Dracula, Grendel, or Sauron as being cartoony just because they are Ultimate Evil. It's a traditional fantasy of morality in black and white.



I've always been a little puzzled by Sauron's motivations. I wouldn't say that he's especially _cartoony_, but rather a bit under-developed.

Whereas that's not really the case for Saruman, Wormtongue, or even Melkor/Morgoth.


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## Rejuvenator (May 11, 2015)

pemerton said:


> I've always been a little puzzled by Sauron's motivations. I wouldn't say that he's especially _cartoony_, but rather a bit under-developed.



Power? Paranoid and eliminating all rivals? I figure he has his reasons, they're just not explained since the character exists primarily behind the scenes.

Mind you, I have the same puzzlement about the endless parade of D&D villians that seek an artifact to take over a region.


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## The Hitcher (May 11, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> I guess, from a world-building perspective, if fiends are pure incarnations of evil on paper (as described officially in many monster manuals and accessories) and yet this meanders in actual play or Planescape whimsy, then where is the For Real Incarnate Evil? I mean, if Sauron and Satan are not ultimate evil and just slightly misunderstood, then who is Ultimate Evil in a classic D&D setting?




Ultimate evil can work as a kind of force of nature - something as pure and inhuman as a volcano or sandstorm. In that form, it can be an obstacle against which the hero's mettle is occasionally tested. But as soon as that evil becomes personified into a character that is even a slight approximation of a person, it pretty quickly becomes cartoony. Likewise for minions who are evil just because their boss is. What's in it for them? Characters need somewhat understandable motivations to be characters at all. Otherwise they're just set dressing with hit points. 

And personally I think a fantasy world populated with complex characters is by far the more interesting alternative. If "good guys" sometimes turn out to be liabilities and "bad guys" to be assets and sometimes you just have no idea, that is way more interesting than just rolling a whole lot of d20s on the way to the big boss.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Hell, if _Paradise Lost_ counts, that's a treatment of Satan Hisself that's EXCEPTIONALLY relatable (but still, as it is a text written by a good Christian, in the wrong).



Yeah, Satan is quite frequently a sympathetic character, even to Christians. I'm quite partial to the version from Sandman, myself.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> In Planescape, the _fiends_ are not just there to be monstrous, but are there to be characters you interact with, since it's a setting that uses hell itself as a stomping-ground on occasion. Because these are in most D&D games the epitome of debased, horrible evil, using them as shopkeeps (A'kin), patrons (Shemeska), informants (Rule-of-Three), whatever, and by depicting them not as all Gothic horror and HR Geiger unsettling weirdness, but as DiTerlizzi's "dark whimsy"...that's part of how PS tweaks D&D into something a bit morally greyer. Even an epitome of debased evil might not be such a bad dude....or maybe he is...it's really an individual consideration, and you can't approach them all the same way.
> 
> ...
> 
> And in PS, at least, I'd say that the *ULTIMATE EVIL* is largely a matter of who your characters think it is, not who the game tells you it is.




This. Imagine how boring roaming the Planes would be if you could already tell EXACTLY how every celestial or fiend was going to act just by looking at them?


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## Rejuvenator (May 11, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Because these are in most D&D games the epitome of debased, horrible evil, using them as shopkeeps (A'kin), patrons (Shemeska), informants (Rule-of-Three), whatever, and by depicting them not as all Gothic horror and HR Geiger unsettling weirdness, but as DiTerlizzi's "dark whimsy"...that's part of how PS tweaks D&D into something a bit morally greyer. Even an epitome of debased evil might not be such a bad dude....or maybe he is...



Not "maybe". He IS bad, to the bone. But it may not manifest as Geiger-ish monstrous behavior. If I was, say, a reporter, and I met with Dracula in his castle, and I know he's the Worst Evil Vampire, and yet he was really nice and polite to me the whole time, that's still really disturbing (perhaps more disturbing in a way than if he predictably attacked me and sucked my blood). I don't for one second think he's not such a bad dude.

What's not relatable to me is if a person meets with Dracula ala Planescape and feels pretty secure and comfortable hanging around Ultimate Evil, and musing how he's not so bad.


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## I'm A Banana (May 11, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> Not "maybe". He IS bad, to the bone. But it may not manifest as Geiger-ish monstrous behavior. If I was, say, a reporter, and I met with Dracula in his castle, and I know he's the Worst Evil Vampire, and yet he was really nice and polite to me the whole time, that's still really disturbing (perhaps more disturbing in a way than if he predictably attacked me and sucked my blood). I don't for one second think he's not such a bad dude.




Actually, with most of the PS examples, and ESPECIALLY with A'kin, the truth of the horror is open to question. Fallen angels and risen fiends are things that are known to happen (even if they're rare, they're not _unique_) and a demon who shares your heroic goals or an angel who opposes them are things that PC's deal with. The setting wants you to ask the in-character question, "What MAKES this character evil/good? And even if they truly are, is that really a problem/solution for us right now?" 

I imagine this adventure is going to be full of mad underdark denizens that you may or may not want to momentarily trust or that you may or may not momentarily need, and this artwork definitely helps sell that. You'll probably not just want to kill Glabbagool, but your ability to trust it will likely be different for different PC's.



> What's not relatable to me is if a person meets with Dracula ala Planescape and feels pretty secure and comfortable hanging around Ultimate Evil, and musing how he's not so bad.




I imagine in ROD, your bonkers wererat gnomes or whatever might earn their share of fans in the party - I could _totally_ imagine folks favoring them to the uptight paladin or the aloof anti-hero. And yet they are wererats and monsters and madmen, things that in a lot of D&D campaigns certainly represent evil. 

In Planescape, your fiendish informant might very well be a more trusted source of advice than the party member who is a Diviner and also a Doomguard ("For some reason, all her predictions point to our grisly and inevitable demise"). Your fiendish shopkeep who smiles and gives you what you ask for and serves you tea, while _odd_, might be the best supplier for your expedition to protect some planar trade caravan of lost orphans going to Elysium by the scenic route or whatever. And you could, in-character, think them quite decent chaps for an entire campaign, and not have any stitch of evidence to prove the contrary. 

Which is all just to say that part of what I think I dig about the dark whimsy on display here is that they seem like interesting characters, not just monsters to slay. I was a fan when PS did that to the fiends, and I'm a fan of it here, though it's not always and everywhere in every campaign the choice you're going to want to make, absolutely.


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## Rejuvenator (May 11, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Which is all just to say that part of what I think I dig about the dark whimsy on display here is that they seem like interesting characters, not just monsters to slay. I was a fan when PS did that to the fiends, and I'm a fan of it here, though it's not always and everywhere in every campaign the choice you're going to want to make, absolutely.



I hear you. Well maybe it's not a zero sum game. Maybe Evil can be characterized just enough to have interesting interactions, but still be faithful to an irredeemably evil nature.

For example, Lucifer can be still come across as somewhat sympathetic and yet still be irredeemably evil. He complains about kicked out of heaven as a disproportionately cruel punishment by the will of God. Sure, he's narcissistic and manipulative, but it's not his fault, he didn't deserve his role in the universe.

If he's NOT Absolute Evil in that story, perhaps he's a victim of circumstance, feels sorry for himself, and strives to be better, but feels like he can't change.

But if he is Absolute Evil in that story, he follows his nature wholeheartedly. He embraces his place in the universe. Poo-poo on his fall from heaven, it was inevitable. He embraces his role as The Devil! Vilest of all, for anybody who believes his sob story, being sympathetic to the devil might actually bar their soul from going to heaven. Thus Lucifer exploits the human desire for empathy in order to possibly claim the mortal's soul for Hell. That would be pure mean evil.

In that vein, Planescape could be PR propaganda churned out by the Lower Planes in order to soften the 'pure evil' reputation of the fiends, get the berks to drop their guard a little, just enough to further their diabolical plans 

If fiends are evil incarnate, then each one IS according to its nature. There is an inconsistency for me when something like Zhentarim are cartoonish one-sided Bad Guys, but a demon (the essence of evil chaos and destruction) wants to sip wine and talk about Art. Some exaggeration there, but human villians demand more humanistic motives to me than extraplanar beings do. I guess I'm saying some things don't seem to walk the talk, don't put their money where there mouth is.


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## I'm A Banana (May 11, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> I hear you. Well maybe it's not a zero sum game. Maybe Evil can be characterized just enough to have interesting interactions, but still be faithful to an irredeemably evil nature.




I guess what I'm saying is that "fiends are irredeemably evil" is a choice you make in a setting, not a constant truism. If that is true in your world, then that affects how you approach fiends as a player (you don't usually try to talk with them, for instance). If that is NOT true in your world, that ALSO affects how you approach fiends as a player. It changes your assumptions. 

The same is true for anything you care to replace "fiends" with. Mind flayers. Wererats. Kuo-toa. Orcs. Whatever. None of those things HAVE to be irredeemably evil, but any of them CAN be, depending on the campaign.

This adventure looks like it's treating some underdark beings at least as they appear in this adventure as More Weird Than Evil, which is great. But, like, in Ravenloft? That would be an _awful_ choice.


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## Rejuvenator (May 11, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> The same is true for anything you care to replace "fiends" with. Mind flayers. Wererats. Kuo-toa. Orcs. Whatever. None of those things HAVE to be irredeemably evil, but any of them CAN be, depending on the campaign.



Look, all I did was take "evil incarnate" in the Monster Manual (and supporting tales of fiendish depravity) at face value. The Monster Manual doesn't describe orcs as "evil incarnate" but merely "evil" or unaligned (in 4E?) as a statistical mean. I have no reason to describe them as HAVE TO BE irredeemably evil (thus killing orc babies is controversial). Is killing demon spawn controversial? Mind flayers are described as alien in thinking, so that means something too. Kuo-toa, if I remember correctly, are insane, so a sane kuo-toa drank the anti Kool-aid. The various canon descriptions place different demands on the DM accordingly, unless the DM veers from the canon, which is cool too, but that's a different argument. Perhaps it's on me, perhaps "evil incarnate" is not as straightforward as I assume it to be.



> This adventure looks like it's treating some underdark beings at least as they appear in this adventure as More Weird Than Evil, which is great.



That's cool. FR makes allowances for variance in (lower case e) evil races (Drizzt and good drow are a case in point) so it's not a systemic problem for me.


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## Relax (May 11, 2015)

How does everyone here feel about the ultimate evil presented in the Cthulhu mythos?  Is an evil with alien motivations still interesting?


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## Sword of Spirit (May 11, 2015)

The way I like to look at evil in Planescape is that fiends really are evil incarnate...but that doesn't mean they can't be allies.

Take a yugoloth. Their core motivation is "what's in it for me?" You can "trust" that a yugoloth will do whatever it considers to be in its own best interest. If your interest and the yugoloth's interest perfectly coincide, you've got a pretty reliable ally (as long as things don't change). I've seen non-D&D fictional presentations _exactly_ like that, and they were quite believable. A lot of the times the protagonists (and the audience) are unsure of how evil the helpful bad guy is--but usually at the end they get betrayed and realize, "Yep, this guy was pure evil the whole time."

So that fiendish shopkeeper? Just as bad as any other, but he is smart, he is working as a shopkeeper _for a reason_, and that reason is best served by not killing people nor breaking (most) laws. My interpretation of Planescape (think about that for a moment...) is bringing up the question, "How many ways can ultimate evil manifest, and are they necessarily a problem to you?"

And I don't look at Planescape as "the planes." It is the specific planar culture of Sigil that also bleeds over into certain other locations. Most fiends are much more transparent, most planar denizens don't speak the cant, and most of them probably either don't know about Sigil, or steer clear of it like an insane asylum. Even for inhabitants of the planes, Sigil is _weird._

So the fact that fiends are rubbing shoulders with everyone else there? Just another oddity. Why are they there? What are their real motives? But, to the average guy on the street in Sigil, if that fiend isn't going to eat me on my way home from work, why should I care?


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## Mouseferatu (May 11, 2015)

pemerton said:


> I've always been a little puzzled by Sauron's motivations. I wouldn't say that he's especially _cartoony_, but rather a bit under-developed.






Rejuvenator said:


> Power? Paranoid and eliminating all rivals? I figure he has his reasons, they're just not explained since the character exists primarily behind the scenes.




It's simple, really.

Sauron is a wight-ring extremist. 

...

I'll just show myself out.


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## pemerton (May 11, 2015)

[MENTION=1288]Mouseferatu[/MENTION], there's no _groan_ button so I had to click _laugh_ instead.



Rejuvenator said:


> Power? Paranoid and eliminating all rivals?



You're right that he wants power, and wants to eliminate rivals, but what does he want the power for? I don't feel we really get a sense of him using or enjoying the power. And he seems to surround himself with people (wights, orcs, trolls) who don't make for any sort of decent company.



Rejuvenator said:


> I have the same puzzlement about the endless parade of D&D villians that seek an artifact to take over a region.



Is this an FR thing? When I try to think of D&D villains that I've used in my games, only a handful come to mind: 

* Iuz (who is a bit like Sauron, but at least has a material body able to take some pleasure from his exercises of power);

* the Scarlet Brotherhood (power-hungry conspiratorial types);

* Za Jikku, the banished immortal of OA7 Test of the Samurai (who is trying to regain immortality by a combination of meditation and large-scale alchemy);

* Vecna (who in one campaign sought to restore his lost empire, and in my current 4e campaign wants to become god of death);

* and then extraplanar being: the Slaad Lords Ygorl and Ssendam (who have no fully rational motivations, but spread entropy and insanity respectively), and Demon Princes like Orcus, Demogorgon et al (who also have not fully rational motivations, but take great pleasure in spreading suffering and destruction).​
Iuz, and 4e's Vecna, are probably the weakest of these in characterisation/motivation.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> I guess what I'm saying is that "fiends are irredeemably evil" is a choice you make in a setting, not a constant truism.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> The same is true for anything you care to replace "fiends" with. Mind flayers. Wererats. Kuo-toa. Orcs. Whatever. None of those things HAVE to be irredeemably evil, but any of them CAN be, depending on the campaign.





Kamikaze Midget said:


> The setting wants you to ask the in-character question, "What MAKES this character evil/good? And even if they truly are, is that really a problem/solution for us right now?"
> 
> <snip>
> 
> In Planescape, your fiendish informant might very well be a more trusted source of advice than the party member who is a Diviner and also a Doomguard ("For some reason, all her predictions point to our grisly and inevitable demise"). Your fiendish shopkeep who smiles and gives you what you ask for and serves you tea, while _odd_, might be the best supplier for your expedition to protect some planar trade caravan of lost orphans going to Elysium by the scenic route or whatever. And you could, in-character, think them quite decent chaps for an entire campaign, and not have any stitch of evidence to prove the contrary.



I'm not sure how much weight should be put on the "irredeemably" element of the evil, but if we put that to one side then the game historically has tended to make acquiring the evidence quite easy: detection magic (Detect Evil, Know Alignment, etc).

There is always going to be a deep tension in trying to push the question "What makes this person evil?" while already answering the question "Is this person evil?" via a two-word alignment descriptor.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Mind flayers. Wererats. Kuo-toa. Orcs. Whatever. None of those things HAVE to be irredeemably evil, but any of them CAN be, depending on the campaign.





Kamikaze Midget said:


> Which is all just to say that part of what I think I dig about the dark whimsy on display here is that they seem like interesting characters, not just monsters to slay. I was a fan when PS did that to the fiends



I don't think that "irredeemably evil" and "just a monster to slay" have to be equated.

The PCs in my current 4e campaign, are aligned in various degrees with:

* the duergar of the underdark;

* some drow NPCs;

* the god Bane;

* the archdevil Levistus;

* the vampire lord Kas;

* the Raven Queen (who in my campaign has turned out to be not a very nice person).​
These people (except for the Raven Queen) all have "evil" in their stat blocks, and not without some good reason: the duergar and drow keep slaves and are notoriously cruel; the god Bane is a hard-hearted war-leader; Levistus traffics in souls; Kas is a blood-thirsty, vengeful vampire; the Raven Queen is self-serving and power-hungry.

But they are not just monsters to be slain. None of the PCs would think of themselves as evil, and nor would their players. But you can't always predict who you'll end up making friends with.



Relax said:


> How does everyone here feel about the ultimate evil presented in the Cthulhu mythos?  Is an evil with alien motivations still interesting?



I don't find HPL's stories very horrific. Cthulhu, or a shoggoth, is _monstrous_, but I'm not sure that these things are ultimate evils.


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## MonsterEnvy (May 11, 2015)

Funny that you had Vecna wanting to be the God of Death in your game given that he has never had an interest in that (Orcus is the one who wants to) Vecna is the God of Secrets, his belif that all beings have a secret or something hidden that would allow them to be brought down. Vecna has always been a schemer who's interest was never to take another gods portfolio, but instead to destory all other deities and powers so he would be the sole remaining god with power over all reality. 

i think Vecna aiming to replace the God of Death is a much too low of a goal for him. He should be turning her into his puppet with some devastating secret or weakness and have her attack other gods while he waits in the shadows scooping up the losers divine essences. Lets not forget that Vecna managed to get one over on the Lady of Pain and partially rewrote reality before his avatar was destroyed. (Even then he still came up on top as he gained the power of a lesser god out of it when he was a Demigod before his plan.)


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## SkidAce (May 12, 2015)

pemerton said:


> I don't find HPL's stories very horrific. Cthulhu, or a shoggoth, is _monstrous_, but I'm not sure that these things are ultimate evils.




I always felt the point of HPL's stories wasn't so much evil, as uncaring indifference on the part of the cosmos, and mankind's futile striving like ants under the heels of an oblivious force.

Sure feels like evil to the humans, but the cosmic horror is the soul crushing insignificance and futility of it all.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> If he's NOT Absolute Evil in that story, perhaps he's a victim of circumstance, feels sorry for himself, and strives to be better, but feels like he can't change.
> 
> But if he is Absolute Evil in that story, he follows his nature wholeheartedly. He embraces his place in the universe. Poo-poo on his fall from heaven, it was inevitable. He embraces his role as The Devil! Vilest of all, for anybody who believes his sob story, being sympathetic to the devil might actually bar their soul from going to heaven. Thus Lucifer exploits the human desire for empathy in order to possibly claim the mortal's soul for Hell. That would be pure mean evil.




I don't think these two portraits are entirely mutually exclusive. "Strives to be better" isn't compatible with ultimate evil of course, but self-pity and adverse circumstances are. It doesn't even have to be cynical manipulation: someone who (for example) steals money from the homeless urchins he employs only because he really NEEDS a new jetliner to maintain his social status--that person is contemptibly evil, in a tawdry sort of way, no matter what lies he tells you. Same thing goes if you have a Lucifer who is determined to prove that God was wrong to give Man freedom to choose, by getting Man to abuse that freedom in all the worst ways, thus showing that Lucifer was right all along and that Man should have been forced--that's a relatable reason for being evil, in the sense that you can model such a being's behavior with some accuracy using your own human brain as opposed to Cthulhu's. But at the same time it is a totally incomprehensible, utterly filthy motive because almost nobody on Earth would be willing to persuade people to abuse, enslave, mutilate, and degrade other human beings just to win an argument with a third party who isn't even listening to them. Most people have limits to their spite.

TLDR; model evil beings in D&D on real human beings, but take off the psychological brakes. Vendettas that spare no innocents and last hundreds of years; greed that counts no externalities; betrayal without a hint of remorse, only self-justification; power without compassion. And it then stands to reason that evil beings will usually have their biggest grudges against other evil beings, while good ones are usually bystanders in the endless wars of spite and wrath. Not always but usually.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

Relax said:


> How does everyone here feel about the ultimate evil presented in the Cthulhu mythos?  Is an evil with alien motivations still interesting?




I don't see Cthulhu and the Hounds of Tindalos as evil per se, just scary.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

pemerton said:


> [MENTION=1288]I'm not sure how much weight should be put on the "irredeemably" element of the evil, but if we put that to one side then the game historically has tended to make acquiring the evidence quite easy: detection magic (Detect Evil, Know Alignment, etc).




From an NPC's perspective, you'd still have to make the case that what those spells are detecting is actually good and evil, as opposed to conformity and naivete, etc. What do you suppose Henry VIII's reaction is to being told he's Neutral Evil? "I guess I am then"? Or "off with the priest's head!" for lese majesty and lying to royalty?


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## steeldragons (May 12, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> TLDR; model evil beings in D&D on real human beings, but take off the psychological brakes. Vendettas that spare no innocents and last hundreds of years; greed that counts no externalities; betrayal without a hint of remorse, only self-justification; power without compassion. And it then stands to reason that evil beings will usually have their biggest grudges against other evil beings, while good ones are usually bystanders in the endless wars of spite and wrath. Not always but usually.




Sooo, exactly like the real world, then?


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## Mouseferatu (May 12, 2015)

Relax said:


> How does everyone here feel about the ultimate evil presented in the Cthulhu mythos?  Is an evil with alien motivations still interesting?




So, Cthulhu (and the other Great Old Ones) are a perfect illustration of the two possible interpretations of the alignment system. Specifically, is alignment _prescriptive_ or _descriptive_?

If alignment is based on intent, belief, motivation, then Cthulhu isn't evil. He's so utterly uncaring and innately destructive that it makes no difference to the world around him, but he's not any more evil than a storm, or a disease, or entropy itself.

If alignment is a description based on results and actions, though, then Cthulhu's evil enough to give the worst demon a run for its money.

As far as alien motivations, I find that a fascinating narrative tool--when it's _kept_ alien. I don't try to describe it, get into it, I just have my players (or characters, when I'm writing) forced to react to it.

So yes, I find them interesting--but then, I'm not sure I define them as villains per se.


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## pemerton (May 12, 2015)

MonsterEnvy said:


> Funny that you had Vecna wanting to be the God of Death in your game given that he has never had an interest in that (Orcus is the one who wants to)



From Open Grave, p 212:

Two of Vecna’s chief rivals are the Raven Queen and Orcus. Both claim dominion over death, though each, including Vecna, has a different vision of what the afterlife should be. Vecna believes that creatures should serve him in both life and death.​
And from the RC, p 53:

Vecna is the evil god of undead, necromancy, and secrets. He rules that which is not meant to be known and that which people wish to keep secret. Evil spellcasters and conspirators pay him homage. He commands them to . . .  Oppose the followers of all other deities so that Vecna alone can rule the world.​
I'm not a canon junkie by any means, but using the basic descriptions of NPCs, gods etc can make record-keeping easier! In this case, Vecna is said to oppose all other deities, to seek to rule the world (both living and dead) and to rule that which is not meant to be known (which, in 4e, includes the ultimate fate of the dead).



MonsterEnvy said:


> Lets not forget that Vecna managed to get one over on the Lady of Pain and partially rewrote reality before his avatar was destroyed. (Even then he still came up on top as he gained the power of a lesser god out of it when he was a Demigod before his plan.)



This sounds like material from some module that I don't know or use, and that is not part of the core 4e cosmology.



MonsterEnvy said:


> Vecna has always been a schemer who's interest was never to take another gods portfolio, but instead to destory all other deities and powers so he would be the sole remaining god with power over all reality.



The only difference I see between (i) "destroying all other deities", including the Raven Queen, to gain "power over all reality", including death and the dead, and (ii) taking over the Raven Queen's portfolio, is that (ii) is only part of the way to (i).



MonsterEnvy said:


> i think Vecna aiming to replace the God of Death is a much too low of a goal for him.



It seems to me that a necessary condition of ruling both the living and the dead is to rule the dead; and that a necessary condition of ruling the dead is to replace the Raven Queen.



MonsterEnvy said:


> He should be turning her into his puppet with some devastating secret or weakness and have her attack other gods while he waits in the shadows scooping up the losers divine essences.



No one's stopping you using that idea in your campaign!

In my own campaign, he was attempting to learn the Raven Queen's name (which is a secret).

The first scheme, hatched by a priest of his, was a little convoluted, but involved (i) learning the Raven Queen's name, either (a) by prising it from the beings from beyond the stars with whom she had hidden it, or (b) recovering her body and then having that body touched by a strange man who had the power to learn the name of any corpse that he touched, so that (ii) the name could be traded to Orcus in return for access to certain tombs that hid a secret map to Torog's Soul Abattoir, so that (iii) the Soul Abattoir could be diverted to power-up Vecna rather than Torog, so that (iv) once Orcus struck the Raven Queen, using the power of her name, Vecna could then strike Orcus and take control of both death and undeath.

This scheme came unstuck when the PCs themselves took the secret map, killed the cultists who had access tothe beings from beyond the stars, and then killed the priest (and killed him again in lich form).

Once the PCs killed the exarch of the Raven Queen who had done the deal with the creature's from beyond the stars, Vecna sent an angel of secrets to acquire her name directly, but the PCs stopped that too.

Then, when the PCs destroyed Torog's Soul Abattoir, Vecna took advantage of the fact that one of the PCs had the Eye of Vecna implanted in his imp familiar to try and divert the power of those souls to Vecna, but the PC in question thwarted this also. And he subsequently was able to sever the connection between Vecna and his Eye.

Most recently, the same PC communed with Vecna again to learn a secret way into Orcus's palace on Thanatos - using, as the focus, the body of an Aspect of Orcus which had been magically bound, after being defeated, by drawing upon Vecna's power. The PC ended up stealing the secret from Vecna (secretly!) so as to avoid having to do a deal.

Overall, Vecna's star has not been ascendant. Which tends to happen to recurring enemies of the PCs in a long-running campaign. But his methods and motivations (manipulation of secrets; necromancy; the desire for power at the expense of other gods) have been pretty clear and consistent.


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## pemerton (May 12, 2015)

SkidAce said:


> I always felt the point of HPL's stories wasn't so much evil, as uncaring indifference on the part of the cosmos, and mankind's futile striving like ants under the heels of an oblivious force.
> 
> Sure feels like evil to the humans, but the cosmic horror is the soul crushing insignificance and futility of it all.



What you describe is, more or less, why I don't find HPL very horrifying.

The "uncaring indifference" of the cosmos, and the mind-destroying character of non-Euclidean geometries of space-time, might have contradicted a certain Victorian Whiggish-ness of outlook, but seem fairly mundane to me.


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## pemerton (May 12, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> From an NPC's perspective, you'd still have to make the case that what those spells are detecting is actually good and evil, as opposed to conformity and naivete, etc. What do you suppose Henry VIII's reaction is to being told he's Neutral Evil? "I guess I am then"? Or "off with the priest's head!" for lese majesty and lying to royalty?



I think the testimony problem is overrated - most "ultimate evils" in D&D are spellcasters, who can scrutinise themselves. And it's always possible to lend the non-spellcasting monarch the ring of spell storing, or whatever it might be, so that s/he can perform a self-scan.

The real issue is that the game posits a type of unmediated epistemic access to evaluative truth, as characterised using the two-word alignment labels. Whereas in the real world, evaluative facts supervene upon other facts, which mediate epistemic access.

To give a non-moral example: the beauty of a painting supervenes on its visual appearance. And epistemic access to a painting's beauty is mediated through visual perception of it. There is no direct cognition of a painting's beauty except via cognition of its appearance. (There can be indirect knowledge, of course, eg someone tells you that it is beautiful.)

Imagine if, in D&D, we had a convention of using "Beautiful", "Plain" and "Ugly" as a set of descriptors for the visual appearance of all objects and creatures, and there was a Detect Beauty spell. Exactly the same issues would come up, because the game would provide answers to questions about beauty or ugly while bypassing the question of what the actual visual appearance on which those answers supervene.

And then, instead of alignment debates, we'd have debates about whether Quasimodo (who statblock says "ugly") is _irredeemably_ ugly, and there would be contrarians who assert that he's really beautiful (because all human beings are beautiful in their own way), etc.

(Also: while questions of objectivity vs relativism/subjectivism about value are interesting, they are orthogonal to the above issues. The tensions that D&D's alignment rules create aren't a result of any assumption of objectivity over relativism, but rather out of the attempt to separate evaluative judgements - via alignment labels and detection magic - from the base on which value facts supervene.)


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

pemerton said:


> I think the testimony problem is overrated - most "ultimate evils" in D&D are spellcasters, who can scrutinise themselves. And it's always possible to lend the non-spellcasting monarch the ring of spell storing, or whatever it might be, so that s/he can perform a self-scan.
> 
> The real issue is that the game posits a type of unmediated epistemic access to evaluative truth, as characterised using the two-word alignment labels. Whereas in the real world, evaluative facts supervene upon other facts, which mediate epistemic access.




I'm a little bit confused because you handwave the issue in paragraph one by calling it "the testimony problem", and then seem to build on that to refer to alignment spells as epistemic truth in paragraph two. To me, paragraph one seems pretty fundamental: Know Alignment spells (which barely exist in 5E anyway, in fact I can only think of sprites and Robes of the Archmagi/Books of Vile Darkness/Exalted Deeds as being alignment-aware) are only epistemic truth if you accept them as epistemic truth. If I have the right personality for it, I can commit mass murder of thousands in order to perhaps save the human race from utter destruction[1], and if my Robe of the Good Archmagi ceases to function, who cares? It's just an object, and it's less important than my mission. [Or at least, that's one way a given character might view the situation.]

The game posits an unmediated access to consistent effects, which get labelled as "good" and "evil" in the metagame--but there's no need for a PC or even a player to accept that label. If my DM says I'm evil (or good), and I disagree--well, he controls the world but he doesn't control my mind as a player. It's just a label.

In practice I expect the DM/player disagreement to pop up more frequently with regard to "good" than "evil", since different people have various degrees of stringency with which they use the word "good." In my view, most (N)PCs are neutral unless they make a concerted effort to be selfless and kind--and my definition holds even if I'm playing in the game of a DM who makes most PCs "good" by default.

And yes, that would apply equally to a "Detect Beauty" spell, or a "Detect Yummy," with the caveat that I'm reliant on the DM to transmit the sensory effects to me as a player before I can make up my mind about them. But if he says it tastes like woodsmoke, and I like woodsmoke, then it's yummy even if the DM intended it to be yucky.

[1] Taravangian is who I have in mind.


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## pemerton (May 12, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> I'm a little bit confused because you handwave the issue in paragraph one by calling it "the testimony problem", and then seem to build on that to refer to alignment spells as epistemic truth in paragraph two.



They're two distinct issues.

The question of whether the cleric or paladin who tells the king that he is evil is lying, or not, is a question about testimony. It can be overcome by having the king cast the spell himself, in a self-scan.

I often see the testimony issue presented as a usable wedge, for gameplay purposes, between alignment truths and NPC self-conceptions. But the relatively easy possibility of self-scanning (especially by demons and devils, who in many editions have their own alignment-detecting magic) means that the wedge is pretty thin.

The deep source of tension is that, in the real world, we have direct epistemic access to facts of value only via our epistemic access to the non-value facts on which they supervene; but D&D posits that facts of value can be known directly and immediately (metagame, via plonking down an alignment label; ingame, via using magic to read that alignment label), without the facts on which they supervene being known.

To give a simple example, in real life the question of whether someone is or isn't "irredeemably evil" supervenes upon such facts as their disposition (if any) to be brutal to others. The question can't be answered without forming a view about this (and many other) salient facts about their actions and dispositions.

Whereas in D&D, the game posits that I can write "chaotic evil" on an NPC's character sheet, without committing myself in any detail to what exactly that NPC's behaviour and dispositions will be. In a game in which moral evaluation is not to the fore, and characterisations are expected to be pretty broad-brush, that's fairly harmless: if I need to know more about the personality of Grugnur, the frost giant Jarl of G2, I can just extrapolate from fairy tales and legends about brutish giants, ogres and the like: let's say he is greedy, cruel and likes to suck the marrow out of the bones of his captives!

But in some moods (eg Planescape; or intentionally subtle political or character-focused play), D&D first writes down alignment labels, but then treats it as a further, open question what exactly that NPC's behaviour and dispositions will be. This is where the potential for incoherence between immediately posited values, and the non-value facts on which such value actually intervenes, arises.



emdw45 said:


> If I have the right personality for it, I can commit mass murder of thousands in order to perhaps save the human race from utter destruction[1], and if my Robe of the Good Archmagi ceases to function, who cares? It's just an object, and it's less important than my mission. [Or at least, that's one way a given character might view the situation.]
> 
> The game posits an unmediated access to consistent effects, which get labelled as "good" and "evil" in the metagame--but there's no need for a PC or even a player to accept that label.



The idea that "good" and "evil" are purely metagame labels is a contentious interpretation in every edition of the game prior to 5e, and I suspect would be regarded as contentious by plenty of 5e players too.

For instance, the outer planes (in the standard AD&D PHB appendix 1 cosmology) are aligned, and known to be so by those who live in the gameworld.

In pre-4e editions, spells like "Detect Evil" and "Know Alignment" provide ingame information using the language of alignment. I guess a character could argue that "the cosmos" got it wrong, but it's not exactly clear what that would even mean - eg if the Abyss is not necessarily _evil_, then what property is the Detect Evil spell detecting? The property of _being disliked and repudiated by the cosmos_? From the point of view both of metaphysics of morals, _and_ of gameplay, if you want to create the conceptual space for individual's to make their own moral judgements, I think it's easier just to drop alignment as a part of the gameworld.

If this path is taken, alignment might still be a useful personality shorthand in monster statblocks, which is roughly how 4e treats it, and perhaps how 5e tends to treat it (with the odd exception). But then you don't need to say that the Abyss and its inhabitants are _irredeemably evil_. It's enough to say that the Abyss is a violent and unpleasant place whose inhabitants are prone to vicious displays of cruelty and destruction. To pick up on [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s example, if the PCs then meet a demon who seems not to be prone to such displays, they (and their players) can form their own moral judgements.


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## Rejuvenator (May 12, 2015)

Relax said:


> How does everyone here feel about the ultimate evil presented in the Cthulhu mythos?  Is an evil with alien motivations still interesting?



Cthulhu mythos is about humanity's powerless and insignificance in the cosmos and a fantasy of alien things we cannot comprehend. I happen to find that very interesting (in an era where we want everything to be at our control), although a lot of that is diminished in D&D. D&D heroes generally feel empowered and successful, and the Far Realm isn't all that strange compared to the rest of the multiverse.

I also find that a lot of horror and tension comes with the disturbing machinations of the freaky cultists and minions that seek to summon the Great Old Ones and their spawn.


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## Morlock (May 12, 2015)

pming said:


> Yay! Saturday morning cartoon-level caricatures with silly names! Now I don't know about you, but this _screams_ "terrifying underdark story involving demons and mad villains" to me.
> 
> Add in Drizz't and I'm pretty sure this will be the most awesomest of awesome $60 story-books the world has ever seen!
> 
> ...



This. The art's good. The art direction?

I was just licking my chops thinking about Rage of Demons. Until this.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

pemerton said:


> They're two distinct issues.
> 
> The question of whether the cleric or paladin who tells the king that he is evil is lying, or not, is a question about testimony. It can be overcome by having the king cast the spell himself, in a self-scan.
> 
> I often see the testimony issue presented as a usable wedge, for gameplay purposes, between alignment truths and NPC self-conceptions. But the relatively easy possibility of self-scanning (especially by demons and devils, who in many editions have their own alignment-detecting magic) means that the wedge is pretty thin.




Hmmm, looks like I assumed too much shared context when I sketched the scenario. (Due to my background, I tend to assume that everybody is thoroughly familiar with the Old Testament, which isn't really true on the Internet.) To explain: in history and legend, whenever somebody lies to a king about his alignment, they don't lie to tell him he's _evil_, they lie to tell him he's _good_. (Think: Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah to king Ahab of Israel, or what they asked Sir Thomas Moore to do for Henry VIII.) When someone tells the king he's evil, the messenger gets shot. A messenger has zero incentive to lie and tell a king he's evil when he's not--but he does have an incentive to lie and tell an evil king that he's fine. Furthermore, the king has zero incentive to "cast" Know Alignment on himself, because he doesn't actually want to know the answer, at least judging from the historical record.

So the scenario, as I intended to present it, is entirely about the reliability of labels ("epistemic" as you call it) and not about the reliability of witnesses. The king doesn't have to accept the judgment of the objective witness (Know Alignment spell/prophet/holy sword/whatever), and usually doesn't.



> The deep source of tension is that, in the real world, we have direct epistemic access to facts of value only via our epistemic access to the non-value facts on which they supervene; but D&D posits that facts of value can be known directly and immediately (metagame, via plonking down an alignment label; ingame, via using magic to read that alignment label), without the facts on which they supervene being known.




And that is equally the case in D&D.



> *snip* For instance, the outer planes (in the standard AD&D PHB appendix 1 cosmology) are aligned, and known to be so by those who live in the gameworld.
> 
> In pre-4e editions, spells like "Detect Evil" and "Know Alignment" provide ingame information using the language of alignment. I guess a character could argue that "the cosmos" got it wrong, but it's not exactly clear what that would even mean - eg if the Abyss is not necessarily _evil_, then what property is the Detect Evil spell detecting? The property of _being disliked and repudiated by the cosmos_? From the point of view both of metaphysics of morals, _and_ of gameplay, if you want to create the conceptual space for individual's to make their own moral judgements, I think it's easier just to drop alignment as a part of the gameworld.
> 
> *If this path is taken, alignment might still be a useful personality shorthand in monster statblocks, which is roughly how 4e treats it, and perhaps how 5e tends to treat it (with the odd exception). But then you don't need to say that the Abyss and its inhabitants are irredeemably evil. It's enough to say that the Abyss is a violent and unpleasant place whose inhabitants are prone to vicious displays of cruelty and destruction.* To pick up on [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s example, if the PCs then meet a demon who seems not to be prone to such displays, they (and their players) can form their own moral judgements.




This bolded section is what I've been saying. Certainly I don't buy the notion that the inhabitants of the Abyss would cop to being "evil." They would tell you that that's just how the world is, and everyone who says it's different is just fooling themselves and/or you. "Everybody has a price," they would say. Dale Carnegie's observation that everyone is a good guy in their own heads applies equally to fiends and devils, even if they _are_ objectively, irreversibly awful. Or rather, it applies to any fiends I'd be interested in having in my game.

TLDR; human feelings and blackest evil are not mutually exclusive. They can go hand in hand with no trouble at all.


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## Rejuvenator (May 12, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> This bolded section is what I've been saying. Certainly I don't buy the notion that the inhabitants of the Abyss would cop to being "evil." They would tell you that that's just how the world is, and everyone who says it's different is just fooling themselves and/or you. "Everybody has a price," they would say. Dale Carnegie's observation that everyone is a good guy in their own heads applies equally to fiends and devils, even if they _are_ objectively, irreversibly awful. Or rather, it applies to any fiends I'd be interested in having in my game.



An interesting option is that fiends (and angels) cannot reflect on that, because they don't have freedom of choice and/or sentience_ in that specific regard_. That morality of choice, which is a mix of gut feeling and cerebral higher-level functions for us, are more like animal instincts for them. In this scenario, if you asked a demon if it thought it was a good guy, it wouldn't really understand or answer the question the way you meant it.

A demon's desire to murder non-minions or non-demons might be nearly uncontrollable. The Abyss might purposefully create demons that way (with the purposeful exception of spawning a demon that could, say, fulfill a purpose in Sigil) and any abberations (ie., demons that are born weak with compassion) die off through an Abyssal version of survival of the fittest.

And/or a demon might not have self-awareness of morality/ethics - it can't tell the difference between good and bad, has no such instinct, although an intelligent demon might academically learn, for example, that unsanctioned murder is considered anti-social in many human societies. But it doesn't feel the distinction. IOW, amoral and sociopathic. For that demon, goodness is just a bunch of rules that certain gods made up to control their worshippers.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> An interesting option is that fiends (and angels) cannot reflect on that, because they don't have freedom of choice and/or sentience in that regard. That morality of choice, which is a mix of gut feeling and cerebral higher-level functions for us, are more like animal instincts for them. In this scenario, if you asked a demon if it thought it was a good guy, it wouldn't really understand or answer the question the way you meant it.




You could do that. I don't personally find "demons have no freedom of choice/sentience" to be an interesting scenario but some people do. I'll save that for murdermachines like bulettes, golems, and intellect devourers: mindless beasts and creatures designed as tools to specific ends.


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## Staffan (May 12, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> You could do that. I don't personally find "demons have no freedom of choice/sentience" to be an interesting scenario but some people do. I'll save that for murdermachines like bulettes, golems, and intellect devourers: mindless beasts and creatures designed as tools to specific ends.




I liked the interpretation Keith Baker had for Eberron's outsiders: on rare occasion, an demon (or other alignment-based outsider) could switch alignment, _but then they'd cease to be demons_. They'd turn into something else.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 12, 2015)

Staffan said:


> I liked the interpretation Keith Baker had for Eberron's outsiders: on rare occasion, an demon (or other alignment-based outsider) could switch alignment, _but then they'd cease to be demons_. They'd turn into something else.




That's an interesting take. Flip it four-dimensionally and you wind up with the steady-state theory: demons have free will, but anything that might eventually choose to be good was never made into a demon in the first place. It was made into something else, like, say, a human.

That is, you don't need demons to lack the ability to change in order for them to be self-responsible. It's sufficient for them to have the power, even if they don't exercise it. Just like any of us.


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## Rejuvenator (May 12, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> You could do that. I don't personally find "demons have no freedom of choice/sentience" to be an interesting scenario but some people do. I'll save that for murdermachines like bulettes, golems, and intellect devourers: mindless beasts and creatures designed as tools to specific ends.



OK, as long as it's clear that the idea is demons having no freedom of choice/sentience _specifically in regards to making moral choices_. Mindless beasts are 100% instinctive, which is different. A drug addict isn't mindless just because they can't control one aspect of their behavior.

Edit: Google "do angels have free will".



Staffan said:


> I liked the interpretation Keith Baker had for Eberron's outsiders: on rare occasion, an demon (or other alignment-based outsider) could switch alignment, _but then they'd cease to be demons_. They'd turn into something else.



Cool. That nicely jives with how Lucifer stopped being an angel.


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## Sword of Spirit (May 12, 2015)

Staffan said:


> I liked the interpretation Keith Baker had for Eberron's outsiders: on rare occasion, an demon (or other alignment-based outsider) could switch alignment, _but then they'd cease to be demons_. They'd turn into something else.




That's actually the default assumption in 5e.

"Alignment is an essential part of the nature of
celestials and fiends. A devil does not choose to be
lawful evil, and it doesn’t tend toward lawful evil, but
rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow
ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil." - Player's Basic Rules, p. 34


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> OK, as long as it's clear that the idea is demons having no freedom of choice/sentience _specifically in regards to making moral choices_. Mindless beasts are 100% instinctive, which is different. A drug addict isn't mindless just because they can't control one aspect of their behavior.




Right, and an intellect devourer isn't mindless either (Int 12 IIRC). But I would play one kind of like an AI with regards to preferences/choices/motivations: it's logical, but the premises it operates under are fixed by its creator. I wouldn't do that for a human, or a demon, or a devil. (I don't have angels in my world, only people, so I won't say "Or an angel.")



> Edit: Google "do angels have free will".




Eh. Googling will only get you other people's opinions, which isn't relevant to determining your own personal Rule of Cool for demons/angels. I already know I think the "angels have no free will" position is incoherent, unfun, and not something I want to run; it makes no difference whether 99% or 1% people on Google agree with that position. In D&D, I am the creator of the universe, and a demon who tells me that he had no control over his own choices is lying to me, in a fourth wall-breaking kind of way. I don't do that to my creations, and I couldn't if I wanted to, which I don't.


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> the king has zero incentive to "cast" Know Alignment on himself, because he doesn't actually want to know the answer
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



In AD&D, devils can cast Know Alignment. In 3E, an Imp, Quasit or Succubus can cast Detect Good.

When one of these creatures self-scans, and gets the answer back, which indicates (at a minimum) that they are not good, what do they do? Reject the accuracy of their own innate magic?

(You might say they have no incentive to self-scan. Let's suppose that, for the sake of argument, they do. Maybe they lost a bet, or got curious, or tried to scan someone else but got reflected by a ring of spell turning!)

Or: the PCs have been hanging out with a friendly shopkeeper in a Planescape game, and eventually get around to casting Detect Evil, and the shopkeeper - being, it turns out, a devil - registers as strongly evil. What do the players have their PCs do?

D&D has a mechanism - of writing down alignment labels, and then of giving characters abilities to read those labels _within the fiction_ - which allow evaluative truths to be ostensibly detached from any sort of supervenience base. It can lead to weird results, like the shopkeeper who is never harsh or brutal to everyone yet registers as chaotic evil because that's what's written in the alignment entry for demons.

D&D's traditional way of handling the issue was to use a very broad-brush conception of the supervenience base in question, and to make sure that the character's behaviour conforms to that. Which, as has been observed upthread, can lead to fairly stereotyped or broadbrushed villains. This won't work very well if the the game participants want subtlety, especially if that subtlety is going to touch on points where they themselves don't fully agree on what features of the supervenience base make someone good or evil.

The way that nearly every other fantasy RPG out there handles the issue is to drop the idea of alignment labels. 4e went part of the way - it dropped the character abilities and the classic scheme of the outer planes, meaning that alignment labels are simply a metagame shorthand.

5e has mostly dropped the character abilities, but retains the classic outer planar scheme. Which means that it will be vulnerable to the same problem with subtlety as classic D&D is.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> In AD&D, devils can cast Know Alignment. In 3E, an Imp, Quasit or Succubus can cast Detect Good.
> 
> When one of these creatures self-scans, and gets the answer back, which indicates (at a minimum) that they are not good, what do they do? Reject the accuracy of their own innate magic?




No, why would they reject it? Maybe that spell is useful for detecting chumps and self-righteous bigots (from their perspective). Or maybe they use it to detect people who aren't worth your time trying to co-op because it won't work. Depends on your setting and how you run their goals/self-image/motivation.

Imagine an ISIS jihadist with a spell that detects faithful Coptic Christians, ones who really live their beliefs. Having an reliable way to Detect Good (Coptic) doesn't necessitate believing that Christians are actually RIGHT about anything. Neither does a Succubus's ability to Detect Chumps (Good) imply any particular value judgment on her part about the correctness of whatever attunement her spell detects.

Are you arguing that the Succubus must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results? If so, why do you think that? Do you think it's so self-evident that other people must think it too?


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## Hussar (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> No, why would they reject it? Maybe that spell is useful for detecting chumps and self-righteous bigots (from their perspective). Or maybe they use it to detect people who aren't worth your time trying to co-op because it won't work. Depends on your setting and how you run their goals/self-image/motivation.
> 
> Imagine an ISIS jihadist with a spell that detects faithful Coptic Christians, ones who really live their beliefs. Having an reliable way to Detect Good (Coptic) doesn't necessitate believing that Christians are actually RIGHT about anything. Neither does a Succubus's ability to Detect Chumps (Good) imply any particular value judgment on her part about the correctness of whatever attunement her spell detects.
> 
> Are you arguing that the Succubus must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results? If so, why do you think that? Do you think it's so self-evident that other people must think it too?




Yes, because those spells are not subjective.  Not since 2e anyway.  Know alignment doesn't "detect chumps" it actually tells you a cosmological truth.  Alignment in D&D is objective.  Your personal beliefs and motivations don't dictate your alignment, your alignment is orthogonal to whatever you choose to believe.  A sociopath truly believes that he isn't doing anything wrong but a detect evil will show him up as evil.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Yes, because those spells are not subjective.  Not since 2e anyway.  Know alignment doesn't "detect chumps" it actually tells you a cosmological truth.  Alignment in D&D is objective.  Your personal beliefs and motivations don't dictate your alignment, your alignment is orthogonal to whatever you choose to believe.  A sociopath truly believes that he isn't doing anything wrong but a detect evil will show him up as evil.




You're begging the question. There's no reason for an NPC or even a player to accept alignment as cosmological truth. Objectively, it's just a spell effect. We've been over this several times already without any new points being raised.


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## Hussar (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> You're begging the question. There's no reason for an NPC or even a player to accept alignment as cosmological truth. Objectively, it's just a spell effect. We've been over this several times already without any new points being raised.




Why? There is no chance of failure with these spells, particularly if they are self administered. Alignment in DND is objective. It has to be or it wouldn't work. 

The reason new points don't get made is because of this insistence that alignment is anything other than objective. 

Until you can show me how subjective alignment with of work, we really can't make any progress here.


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> Imagine an ISIS jihadist with a spell that detects faithful Coptic Christians, ones who really live their beliefs. Having an reliable way to Detect Good (Coptic) doesn't necessitate believing that Christians are actually RIGHT about anything.



I'm a bit wary of real-world examples, but with due caution will respond to this.

*First*, the proper interpretation of the requirements of any major religion (including Christianity, and including its Coptic denomination) is a matter of contention. It's analogous to my example of _beauty_, upthread. Human beings do not have _immediate_ epistemic access to facts of beauty - our immediate access is to perceptual facts (facts about colour, shape, visual texture etc), and beauty supervenes in some very complex way on these more basic facts.

Similarly for religious observance: the basic facts, to which we do have immediate access, are facts of behaviour, and (some) facts of motivation (trickier, because of the "problem" of other minds, but let's put that to one side for the moment). The fact of being a _good Copt_ supervenes on these in some complex way, and in the typical case actual human beings don't have un-mediated access to this fact (absent supernatural revelations, which are themselves, among human beings, often contested matters).

To elaborate a bit more on that, let's move away from real-world religion and into fantasy. Consider, for instance, a fantasy game set in Middle Earth, wanting to evoke some of the thematic content of the Akallabeth. One question that is going to come up in the game is, What are the right and wrong ways of honouring the Valar, and their various spiritual servants, and of the human kings who have been endowed by providence with the right to rule, etc? The facts of value relevant to answering these questions have the same sort of supervenience structure as described above; so does epistemic access to those facts. So, for instance, the characters in the gameworld can have immediate epistemic access to a fact of human sacrifice (eg they can see and hear it taking place, perhaps perform it themselves, etc), and their epistemic access to the value fact that _a wrongful event is occurring, which shames both humans and the Valar who have tried to guide them_ is mediated by that basic fact.

Suppose, in this hypothetical Middle Earth game, we then give certain characters access to a magical ability _Detect Faithful_. We are now positing that - much like your "Detect Copt" example - the character in question has un-mediated epistemic access to facts of value, without having to epistemically engage with the more basic facts on which those value facts supervene.

For this to work, in game, the participants (led, presumably, by the GM) _do_ have to form a view about what is right: they have to form a view about what behaviours and motivations are or are not consistent with being faithful to the Valar (given that the value fact of being faithful to the valar supervenes upon such more basic facts).

In games being run with fairly broad-brush or B-movie morality, that is probably not a big deal. Human sacrifice is obviously a breach of faith, doing your duty in the war against Sauron is keeping faith, etc. But it doesn't take very much subtlety for the issue to become a bigger deal. For instance, being _prideful_ in the performance of your duty (Denethor, Saruman, and sometimes Boromir) is a way of breaching faith with the Valar, but what counts as _pridefulness _might be something on which members of an RPG group could reasonably have differing views. My advice to groups wanting to run a Middle Earth game that wants to be subtle enough to explore these sorts of issues would be to not have characters (PC or NPC) having the supernatural ability to Detect Faithfulness.

Similarly, positing a Detect True Copt ability raises the same issues. I wouldn't recommend it for a game in which issues of religious interpretation or faithfulness are meant to be engaged with to even a fraction of a degree of the seriousness with which mainstream art and literature do so.

*Second*, even if we put all the foregoing to one side, Detect Good in D&D (or Know Alignment, etc) is not a detector of religious conviction or propriety. It detects moral facts. What a succubus learns when she scans a paladin is not that the latter is (say) faithful to Bahamut, but rather that s/he is _good_.

In fact, it is _because_ the paladin is good that s/he counts as one of Bahamut's faithful. (It is "law and good deeds [that] are the meat and drink of paladins" (Gygax's PHB p 22), after all, not fidelity to some god's decrees.) In other words, D&D in its standard or default presentation of 9-point alignment rejects Hobbes' answer to the Euthyphro: goodness is loved by Bahamut because it is good; it is not constituted as good in virtue of being loved by Bahamut.

(I think this is consistent with Gygax's DMG p 23: "alignment does not necessarily dictate religious persuasion, although many religious beliefs will dictate alignment".)



emdw45 said:


> Are you arguing that the Succubus must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results? If so, why do you think that?



I think it because it's what the game texts say: for instance, the 3E SRD describes alignment as "general moral and personal attitudes", and goes on to say which of these are _good_ and which are _evil_. Similarly, p 33 of the 5e Basic PDF says that alignment "broadly describes . . . moral and personal attitudes. Alignment is a combination of two factors: one identifies morality . . ."

So, for instance, when Gygax says that, for lawful evil persons, "life, beauty, truth, freedom and the like are held as valueless, or at least scorned" I don't read him as saying that _evil_ is just a shorthand for "scorner of life, beauty, truth, freedom and the like". I read him as telling us that such individuals are _evil_ ie are committing moral error.

One can also look at it from the paladin's point of view. The paladin uses Detect Evil (classic version, not 5e version which is different), and the succubus registers. As I read the traditional alignment text, the paladin learns not just that the succubus scorns life, beauty and truth, but _also_ that the succubus, in doing so, is wrong. Which is to say that using Detect Evil is, for the paladin, not _just_ a way of identifying those who scorn the things the paladin values, but is _also_ a source of moral comfort: it affirms the paladin's values.

There's nothing stopping anyone from adopting a different approach: that _good_ is just a shorthand label for "respects and fosters the welfare of others, plus beauty" and _evil_ a label for "disregards both beauty and the welfare of others". But that's not how I've ever read the alignment descriptions; they seem to me to affirm that there is _reason_ to respect and foster the welfare of others, and hence that is why it is good. The evil, being _evil_ disregard these reasons.

In any event, I think that a game that adopts the shorthand label approach has a reasonable chance of encountering one or both of a couple of issues. There is the first issue I described in relation to the "Detect Copt" example: a subtle game may put pressure on issues like "what is welfare" or "what is beauty", and hence bring to light any disagreements over such matters among the game participants, and hence make the use of Detect Evil or Detect Good a contentious matter even when divorced from moral evaluation - who's to say, after all, that the succubus hasn't _really_ gotten to the bottom of the issue of welfare (maybe the Sadeian theory of libertinage is correct), in which case perhaps _she_ should register positive to Detect Good!

I've run campaign in which the PCs (and their players) form the view that the (so-called!) Heavens are wrong, because they have formed the view that the gods' conceptions of welfare are corrupt and self-serving. In such circumstances, how do we determine who registers to Detect Good. What sense would it make, in Planescape say, for the Seven Heavens to fail to register to Detect Good? The whole notion seems incoherent to me.

Second, there is the Euthyphro problem, which in practical D&D play tends to manifest itself in the collapse of moral distinctions into team distinctions. Rather than angels and paladins being _good_, and devils and demons _evil_, we get angels and paladins valuing _this stuff_, while demons and devils scorn _the same stuff_, and so they come into conflict. But we then lose our ability to frame the conflict as asymmetric, because we've deprived ourselves of the necessary moral vocabulary by simply equating it with certain orientations (either valuing or scorning) towards _this stuff_.

My general solution to these issues, for any game that is going to raise subtle issues: use alignment as a broad metagame descriptor of NPC personalities/allegiances; but drop alignment as an ingame phenomenon (no Detect/Know Alignment spells, no aligned outer planes, etc). 4e basically went down this route; so does 5e in its character and monster building, but not so much in its cosmology.


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## Manbearcat (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> No, why would they reject it? Maybe that spell is useful for detecting chumps and self-righteous bigots (from their perspective). Or maybe they use it to detect people who aren't worth your time trying to co-op because it won't work. Depends on your setting and how you run their goals/self-image/motivation.
> 
> Imagine an ISIS jihadist with a spell that detects faithful Coptic Christians, ones who really live their beliefs. Having an reliable way to Detect Good (Coptic) doesn't necessitate believing that Christians are actually RIGHT about anything. Neither does a Succubus's ability to Detect Chumps (Good) imply any particular value judgment on her part about the correctness of whatever attunement her spell detects.
> 
> Are you arguing that the Succubus must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results? If so, why do you think that? Do you think it's so self-evident that other people must think it too?




I can't quite grok how this is coming together for you, specifically from a simulationist's perspective.  

Alignment in AD&D and 3.x are empirically testable, physical laws of the cosmos no different than gravitational attraction and the immediately observable effects of combustion (the production of heat and light).

I mean I suppose you could certainly rationalize ignorance from the layfolk's perspective (to some degree) as they (a) are generally distant from the cosmological certainty of alignment due to their fundamentally mundane existence (till fields, raise children, barter, etc) and (b) don't interface regularly (if at all) with the magical means of discernment nor the implications of said discernment.  However, I don't see how you could do the same for adventurers or any collection of immortals (demons, devils, gods, etc) of which (a) and (b) above are 100 % inverted.  Could you have a stray demon who is all "yea I don't buy that rot"...sure, I suppose.  However, I can't imagine that his skepticism (whether he actually prosletyzed or just passively objected) would move the requsite number of units to be anything but the most extreme outlier without a shred of evidence to support his personal ethos.

Could these immortals/adventurers possibly have discussions about the utility (solely within the scope of their own personal needs) of each alignment?  Sure, I could see that I suppose.  But that isn't the same thing as denying the utterly inescapable cosmological fact that some entity (or entities) organized the universe such that behavioral profile x unerringly yields alignment y upon detection.  And further, that said entity which organized universal laws has already rendered their, obviously authoritative as the creator-entity, judgement upon the cosmological nature and utility of each alignment.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Why? There is no chance of failure with these spells, particularly if they are self administered. Alignment in DND is objective. It has to be or it wouldn't work.
> 
> The reason new points don't get made is because of this insistence that alignment is anything other than objective.




I'm arguing that alignment is am objective phenomena, which like all things objective, is subjectively interpreted according to the value system of the observer. Who's arguing that it's subjective? You?


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## I'm A Banana (May 13, 2015)

Part of the issue is that "Good" in D&D isn't meaningful beyond a few basic facts. You can say that someone is "Good" becaue you magic it and you can say that Good people tend to act like X, Y, and Z, and go to That Place when they die, and these are all factual and useful bits of knowledge, but this doesn't translate into there being any particular REASON for an individual to behave that way. A person who knows they are "Evil" knows that they tend to act like X, Y, and Z, and will go to That Other Place when they die, but there's no inherent reason for them to want to change the way they act. Okay, so burning this orphanage down and pinning it on the local gnome population is "Evil." So what? A gnome assassin killed my father and plunged my family into poverty and these orphan's deaths will help me find him and extract vengeance - why should I care if that selfish, hedonic desire for simple bloody revenge will plunge me into the Abyss when I die? 

If I die and my soul becomes transformed into a demon what does it matter, in a practical sense, if I am "Evil?" It's not going to STOP me form doing what I do, from viewing my own hedonic pleasure as most important to me, even from encouraging EVERYONE to act the way I act. If that makes everyone evil - sure. Whatever. Who cares? It doesn't matter. From my personal perspective as an individual, "Evil" doesn't mean I shouldn't do it, it just means celestials will try and stop me.



			
				Pemerton said:
			
		

> What sense would it make, in Planescape say, for the Seven Heavens to fail to register to Detect Good?




If someone were to go to Celestia and _Detect Good_ and fail to get a ping, it would mean that the area around them doesn't have traits X, Y, and Z that are defined as Good by the mutliverse (ie, the rulebooks/gygax/crawford, or in PS specifically, a sort of planar consensus).

It would probably mean that - for whatever reason - the beings who live there and who make up the plane's matter are no longer doing the right thing by society, helping others, or acting according to conscience. It may mean that the souls who act like that are going somewhere else. It may mean that something is preventing souls from acting like that. 

It'd be a pretty awesome plot hook in PS.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> In any event, I think that a game that adopts the shorthand label approach has a reasonable chance of encountering one or both of a couple of issues. There is the first issue I described in relation to the "Detect Copt" example: a subtle game may put pressure on issues like "what is welfare" or "what is beauty", and hence bring to light any disagreements over such matters among the game participants, and hence make the use of Detect Evil or Detect Good a contentious matter even when divorced from moral evaluation - who's to say, after all, that the succubus hasn't _really_ gotten to the bottom of the issue of welfare (maybe the Sadeian theory of libertinage is correct), in which case perhaps _she_ should register positive to Detect Good!
> 
> I've run campaign in which the PCs (and their players) form the view that the (so-called!) Heavens are wrong, because they have formed the view that the gods' conceptions of welfare are corrupt and self-serving. In such circumstances, how do we determine who registers to Detect Good. What sense would it make, in Planescape say, for the Seven Heavens to fail to register to Detect Good? The whole notion seems incoherent to me.




You've written a lot, and it's worthy of response but unfortunately I'm on a phone, so I've just picked what I think is the key point here. It sounds as if you're describing a party above who has concluded that Gygaxian labels of good and evil are incorrect--and there's no way to prove them wrong. That doesn't mean that the Seven Heavens aren't "good-aligned" according to the spell (because the spell goes off of Gygaxian definitions), it means that the Gygaxian definitions aren't credible in the eyes of that party. This is boo different than Morgoth not crediting Detect Faithful because he doesn't believe in Eru's correctness, or the ISIS dude not crediting Detect Good (Coptic) because Christians violate monotheism (in his view) and therefore cannot be good. Objective phenomena must always be subjectively interpreted.

And, to bring it back on topic, thus is true even if you AGREE with the Gygaxian definitions. You have to acknowledge the possibility that other people won't. The succubus can't be expected to just scan herself with Know Alignment and go, "oh, I guess I'm I'm the wrong. I'm so awful." She might be good enough in her own eyes (you mentioned libertinage) and bad in yours, and Know Alignment doesn't change that any more than the Ten Commandments do.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Manbearcat said:


> I can't quite grok how this is coming together for you, specifically from a simulationist's perspective...
> 
> Could these immortals/adventurers possibly have discussions about the utility (solely within the scope of their own personal needs) of each alignment?  Sure, I could see that I suppose.  But that isn't the same thing as denying the utterly inescapable cosmological fact that some entity (or entities) organized the universe such that behavioral profile x unerringly yields alignment y upon detection.  And further, that said entity which organized universal laws has already rendered their, obviously authoritative as the creator-entity, judgement upon the cosmological nature and utility of each alignment.




Sorry to give short shrift, but here I go:

Therefore what? So there's a detection spell, and maybe (depending on your cosmology) also an after-death effect that shunts your soul/shade to the appropriate plane. So that makes, Know Alignment basically a "detect planar linkage" spell (and that is exactly how I run it in AD&D). So what?

Within the Christian tradition (specifically Mormon, which I know best), Lucifer knows perfectly well where he's going when this is all over. Doesn't mean that he thinks he deserves it. And isn't the self-image of evil creatures what we're talking about in this subthread? I am, primarily. To analogize, they may acknowledge that they're going against RAW (cosmological creator's rules, i.e. mine as DM) without acknowledging that they're having badwrongfun (i.e. actually in the wrong).


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> It sounds as if you're describing a party above who has concluded that Gygaxian labels of good and evil are incorrect



It goes deeper than that.

Those definitions, and some of their later-edition counterparts, use concepts like "dignity", "rights", "innocent", "truth", "beauty" etc.

So what does a Detect Good spell latch onto? Does it latch onto a character's attitude towards, and treatment of, truth, beauty and human dignity? But in that case, who gets to determine that the Seven Heavens rather than the succubus has really got the hang of beauty and dignity? In a broad-brush or four-colour game we can take it for granted that the Heavens are right and the succubus wrong, but that won't do for a more subtle game.

In practice, at least as I've experienced it, these spells latch onto the GM's two-word alignment descriptor for the character in question - but that's hardly making the tension go away, is it?



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Part of the issue is that "Good" in D&D isn't meaningful beyond a few basic facts. You can say that someone is "Good" becaue you magic it and you can say that Good people tend to act like X, Y, and Z
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



This doesn't really address what, in post , I called the first issue with Detect Copt.

You seem to assume that whether or not someone is beahving in ways X, Y and Z is epistemically accessible in just the same way whether "X", "Y" or "Z" is _stopping at traffic lights_ and _shaking hands as a greeting_ and _not leaving the house naked_, or _doing the right thing by society_ and _helping others_ and _fostering and admiring beauty_. But as soon as you move out of broad-brush or four-colour storytelling this isn't the case. There is no sort of category error or basic failure of comprehension, for instance, in a succubus arguing that Sadeian libertarianism is true, and hence that by breaking down received mores she is in fact doing the right thing by society. (In fact, when you compare contemporary sexual ethics across huge parts of the world, compared to sexual ethics when the succubus was first conceived of as a threat to human wellbeing, you can see that the Sadeian argument has already made great progress!)

But if she is right, then Detect Good should ping on her, and not the Seven Heavens, _even though the basic facts of their behaviour are no different from those set out in the relevant rulebooks_. Which, as I said, would be verging on the incoherent.

Two solutions suggest themselves. First, stick to broad-brush or four-colour rather than subtle explorations of value. This is the norm for D&D, I think, but by no means exhausts the possibilities inherent in the system. Second, drop alignment as an ingame phenomenon directly accessible via informational/cosmological magic.



emdw45 said:


> I'm arguing that alignment is am objective phenomena, which like all things objective, is subjectively interpreted according to the value system of the observer.



This seems to assume a contrast between _objective things_ and _value systems_. But alignment is about _values_. Even if you treat "good" and "evil", as they are used in the alignment system, as shorthand labels rather than having their ordinary English evaluative meanings, you don't avoid the problem that the _X_, _Y[_ and _Z_ for which they are shorthands are, as I've just replied to KM, themselves open to argumentation and contestation.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Part of the issue is that "Good" in D&D isn't meaningful beyond a few basic facts. You can say that someone is "Good" becaue you magic it and you can say that Good people tend to act like X, Y, and Z, and go to That Place when they die, and these are all factual and useful bits of knowledge, but this doesn't translate into there being any particular REASON for an individual to behave that way. A person who knows they are "Evil" knows that they tend to act like X, Y, and Z, and will go to That Other Place when they die, but there's no inherent reason for them to want to change the way they act. Okay, so burning this orphanage down and pinning it on the local gnome population is "Evil." So what? A gnome assassin killed my father and plunged my family into poverty and these orphan's deaths will help me find him and extract vengeance - why should I care if that selfish, hedonic desire for simple bloody revenge will plunge me into the Abyss when I die?




Yeah. Here's another scenario I've thought about using:

A friendly (fiend, human tyrant, black dragon, vampire) has invited the PCs over to talk business. Maybe he's putting together a treasure hunting expedition to another sphere, and he wants these guys to be part of it. Partway through negotiations/dinner, the fiend pauses briefly to check up on something else: he's got a hireling nearby in a cell with a withered old lady, doing... things with a needle and a hot poker. If the horrified PCs inquire, it turns out that, "Yeah, I've got this buddy. He's in an unsavory line of business, and this woman, this peasant nobody, called him out in front of his friends and family, told them about his work and said he was an awful guy. It shamed him, you know, made him feel really bad. So I talked to a guy I know and brought her here. When they're all done I'll let the word get out that nobody messes with my pals."

If the PCs try to stop him forcibly, the fiend is liable to take it personal. "I invite you into my home to talk mutually profitable business, and you repay me with treachery? Forget that." Voila! Instant treasure rivalry! Too bad the fiend hadn't finished telling them exactly where on the planet the cache was located, but the PCs will find a way around that.

Or they could just bite their tongues, go along with it, and become filthy rich.

Either way, in the bad guy's mind, he's the good guy. The hero of his own story.


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## SkidAce (May 13, 2015)

Hence why my "Detect" spells only register supernatural good or evil.  Demon or angel?  Ping ping ping....

Evil (as per society and values) cannibal shopkeeper... silence on the radar screen.

Unless of course he manages to get supernaturally tainted...cause if you've seen Time Bandits, you know there ARE chunks of pure evil out there...


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> A person who knows they are "Evil" knows that they tend to act like X, Y, and Z, and will go to That Other Place when they die, but there's no inherent reason for them to want to change the way they act. Okay, so burning this orphanage down and pinning it on the local gnome population is "Evil." So what? A gnome assassin killed my father and plunged my family into poverty and these orphan's deaths will help me find him and extract vengeance - why should I care if that selfish, hedonic desire for simple bloody revenge will plunge me into the Abyss when I die?



I've already explained, in my post above this one, how the issue about alignment goes "all the way down" - as in, the X, Y and Z themselves are open to interpretation and contestation.

But this passage gives rise to another point: the claim that no one has an inherent reason to do good (let's say, to promote the interests of others even when this doesn't directly further his/her own interests; to encourage beauty rather than squalor; etc) is iteslf hugely, hugely contentious. For most of the history of philosophy, pages of ink were spilled trying to rebut it (Hobbes and perhaps Hume stand out as pre-19th/20th century philosophers who accept the claim).

That's not a reason to reject the claim - perhaps Hobbes was right and everyone else from Socrates through to Kant wrong - but if we're going to affirm it, we probably should at least take it seriously. How can such everyday practices as praise, blame, punishment and the like - all of which are part of D&D (eg it's OK to kill the orcs, because they're to blame for doing the wrong thing) - be reconciled with the fact that the ones we are blaming _never had a reason to do otherwise_? In which case, what are we blaming them for? Failing to toss the coin again and again until it came up heads rather than tails?

Hobbes, and in a slightly different way Nietzsche, are prepared to bite the bullet and say that value is really just about desire and power. But they didn't believe in angels, paladin or the Seven Heavens, either!


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> Yeah. Here's another scenario I've thought about using:
> 
> A friendly (fiend, human tyrant, black dragon, vampire) has invited the PCs over to talk business.
> 
> ...



Sure. But how does the NPC register to Detect Good/Evil? And how do we work that out?

In the scenario you describe, the NPC is punishing the old woman for shaming his friend. So why doesn't this count as upholding dignity and social order (ie LG)?

It seems to me to answer that question you have to take a _stand_ on what dignity, proper social order, etc consist in - and you have to assume that these are as binding on the NPC and his friend as the PCs (because presumably Detect Evil gives the same result whoever casts it). To borrow from your post upthread, the NPC and his friend "must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results".

At which point, if we're going to have alignment as an ingame phenomenon at all, why not just take a stand on what _good _and _evil_ are? What is gained by pushing it back one degree to _dignity_, _innocence_, _help/sacrifice_, _truth_, _beauty_ etc?


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> It goes deeper than that.
> 
> Those definitions, and some of their later-edition counterparts, use concepts like "dignity", "rights", "innocent", "truth", "beauty" etc.
> 
> ...




You're pointing out that alignment has multiple failure points. I don't disagree, but this is a non-issue for what I'm discussing. Even if the GM does manage to unambiguously determine alignment, and regardless of how the GM determines what alignment the creature possesses, it's still merely an objective phenomenon, not an internalized self-assessment. If the GM's definition uses words like "beauty" in his alignment descriptor, it kind of stinks to be one of his players because you're playing guessing games with him about what beauty is, but it's not really important unless 1.) Your PC personally cares a lot about his alignment (reasons to do so will vary), or 2.) alignment mechanically interacts with things PCs care about. For instance, magic items that function only for certain alignments (Robe of the Neutral Archmagi), or societies that have access to effects that show alignment (lots of Sprites) and obsess about it the way Americans obsess about credit ratings (Lawful creatures get a discount rate on business loans).

You could certainly run a game where alignment is subjective and the Succubus therefore detects as Good-aligned, but I don't believe anyone in this thread is proponing a subjective alignment system like that, and I'm personally not interested in discussing such a system because like you I feel that it would be incoherent and hard to adjudicate. Take it as a given that we're talking about alignment as a reliable, objective, repeatable measurement.


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## I'm A Banana (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:
			
		

> Those definitions, and some of their later-edition counterparts, use concepts like "dignity", "rights", "innocent", "truth", "beauty" etc.
> 
> So what does a Detect Good spell latch onto? Does it latch onto a character's attitude towards, and treatment of, truth, beauty and human dignity? But in that case, who gets to determine that the Seven Heavens rather than the succubus has really got the hang of beauty and dignity?




I might quibble with the degree to which these concepts are part of alignment (or which particular concepts are exclusively part of one alignment or another), but there is a rather explicit answer to this question in _Planescape_.

In PS, if something is "Good" ("right", "helpful", or "conscientious" to use 5e's concepts) it is because most creatures believe it to be so. A demon who detected itself as evil would know that, as defined by the belief of most, it was not right by society, helpful to others in need, or acting according to a conscience. The same would be generally true, of, say, a modron (who acts in accordance with a code that may not always line up with what is right by society), or a slaad (who follows whims which may be entirely conscience-free). 

"Most creatures" becomes in the setting a more narrative concept than a numerical concept - "most" in this case means a number so unreasonably large that it might as well be (and may actually be, depending on the DM's interpretation) infinite. PS protagonists often change the setting by changing how "most" creatures believe, by accomplishing tremendous actions and affecting the hearts and minds of people far removed from their current surroundings (a kind of butterfly effect). Part of the reason  you play PS is because you want to play such a character, so the setting makes such a character possible. 

So "detect good" in PS latches onto if most people believe the target to have the qualities that most people have defined to be good, or if they do not believe that (in 3e, this would be explicitly "altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings").

In PS, that friendly business associate would probably still ping as evil (most people believe that they hurt, oppress, and kill others, to use 3e's terms).



			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> But this passage gives rise to another point: the claim that no one has an inherent reason to do good (let's say, to promote the interests of others even when this doesn't directly further his/her own interests; to encourage beauty rather than squalor; etc) is iteslf hugely, hugely contentious




It is not so much contentious in D&D, where "Good", at least in 5e, only means that you do right by society, you help others according to their needs, or you obey your conscience (presumably, excluding people/creatures who cannot form a conscience), and that when you die, your soul goes to A Particular Place. There's plenty of reasons one could have to reject what society thinks of as right, to refuse to help others, or to ignore your conscience. This would make you not-good. These are also things that every human being is familiar with doing in their lives.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Sure. But how does the NPC register to Detect Good/Evil? And how do we work that out?
> 
> In the scenario you describe, the NPC is punishing the old woman for shaming his friend. So why doesn't this count as upholding dignity and social order (ie LG)?
> 
> It seems to me to answer that question you have to take a _stand_ on what dignity, proper social order, etc consist in - and you have to assume that these are as binding on the NPC and his friend as the PCs (because presumably Detect Evil gives the same result whoever casts it). To borrow from your post upthread, the NPC and his friend "must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results".




That's a non-sequitur. Clearly the fiend DOES NOT share the same values as the entity (me, the DM) evaluating him as Neutral Evil. You state that he must, but I don't understand your argument for it. Is this that "subjective alignment" thing again? I've already said that I don't use subjective alignment.

Are you asking about my methods for determining his alignment? If you're arguing that I should call him LG I'll just say, "No. He kidnaps and tortures people for petty personal reasons. That's evil, and it's not lawful, but I'll call him Neutral instead of Chaotic because he usually doesn't cross the law without a specific reason." You (pemerton) can dispute that label and so can he--but are you disputing my ability to give him that label without his agreement? Because clearly I can do it. Are you really arguing that I can't?


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> So "detect good" in PS latches onto if most people believe the target to have the qualities defined to be good, or if they do not believe that (in 3e, this would be explicitly "altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings").



The question still arises.

How do I tell that a person is judging so-and-so to be _altruistic_? I need criteria for concept-individuation, and how am I going to do that?

If I'm trying to work out whether they are talking about chairs or tables or trees or mountains, the problem is not too bad: I look at what they point to when they teach the word to a child.

But what is the common anchor for my belief about Bahamut's behaviour, your belief about it, etc, such that we can all be said to be judging that he is _altruistic_?

I wouldn't expect a typical D&D group to stumble onto the problem in exactly the terms I've put it, but I think the problem is a real one. The way I think it would most likely manifest itself would be via a more obvious vicious circularity: good is defined as "What everyone judges to be _good_", and we explain the content of various peoples' concepts of _good_ by pointing to the Upper Planes. I don't know the Planescape texts well enough to know whether or not they present this sort of circularity, but I would not be surprised if they do.


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> That's a non-sequitur. Clearly the fiend DOES NOT share the same values as the entity (me, the DM) evaluating him as Neutral Evil. You state that he must, but I don't understand your argument for it. Is this that "subjective alignment" thing again? I've already said that I don't use subjective alignment.
> 
> Are you asking about my methods for determining his alignment? If you're arguing that I should call him LG I'll just say, "No. He kidnaps and tortures people for petty personal reasons. That's evil, and it's not lawful, but I'll call him Neutral instead of Chaotic because he usually doesn't cross the law without a specific reason." You (pemerton) can dispute that label and so can he--but are you disputing my ability to give him that label without his agreement? Because clearly I can do it. Are you really arguing that I can't?



Of course you can give him that label, but then why not just say that he's evil (in the full-fledged moral sense) and be done with it?

I'll focus on your use of "petty personal reasons". This is why he detects as evil. Whereas let's say a jailer or even executioner in the court of Furyondy or Cormyr presumably need not, per se, detect as evil - these people also inflict suffering, but not for _petty personal reasons_.

But now, when the villain casts Detect Evil on himself, and comes up positive, is he obliged to conclude that he _is_ inflicting suffering for petty personal reasons? If not, why not? What other explanation is there for the fact that he registered to Detect Evil? If so, then hasn't he just been told, by the detection magic, that he is committing moral error (in this case, mistaking petty personal reasons for genuine ones)?



emdw45 said:


> Even if the GM does manage to unambiguously determine alignment, and regardless of how the GM determines what alignment the creature possesses, it's still merely an objective phenomenon, not an internalized self-assessment.



What does it mean for the villain in your example to realise that, as an objective matter, he is inflicting suffering for petty personal reasons, but yet for this not to amount to internalised self-assessment? The only way that you could avoid the self-assessment is to reject the characterisation of your reasons as _petty_. Yet the Detect Evil spell is unambiguously telling you that your reasons are petty ones.



emdw45 said:


> You could certainly run a game where alignment is subjective and the Succubus therefore detects as Good-aligned, but I don't believe anyone in this thread is proponing a subjective alignment system like that,



Nor am I, although someone in a recent thread did (maybe not this one, maybe the one about the "problem" player of a CN PC).

I'm making the point that if Detect Evil pings on "scornful of beauty" (as another indicator alongside "inflicts suffering for petty personal reasons"), and the succubus pings as Evil, then she herself has to conclude that she is scornful of beauty. Whereas in the real world it would be open for her to argue that the received conception of beauty is deeply flawed (look at the disputes between mainstream and avant-garde artists between the late nineteenth century and (say) the 1960s - and notice how work that was once scandalous is now completely mainstream and used on chocolate boxes and family TV commercials).

In other words, in the real world she would not have to accept the "internal self-assessment" that she is scornful of beauty, but the world of Know Alignment spells obliges her to.


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## I'm A Banana (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> The question still arises.
> 
> How do I tell that a person is judging so-and-so to be _altruistic_? I need criteria for concept-individuation, and how am I going to do that?




Well, in D&D, you could tell that with something like _detect thoughts_, or you could ask someone what they think of so-and-so (presuming they're not being dishonest). But a single individual's opinion wouldn't typically matter that much cosmologically. What matters is the people in aggregate, and as a character in that setting, that's defined for you before you're born, and easily discoverable with spells/maps/conversations with your local priest/etc. 



> If I'm trying to work out whether they are talking about chairs or tables or trees or mountains, the problem is not too bad: I look at what they point to when they teach the word to a child.
> 
> But what is the common anchor for my belief about Bahamut's behaviour, your belief about it, etc, such that we can all be said to be judging that he is _altruistic_?




You mean aside from the spell? Because looking at a spell's results is probably just as empirical as looking at a tree.  

The social context - what "most people think." In PS, again, this involves uncountably vast amounts of people for "most" so that it becomes a narrative conceit in practice (you know most people think that way because the book tells you most people think that way and you want to play the game). Presumably if there were only 9 people in existence in such a world and 5 of them thought Bahamut was not altruistic, then Bahamut would not ping on a _detect good_ spell and would not go to one of the upper planes when he died. If one person changed their mind, he'd be pinging again. But, of course, that is not really a situation that arises in practice.


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Well, in D&D, you could tell that with something like _detect thoughts_, or you could ask someone what they think of so-and-so (presuming they're not being dishonest).
> 
> <snip>
> 
> The social context - what "most people think."



This doesn't address the point.

In the real world, when I meet a stranger who speaks a different language from me, how do I translate it? I might point to a chair and say (in English) "chair", and the stranger might point and say (perhaps) "la chaise", and by repeating the process I gradually build up a sense of some common nouns of the stranger's language. Similar techniques are used to learn common adjectives, verbs, adverbs etc.

But now how do I work out what the word for "generosity" is in that person's language? If I look to see what word s/he uses to describe (say) boy scouts helping old ladies across the road, then I'm building into my translation an assumption that s/he shares my values. Which doesn't look very much like what you described for Planescape.

If I look to see what word the stranger uses to describe (i) episodes of one person providing goods or services to another with (ii) no obvious reciprocation and (iii) of which the stranger seems to approve, then I'm building into my translation an assumption that generosity warrants admiration. Which doesn't look very much like what you described for Planescape - you want the demons, for instance, to be able to coherently say of something both that (i) it is generous, and (ii) it is not worthy of admiration.

You can try and strip all your X, Y and Zs down to simple observables, like chairs and tables and mountains, but no bit of D&D alignment text has ever actually managed to do that (they all use value-laden words like "truth", "beauty", "innocent", "dignity" etc) and there are plausible arguments (mostly coming out of work on the methodology of the social sciences) that it can't be done.


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> You mean aside from the spell?



That's what I started with. The spell latches onto the two-word entry in the alignment box on the character sheet/statblock.

But that doesn't make the problem go away - it just reinforces it. In two respects. First, from the point of view of other game participants, labelling doesn't make it so: I can draw a stick figure portrait and stick "brilliant work of art" in the _aesthetic value_ box on its statblock, but no one is going to take that seriously.

And from the point of view of the metaphysics of the gameworld, characters now have a sui generis property - an alignment label - which is divorced from and knowable independently of any particular behaviour they engage in, yet is also supposed to do much the same conceptual work as natural language value concepts for which neither independence claim is true (ie the things we talk about using natural language value concepts are not independent of, and are not epistemically accessible independent of, the more basic facts on which they supervene).


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## Von Ether (May 13, 2015)

So ... yeah. When did I get to beat up on some undead 'cause they are the villains and I'm the hero?

D&D over the years has played fast and loose with anything that wasn't archetypical with a baseline that was changed for different settings (Planscape, Eberron and Ravenloft) all of it written as work-for-hire by hundreds of people over a generation. So to find a coherent philosophy in all that might be fun, but it's ultimately a mental exercise with no real resolution.

My own anecdote on this line was the time a GM made my paladin unfun to play. Basically the fellow would keep switching between a black/white morality and then a more modern take on a whim to make my PC's job much harder. 

One minute he'd ask for me to "Think of the goblin children" and free will and then the next drag me by the nose with "blue flashes" of vision that pointed parts of the dungeon we missed. Not a very consistent fellow.


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## Rejuvenator (May 13, 2015)

Here's a thought: Detect Evil/Good does NOT measure the moral weight of individual actions. It measures the balance of morality of all of an individual's actions.

Presumably, the cosmos has some obscure algorithm that judges a person's psyche and behavioral history to produce an overall score of Good, Neutral or Evil. Just like a soul needs a positive balance of 'Good points' minus 'Sin points' to go to Heaven, or otherwise go to Hell.

The only difference between a real-life medieval devout peasant, vs a fantasy devout peasant, is that the latter can find out objectively if they're currently destined for Heaven or not. But neither can prove that any one act that they've committed is itself objectively good or evil in any single specific context.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Of course you can give him that label, but then why not just say that he's evil (in the full-fledged moral sense) and be done with it?
> ...
> But now, when the villain casts Detect Evil on himself, and comes up positive, is he obliged to conclude that he _is_ inflicting suffering for petty personal reasons? If not, why not? What other explanation is there for the fact that he registered to Detect Evil? If so, then hasn't he just been told, by the detection magic, that he is committing moral error (in this case, mistaking petty personal reasons for genuine ones)?
> 
> What does it mean for the villain in your example to realise that, as an objective matter, he is inflicting suffering for petty personal reasons, but yet for this not to amount to internalised self-assessment? The only way that you could avoid the self-assessment is to reject the characterisation of your reasons as _petty_. Yet the Detect Evil spell is unambiguously telling you that your reasons are petty ones.




There are several problems with the argument you're making:

1.) 5E doesn't have a Know Alignment spell, and the alignment-oriented effects that it does have don't give you a detailed justification for their results. Nothing tells him, "That old lady that you tortured? That was petty." All he gets is, "You can't use the holy sword/whatever," which of course just strikes him as unjust condemnation because CLEARLY this guy isn't open to criticism! Just look at why he was torturing the old lady! In short, no of course he isn't obliged to conclude anything about his actions, he doesn't have the detailed information I gave to pemerton. 

2.) He can externalize his conclusions. It's trendy nowadays to refer to this phenomenon as "cognitive dissonance" although I don't personally like that usage of the term. 

2.) Most importantly, you still haven't made your argument for why he must share my axiological values. I think kindness is important. He thinks it's unimportant, except to your buddies, but he thinks making important people like himself and his friends keep face/feel good is very important. Let me know if the way I'm using "axiological values" is unclear to you, but if I assume we both know what it means in this context, all you've done is quibble over the meaning of "petty reasons" while the more fundamental point is that in his axiology, it doesn't matter if the reasons are petty or not. Being kind to random peasants isn't even on his radar as something you should do. He would disagree very strongly with my characterization of him as evil. Maybe you would too.

4.) Nitpick: re your first paragraph, "why not say he's evil". I did say he's evil. I've said it multiple times. How many times do I need to say it? But that doesn't mean he says it.


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## pemerton (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> Most importantly, you still haven't made your argument for why he must share my axiological values. I think kindness is important. He thinks it's unimportant, except to your buddies, but he thinks making important people like himself and his friends keep face/feel good is very important. Let me know if the way I'm using "axiological values" is unclear to you, but if I assume we both know what it means in this context, all you've done is quibble over the meaning of "petty reasons" while the more fundamental point is that in his axiology, it doesn't matter if the reasons are petty or not.



The issue of "petty reasons" isn't quibbling.

Clearly he doesn't think they're petty, in so far as he puts them forward as reasons to justify his treatment of the old woman. He didn't tell the PCs that he was just doing it for a lark.



emdw45 said:


> Nitpick: re your first paragraph, "why not say he's evil". I did say he's evil. I've said it multiple times. How many times do I need to say it? But that doesn't mean he says it.



My point is that if you're going to have him agreeing that his reasons are petty, yet not caring, why not just have him agreeing that he's evil, but not caring?

Or, contraposing: I can see why it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to judge himself as evil. But for the same reason, he doesn't judge his reasons as petty. Which means, to him, it must be a complete shock when he registers to Detect Evil (pre-5e version).


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## I'm A Banana (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> In the real world, when I meet a stranger who speaks a different language from me, how do I translate it? I might point to a chair and say (in English) "chair", and the stranger might point and say (perhaps) "la chaise", and by repeating the process I gradually build up a sense of some common nouns of the stranger's language. Similar techniques are used to learn common adjectives, verbs, adverbs etc.
> 
> But now how do I work out what the word for "generosity" is in that person's language? If I look to see what word s/he uses to describe (say) boy scouts helping old ladies across the road, then I'm building into my translation an assumption that s/he shares my values. Which doesn't look very much like what you described for Planescape.




I don't know that the language analogy is helping - your understanding of the moral value of "la chaise" in this context is just as empty as your understanding of the word for "helping an old woman cross the road." The stranger's language could very well put a moral value on "la chaise" (only the Oppressors use those!) and no moral value on "helping an old woman cross the road" (everyone does this, even the Oppressors!). 

As far as what helping an old lady cross the road looks like to different people in PS - there is a social context to determine the "default" in the setting that the characters are aware of (based on it being D&D and also it being presented as the current state of affairs in the books). Your characters know that social context, they can see it in the geography. They can accept the moral aspect of that definition or reject it as they see fit, and of course this means that the social context will judge them as well and define what they are (unless they can change it). They also know that this social context is just that - the opinion of others, made manifest by the way this reality works. Change the opinion, and reality will work differently. 



> If I look to see what word the stranger uses to describe (i) episodes of one person providing goods or services to another with (ii) no obvious reciprocation and (iii) of which the stranger seems to approve, then I'm building into my translation an assumption that generosity warrants admiration. Which doesn't look very much like what you described for Planescape - you want the demons, for instance, to be able to coherently say of something both that (i) it is generous, and (ii) it is not worthy of admiration.




Part of the issue is that it is not the case that items (i)-(iii) of your definition necessarily warrant admiration. In example, any economist would balk at anything happening without reciprocation - they'd say that of course you got reciprocation, you just didn't realize or call it that, and so why would that be any more worthy of admiration than that same boyscout charging the old lady money? At least then it would be a measurable gain that you could put to use and not some squishy social capital that might go to waste at a retirement home! That might be similar to how an LE creature would view the act, as well (with perhaps a little more emphasis on making sure ladies who can't afford it stay on the right side of the street!). A NE person might reasonably conclude that anyone who fulfilled conditions i-iii is being a fool to get nothing out of it. A CE person might claim that same process results in nothing more than fewer useless old bints getting turned into traffic hazards. 

I think [MENTION=6787650]emdw45[/MENTION] has been using the term "axiological values" to refer to a the same idea - admiration depends on those being shared. You and the stranger do not necessarily share those. The demon likely does not share those. 



> You can try and strip all your X, Y and Zs down to simple observables, like chairs and tables and mountains, but no bit of D&D alignment text has ever actually managed to do that (they all use value-laden words like "truth", "beauty", "innocent", "dignity" etc) and there are plausible arguments (mostly coming out of work on the methodology of the social sciences) that it can't be done.




The characters in a PS game exist in a setting where social consensus has defined alignments and what they mean - all societies have been cosmically aggregated, each individual's ever-changing data-point tallied on some grand database, and this presented as the context. That determines the "axiological values" of the multiverse in general. Characters are free to dispute that consensus, and it is assumed that they will, at least in some form or another - that's the "things that need changing" in the 3-act structure of a PS campaign. Even LG characters find that their values will differ from the values of the multiverse at large.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

pemerton said:


> The issue of "petty reasons" isn't quibbling.
> 
> Clearly he doesn't think they're petty, in so far as he puts them forward as reasons to justify his treatment of the old woman. He didn't tell the PCs that he was just doing it for a lark.
> 
> ...




I agree at least with the point in bold, and I've been saying something very much like it for ten pages or so. But you're kind of changing the subject here. You've asserted that the fiend must share my axiological values as a DM. Your post quoted here seems to concede the point ("I can see why it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to judge himself as evil"). And yes, I agree that he probably also wouldn't judge his reasons as petty, although it wouldn't matter if he did because it still wouldn't be a big deal because benevolence to nobodies isn't axiologically important to him. ("Yeah, I probably shouldn't have lost my temper and tortured that lady for losing my laundry. Oh well, we all have off days.")

If you've conceded that point, then we're done with this sub-thread, which started in post #184 with the question,



			
				emdw45 said:
			
		

> Are you arguing that the Succubus must of necessity share the axiological values of whatever force/entity is responsible for assigning Know Alignment results? If so, why do you think that? Do you think it's so self-evident that other people must think it too?





If your revised answer to that question is, "No," then we're done. Or at least I am--the potential axiological divergence between DM/universe and (N)PC has been my point all along.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> That might be similar to how an LE creature would view the act, as well (with perhaps a little more emphasis on making sure ladies who can't afford it stay on the right side of the street!). A NE person might reasonably conclude that anyone who fulfilled conditions i-iii is being a fool to get nothing out of it. A CE person might claim that same process results in nothing more than fewer useless old bints getting turned into traffic hazards.




I find this characterization of CE inspirational. Mind if I steal it for occasional use?


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## I'm A Banana (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> I find this characterization of CE inspirational. Mind if I steal it for occasional use?




Please do!  Let me know how it goes!


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## Elderbrain (May 13, 2015)

In the hopes that this has not already been asked/answered... are there going to be game stats for Demogorgon, Orcus, Grazz't, etc. in the Rage of Demons book, in the same way the Elemental Princes of Evil got stats in Princes of the Apocalpse?


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## I'm A Banana (May 13, 2015)

Elderbrain said:


> In the hopes that this has not already been asked/answered... are there going to be game stats for Demogorgon, Orcus, Grazz't, etc. in the Rage of Demons book, in the same way the Elemental Princes of Evil got stats in Princes of the Apocalpse?




We don't know for sure, but their depiction certainly points to that likelihood.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Please do!  Let me know how it goes!




It definitely makes me want to give the PCs a useful but psychopathic (Chaotic Evil) ally. Kind of like Dogbert for Dilbert. I don't know if I'll actually do it, but the idea is tickling my fancy right now and I'll chew on it.


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## TarionzCousin (May 13, 2015)

Elderbrain said:


> In the hopes that this has not already been asked/answered... are there going to be game stats for Demogorgon, Orcus, Grazz't, etc. in the Rage of Demons book, in the same way the Elemental Princes of Evil got stats in Princes of the Apocalpse?






Kamikaze Midget said:


> We don't know for sure, but their depiction certainly points to that likelihood.








/Hackmaster.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 13, 2015)

RE "if it has stats, we can kill it", my players derive great joy from the fact that "everything has HP" including doors, walls, stone slabs, and the planet itself. It doesn't come into play often, but the fact that it is at least theoretically possible to destroy everything increases their enjoyment--and mine too.


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## Hussar (May 13, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> I'm arguing that alignment is am objective phenomena, which like all things objective, is subjectively interpreted according to the value system of the observer. Who's arguing that it's subjective? You?




Objective phenomena cannot be subjectively interpreted.  You don't get to believe things about gravity or 2+2=4.  Well, you can, but, then you'd be wrong.  These are measurable forces.  Water at sea level boils at 100 C.  The philosophical bent of the observer cannot change that.  So, yes, you are trying to argue that alignment is subjective.


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## I'm A Banana (May 14, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Objective phenomena cannot be subjectively interpreted.




I might actually argue that all phenomena can only be subjectively interpreted - the act of interpreting is itself a process of subjective judgement. 



> You don't get to believe things about gravity or 2+2=4.  Well, you can, but, then you'd be wrong.  These are measurable forces.  Water at sea level boils at 100 C. The philosophical bent of the observer cannot change that.  So, yes, you are trying to argue that alignment is subjective.




Whether or not 2+2=4 is real or some sort of fiction or useful language or other subjective thing is actually open to some debate, but that's not the most grounded conversation for our purposes here. 

In PS, at least, that there is some force called "good" that exists depends on observing minds believing that to be the case, and so cannot be said to exist without an observer (an observer assigns, say, altruism to this "good" force, and so "good" becomes linked to altruism). If no one believed in this force, "good," then it would not exist (that's the way the fictional universe works!). But it does not depend on any one particular mind's belief -  you cannot personally just say that "good is an illusion" and have it be true any more than you can say "Bruce Wayne is the Joker" and have it be true, despite the fact that neither PS-style "good" or "Bruce Wayne" have any objective existence.


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## pemerton (May 14, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> The game posits an unmediated access to consistent effects, which get labelled as "good" and "evil" in the metagame--but there's no need for a PC or even a player to accept that label.





emdw45 said:


> I agree at least with the point in bold, and I've been saying something very much like it for ten pages or so.



What, then, do you think that Detect Good or Detect Evil (pre-5e version) is detecting?

It's not detecting value per se - because you deny that the torturing villain, or succubus, is obliged to accept the deliverances of the spell as stating evaluative truths.

 [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] suggested, upthread, that it is detecting X, Y and Z - but then characterised X, Y and Z using evaluative language. You seemed to do the same thing when you referred to "petty reasons".

And when you recharacterise your villain as ""Yeah, I probably shouldn't have lost my temper and tortured that lady for losing my laundry. Oh well, we all have off days." you have a villain who is not the hero of his adventure at all! He's conceding error. (Though is failing to manifest contrition.)



Kamikaze Midget said:


> I don't know that the language analogy is helping



It's not an analogy.

You said that, in PS, the truth of your evaluative Xs, Ys and Zs (say, "beauty" or "doing right by others") is determined by majority belief. Beliefs are mental states with propositions as their contents. So we can't talk about shared beliefs until we have an account of proposition individuation, which will require an account of concept individuation.

In the case of chairs and tables, the account of concept individuation is fairly straightforward: my word "chair" and the French word "la chaise" are synonyms because they are both introduced into their respective languages by reference to things of the same kind (namely, chairs, with which we interact in all sorts of mundane and non-spooky ways).

In the case of evaluative language, the account of concept individuation is hugely contested, and is perhaps the longest ongoing intellectual debate in human history. Some people think that you work out the French word for "good" by seeing what word, in the French language, serves as a general term of praise and commendation (which is the basic use of the English word "good"). But in that case, to judge something good is to judge it as praiseworthy - which won't work for the framework you're trying to set up, because you want the demon to be able to agree that the Seven Heavens is X, Y and Z yet deny that it is praiseworthy.

An alternative approach would be to identify some non-evaluative X, Y and Z to be a supervenience base for the evaluative terms. The debate about whether or not this is possible for the social sciences is over 100 years old and still going strong. I've certainly never seen anyone even try and do it for D&D alignments, and even if you did you would likely get a contentious list of factors which - whether or not it was accurate as a matter of fundamental analysis - would not necessarily work for play purposes (because it is contentious).

Therefore, the coherence of the position that (a) Detect Good/Evil delivers uniform results, because (b) the X, Y and Z are intersubjectively accessible features of the scanned entities/places, because (c) the X, Y and Z are determined by majority belief, is not easily demonstrated. You need an account of concept individuation for the Xs, Ys and Zs that doesn't depend upon a presupposition of being admirable/undesirable. That's not easy to do.

If we put to one side the worries about concept individuation, though, then it's fairly easy to see how we get (d) anyone is free to deny that the results of Detect Good/Evil has no necessary bearing on his/her self-evaluation. Because all that amounts to is rejecting the majority consensus in respect of <something - not sure what, because I've put the issue of concept individuation to one side>.

Which gives rise to (e) can evaluative judgements, in this system, be in any way non-arbitrary or can play some sort of justificatory or reason-giving role in a person's life? I don't see how. And given that Bahamut has a 20+ INT, presumably he can reach the same conclusion. How does he differentiate the killings he urges his paladins to undertake from the murders by demons that he condemns? As I posted upthread, the whole thing is very much in danger of collapsing into teams, with no moral asymmetry at all. Which, again, Bahamut, with his 20+ INT, can notice.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Part of the issue is that it is not the case that items (i)-(iii) of your definition necessarily warrant admiration. In example, any economist would balk at anything happening without reciprocation



That's not true of "any economist" - not all economists subscribe to psychological egoism.

But that to one side, of course it's not self-evident that (i) through (iii) are admirable: Ayn Rand may not be correct, but she hardly failed to notice a self-evident truth. My point is that if you don't think they're admirable then it is not at all clear that you think they are markers of generosity, given that to decribe something as "generous" carries with it an implication of worthiness of admiration. But if you don't think they're markers of generosity, then how are you going to participate in the great social consensus that establishes the meaning of the Xs, Ys and Zs?



Kamikaze Midget said:


> They can accept the moral aspect of that definition or reject it as they see fit, and of course this means that the social context will judge them as well and define what they are



What does "define" mean here? It can't mean _make true_ - because in that case they _couldn't_ (rationally) accept or reject as they see fit. (Contrast: the positions of stellar and planetary masses "define" the shortest distances along which light rays travel - as with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s example of objective gravity and boiling point of water, light rays _aren't_ free to accept or reject the consequences of general relativity as they see fit; and rational physicists are obliged to bring their beliefs into conformity with reality.)



Kamikaze Midget said:


> (unless they can change it)
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Change the opinion, and reality will work differently.



What is at stake in changing anything? I mean, if I make everyone believe that shiny armour is ugly and saving princesses is ignoble, and that acidic corrosion is beautiful and wanton killing noble, paladins will still go to the Seven Heavens when they die, and the Abyss and the Seven Heavens will still be at loggerheads. Perhaps, because the X, Y and Z for good and evil are held constant, Detect Good will now ping on demons and Detect Evil on paladins, but I don't see how that is of any great interest.

I certainly don't have any sense of what it means to say that paladins used to be good but now are evil, when _no behaviour in the world has actually changed_, and _I haven't changed my mind about anything either_.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> The characters in a PS game exist in a setting where social consensus has defined alignments and what they mean
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Characters are free to dispute that consensus, and it is assumed that they will, at least in some form or another - that's the "things that need changing" in the 3-act structure of a PS campaign.



I'm not confused about what PS asserts. I'm expressing doubts about its coherence - both conceptual and practical.

If we solve the conceptual problem of even establishing what the global consensus is - far from trivial, because of the complexities and disputes around concept-individuation for evaluative terms - we get to the practical question: who cares what the consensus is? If I'm a paladin, and my goal is to relieve suffering and vindicate the innocent, why do I care what labels the majority of people use to describe my conduct (unless I'm guilty of the sin of vanity)?

And to leverage this practical question back to a conceptual one: if it is not per se irrational to value things differently from the global consensus, then why does the content of the consensus have any relevance to anyone? If there's no reason per se to have regard to it in one's own practical deliberations then it is arbitrary, and hence not a rational object of concern.


----------



## pemerton (May 14, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> In PS, at least, that there is some force called "good" that exists depends on observing minds believing that to be the case, and so cannot be said to exist without an observer (an observer assigns, say, altruism to this "good" force, and so "good" becomes linked to altruism). If no one believed in this force, "good," then it would not exist (that's the way the fictional universe works!).



But if the force called "good" ceased to exist, what would actually change?

As far as I can see, nothing. It's all epiphenomenal.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 14, 2015)

pemerton said:


> What, then, do you think that Detect Good or Detect Evil (pre-5e version) is detecting?
> 
> It's not detecting value per se - because you deny that the torturing villain, or succubus, is obliged to accept the deliverances of the spell as stating evaluative truths.
> [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] suggested, upthread, that it is detecting X, Y and Z - but then characterised X, Y and Z using evaluative language. You seemed to do the same thing when you referred to "petty reasons".
> ...




Here on Earth, even our sociopaths are capable of conceding error, if not in any sincerely remorseful way, especially if there's a rational reason for them to want to do so, such as making parole or even ending an unpleasant conversation. You're reading too much nonexistent moral angst into an offhanded, unapologetic remark.


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## I'm A Banana (May 14, 2015)

*The conceptual problem*


			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> But that to one side, of course it's not self-evident that (i) through (iii) are admirable: Ayn Rand may not be correct, but she hardly failed to notice a self-evident truth. My point is that if you don't think they're admirable then it is not at all clear that you think they are markers of generosity, given that to decribe something as "generous" carries with it an implication of worthiness of admiration. But if you don't think they're markers of generosity, then how are you going to participate in the great social consensus that establishes the meaning of the Xs, Ys and Zs?




This is what you describe as the "conceptual problem", right?

I don't see the problem. If it's not self-evident that these qualities are admirable, then it's not self-evident that they carry a necessary implication of "worthiness of admiration," and so they lack that "evaluative" property - they describe an action or a trait, as simply as "chair" describes an object. 

It's rather trivial to use "generosity" to describe the bare quality of a "liberality in giving or willingness to give" without regarding that as inherently admirable or undesirable. I may say that a generous person is a fool, or that they are a saint, or that they are simply doing as they desire, or that they are generous in accordance with some internal system or that they simply like to give stuff away and I don't care why. The fiend and the celestial can agree that they are markers of generosity - that the person so described is liberal in giving and has a willingness to give - but only one would agree with your assertion that this implies a worthiness of admiration.

This is without even getting into the thorny weeds of fantasy languages and cultures - perhaps there's no word in Abyssal for the concept that a player would regard as "Generosity", and so, much like English borrowing the word schadenfreude to describe something it has no word for, the fiend uses the Common phrase "generosity" to describe something it has no word for. Maybe if you wanted to describe someone as "generous" in Abyssal you'd have to use a word that would also mean "spreader of plagues."

But put simply, one can describe the trait while acknowledging that there are competing value judgements on that trait and thus have a common basis for understanding without a common basis for values. 

*The Practical Problem*


			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> who cares what the consensus is? If I'm a paladin, and my goal is to relieve suffering and vindicate the innocent, why do I care what labels the majority of people use to describe my conduct (unless I'm guilty of the sin of vanity)?



In PS, you care because to realize your goal, to relieve suffering and vindicate the innocent on a planar scale, you will need to change the minds of those who believe that these goals are wrong or harmful or unacceptable or undesirable in some way (that is your antagonist, and it is an antagonist that cannot simply be slain). These opponents make up a part of that consensus, and when you overcome them and change their beliefs, the consensus shifts to be closer to your own view, thanks to more people agreeing that what you say is true. 



			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> if it is not per se irrational to value things differently from the global consensus, then why does the content of the consensus have any relevance to anyone? If there's no reason per se to have regard to it in one's own practical deliberations then it is arbitrary, and hence not a rational object of concern.




The consensus is setting material - you can say "I don't care about the Dawn War!" when you play in the Nentir Vale, but that doesn't mean that the Dawn War isn't relevant to other characters in the setting - including other PC's, and/or your antagonists. You can even say "I don't care about the Dawn War!" in the midst of a campaign about a gods vs. primordials war in that setting and you wouldn't stand out - you might be just another mercenary with a handy sword-arm and the Churches aren't the ones threatening to wreck all the nice stuff you're spending their money on. No need to care about the setting material even a little, just point yourself at the things threatening your goal and end 'em. 

That's possible in PS. You can say "I don't care what other people think!" That doesn't mean that what other people think isn't relevant to other PC's and/or your antagonists. Since the setting is founded on the conceit of a battleground for ideas, it's likely going to affect your character, even if your character is just a well-paid mercenary making practical choices. In this respect, making such a character in PS is a little like the DM saying "We're going to have a campaign about the Dawn War" and the player saying "My character doesn't care about the Dawn War!" You can do it, but you're kind of ignoring the meat of the game. 

Because this is PS, even if you play a character who doesn't care about what others think, you will wind up _affecting_ how others think, thus subtly changing that consensus. Similarly, in a Dawn War campaign, even a character who doesn't care about the Dawn War will still wind up slaying elementals and helping the gods. That's just the story being told, even if you're not digging deeply into it. 

And I'd say in both situations, for meta-game reasons, you're better off making a character who is _invested_ in the conflict. 4e D&D has divine power linked to classes; PS has factions whose explicit goals are to change the consensus. 



pemerton said:


> But if the force called "good" ceased to exist, what would actually change?




In D&D, and rather more strongly in PS's concept of the planes and planar natives, the "force of good" (like the force of any alignment) is a magical mana that can be detected, transmuted, abjured, harnessed, etc. 

So if that force ceased to exist, that might mean that, for instance, the _Talisman of Pure Evil_ cannot harm any creatures (since no creatures can be considered "good" - good has ceased to exist). 

Narratively, it might further mean that the upper planes and its residents cease to exist or slowly fade away (since there is no "good soul" that can go there, and people have lost faith in the "force of good" that powers them). The planes in PS are somewhat considered to be made of this nebulous alignment-mana, so without it, the planes powered by it would cease to be planes. If the other alignments don't change, then displaying the qualities of good don't have any more cosmic relevance than displaying the qualities of hunger or boredom or chairs - there is no greater meaning to your altruism, no cosmic force behind your conscience. You would create a world with no heavens, only hells, where the guy who burns down orphanages has cosmic power backing him but those defending the orphans have none. The particulars would probably vary pretty dramatically with the individual DM there, but it'd be a pretty good plot, I think!


----------



## Rejuvenator (May 14, 2015)

pemerton said:


> But if the force called "good" ceased to exist, what would actually change?






Kamikaze Midget said:


> You would create a world with no heavens, only hells, where the guy who burns down orphanages has cosmic power backing him but those defending the orphans have none. The particulars would probably vary pretty dramatically with the individual DM there, but it'd be a pretty good plot, I think!



I think that's because, in this hypothetical scenario, the force of "evil" continues to exist. That is, in in the absence of Force of Good, the triumphant Force of Evil pushes psychopaths to burn down orphanages, etc. and drives regular folk into turncoats or apathy and despair.

What if the question was: if the forces called "good" and "evil" (and "neutrality") ceased to exist, what would actually change?

Couldn't the outer planes and angels and demons continue to exist, founded on individual virtues and sins and beliefs that continue to persevere in the hearts and minds of the immortals and mortals? If people still cherish their values, must the outer planes come crashing down in this new secular world?


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## Jeff Albertson (May 14, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Whether or not 2+2=4 is real or some sort of fiction or useful language or other subjective thing is actually open to some debate[/URL], but that's not the most grounded conversation for our purposes here.





Yeah, it was questions like "…but why does 2+2 = 4…?" that failed Albert Einstein out of school.


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## Imaro (May 14, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> What if the question was: if the forces called "good" and "evil" (and "neutrality") ceased to exist, what would actually change?




I believe it would lead to a world dominated by the opposing forces of Law and Chaos... A place where the concept of good, evil, and neutrality are gone.  One would pick a side (or be picked by a side like our favorite Moorcockian albino) either voluntarily or involuntarily and only whether one subscribes to order or chaos in his beliefs and actions would be of any importance...



Rejuvenator said:


> Couldn't the outer planes and angels and demons continue to exist, founded on individual virtues and sins and beliefs that continue to persevere in the hearts and minds of the immortals and mortals? If people still cherish their values, must the outer planes come crashing down in this new secular world?




I don't think they would continue to exist in their current form... Again instead the multiverse transforms into a place where Law and Chaos are the opposing forces instead of good and evil. It's a place where fiends and angels would find common cause in keeping the multiverse from sliding into utter chaos at the hands of allied demons and djinni... even thought their methods, tactics and behavior would still differ... Or did you mean if all cosmological forces were gone?


----------



## I'm A Banana (May 14, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> I think that's because, in this hypothetical scenario, the force of "evil" continues to exist. That is, in in the absence of Force of Good, the triumphant Force of Evil pushes psychopaths to burn down orphanages, etc. and drives regular folk into turncoats or apathy and despair.




Basically. PS starts with the conceit that good exists because people believe it exists and if a villain (or PC perhaps!) started changing that belief, you might have a scene in, say, Arcadia, where this iconoclast convinces the people of Mount Clangeddin that there is no such thing as "good", there is only this phenomena of "peace" and that comes out of "order" and then the dwarves, convinced due to the creature's actions, spread out over the planes to help convert others, and maybe Silverbeard goes to talk to the other dwarven deities about this remarkable individual with these interesting ideas and through some other effort the entire dwarven pantheon is convinced and now things start rolling because every dwarf on every world slowly starts to agree that LG is an illusion of ego and there is only truly Law, and influence spreads...and on and on. As this influence grows, layers and planes start becoming part of other places - Mount Clangeddin becomes a gear on Mechanus and soon the dwarven heavens join it and dwarf-bots suffuse the planes and the Slaad become nervous and the story goes on and the assuming it's the antagonist doing this the climax sees the party in the plane of Elysium as Law and Chaos try to claim dibs on it and the guardinals are fighting a civil war and they must convince the Last Good Soul (perhaps the spirit of a child) to somehow remind everyone that there is more than Law and Chaos and Evil, and either they succeed and Good gets (gradually) restored or they fail and there are no upper planes. 

...but of course there are still people helping little old ladies across the street, probably, the consensus just views this as their duty to the social order, rather than as "good." 

And that's just one interpretation - other groups would probably have their own. 



> What if the question was: if the forces called "good" and "evil" (and "neutrality") ceased to exist, what would actually change?
> 
> Couldn't the outer planes and angels and demons continue to exist, founded on individual virtues and sins and beliefs that continue to persevere in the hearts and minds of the immortals and mortals? If people still cherish their values, must the outer planes come crashing down in this new secular world?




Based on the PS idea of the planes being _made of_ this belief-mana, the obvious question would be: what do people believe in when they don't believe in the alignments? I could see a story based on the idea of the outer planes collapsing entirely (perhaps motivated by empiricist-Sensates in league with elementals - believe in nothing beyond facts!), or one simply based on them transforming dramatically (what does the consensus believe in now? does a monotheism perhaps change the consensus to believing in a dualistic multiverse? is good/evil less relevant than death/life or honor/dishonor? what changes?), but the end result wouldn't be the Great Wheel, and those that are at risk of being believed out of existence would certainly fight against that! Whether those are your allies or your enemies would probably depend upon which side of the iconoclasm the party is on.

Again, the interpretation would vary between tables. PS sort of wants you to figure this out for yourselves.


----------



## Staffan (May 14, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> What if the question was: if the forces called "good" and "evil" (and "neutrality") ceased to exist, what would actually change?



No Hell below us, above us only sky?


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## Parmandur (May 14, 2015)

Dungeons & Dragons *is* "four-color" adventure; trying to make it something else results in metaphysical absurdity when discussing a cosmology designed to generate monsters to kill with swords.


----------



## Scott DeWar (May 14, 2015)

I want to be sure I understand the stance of the schools of thought here.

The school that says: "alignment of good and evil is Euclidean" in they never cross or converge

whereas the school that says good and evil are not so Euclidean and the parallel lines are curved elliptical or hyperbolic 

in that either they cross paths every now and then such that sometimes to do good, one must do what seems evil or if one wants to be evil one must act good every now and them?

I know You really shouldn't mix math and theology, but I could not come up with an appropriate parallel.


----------



## Imaro (May 14, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Dungeons & Dragons *is* "four-color" adventure; trying to make it something else results in metaphysical absurdity when discussing a cosmology designed to generate monsters to kill with swords.




I'm sure this is all true... for you.


----------



## Parmandur (May 14, 2015)

Imaro said:


> I'm sure this is all true... for you.





Based on what I've read, seems true on all fronts!


----------



## Parmandur (May 14, 2015)

Scott DeWar said:


> I want to be sure I understand the stance of the schools of thought here.
> 
> 
> 
> ...





The geometry analogy is insufficient:  the schools are (broadly):

-Alignment is like math, so what is good is like 2+ 2 = 4 (the position of most all published D&D books)

-Alignment is like literature, highly subjective.


----------



## Imaro (May 14, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Based on what I've read, seems true on all fronts!




Again, I'm sure it is for you...


----------



## Staffan (May 14, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Dungeons & Dragons *is* "four-color" adventure; trying to make it something else results in metaphysical absurdity when discussing a cosmology designed to generate monsters to kill with swords.




I take great exception to that.

You can also kill monsters with axes, fireballs, daggers, trees, fists, harsh language, arrows, and all sorts of other implements.


----------



## Imaro (May 14, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> The geometry analogy is insufficient:  the schools are (broadly):
> 
> -Alignment is like math, so what is good is like 2+ 2 = 4 (the position of most all published D&D books)



 Except for the actual core books of certain editions...

Alignment in 3.x "Alignment is a tool for developing your character’s identity. It is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two characters of the same alignment can still be quite different from each other. In addition, few people are completely consistent."

Alignment in 5e "A typical creature in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons has an alignment which broadly describes it's moral and personal attitudes... These brief summaries of the nine alignments describe the typical behavior of a creature with that alignment.  Individuals might vary significantly from that typical behavior, and few people are perfectly and consistently faithful to the precepts of their alignment."


So tell me again how alignment is always as objective as 2+2= 4...


----------



## Parmandur (May 14, 2015)

Staffan said:


> I take great exception to that.
> 
> 
> 
> You can also kill monsters with axes, fireballs, daggers, trees, fists, harsh language, arrows, and all sorts of other implements.





True; the broad, metaphorical sword.


----------



## Parmandur (May 14, 2015)

Imaro said:


> Except for the actual core books of certain editions...
> 
> 
> 
> ...






On the one hand it says that, on the other the Great Wheel keeps on turning.   [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has gone into this in detail before.



Both positions, incidentally, are absurd as applies to D&D: because D&D is really not the forum for dealing ethics, epistemology or metaphysics so much as killing things and taking their stuff.


----------



## Imaro (May 14, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> On the one hand it says that, on the other the Great Wheel keeps on turning.   @_*pemerton*_ has gone into this in detail before.




Yeah... yeah I've seen pemerton's arguments and remain unconvinced... I'll stick with the actual books... you know the original source you cited earlier in the thread.



Parmandur said:


> Both positions, incidentally, are absurd as applies to D&D: because D&D is really not the forum for dealing ethics, epistemology or metaphysics so much as killing things and taking their stuff.




Well I'll keeping playing in the Planescape setting and you keep running combats with treasure...


----------



## Parmandur (May 14, 2015)

Imaro said:


> Yeah... yeah I've seen pemerton's arguments and remain unconvinced... I'll stick with the actual books... you know the original source you cited earlier in the thread.
> 
> 
> 
> Well I'll keeping playing in the Planescape setting and you keep running combats with treasure...





Don't get me wrong; not saying you are having badwrongfun, have at it.  But that is...not really what D&D was designed around, nor does the Planescape philosophical exploration mean much from a philosophy point of view.  As somebody who enjoys beer and pretzel D&D and serious philosophical investigation, the attempted mixture does not really take off.  Neither fish nor fowl.


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## Hussar (May 15, 2015)

I have to admit, I'd play Planescape, but, not with the D&D system.  There are all sorts of systems out there that deal with metaphysical ethics and morality much, MUCH better than D&D.  Paramandur might be a bit facile in his description, but, I don't think he's wrong.  Saying that D&D is four-color fantasy isn't a huge leap here, is it?


----------



## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Don't get me wrong; not saying you are having badwrongfun, have at it.  But that is...not really what D&D was designed around, nor does the Planescape philosophical exploration mean much from a philosophy point of view.  As somebody who enjoys beer and pretzel D&D and serious philosophical investigation, the attempted mixture does not really take off.  Neither fish nor fowl.





Again, not to say that you and yours don't enjoy it; I'm sure it is fun.  But it is not coherent metaphysics.


----------



## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Hussar said:


> I have to admit, I'd play Planescape, but, not with the D&D system.  There are all sorts of systems out there that deal with metaphysical ethics and morality much, MUCH better than D&D.  Paramandur might be a bit facile in his description, but, I don't think he's wrong.  Saying that D&D is four-color fantasy isn't a huge leap here, is it?






I used that description because @pemerron did: D&D was designed as a small scale wargame to pretend to be Conan or the Grey Mouser, not explore metaphysics or epistemology.  As someone interested in epistemological concerns for real, I wouldn't explore them In any sort of RPG, even one more well suited like Runescape.  And not saying to do so is badwrongfun, but that's not pizza night material for me.


----------



## Fralex (May 15, 2015)

SkidAce said:


> Hence why my "Detect" spells only register supernatural good or evil.  Demon or angel?  Ping ping ping....
> 
> Evil (as per society and values) cannibal shopkeeper... silence on the radar screen.
> 
> Unless of course he manages to get supernaturally tainted...cause if you've seen Time Bandits, you know there ARE chunks of pure evil out there...




I really like the fact that the _Detect Evil and Good_ spell in 5e is more like _Detect Foreigners_. That is, after all, a classic medieval (and sadly, modern) definition of Good and Evil, and it can be objectively defined in no uncertain terms. The idea that philosophical concepts are actual _forces_ pervading the multiverse always just sorta weirded me out. But I can totally get behind the idea that different planes are home to creatures with similar moral philosophies, although I wish we had more diversity than just a big ol' wheel of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos. Why can't we have a Plane of Existentialists, or Realm of Objectivism? Or how about Realist Heaven or Egaltarian Nirvana? Come on, this would totally be a cool idea!


----------



## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Fralex said:


> I really like the fact that the _Detect Evil and Good_ spell in 5e is more like _Detect Foreigners_. That is, after all, a classic medieval (and sadly, modern) definition of Good and Evil, and it can be objectively defined in no uncertain terms. The idea that philosophical concepts are actual _forces_ pervading the multiverse always just sorta weirded me out. But I can totally get behind the idea that different planes are home to creatures with similar moral philosophies, although I wish we had more diversity than just a big ol' wheel of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos. Why can't we have a Plane of Existentialists, or Realm of Objectivism? Or how about Realist Heaven or Egaltarian Nirvana? Come on, this would totally be a cool idea!





I am so glad 5E took a step away from quantifiable "alignment as element" as a model.  That's the incoherence at plat: Good, Evil, Law and Chaos as separate, concrete cosmic principles...


----------



## Fralex (May 15, 2015)

Actually, a "Plane of Existentialists" would be pretty hilarious, since a common theme in existentialism is that there _is_ no afterlife. Some of these philosophies would probably need to be modified to work in a fantasy setting, but they could still work with some tweaking.

Philosophies that deny the existence of gods and such could be translated into "OK, yeah, gods _exist, _but if you think any of them _really_ care about us you're a fool," or maybe "Well, they _say_ they're gods, but they might be stuffing their resumes a bit in terms of how strong or unique from mortals they really are."


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

Hussar said:


> I have to admit, I'd play Planescape, but, not with the D&D system.  There are all sorts of systems out there that deal with metaphysical ethics and morality much, MUCH better than D&D.  Paramandur might be a bit facile in his description, but, I don't think he's wrong.  Saying that D&D is four-color fantasy isn't a huge leap here, is it?




I just purchased the Planescape boxed set PDF off DND classics... though I had it when I was much younger but lost it... and am re-reading it now.  Haven't finished up all 3 books in the set yet but so far I honestly am not seeing why D&D (at least 5e) isn't a good system for it... maybe it's something I haven't read or remembered yet that makes D&D horrible for Planescape... could you elaborate?


----------



## I'm A Banana (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Dungeons & Dragons *is* "four-color" adventure; trying to make it something else results in metaphysical absurdity when discussing a cosmology designed to generate monsters to kill with swords.




I gotta say that puritanical genre-policing like this makes me sad and a little irate.

It's a simple attempt to de-legitimize a style of game, badwrongfun in a more condescending garb. "Oh, that's all well and good, but it's not _real_ D&D!" is utterly pointless border-patroling and more than that it is absolutely and empirically *wrong on every conceivable level*.

Because D&D is four-color adventure, and it is also moral ambiguity and it is slaying Thor and turncoat Drow and Balance Above All and cheap LotR rip-offs featuring monsters from Greek myth and Gygaxian dungeon crawls and Gothic horror and slightly homoerotic '80's style leather daddy environmentalism metaphor and swashbuckling 70's sci-fi and countless and infinite other stops in between and beyond. D&D is not limited, it is whatever any table says it is, and sometimes, at my tables, D&D absolutely *is* this narrative of ideological warfare. 

D&D has been all this, it will continue to be all this and more, and while your tables might be limited to one of your favorite styles, you don't have the authority or the ability to impose your view on the _game itself_. Not even the designers have that authority (see 4e's sacred cow bar-b-que). No one who wants to run a morally ambiguous game needs to run their plan by anyone other than their own group for approval, and if they gather together and play that game and call it D&D, guess what? _That is D&D, even if it's not your kind of game._

That diversity is a strength - it's part of the fun of D&D that it is whatever you turn it into in your group. And telling people that their games aren't "_real D&D_" violates that strength. 



			
				Hussar said:
			
		

> I have to admit, I'd play Planescape, but, not with the D&D system. There are all sorts of systems out there that deal with metaphysical ethics and morality much, MUCH better than D&D. Paramandur might be a bit facile in his description, but, I don't think he's wrong. Saying that D&D is four-color fantasy isn't a huge leap here, is it?




It is, because it's pretending that D&D is some monolithic single-purpose input-output device that can only do one thing. That has never, ever, _ever_ been true of D&D, and the fact that this has never been true of D&D is part and parcel of why D&D is so much more fun and enjoyable than most other things you can do with your time - because it is what you make of it.

And making of it a campaign setting that is a battleground of ideologies amongst the heavens and the hells is one of the _less_ radical things you can do with it - certainly TSR circa 1990 thought it was totally within the D&D wheelhouse. 

As an aside, it's worth noting that PS is very much a product of its times - one of the reasons it futzes with the alginment concept is one of the same reasons it futzes with traditional fantasy races or with traditional overland journeys. PS is to a large degree a reaction within D&D to the prevalence of traditional Tolkeinish fantasy. One of it's goals is to be non-traditional. Alignment-busting by saying that alignments are really just based on a sort of consensus is one way it does that.


----------



## Sword of Spirit (May 15, 2015)

Fralex said:


> Philosophies that deny the existence of gods and such could be translated into "OK, yeah, gods _exist, _but if you think any of them _really_ care about us you're a fool," or maybe "Well, they _say_ they're gods, but they might be stuffing their resumes a bit in terms of how strong or unique from mortals they really are."




You just gave a passable description of the Athar faction of Planescape.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 15, 2015)

Scott DeWar said:


> I want to be sure I understand the stance of the schools of thought here.
> 
> The school that says: "alignment of good and evil is Euclidean" in they never cross or converge




Ah, which posters are you trying to classify here? To the extent I've been involved with this thread, it was to point out that (in your terms) Euclidean theorems, while sound and even (in my opinion) representative of everyday reality ("true" in common parlance), are not significant unless you first buy into Euclidean axioms. You can have a protractor for objectively measuring Euclidean angles, but it's of no interest to someone who believes axiomatically that parallel lines can intersect exactly twice.


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## Fralex (May 15, 2015)

Sword of Spirit said:


> You just gave a passable description of the Athar faction of Planescape.




Planescape sounds fun.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 15, 2015)

Sword of Spirit said:


> You just gave a passable description of the Athar faction of Planescape.




And in real life, this viewpoint is called maltheism.


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## Scott DeWar (May 15, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> Ah, which posters are you trying to classify here?  . . . . ..



 Uh, I am not so sure I want to answer that question. It seems we are witnessing some thing that Kamikaze Midget is addressing that I could inadvertently exasperate.


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## Rejuvenator (May 15, 2015)

Imaro said:


> I don't think they would continue to exist in their current form... Again instead the multiverse transforms into a place where Law and Chaos are the opposing forces instead of good and evil. It's a place where fiends and angels would find common cause in keeping the multiverse from sliding into utter chaos at the hands of allied demons and djinni... even thought their methods, tactics and behavior would still differ... Or did you mean if all cosmological forces were gone?



I guess I meant the Good/Neutral/Evil alignment system was gone. People still did good and bad things, just like in real life, but good and evil does not exist as an objective cosmological force.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Based on the PS idea of the planes being _made of_ this belief-mana, the obvious question would be: what do people believe in when they don't believe in the alignments?
> <snip>
> Again, the interpretation would vary between tables. PS sort of wants you to figure this out for yourselves.



Norse myths of Valhalla and Hel, and Greek myths of Olympus existed in absence of Judeo-Christian values that inform the D&D Alignment system. My interpretation is that outer planes can (and IMO should) exist on their own merits, and not because someone needed to plug in a plane for Lawful-Neutral-Good or whatever to fill in a missing peg on the alignment wheel, but I betray my biases by saying that.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> Ah, which posters are you trying to classify here? To the extent I've been involved with this thread, it was to point out that (in your terms) Euclidean theorems, while sound and even (in my opinion) representative of everyday reality ("true" in common parlance), are not significant unless you first buy into Euclidean axioms. You can have a protector for objectively measuring Euclidean angles, but it's of no interest to someone who believes axiomatically that parallel lines can intersect exactly twice.





Well, that is exactly the issue with ontological discussion in philosophy:  you can have something as solid as arithmetic or geometry, but throwing in a "Detect Mathematical Soundness" spell...radically changes the epistemological context.  Which is what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is saying.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> I gotta say that puritanical genre-policing like this makes me sad and a little irate.
> 
> 
> 
> ...





I think that there is some miscommunication going on here, for which I apologize.  I do not question the fun you are having.  Go at it, I LOVE the whole Great Wheel; partly because it's incoherent, which is my point.  It's bonkers, and I don't mind the insanity, O have fun with it as well.

But, as @pemerron points out eloquently though perhaps overly forecfully, it is not a basis for real world thinking.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Having trouble formatting in Windows Phone:

The point, for me, is that Traits-flaws-bonds are more effective as character descriptors than the traditional alignment system, because they are more *real*, and as such more relatable than the Gygaxian cosmic goofiness; which, at the same time us huge, goofy fun.


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Well, that is exactly the issue with ontological discussion in philosophy:  you can have something as solid as arithmetic or geometry, but throwing in a "Detect Mathematical Soundness" spell...radically changes the epistemological context.  Which is what  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is saying.




But [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and a few others seem to be going on the basis that these spells are infallible when from 3e on-wards... detect alignment spell(s) either don't exist or aren't infallible (I'm not sure about earlier editions).


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## I'm A Banana (May 15, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> Norse myths of Valhalla and Hel, and Greek myths of Olympus existed in absence of Judeo-Christian values that inform the D&D Alignment system. My interpretation is that outer planes can (and IMO should) exist on their own merits, and not because someone needed to plug in a plane for Lawful-Neutral-Good or whatever to fill in a missing peg on the alignment wheel, but I betray my biases by saying that.




The PS idea is that a plane of Lawful-Neutral-Good only exists because people in the setting believe that it exists. So it doesn't exist on its own merits per se, but it also doesn't exist just to fill in a peg on an alignment wheel. 

Not that this is the way the game has to be, of course, just that this is a way the game can be. 



			
				Parmandur said:
			
		

> I think that there is some miscommunication going on here, for which I apologize. I do not question the fun you are having. Go at it, I LOVE the whole Great Wheel; partly because it's incoherent, which is my point. It's bonkers, and I don't mind the insanity, O have fun with it as well.
> ...
> The point, for me, is that Traits-flaws-bonds are more effective as character descriptors than the traditional alignment system, because they are more *real*, and as such more relatable than the Gygaxian cosmic goofiness; which, at the same time us huge, goofy fun.




Can't disagree with any of that!  Thanks for clarifying. I think "it's not what D&D *is*" probably just triggers my Edition Wars PTSD.


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Having trouble formatting in Windows Phone:
> 
> The point, for me, is that Traits-flaws-bonds are more effective as character descriptors than the traditional alignment system, because they are more *real*, and as such more relatable than the Gygaxian cosmic goofiness; which, at the same time us huge, goofy fun.




See I find either, depending on the type of fantasy fiction one is trying to model, pretty easy to relate too within genre conceits... Now when speaking to modeling actual real life they are both too simplistic and equally "goofy" to model the reality and complexity of most real life people's behavior, patterns, beliefs, etc...


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> The PS idea is that a plane of Lawful-Neutral-Good only exists because people in the setting believe that it exists. So it doesn't exist on its own merits per se, but it also doesn't exist just to fill in a peg on an alignment wheel.
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Heh, I cut loose about when the edition wats started.  To be honest, I think five friends who were up to it could do that sort of thing with *any* game if they dedicate to the RP side; when I said that, I referred not to rules so much as the cosmology: when they did the 1E Manual of the Planes, what were they doing?  Creating high level adventuring (as in, killing things and taking their stuff) locations.  What Planescape does with it is perfectly valid: but I doubt Gygax was thinking along those lines originally, so it is a latter gloss on what was, by design, a little tongue in cheek stylistically.

Doesn't mean ot is *wrong*, just that history makes it mighty peculiar (that peculiar seems to me to be the fun part!).


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Imaro said:


> See I find either, depending on the type of fantasy fiction one is trying to model, pretty easy to relate too within genre conceits... Now when speaking to modeling actual real life they are both too simplistic and equally "goofy" to model the reality and complexity of most real life people's behavior, patterns, beliefs, etc...





Fair enough.  It seems to me that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] takes issue with the setup because of the logical coherence issues which would prevent it from being workable, which as I just stated in my previous post is a feature,not a big, of the Great Wheel.


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## I'm A Banana (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Heh, I cut loose about when the edition wats started.  To be honest, I think five friends who were up to it could do that sort of thing with *any* game if they dedicate to the RP side; when I said that, I referred not to rules so much as the cosmology: when they did the 1E Manual of the Planes, what were they doing?  Creating high level adventuring (as in, killing things and taking their stuff) locations.  What Planescape does with it is perfectly valid: but I doubt Gygax was thinking along those lines originally, so it is a latter gloss on what was, by design, a little tongue in cheek stylistically.
> 
> Doesn't mean ot is *wrong*, just that history makes it mighty peculiar (that peculiar seems to me to be the fun part!).




Yeah, I totally agree that what PS did with the thing is a different take than their original Gygaxian purpose. That's part of why I'd say that a _Planescape_ game is not just a Greyhawk or Dragonlance or FR game on the planes (anymore than a Ravenloft game is just a Greyhawk or FR or Dragonlance game with vampires), but kind of its own beast that uses Greyhawk's wheel as a starting point.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Yeah, I totally agree that what PS did with the thing is a different take than their original Gygaxian purpose. That's part of why I'd say that a _Planescape_ game is not just a Greyhawk or Dragonlance or FR game on the planes (anymore than a Ravenloft game is just a Greyhawk or FR or Dragonlance game with vampires), but kind of its own beast that uses Greyhawk's wheel as a starting point.





Absolutely; so, then what I see is you and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] talking in circles, comparing the original 1E setup to the 2E Planescape, which are extremely different, complicated by how D&D of all stripes cuts off the basis for real world discussions of epistemology.


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## Shasarak (May 15, 2015)

Imaro said:


> See I find either, depending on the type of fantasy fiction one is trying to model, pretty easy to relate too within genre conceits... Now when speaking to modeling actual real life they are both too simplistic and equally "goofy" to model the reality and complexity of most real life people's behavior, patterns, beliefs, etc...




Not to call out anyone in particular but to me DnD alignment seems a lot less "goofy" then some actual real life peoples beliefs.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Shasarak said:


> Not to call out anyone in particular but to me DnD alignment seems a lot less "goofy" then some actual real life peoples beliefs.





Well, not delve into politics or religion, I will just say with no fear of exaggeration, across the board, that every belief system and philosophy ever subscribed to by actual human beings (not figuratively; literally every single one) is more coherent than the nine-point alignment setup.  It is crazy incoherent when actually scrutinized, hence why this discussion always devolves this way.  But, it makes a very interesting short hand for acting, which is useful for creating a quick and dirty character...until it doesn't or you get a player who thinks Chaotic Neutral is grounds for being an in game rapist or something...


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Well, not delve into politics or religion, I will just say with no fear of exaggeration, across the board, that every belief system and philosophy ever subscribed to by actual human beings (not figuratively; literally every single one) is more coherent than the nine-point alignment setup.  It is crazy incoherent when actually scrutinized, hence why this discussion always devolves this way.  But, it makes a very interesting short hand for acting, which is useful for creating a quick and dirty character...until it doesn't or you get a player who thinks Chaotic Neutral is grounds for being an in game rapist or something...



IMO, what we always get are a couple of posters who go on and on about how incoherent it is... and how it's horrible for what we're using it for... without actually showing why and how it's inoherent or explaining convincingly why it shouldn't be working for the people who are actually using it...


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## Shasarak (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Well, not delve into politics or religion, I will just say with no fear of exaggeration, across the board, that every belief system and philosophy ever subscribed to by actual human beings (not figuratively; literally every single one) is more coherent than the nine-point alignment setup.  It is crazy incoherent when actually scrutinized, hence why this discussion always devolves this way.  But, it makes a very interesting short hand for acting, which is useful for creating a quick and dirty character...until it doesn't or you get a player who thinks Chaotic Neutral is grounds for being an in game rapist or something...




Even the ones fueled by Marijuana and/or with "science" in their name?

I am going to have to go with, yeah nah.


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## Fralex (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Well, not delve into politics or religion, I will just say with no fear of exaggeration, across the board, that every belief system and philosophy ever subscribed to by actual human beings (not figuratively; literally every single one) is more coherent than the nine-point alignment setup.  It is crazy incoherent when actually scrutinized, hence why this discussion always devolves this way.  But, it makes a very interesting short hand for acting, which is useful for creating a quick and dirty character...until it doesn't or you get a player who thinks Chaotic Neutral is grounds for being an in game rapist or something...




I always find Lawful Neutral a little hard to visualize. I mean, what does it say about the alignment that the creatures living on its plane of origin are souless automatons following rules you can't even explain? Lawful Good people want to give structure to the world so that things are more fair and just, Lawful Evil people want to give structure to the world for personal gain and subjugation, so Lawful Neutral people just kind of... want structure? But don't want to do anything with it? They sound more like comical bureaucrats to me than real people, because Lawful Neutral says nothing about what they _do_ believe structure and rules are for. I can't think of any society that enforces generic neutrality.


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## Hussar (May 15, 2015)

Imaro said:


> I just purchased the Planescape boxed set PDF off DND classics... though I had it when I was much younger but lost it... and am re-reading it now.  Haven't finished up all 3 books in the set yet but so far I honestly am not seeing why D&D (at least 5e) isn't a good system for it... maybe it's something I haven't read or remembered yet that makes D&D horrible for Planescape... could you elaborate?




Because of alignment. It's that simple for me. Alignment is objective in DND. There's no subjectivity at all. The universe says that if you generally do X then you are alignment Y. What you believe doesn't matter and no amount of belief changes that any more than trying to believe that rain is not wet. 

Which makes DND a very poor game for any sort of philosophical debate. There are other systems much better auited for this. 

Note, I'm not making a general judgement here. Add the words "for me" to every statement.


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## steeldragons (May 15, 2015)

Structure and rules are for one thing...establishing and enforcing Order! The universe must have Order. Without Order there is CHAOS!!! How can you NOT see a world of Order is the best and safest way for society and civilization to thrive?!

...is what a Lawful Neutral character would/should/could say. [MENTION=6785902]Fralex[/MENTION]

Lawyers. Judges...the PERFECT alignment one (of any alignment, really) wants for soldiers, really. Don't think about anything yourself, just follow  orders.

I can see it for scholars, sages, diviners (be they clerics or mages), general seekers of "Truth/Order/Justice", anyone who prizes civilization or knowledge (in a neutral, for knowledge's sake/its own reward kind of way).

Lawful Neutral is a fairly common alignment among npcs of my campaign world. Granted, mostly in large/urban centers where having and enforcing order is highly regarded.


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## Hussar (May 15, 2015)

Additionally, alignment detection in 3e is not fallible. Anyone believing they are good but detect as evil automatically knows he or she is wrong. There is no doubt or discussion.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Imaro said:


> IMO, what we always get are a couple of posters who go on and on about how incoherent it is... and how it's horrible for what we're using it for... without actually showing why and how it's inoherent or explaining convincingly why it shouldn't be working for the people who are actually using it...





It is pretty handy for a shorthand when creating a character; for analyzing complex moral problems.eeeeehhh, not so much.  So, working as designed.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Shasarak said:


> Even the ones fueled by Marijuana and/or with "science" in their name?
> 
> 
> 
> I am going to have to go with, yeah nah.





Even those, absolutely.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Well, that is exactly the issue with ontological discussion in philosophy:  you can have something as solid as arithmetic or geometry, but throwing in a "Detect Mathematical Soundness" spell...radically changes the epistemological context.  Which is what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is saying.




No, it doesn't change anything important. Most important disagreements with non-idiots are over axioms and definitions, not logic. (This thread is a case in point.) I agree that pemerton is focusing on objective measures of soundness (to continue the analogy), and clearly you agree with that perspective, but all your spell is doing is reifying a particular metalogic. You don't seem to be conscious of the fact that you're relying on a metalogic but it doesn't change the fact that you are, and that other metalogics exist. In fact, you could have spells for other metalogics too--and you could have other goodness-detecting spells in D&D too! "Detect Virtue" = find virgins and those who never lie. Now some Lawful Evil people are objectively Virtuous and some Lawful Good people are objectively non-Virtuous. (In fact, you could even name the new spell Detect Good to be even more confusing.) Just because you have a detector for a phenomenon doesn't mean you have to venerate the quality which is getting detected.

Anyway, I didn't want to beat the dead horse any more, and the question-asker has declined to clarify whom he was addressing, so I'll bow out again right here...


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 15, 2015)

Fralex said:


> I always find Lawful Neutral a little hard to visualize. I mean, what does it say about the alignment that the creatures living on its plane of origin are souless automatons following rules you can't even explain? Lawful Good people want to give structure to the world so that things are more fair and just, Lawful Evil people want to give structure to the world for personal gain and subjugation, so Lawful Neutral people just kind of... want structure? But don't want to do anything with it? They sound more like comical bureaucrats to me than real people, because Lawful Neutral says nothing about what they _do_ believe structure and rules are for. I can't think of any society that enforces generic neutrality.




Here's my model:

Extreme Lawful Neutral = Inspector Javert.

He's not cruel, he's not kind, he's not merciful, he's not evil. He's very dedicated and a decent fellow in his way, but he isn't any of the things that align you with "good" by D&D definitions. (Courage and integrity aren't on the radar, which of course is a value judgment by D&D and a perfect example of where someone could disagree with Know Alignment's value system.)

And BTW, Neutral Evil = Edmund Blackadder as personified during season 2 (Elizabethian era). The things he does to Baldrick are just awful. Funny, but awful.


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## Shasarak (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Even those, absolutely.




The best bit is when someone tells you how incoherent your religion is you can just turn around and say, "Well thats just, you know, your opinion man"


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## Hussar (May 15, 2015)

emdw45 said:


> No, it doesn't change anything important. Most important disagreements with non-idiots are over axioms and definitions, not logic. (This thread is a case in point.) I agree that pemerton is focusing on objective measures of soundness (to continue the analogy), and clearly you agree with that perspective, but all your spell is doing is reifying a particular metalogic. ...




But the game provides us with the axioms. That's kid of the point. Your examples don't really apply since the game doesn't concern itself with those things. The metalogic is defined for us. 

Again, if a genocidal king detects as evil, as he would by DND definitions, then that king knows, absolutely, that his actions are evil and wrong. There is no way he can justify his actions when he knows that he is evil. 

Now he might not care and will continue right on committing genocide, and I'd put demons and Devils in that category, but he can't pretend that he's just misunderstood and is actually doing good. As I said, DND doesn't really allow for that sort of discussion. Evil is reified. It's not really up for opinions any more than any other concrete element is. 

I like the concept of Planescape. I think it could be a lot of fun. But, again for ME, the rules of DND get in the way too much. Fate would IMO be a much better system. Or perhaps Dogs in the Vinyard.


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## Parmandur (May 15, 2015)

Shasarak said:


> The best bit is when someone tells you how incoherent your religion is you can just turn around and say, "Well thats just, you know, your opinion man"





Heh;  I will qualify it as any system that was maintained among multiple people for an extended period: natural selection has an effect.


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## FormerlyHemlock (May 15, 2015)

Hussar said:


> But the game provides us with the axioms. That's kid of the point. Your examples don't really apply since the game doesn't concern itself with those things. The metalogic is defined for us.




Le sigh. Look, I don't want to beat this dead horse any more, because this disagreement is actually a perfect example of a case where axioms, not logic, are creating a disagreement. You seem to believe that because the game defines a feature (alignment) using terms used in English for moral values (good/evil), that the alignment definition is dispositive. Good-aligned = "good" because that's the word the game uses, and for you that's apparently axiomatic, and no one can ever use the word "good" to mean anything than the PHB definition. I don't share that axiom, and more importantly neither do the creatures in my game world. My dragons don't have PHBs, and if they did they wouldn't care. They can use the word "good" to mean something completely different than the PHB's section on alignment descriptions, in spite of the empirical reality that red dragons polymorphed into human form still cannot attune a Robe of the Good Archmagi. (They probably don't call it by that name anyway: "Robe of the Good Archmagi" is a metagame term. The PCs might call it a Robe of Purity or Mordenainen's Robe or Flauntiir or something.)



> Again, if a genocidal king detects as evil, as he would by DND definitions, then that king knows, absolutely, that his actions are evil and wrong. There is no way he can justify his actions when he knows that he is evil.




You're assuming that the king must necessarily share the same axiological values as the entity (me) responsible for assigning alignments. In general this is not the case.

I'm sick of repeating myself, so I won't be responding to further repeated assertions from you unless they raise a point which is actually new. Clearly we disagree, and I'm fine with that.


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## pemerton (May 15, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> It's rather trivial to use "generosity" to describe the bare quality of a "liberality in giving or willingness to give" without regarding that as inherently admirable or undesirable.



This claim is highly contentious.

It's contentious among moral philosophers. It's contentious among theorists of the methodology of social science.

Those are academic debates, and so it's not reasonable to expect lay people to follow them in any detail. But they aren't _merely_ academic debates, and it's not hard to see them reflected in contexts that lay people engage with all the time.

Giving examples where the debates in methodology play into ordinary life and discussion is tricky because of board rules, which forbid discussing politics. So I'll confine myself to some examples that I think are relatively uncontentious: America, like Australia, experiences public debates about its history and the meaning/significance of its history. Who can write a history of 1492 and thereafter, or of the Civil War and emancipation, without using language that (wilfully or not) takes a stand on whether the things described are inherently admirable or undesirable? 

Or consider Ferguson's "The Hammer and the Cross" (a recently-published history of the vikings). And then this review. It's not easy to talk about patterns of history, and social processes, and cultures, without engaging in evaluation. Suppose, for instance, that vikings really were lovers of martial violence. It's very hard to identify and explain that, and the way that it shapes their culture, without taking an orientation towards it. For instance, to think oneself into the viking mindset one therefore has to think oneself into a love of violence - if one can, or if one can't, it seems that either way it's going to be hard to divorce what follows from that orientation. To put it at its plainest (and therefore perhaps a bit simplistically): how can someone claim to have properly comprehended or translated the viking concept of battle, if the translation doesn't capture and manifest the viking joy in fighting? (This connects to the "social consensus" issue - for those who don't find fighting joyful, what concept do they have in common with the vikings in respect of which some aggregate social consensus is then determined by the multiverse?)

On moral philosophy rather than methodology of social science: look at literature that tries to present human life and experience in a way that involves stripping off questions of evaluative commitment (say, _The Outsider_ or, in a less stylised way, _The Quiet American_ - it's not coincidence that they're both "existentialist" novels). It's not a trivial thing, and there's an argument that evaluative disengagement is itself a form of commitment (or perhaps , rather, callous or indifferent or self-satisfied non-commitment).

What I find frustrating in some contexts of the use of alignment (Planescape tends to highlight it but doesn't have a monopoly on the issue) is that it doesn't engage seriously with these pretty significant strands in our culture that concern the relationship between human activity, human sociality, evaluative commitment and the like.

As I've said upthread, if you want to be broad-brush or 4-colour, that's completely fine. And there are a range of literary/narrative techniques that can be used to facilitate this. Tolkien and superhero comics provide good models in respect of this: for instance, one of the techniques that Tolkien uses for avoiding the raising of moral questions around the divine right of kings is to avoid giving us any systematic study of the peasantry of his imagined world; similarly, Chris Claremont frames the world of the X-Men so that the read is mostly distracted from asking the question why Storm does not use her weather powers to end drought and famine rather than fight the Brood and Doctor Doom.

But if you are going to get more subtle - consider, eg, what happens to the tone of the X-Men/Magneto conflict once Magneto is reconceived as a Holocaust survivor - then I think it becomes harder to ignore the fact that these questions are real one, and figure in our cultural lives, and to pretend that it is trivial to strip all evaluation from the description of human choice and experience and yet still adequately capture and describe human life.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> perhaps there's no word in Abyssal for the concept that a player would regard as "Generosity", and so, much like English borrowing the word schadenfreude to describe something it has no word for, the fiend uses the Common phrase "generosity" to describe something it has no word for. Maybe if you wanted to describe someone as "generous" in Abyssal you'd have to use a word that would also mean "spreader of plagues."



I think that if this idea is taken seriously - which perhaps it should be - it casts significant doubt on the existence of "multiversal consensus" in respect of these notions.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> In PS, you care because to realize your goal, to relieve suffering and vindicate the innocent on a planar scale, you will need to change the minds of those who believe that these goals are wrong or harmful or unacceptable or undesirable in some way



It strikes me that this is no different from the real world. But in the real world, when I (for instance) persuade a former Communist to become a parliamentary democrat, the persuaded person regards this as a change of mind - from error to truth (I choose this example because it is a very common pathway for many well-known and engaged intellectuals in the US, Australia and Europe).

I don't see what it adds to say that, furthermore, Communism used to be _good_ (due to social consensus) but is now _evil_ (due to a changed social consensus). If the good/evil labels are meant to signify the existence of agent-independent reasons, then the whole set up becomes bizarre - because changing someone's mind required getting them to be _irrational_ (ie go against reason) until I got enough people to change their minds, in which case they retrospectively validated their irrationality. But upthread you and other posters have suggested that good/evil does not signify the existence of agent-independent reasons, in which case what is the point of the changes of label? Why can't we just speak as we do in the real world, and say "I used to think the Seven Heavens was good but now I realise it's not, for reasons . . ."?



Kamikaze Midget said:


> you can say "I don't care about the Dawn War!" when you play in the Nentir Vale, but that doesn't mean that the Dawn War isn't relevant to other characters in the setting



But the relevance of the Dawn War is like the relevance of the French Revolution, or any major historical event. 

For clarity, I'm not puzzled about why people in a fantasy campaign care about what others think of political or moral things. I have a life outside of ENworld!, and important chunks of it connect to such elements of the real world.

But my goal (and the goal of others whom I know) is to get people to change their minds. It's not to change the meaning of words. The target is human belief and motivation, getting people to realise they were mistaken in their former attitudes.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> the setting is founded on the conceit of a battleground for ideas



The real world - at least as I experience it, which admittedly isn't the way everyone experiences it - is a battleground for ideas. My comment on PS is that its metaphysics (i) are epiphenomenal to this, and (ii) threaten to make the notion of a "battleground for ideas" incoherent by stripping away the very grounds of the reasons that real people actually deploy in real battles over ideas.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> If the other alignments don't change, then displaying the qualities of good don't have any more cosmic relevance than displaying the qualities of hunger or boredom or chairs - there is no greater meaning to your altruism, no cosmic force behind your conscience.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> the guy who burns down orphanages has cosmic power backing him but those defending the orphans have none.



If Bahamut, Heironeus, etc are all killed off, then this will be true, sure. But that has no bearing on any question of evaluation. That possibility on its own has nothing to do with PS - it could happen in any D&D game where the gods can be killed. (Dark Sun can be seen as a variant on this.)

I can see that you might add to a campaign setting that if most people cease to believe that Bahamut, Heironeous etc are good then they die. The whole "old gods making way for the new" thing. But that also has no bearing on any moral question. If people cease to believe that Bahamut is good, that doesn't show that he's not (anymore than people believing that he is good shows that he is). People might be wrong. (Just as they might think he lives somewhere beyond the East Wind, but be wrong because he really lives in the Seven Heavens. Or whatever else people could be mistaken about in respect of Bahamut.)

The bit of PS that I find verging on incoherent, and mostly unmotivated, is the bit where it says that people's believing Bahamut to be good makes it so.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> In D&D, and rather more strongly in PS's concept of the planes and planar natives, the "force of good" (like the force of any alignment) is a magical mana that can be detected, transmuted, abjured, harnessed, etc.
> 
> So if that force ceased to exist, that might mean that, for instance, the _Talisman of Pure Evil_ cannot harm any creatures (since no creatures can be considered "good" - good has ceased to exist).



I find this all very hard to make sense of.

As best I can: the force of "good" is a free-floating but capturable/directable force, and the way you capture/direct it is by making people believe that goodness consists in X rather than Y. And the effect of the force is channelled/manifested through certain magic items/effects that themselves deploy these capturing/directing labels.

So saying that something is good or evil doesn't have the meaning it has in the real world (where these are the most ggeneric but also the clearest terms for expression moral praise or condemnation) but simply aims at characterising someone's place in this metaphysical scheme.

I don't get the motivation behind this - it's still basically epiphenomenal, except for a handful of magical effects (the Talisman's, some cleric spells) that themselves were introduced into the game in the context of an alignment system that _was_ intended to give voice to ordinary understandings of the meanings of moral language.

I also find the irrationality worrying: if I am currently labelled "good", and hence vulnerable to the Talisman of Pure Evil, I have to (i) concede that I am good (the evidence of the Talisman affecting me is sufficient for that), but you are saying that I can also (ii) try and persuade everyone (including myself?) that I am really not good, thereby changing the social consensus and hence the effects of the Talisman. It seems that (ii) requires me lying to others, ore else deluding myself (eg by denying that I am vunerable to the Talisman).

*TL;DR*: battles over ideas don't puzzle me; moral disagreement doesn't puzzle me; the claim that you can increase a campaign's focus on these things by asserting that social consensus makes moral claims true is the bit that I don't get. And when the answer is "Well, no one has to _agree_ with the social conensus, but if you don't you'll still get burned by the Talisman of Pure Evil" that looks to me like epiphenomenalism plus a hesitance to get rid of legacy features of the game (like the Talisman, Holy Word etc) which are huge _obstacles_ to making the game one in which the focus is on battles over ideas and moral disagreement.


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## pemerton (May 15, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> What if the question was: if the forces called "good" and "evil" (and "neutrality") ceased to exist, what would actually change?
> 
> Couldn't the outer planes and angels and demons continue to exist, founded on individual virtues and sins and beliefs that continue to persevere in the hearts and minds of the immortals and mortals? If people still cherish their values, must the outer planes come crashing down in this new secular world?





Rejuvenator said:


> I guess I meant the Good/Neutral/Evil alignment system was gone. People still did good and bad things, just like in real life, but good and evil does not exist as an objective cosmological force.



I think this would be perfectly coherent. It's how I run all my fantasy RPGs.

I'll elaborate, but with reference to these posts too:



Parmandur said:


> every belief system and philosophy ever subscribed to by actual human beings (not figuratively; literally every single one) is more coherent than the nine-point alignment setup.  It is crazy incoherent when actually scrutinized





Fralex said:


> The idea that philosophical concepts are actual _forces_ pervading the multiverse always just sorta weirded me out. But I can totally get behind the idea that different planes are home to creatures with similar moral philosophies



Having fairly recently done a systematic rereading of Gygax on alignment, I think it is possible to character his scheme in a relatively coherent way: _good_ is about fostering human wellbeing (Gygax doesn't distinguish between economistic conceptions of welfare, happiness, rights and dignity here, which means that there is scope for disagreement over what is truly good) and also beauty; and _evil_ is the disregard of this ("purpose is the determinant"). (On this view, "evil" is not a distinct moral outlook, but rather a failure to take the demands of morality seriously.)

Law and chaos are considerably harder to pin down, because he doesn't deal with what has been the most contentious issue in modern debates around institutional design, namely, what is the role of freedom and "invisible hand" mechanisms in generating effective systems of social order?

Still, roughly, the LG are those who believe that social order will foster welfare and beauty (and accept at least some interpersonal trade-offs); the CG are those believe that individual self-realisation is the best way to foster welfare and beauty (and are more doubtful about interpersonal trade-offs, although clearly think that individuals owe duties of forbearance to one another).

The LE are those for whom purpose is the determinant, and think the best way for them and their friends to get what they want (and deserve - Gygax characterises the LE as meritocrats) is via social hierarchies with them at the top. The CE are those who favour individual self-aggrandisement above all - they are willing and lusty participants in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

The True Neutrals are believers in the importance of balance and harmony. They favour nature over artifice. In terms of real-world intellectual tradition, Stoics and some strands of Taoism and Zen are the models.

This is not a comprehensive scheme for describing people. It doesn't capture the difference between (say) a modern utilitarian and Rawls (both probably end up as LG), nor between right and left anarchists (both probably end up as CG). There is also a tendency for the self-realisation goals of the CG to collapse into the anti-artifice outlook of the TN. But it's not hopeless.

Where the incoherence kicks in is in trying to turn this framework for labelling people's beliefs and outlook _into a scheme of social and metaphysical truth_. For instance, once we say that the Seven Heavens is, per se, a LG place, we are stipulating that _it is true_ that social order can maximise human wellbeing. Yet, at the very same time, we define Olympus as, per se, a CG place, thereby stipulating that _it is true_ that the best route to human wellbeing can be self-realisation largely free of social constraint.

The same thing happens when we label nations as LG, CG etc - we imply that they _successfully give effect to_ their alignment beliefs, although each of LG and CG involves a denial of the other.

I don't know what exactly Gygax intended with his outer planar sceme - did he mean that Olympus is populated by people who have the CG outlook (seems feasible) or that Olympus is a place where the claims of CG people are true (seems uttery infeasible when generalised, as I've just argued)? But it's the second approach that is picked up in Planescape and has continued since, and that is what produces the incoherence. A similar question - are devils happy or miserable? Gygax's Appendix IV leaves it open that devils are miserable, because in fact wellbeing is a real thing and living in a place where the most powerful people don't care about others' wellbeing would be horrible. But Planescape and onwards present a realm where the devils are happy with their situation ie where wellbeing is being created. This is incoherent - if the Nine Hells succeed in generating wellbeing via harsh discipline then they show the truth of (a particular view within) LG, not LE!

It is just as bad to turn the alignment "grid" from a device for labelling outlooks into a conception of two sets of two forces - G/E and L/C - which mix together to produce the alignments. Under this bizarre metaphysical view, a LG person has to accept that a CG person is just as infused with the "good" force - whereas the whole essence of the LG outlook is to _deny_ that self-realisation will lead to human wellbeing, and hence to deny that those of CG outlook actually do good.

Enough on incoherence. An interesting challenge for using the Gygaxian scheme as a set of labels for outlooks - which I've argued it _can_ be used for, though it's not perfect by any means - is what to do once the game actually starts, the world is put into motion, and various truths become evident. For instance, suppose that in my game, due to whatever factors (the ideological biases of the participants, the roll of the dice, whatever) it turns out that social structures are nothing but a source of misery. Then, in that game, the Lawful Good have been refuted! Their belief - that social order will be maximising of well-being - has been shown to be false. They can stick to their guns if they like, but (within that game) most morally decent people are going to judge them as deluded or worse.

Gygax gives no advice on this, and I don't recall ever seeing any in any D&D book. But it seems to me that, if we want to use the alignment system as a way of loosely characterising a variety of recognisable moral/behavioural outlooks, this is the number one question that is going to come up in play! For instance, thinking of a campaign I ran several years ago now, there were PCs who started with the belief that conformity to the will of heaven was the best way to foster wellbeing - we could call that, roughly, LG. But then those PCs (as played by their players in response to the unfolding ingame situation) found they had to abandon that belief. The heavens were still there, and the gods and angels still asserted that conformity to the will of heaven was the best way to foster wellbeing - that is to say, they continued to proselytise for LG - but the PCs (and players) had given up on them, and regarded them as self-deluded, self-serving or both.

That was a fun game. But it couldn't have happened if we began from the premise that the _claims_ of LG, about the relationship between divine order and wellbeing, aren't open to doubt. Which means that it couldn't have happened if you built in to the cosmology of the game that the heavens are a cosmologically LG place.



Fralex said:


> I always find Lawful Neutral a little hard to visualize.



In my sketch of Gygaxian alignment above I left out LN and CN. (I also left out NG and NE, but that's because I think they're completely uninteresting. They're purely products of grid-fetishism, but don't describe any distinctive evaluative outlooks. NG is basically CG-lite, and NE is basically LE-lite.)

LN, as I read Gygax's alignment descriptions, is rules fetishism. Hence, it's a type of moral failing of the LG: the conviction that wellbeing can be maximised by social order gets corrupted into an obsession with order for its own sake. It's the vice of bureacrats. As for a plane full of LN people - as per my comment upthread about devils, it should be a miserable place. If, in fact, all that order was making them happy, then it would be an instance of order fostering welfare and hence a proof of the truth of LG!

CN is freedom-fetishism. It's distinct from CE, because the CN recognises others as a limit to his/her will - their freedom, too, has value. But the CN people doesn't properly honour the duties owed to others (eg in virtue of those others' rights). CN is a failing of the CG. (Thinking about this also brings out that the CG are slightly more lawful than the CN: they at least acknowledge duty as between individuals, which is a type of minimal sociality/order. Whereas I don't see any reason to think that the LN is more lawful than the LG. An insistence on grid symmetry isn't helpful for making sense of the Gygaxian scheme.)



Kamikaze Midget said:


> Basically. PS starts with the conceit that good exists because people believe it exists and if a villain (or PC perhaps!) started changing that belief, you might have a scene in, say, Arcadia, where this iconoclast convinces the people of Mount Clangeddin that there is no such thing as "good", there is only this phenomena of "peace" and that comes out of "order" and then the dwarves, convinced due to the creature's actions, spread out over the planes to help convert others, and maybe Silverbeard goes to talk to the other dwarven deities about this remarkable individual with these interesting ideas and through some other effort the entire dwarven pantheon is convinced and now things start rolling because every dwarf on every world slowly starts to agree that LG is an illusion of ego and there is only truly Law, and influence spreads...and on and on. As this influence grows, layers and planes start becoming part of other places - Mount Clangeddin becomes a gear on Mechanus and soon the dwarven heavens join it and dwarf-bots suffuse the planes and the Slaad become nervous and the story goes on and the assuming it's the antagonist doing this the climax sees the party in the plane of Elysium as Law and Chaos try to claim dibs on it and the guardinals are fighting a civil war and they must convince the Last Good Soul (perhaps the spirit of a child) to somehow remind everyone that there is more than Law and Chaos and Evil, and either they succeed and Good gets (gradually) restored or they fail and there are no upper planes.



I don't see how you need any sort of alignment system, or "social consensus makes alignment labels true", to make this work.

The 20th and 21st centuries provide plenty of examples of people forming strong views about the truth of certain moral/political frameworks and successfully spreading them, thereby incorporating other realms into theirs, starting new social conflicts in places that didn't use to polarise along those lines, and making their ideological opponents nervous.

All without the PS theory that "belief is the grounds of truth".



Kamikaze Midget said:


> what do people believe in when they don't believe in the alignments?



This is the sort of thing that I don't get. A bit like the issue with the Talismans or Holy Word, its the game disappearing down a rabbit-hole that only exists because Gygax et al invented the alignment system for a completely different purpose.

It makes sense, to me, that someone should think that helping the suffering is important. It makes sense, too, that s/he might label this "good". It makes sense, too, that s/he might be perturbed, and perhaps moved to a re-evaluation of her own values, when s/he encounters Milton Friedman (or perhaps a parody of him) saying that the best way to relieve suffering is to mostly ignore it in your daily life and instead build up your own weath so that it will trickle down - maybe in giving alms to the poor for all these years s/he's been fostering rather than relieving suffering!

But none of this intellectual and emotional activity is concerned with _labels_. It's not that s/he cares about suffering because it bears the label _good_. Rather, it's because suffering ought to be alleviated that s/he labels behaviour that does so good. (This is the Euthyphro issue again.)


----------



## pemerton (May 15, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> The geometry analogy is insufficient:  the schools are (broadly):
> 
> -Alignment is like math, so what is good is like 2+ 2 = 4 (the position of most all published D&D books)
> 
> -Alignment is like literature, highly subjective.



I would add a couple of glosses.

The main claim I am disputing in relation to the "alignment is like maths" school is that _good_ = value-neutral description + affective response, and that you can strip off the affective response while retaining unproblematic epistemic access to and comprehension of the value-neutral description.

I have taken this up in my long reply to [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] not far upthread, so won't repeat except to say that it is contentious.

As for the "alignment is like literature" school, for me it's not that it's _subjective_ but rather that dealing seriously with value and evaluation engages huge chunks of history, culture and their interpretation. Besides the conceptual implications of this for the "maths" school (see previous two paragraphs), it also has implications for the play of a multi-participant game that requires imaging a shared fiction with histories, cutures etc. Namely, as soon as you get subtle you will encounter interpretive disagreements, so it's probably best not to unilaterally build contentious answers to those disagreements into the very framework of your game.



Parmandur said:


> Dungeons & Dragons *is* "four-color" adventure; trying to make it something else results in metaphysical absurdity when discussing a cosmology designed to generate monsters to kill with swords.





Parmandur said:


> D&D was designed as a small scale wargame to pretend to be Conan or the Grey Mouser, not explore metaphysics or epistemology.  As someone interested in epistemological concerns for real, I wouldn't explore them In any sort of RPG, even one more well suited like Runescape.



Personally, I find FRPGs a fun vehicle for exploring questions of value and the like, provided you focus on questions that the game gives you the tools to address (eg D&D is better at "heroism", "honour", divine order vs chaos" rather than (say) Keynesianism vs neoliberalism in economics, or utilitarianism vs Rawlsianism in the theory of social justice, which it completely lacks the tools - both story framing and mechanical resolution tools - to address).

But if you want to explore these issues in play, it's no good to build the answer in from the get-go!


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## pemerton (May 15, 2015)

Imaro said:


> pemerton and a few others seem to be going on the basis that these spells are infallible when from 3e on-wards... detect alignment spell(s) either don't exist or aren't infallible (I'm not sure about earlier editions).



In what way are 3E alignment detection spells fallible?


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Additionally, alignment detection in 3e is not fallible. Anyone believing they are good but detect as evil automatically knows he or she is wrong. There is no doubt or discussion.




Eh, I disagree... there are still ways of throwing the "Detect" spells off... like the Misdirection spell... So they aren't infallible and in a world where Detect good/evil/law and chaos are as common as you seem to be painting them... why wouldn't a 2nd level spell capable of totally nullifying it be just as common?

In other words why do I trust a spell 100% that can easily be fooled by a low level spell that grants no save and could be cast on me by any low level spellcaster?


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

pemerton said:


> In what way are 3E alignment detection spells fallible?




As I replied to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] above... Misdirection totally nullifies the reliability of the Detect spells... and on the divine side there is another low level spell called Undetectable Alignment... that makes the Detect good/evil/law/chaos spells useless.


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## Imaro (May 15, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Where the incoherence kicks in is in trying to turn this framework for labelling people's beliefs and outlook _into a scheme of social and metaphysical truth_. For instance, once we say that the Seven Heavens is, per se, a LG place, we are stipulating that _it is true_ that social order can maximise human wellbeing. Yet, at the very same time, we define Olympus as, per se, a CG place, thereby stipulating that _it is true_ that the best route to human wellbeing can be self-realisation largely free of social constraint.




Why is this incoherent since we are not stating that either has been proven to be 100% true... all we are stating is that the possibility exists that social order *can* maximise human well being and that the posibility exists that the best route to well being *can* be self-realisation largely free of social constraint... of course neither of these planes is the entirety of the multiverse (And thus all of humanity) so neither is a truth that has been proven out 100%...



pemerton said:


> The same thing happens when we label nations as LG, CG etc - we imply that they _successfully give effect to_ their alignment beliefs, although each of LG and CG involves a denial of the other.




I don't follow... in labeling a nation all we say is that for this specific group of individuals the society labelled with this alignment exists... how in simply labeling a kingdom with a certain alignment (usually, though not always, based on the moral outlook of it's rulers) are we in any way implying that they are "successfully" giving effect to their alignment beliefs?  If anything all we are saying is that this kingdom has the potential... or not... to successfully implement their alignment beliefs... but unless said kingdom rules the entire world and in fact brings about well being for all... nothing has been proven and it exists in a state of possibility...



pemerton said:


> I don't know what exactly Gygax intended with his outer planar sceme - did he mean that Olympus is populated by people who have the CG outlook (seems feasible) or that Olympus is a place where the claims of CG people are true (seems uttery infeasible when generalised, as I've just argued)?




Gygay states in the 1e DMG... "However, the "outer
planes" show various alignments. This is because they are home to
creatures who are of like general alignment."




pemerton said:


> But it's the second approach that is picked up in Planescape and has continued since, and that is what produces the incoherence. A similar question - are devils happy or miserable? Gygax's Appendix IV leaves it open that devils are miserable, because in fact wellbeing is a real thing and living in a place where the most powerful people don't care about others' wellbeing would be horrible. But Planescape and onwards present a realm where the devils are happy with their situation ie where wellbeing is being created. This is incoherent - if the Nine Hells succeed in generating wellbeing via harsh discipline then they show the truth of (a particular view within) LG, not LE!




I think you're off in your view of Planescape, at least as I understand it... the multiverse is a consensus reality... which means that Olympus is what the consensus of the multiverse (not just inhabitants of Olympus) believe it to be at the start state of the campaign setting.  You seem to be treating Olympus as some kind of isolated pocket dimension that is only shaped by those who reside in it and thus must be "true", but as I understand PS, this is wrong.

To touch on your comment about Devil's... Devil's don't value well being...
from the 1e DMG...   
"Evil, on the other hand, does not concern itself with rights or
happiness; purpose is the determinant."

LAWFUL EVIL: Obviously, all order is not good, nor are all laws beneficial.
Lawful evil creatures consider order as the means by which each group is
properly placed in the cosmos, from lowest to highest, strongest first,
weakest last. Good is seen as an excuse to promote the mediocrity of the
whole and suppress the better and more capable, while lawful evilness
allows each group to structure itself and fix its place as compared to
others, serving the stronger but being served by the weaker."

Evil cares nothing for well being...So I guess in the sense that Devil's want a place where proper place from weakest to strongest is enforced and the weaker server the stronger... then yes they would be "happy" (not sure I would use this word but you chose it)... but as stated by Gygax well being isn't a consideration in that "happiness" whatsoever.


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## I'm A Banana (May 15, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Because of alignment. It's that simple for me. Alignment is objective in DND. There's no subjectivity at all. The universe says that if you generally do X then you are alignment Y. What you believe doesn't matter and no amount of belief changes that any more than trying to believe that rain is not wet.
> 
> Which makes DND a very poor game for any sort of philosophical debate. There are other systems much better auited for this.




Dwarves have beards in D&D, but Dark Sun dwarves are hairless.

Golems are monsters in D&D, but Eberron makes them PC's.

Halflings are hobbits in D&D, but Dragonlance makes them kender.

Drow are evil in D&D, but Forgotten Realms make them possibly good. 

Alignment is objective in D&D, but Planescape makes it more consensus-based and socially bound.

Whenever you play in a D&D setting, you're going to be changing D&D (more honestly, Greyhawk) assumptions, and alignment isn't somehow any less removable from D&D/Greyhawk than dwarf-beards or hobbits.

If you never want to play a D&D without objective alignment, that's fine enough, but I *promise* you that others will and it will be for-real D&D using the D&D system and it will not be a problem for them.


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## Rejuvenator (May 15, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> The PS idea is that a plane of Lawful-Neutral-Good only exists because people in the setting believe that it exists. So it doesn't exist on its own merits per se, but it also doesn't exist just to fill in a peg on an alignment wheel.



I guess so. IIRC, 5e states that the Great Wheel (the default cosmology) is metaphysical. That is, the planes aren't literally next to each other in a wheel. Now we know the designers had purposesfully designed the planes to go clockwise in order of incremental alignment. And we know that in-game, learned planar sages have also discovered the metaphysical structure of the Great Wheel. How do they explain this metaphysical construct without also acknowledging the existence of Lawful Neutral, Lawful Neutral-Good, and Lawful Good? Objective good and evil is one thing, but Lawful Neutral-Good is like levels and xp; that's a metagame construct that's awkward to acknowledge by PC's in-game.

So to go back to your first sentence above ("The PS idea is that a plane of Lawful-Neutral-Good only exists because people in the setting believe that it exists'), does Arcadia exist as a plane of Lawful-Neutral-Good, because mortals understand Lawful-Neutral-Good (relative to Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral) or because they value the inherent merits manifested in Arcadia?


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## I'm A Banana (May 15, 2015)

Trying not to flood the thread...




			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> Kamikaze Midget said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




It is literally one of the definitions of the word in the American Heritage dictionary (I checked!). The idea that using a word consistent with an understood meaning is somehow "contentious" is kind of incomprehensibly absurd to me. How else am I meant to use it?

Alternately, you could be claiming that the contentious part is "without regarding that as inherently admirable or undesirable," which is equally befuddling for me.

"He made a generous donation to our cause": clearly admirable.
"She is certainly generous with her affections, the trollop.": clearly undesirable.
"Be careful with your generosity, my love, lest we go hungry on account of it.": more ambiguous. 

All three express generosity as a liberality or willingness to give, but have very different judgements on whether that liberality or willingness to give called generosity is admirable, undesirable, or somewhere a little in between. 

I don't see what is contentious about claiming that words have multiple meanings and values depending on their context. 



			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> The bit of PS that I find verging on incoherent, and mostly unmotivated, is the bit where it says that people's believing Bahamut to be good makes it so.




The force of good in PS doesn't exist outside of the consensus deeming something to be good and ascribing to it that force, so there can be no other source of Bahamut's goodness as determined by alignment spells and talismans and whatnot. If the consensus shifts, then he is, by that definition, not good any more, even if he has not changed anything that he does. 



			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> I also find the irrationality worrying: if I am currently labelled "good", and hence vulnerable to the Talisman of Pure Evil, I have to (i) concede that I am good (the evidence of the Talisman affecting me is sufficient for that), but you are saying that I can also (ii) try and persuade everyone (including myself?) that I am really not good, thereby changing the social consensus and hence the effects of the Talisman. It seems that (ii) requires me lying to others, ore else deluding myself (eg by denying that I am vunerable to the Talisman).




In this example, you're not being delusional by denying your goodness, you're asserting that the consensus view of "good" - what powers the talisman - is not what it should be, if it includes you. Because words have multiple meanings, and you're out to change what "good" means.


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## Fralex (May 15, 2015)

pemerton said:


> In my sketch of Gygaxian alignment above I left out LN and CN. (I also left out NG and NE, but that's because I think they're completely uninteresting. They're purely products of grid-fetishism, but don't describe any distinctive evaluative outlooks. NG is basically CG-lite, and NE is basically LE-lite.)
> 
> LN, as I read Gygax's alignment descriptions, is rules fetishism. Hence, it's a type of moral failing of the LG: the conviction that wellbeing can be maximised by social order gets corrupted into an obsession with order for its own sake. It's the vice of bureacrats. As for a plane full of LN people - as per my comment upthread about devils, it should be a miserable place. If, in fact, all that order was making them happy, then it would be an instance of order fostering welfare and hence a proof of the truth of LG!




And that just brings me back to my confusion over what LN actually means. If it creates misery, then in Mechanus LN is the "chump" alignment, for people who just do what they're told even if it makes them unhappy and doesn't appear to make anyone else happy except their leader. That means Primus is really LE for not caring that His subjects are miserable, and it really speaks volumes that these subjects are essentially robots, the perfect "chumps" who will always do what they're told and their creators don't need to feel sorry for their slavery because they're not really alive. So by this logic you can make LN people be slaves who have given up any hope that their lives could be better and have just accepted their place in the world, or weirdly neurotic types who are obsessed with rules and tradition for their own sake. But you can't have any LN _leaders_, people who are champions of their alignments, because anyone who tries to make people adopt the alignment of slaves, robots, and (worst of all??) bureaucrats who isn't doing it in service to some greater power is just taking advantage of them, or at the very least taking away their freedom in exchange for nothing, and that would make them lawful evil, not neutral. And I guess maybe you _can_ have people like that, insisting everyone is just the servant of someone higher up, but most of the people I can think of insisting on that are really just doing it to trick others into obeying them for no reason.

I... I guess I'm saying that the Lawful Neutral alignment is a pyramid scheme created by Lawful Evil creatures?


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## Imaro (May 16, 2015)

Fralex said:


> And that just brings me back to my confusion over what LN actually means. If it creates misery, then in Mechanus LN is the "chump" alignment, for people who just do what they're told even if it makes them unhappy and doesn't appear to make anyone else happy except their leader. That means Primus is really LE for not caring that His subjects are miserable, and it really speaks volumes that these subjects are essentially robots, the perfect "chumps" who will always do what they're told and their creators don't need to feel sorry for their slavery because they're not really alive. So by this logic you can make LN people be slaves who have given up any hope that their lives could be better and have just accepted their place in the world, or weirdly neurotic types who are obsessed with rules and tradition for their own sake. But you can't have any LN _leaders_, people who are champions of their alignments, because anyone who tries to make people adopt the alignment of slaves, robots, and (worst of all??) bureaucrats who isn't doing it in service to some greater power is just taking advantage of them, or at the very least taking away their freedom in exchange for nothing, and that would make them lawful evil, not neutral. And I guess maybe you _can_ have people like that, insisting everyone is just the servant of someone higher up, but most of the people I can think of insisting on that are really just doing it to trick others into obeying them for no reason.
> 
> I... I guess I'm saying that the Lawful Neutral alignment is a pyramid scheme created by Lawful Evil creatures?




This is what the 1e DMG says...

LAWFUL NEUTRAL: It is the view of this alignment that law and order give
purpose and meaning to everything. Without regimentation and strict definition,
there would be no purpose in the cosmos. Therefore, whether a law
is good or evil is of no import as long as it brings order and meaning

My interpretation of this would be that those of LN alignment are first and foremost concerned with order and meaning... not misery or well being, those could/might be byproducts of an ordered and meaningful life but are not in and of themselves desirable or undesirable for LN creatures...some would say this is very similar to the romanticized version of the samurai's code of Bushido... where duty is paramount... 

In other words your view above seems to assume that in following rules only misery is created for those that do so...but that's false... both misery and well being are created but neither are considered a primary concern to one of LN alignment since what is most important is whether order and meaning have been imposed by the following of said law.  

As to whether you can have a LN leader arise... I would say most soldiers are trained, especially in the heat of battle to follow orders without question... now whether that results in misery or well being is dependent upon whether the LN commander giving the orders is tactically adept or not... however I think more misery would result if every soldier just did whatever they wanted to regardless of what they were commanded to... and thus I could easily see societies, cultures, etc... especially in a world as dangerous as default D&D adopting a LN alignment without necessarily being miserable and in fact even believing their very lives and well being depended upon it.


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## Rejuvenator (May 16, 2015)

pemerton said:


> An interesting challenge for using the Gygaxian scheme as a set of labels for outlooks - which I've argued it _can_ be used for, though it's not perfect by any means - is what to do once the game actually starts, the world is put into motion, and various truths become evident. For instance, suppose that in my game, due to whatever factors (the ideological biases of the participants, the roll of the dice, whatever) it turns out that social structures are nothing but a source of misery. Then, in that game, the Lawful Good have been refuted! Their belief - that social order will be maximising of well-being - has been shown to be false. They can stick to their guns if they like, but (within that game) most morally decent people are going to judge them as deluded or worse.
> 
> Gygax gives no advice on this, and I don't recall ever seeing any in any D&D book. But it seems to me that, if we want to use the alignment system as a way of loosely characterising a variety of recognisable moral/behavioural outlooks, this is the number one question that is going to come up in play!



I agree with everything else you wrote in your post, but this one is arguable to me. I think that, if Alignment is used at the gaming table, then the DM and players accept the premise of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos as universal truths. If the table accepts the D&Dism, it is incumbent upon the DM to use whatever pseudo-theology and pseudo-philosophy to counteract this hypothetical emerging narrative that social structures must be a source of misery. It's a fantasy, after all, so you can make whatever utopian facts you need to dispute the PC's subjective opinion about the merits of law and order.

Just like a lot of other various "truths" become evident in D&D, which Gygax gives no advice on. If you can use fantasy to handwave other bits of implausibility in D&D, I think the same applies here. (If exploring such themes is far more important to your gaming table than sticking to the Alignment system, then obviously the Alignment will get tossed out.)

Alignment strikes me as somewhat like phrenology, astrology, etc. which happens to be truth in the fiction. When there's an apparent conflict between the predicative and the actual, the narrative is twisted to make it fit. This may or may not be satisfying to the players.


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## Hussar (May 16, 2015)

Imaro said:


> As I replied to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] above... Misdirection totally nullifies the reliability of the Detect spells... and on the divine side there is another low level spell called Undetectable Alignment... that makes the Detect good/evil/law/chaos spells useless.




But why would you cast any of those on yourself and then detect your own alignment?


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## Hussar (May 16, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Dwarves have beards in D&D, but Dark Sun dwarves are hairless.
> 
> Golems are monsters in D&D, but Eberron makes them PC's.
> 
> ...




I repeatedly stated that this was all for me.  I was in no way trying to claim that this isn't D&D.  It's just that _I_ would never use D&D for this.  Again, 100% for me, D&D is a terrible fit for this type of gaming.


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## Imaro (May 16, 2015)

Hussar said:


> But why would you cast any of those on yourself and then detect your own alignment?




The point is that you can never be sure whether you are or are not operating under the Misdirection spell cast by someone else when you cast detect "whatever" on yourself... and thus it is not infallible.


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## Trickster Spirit (May 16, 2015)

View attachment 68380


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## Shasarak (May 16, 2015)

Hussar said:


> But why would you cast any of those on yourself and then detect your own alignment?




Because you are CN?


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## pemerton (May 16, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Alternately, you could be claiming that the contentious part is "without regarding that as inherently admirable or undesirable,"



Correct. _Generous_ is a term of commendation. To commend something without regarding it as admirable is not an easy thing to do.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> "He made a generous donation to our cause": clearly admirable.
> "She is certainly generous with her affections, the trollop.": clearly undesirable.
> "Be careful with your generosity, my love, lest we go hungry on account of it.": more ambiguous.



These examples are a little hard to engage with, consistent with board rules. That said:

The second example is probably ironic - it's analogous to Satan saying "Evil, be thou my good".

The third example concerns a weighing of goods. Generosity doesn't cease to be a good when someone is overly generous - the issue is that the person is neglecting other goods - in your example, providing for those to whom duties of support are owed.

Notice that nothing in your example precludes the 1st and 3rd examples being descriptions of exactly the same act!



Kamikaze Midget said:


> All three express generosity as a liberality or willingness to give, but have very different judgements on whether that liberality or willingness to give called generosity is admirable, undesirable, or somewhere a little in between.



Putting the ironic case to one side - in general, if something is a virtue, and hence admirable (in this case, generosity) it doesn't follow that every manifestation of the virtue in action is a good thing.  Both real life and literature are replete with examples where virtue leads to trouble due to naive enthusiasm.

That doesn't mean that the virtue ceases to be one.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> The force of good in PS doesn't exist outside of the consensus deeming something to be good and ascribing to it that force, so there can be no other source of Bahamut's goodness as determined by alignment spells and talismans and whatnot.



As far as I can see, _Bahamut's goodness_ here doesn't denote any actual property of his (eg his propensity to generosity, to humility, to righting wrongs, etc). That is to say, this instance of the phrase _Bahamut's goodness_ has no deep resemblance to the phrase _Percival's goodness_ (used to explain why he succeeded in the Grail quest) or _The goodness of the person who donated a kidney to a stranger_, used to refer to a person's generosity and willingness to aid a stranger.

It simply refers to a game-construct that governs the operation of a relatively small handful of magical effects that are in the game as legacy consequences of a different conception of alignment.

I don't see the point.

Suppose that (for whatever reason) a majority of the NPCs in PS decide that Demogorogn is "good" and Bahamut "evil", and so the polarity of all those magical effects is reversed. But Bahamut is still noble and generous, and Demogorgon still a vicious brute. Why would that be important?



Kamikaze Midget said:


> In this example, you're not being delusional by denying your goodness, you're asserting that the consensus view of "good" - what powers the talisman - is not what it should be, if it includes you. Because words have multiple meanings, and you're out to change what "good" means.



If the word "good", by social consensus, denotes X; then what reason can I have for saying that it _should_ denote Y.

Consider a real world example. _Tree_, in English, denotes trees. _Refrigerator_ denotes fridges. Someone who though that trees should be called fridges, and that fridges should be called trees, would be pretty weird. What possible reason could s/he have? Suppose, via mass mail-outs, or mind control, or whatever, this person actually succeeds, so now English speakers call fridges trees and trees fridges. What meaningful thing about the world has changed?


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## pemerton (May 16, 2015)

Fralex said:


> And that just brings me back to my confusion over what LN actually means. If it creates misery, then in Mechanus LN is the "chump" alignment, for people who just do what they're told even if it makes them unhappy and doesn't appear to make anyone else happy except their leader. That means Primus is really LE for not caring that His subjects are miserable
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



I can see the argument, and I think that would be an interesting thing to explore in a game. (Think of a game where we try to find out whether Kafka or Orwell was right about totalitarian bureaucracy.)

But I don't think the analysis you put forward is _inevitable_. (If it was, then there would be no game to play, because we'd already know that Orwell was right.)

_Evil_ (as defined by Gygax) is about pursing self-interest with disregard for the well-being of others.

But in your scenario, the chief bureaucrat need not be pursuing self-interest. If s/he is a genuine order fetishist, then s/he is pursuing something external to him/her, which s/he accepts as a limit to his/her will, and hence is not evil. It's just that the thing s/he's pursuing is not wellbeing - it's social organisation per se. So s/he's making people miserable, but not because s/he's evil.

(For an example, in literature, of someone who makes people miserable but at least arguably isn't evil in Gygax's sense, consider Pyle in _The Quiet American_.)



Rejuvenator said:


> I think that, if Alignment is used at the gaming table, then the DM and players accept the premise of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos as universal truths.



I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "universal truths".

I think that the table has to accept that LG describes a person who thinks that order promotes wellbeing; that CG describes a person who thinks that freedom promotes wellbeing; that LE people create exploitative hierarchies through which they can exercise power; that CE people are immoral self-aggrandizers; etc.

But I don't think the table has to accept that LG and CG people are all true in their beliefs. That is what leads to incoherence, because to be LG means to deny that CG beliefs are true (and vice versa), which means that if the gameworld begins from the premise that both LG and CG beliefs are true, it has a contradiction built in on the ground floor.

As long as you don't build that contradiction into your game, I think alignment is, while not perfect (because Law and Chaos are not very well-defined and the notion of Good covers a range of potentially conflicting theories of wellbeing), serviceable enough.

To give another example (this time hypothetical rather than from actual play): dwarves are LG, meaning that they pursue wellbeing through social order; elves are CG, meaning that they pursue wellbeing through self-realisation. It would be interesting to play a game in which these rival political and social conceptions are put to the test - whose social structure _really_ conduces to wellbeing?

But if the game stipulates from the outset that both social orders do so - that dwarves flourish under orderly conditions, and elves flourish under conditions of flighty freedom - then there is no alignment disagreement. The difference between the social structures would have no more significance than the fact that schools in Australia make the children wear hats when the play outside, but schools in Scotland (I imagine) do not.


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## pemerton (May 16, 2015)

Imaro said:


> Evil cares nothing for well being



Evil people care nothing for the wellbeing of others. They certainly care about their _own_ wellbeing, though! They care about it so much that they are prepared to do anything to achieve it, even if that means running roughshod over the wellbeing of others.



Imaro said:


> Why is this incoherent since we are not stating that either has been proven to be 100% true... all we are stating is that the possibility exists that social order *can* maximise human well being and that the posibility exists that the best route to well being *can* be self-realisation largely free of social constraint



In that case, there is no interesting conflict between LG and CG, and in fact NG has turned out to be the correct account of how to maximise wellbeing!



Imaro said:


> Gygax states in the 1e DMG... "However, the "outer planes" show various alignments. This is because they are home to creatures who are of like general alignment."



But this doesn't entail that the outer planes manifest the truth of their alignments. For instance, this tells us that people in Olympus believe that the path to good is freedom. It doesn't tell us that they are correct. 

I don't know what Gygax pesonally believed about these matters in play, but his framework as he writes it, it is possible to have a game in which a paladin goes to Olympus and explains to Zeus that in fact the lack of social order in Olympus is making everyone miserable (eg they keep getting into pointless arguments because there are no rules to settle when it is or isn't OK for Zeus to sleep with cows, for queens to compare their beauty and skill to the various godesses, etc). And for Zeus to then say, "Yep, you're right, we were wrong all along. Please help us right a sensible set of social rules that we can implement."

In the campaign, the paladin (and his/her players) would have vindicated the truth of LG by showing the Olympians that social order actually makes life better. (It would be roughly the opposite of the campaign I described upthread, where the PCs had to depart from the rules laid down by heaven in order to bring an end to human misery. In Gygaxian terms, that was a campaign in which CG (or perhaps NG) was shown to be true and strict LG false.)


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## Hussar (May 16, 2015)

Imaro said:


> The point is that you can never be sure whether you are or are not operating under the Misdirection spell cast by someone else when you cast detect "whatever" on yourself... and thus it is not infallible.




Sorry, but, while Misdirection would affect a "Detect Evil", it has no effect on Know Alignment, since it only affects spells that detect auras. ... That being said, isn't there a Know Alignment spell in 3e?  I just checked the SRD, and couldn't find one.  Was it removed since 2e?  Jeez, learn something new every day.

But, also, since spells like Misdirection only affect detection spells, there are easy ways around that.  Place Evil Bane on the crown (after all, who wants an evil king) and every day the king puts his crown on.  If his head doesn't melt, then he's still good.  An Evil Bane Pin, prick the finger of the king and know for sure.  Heck, Glyph of Warding can be set to Good alignment triggers.  If the king puts on the crown, and his head explodes, guess he wasn't good anymore, and I hope the king's days are short since Non-detection doesn't last that long.

IOW, for everything you could try to make the test fallible, there are a dozen ways to get around it.

But, again, this is really not my point.

----------

_Caveat:  The following is purely my own opinion and ONLY APPLIES to me, Hussar.  It is not meant to apply to anyone else.  Only me.  I hope this makes it perfectly clear that I am only speaking for myself and not any greater or broader truth.  All that lies after this point is solely the opinion of Hussar_

((I hate that I have to put that caveat on there, but, sheesh, I've been accused like three times so far of trying to claim badwrongfun when that is not my point.))

For me, D&D is a game of Heroic Fantasy.  It says so right on the tin.  And D&D does this extremely well.  If I want to do Conan, or Tolkien, or Cook's Black Company, D&D would be my go to game.  OTOH, there are things that I don't feel D&D does really well.  If I wanted to run a court intrigue game, for example, I would not use D&D.  Say the PC wants to influence the court in order to pressure the king to do X.  D&D's skill system is too simplistic for my purposes, and the magic system is too pervasive.  Trying to abstract D&D's skill system across several weeks of effort just doesn't work for me.  4e comes close with its skill challenge system, but, again, that's really clunky compared to other games out there.  For another example, if I wanted to do Call of Cthulu, with its descent into madness and PC's that will inevitably always fail and fall (hopefully in spectacularly interesting ways) I would not use D&D.  The trajectory of a D&D character is opposite to what I want to happen to a Call of Cthulu character. CoC characters don't get more powerful as they progress, they get weaker and usually a lot deader.  

Which rolls me back to Planescape.  The idea of using an RPG to explore morality is an interesting one to me.  I did it a couple of years back using another system called Sufficiently Advanced.  I think it succeeded.  Although it did get a bit silly at the end with the PC's saving the galaxy through the use of a very stretchy invisible whale scrotum.  Sigh.  So much for serious toned gaming.    But, again, Sufficiently Advanced, for me, is a much better system for something like this.  Using the above example of someone convincing a group of people to change their beliefs and thus causing the area to shift to another plane, would be, again IMO, better handled by a skill resolution system that can scale between minutes, hours, days, months and even years.  There are games out there that do have systems that can do this.

Am I saying that you cannot do it in D&D?  No, of course not.  Obviously that's not true since lots of people like Planescape and it does what they want it to do.  For me, it doesn't.  I would be fighting the system every step of the way, either as a player or a DM.  To me, D&D doesn't come with that particular toolset.  There are other games that do.  As I've stated already, I would be interested in the Planescape setting if it was ported into another system that wasn't designed for heroic fantasy.


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## I'm A Banana (May 16, 2015)

Hussar said:


> I repeatedly stated that this was all for me.  I was in no way trying to claim that this isn't D&D.  It's just that _I_ would never use D&D for this.  Again, 100% for me, D&D is a terrible fit for this type of gaming.




I guess I don't understand why you would use D&D to play in a game without hobbits (for instance), but not in a game with consensus alignment. I don't understand why the latter is DEFINING of D&D to you to the extent that if you want to do that you are better off not doing D&D and the former is more open to being done in D&D. 

I mean, you can decide whatever's out or in of D&D for you and I'm not really disputing it, I just can't see the logic in there myself (and maybe I don't have to!).


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## Beleriphon (May 16, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Which rolls me back to Planescape.  The idea of using an RPG to explore morality is an interesting one to me.  I did it a couple of years back using another system called Sufficiently Advanced.  I think it succeeded.  Although it did get a bit silly at the end with the PC's saving the galaxy through the use of a very stretchy invisible whale scrotum.  Sigh.  So much for serious toned gaming.    But, again, Sufficiently Advanced, for me, is a much better system for something like this.  Using the above example of someone convincing a group of people to change their beliefs and thus causing the area to shift to another plane, would be, again IMO, better handled by a skill resolution system that can scale between minutes, hours, days, months and even years.  There are games out there that do have systems that can do this.
> 
> Am I saying that you cannot do it in D&D?  No, of course not.  Obviously that's not true since lots of people like Planescape and it does what they want it to do.  For me, it doesn't.  I would be fighting the system every step of the way, either as a player or a DM.  To me, D&D doesn't come with that particular toolset.  There are other games that do.  As I've stated already, I would be interested in the Planescape setting if it was ported into another system that wasn't designed for heroic fantasy.




I'd actually argue that Planescape isn't about morality, or even the fight between Good and Evil. Its about Belief. That's the whole point of the Factions, they Believe in something. The Dustmen genuinely believe that death isn't True Death, and that only through denial of emtion and want can one achieve True Death and escape the Turning of the Wheel. The Fated are the ultimate social darwinists, to the point that their leader honestly believed that he could take Sigil from the Lady of Pain.

The Harmonium caused and entire layer Arborea to shift to Mechanus through belief (not that they meant to). Planescape isn't about morality or ethics. Its about belief at both the smallest and grandest scales. No where else in D&D can you believe a person into being by getting enough people to believe in them. I'm not even sure most of the things that Planescape are about actually require a skill system, it does require willing players, and a DM that is looking to explore those kinds of events. Most of the stuff Planescape is about is really about the players exploring the world, rather than the characters.


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## Hussar (May 16, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> I guess I don't understand why you would use D&D to play in a game without hobbits (for instance), but not in a game with consensus alignment. I don't understand why the latter is DEFINING of D&D to you to the extent that if you want to do that you are better off not doing D&D and the former is more open to being done in D&D.
> 
> I mean, you can decide whatever's out or in of D&D for you and I'm not really disputing it, I just can't see the logic in there myself (and maybe I don't have to!).




To me consensus alignment makes no sense. I mean heck, you gave an example where the beliefs of a group shifts a part of one realm into another. But that's not consensus alignment. They were wrong. If they were right then why did they get booted to another plane?  If they were right, shouldn't they have been able to stay?

You can't have objective consensus. To me alignment is objective. It doesn't work if it's not. I loathed the old 2e take on alignment that tried to be relative but never actually did it. 

For me, Planescape pretty much hit everything wrong with 2e. Playing without Hobbits?  That's easy. But tring to have a game about morality where the game itself predefined that morality is pointless.


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## I'm A Banana (May 16, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Putting the ironic case to one side - in general, if something is a virtue, and hence admirable (in this case, generosity) it doesn't follow that every manifestation of the virtue in action is a good thing.  Both real life and literature are replete with examples where virtue leads to trouble due to naive enthusiasm.




If it is not a good thing in a particular instance then how can it be said to be a virtue? If there are instances when it is not a good thing, then only by ignoring those instances can we say that it is a virtue. It clearly isn't at all times a virtue. 

This seems so nakedly obvious to me in the common use of language and value judgments that I'm having a hard time believing you truly don't understand this. 



> As far as I can see, _Bahamut's goodness_ here doesn't denote any actual property of his (eg his propensity to generosity, to humility, to righting wrongs, etc).
> ...
> It simply refers to a game-construct that governs the operation of a relatively small handful of magical effects that are in the game as legacy consequences of a different conception of alignment.




That's fairly true in PS - Bahamut's goodness is a property of what people believe to be true about him, not a quality of his that exists without others there to place it upon him.



> Suppose that (for whatever reason) a majority of the NPCs in PS decide that Demogorogn is "good" and Bahamut "evil", and so the polarity of all those magical effects is reversed. But Bahamut is still noble and generous, and Demogorgon still a vicious brute. Why would that be important?




It probably wouldn't be. I'd question why a character in PS would want to flip those definitions, aside from semantics. 



> If the word "good", by social consensus, denotes X; then what reason can I have for saying that it _should_ denote Y.




This might be a more nuanced position. One might believe that "good" should be compatible, say, coercive mind control in the interests of social unity, because one believes that this goal is consistent with one's conscience (others are suffering without our society!), with one's duty to society (those who can't participate participate in it should be convinced to participate in it!) or with helping others according to their needs (those people aren't better off without our civilization...this is for their own good) - that the angels and the archons should support coercive mind control just as they support charity and self-sacrifice and all the other things people ascribe to "good." 

If that then becomes the case that the consensus believes coercive mind control to be "good," you will dramatically change the planes (at least drawing many of the Lawful planes into some of the Lawful Good planes, probably!), and coercive mind control will be another instrument in the tools of the angels and societies will likely become more peaceful and orderly and such. The exact ramifications are open to individual table interpretation. 



> Consider a real world example. _Tree_, in English, denotes trees. _Refrigerator_ denotes fridges. Someone who though that trees should be called fridges, and that fridges should be called trees, would be pretty weird. What possible reason could s/he have? Suppose, via mass mail-outs, or mind control, or whatever, this person actually succeeds, so now English speakers call fridges trees and trees fridges. What meaningful thing about the world has changed?




It would in large part depend upon this person's reason for being pretty weird like that. At the very least, people would have a deeper understanding of the arbitrariness of language and the power of one person to influence it. 

But this also seems like theorycraft - there's no explanation for why someone would believe that these words should mean different things. Given a strong enough motivation, maybe there would be other effects, but that would depend on the core element of a PS character that you've left out here - their belief in why this should be.


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## Imaro (May 16, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Evil people care nothing for the wellbeing of others. They certainly care about their _own_ wellbeing, though! They care about it so much that they are prepared to do anything to achieve it, even if that means running roughshod over the wellbeing of others.




Some... but we aren't talking about just "people" when it comes to the D&D worlds... as an example,in the 4e cosmology demons don't care about the well being of anything and wish to destroy everything... including themselves.



pemerton said:


> In that case, there is no interesting conflict between LG and CG, and in fact NG has turned out to be the correct account of how to maximise wellbeing!




Wait what?  The interesting conflicct is in determining, through play, whose beliefs (if any) are correct (in the sense that they set the paradigm for the multiverse).  I also fail to see how having not proven that LG or CG is the "correct" belief automatically defaults to NG is the correct belief... none are until it is proven/decided.



pemerton said:


> But this doesn't entail that the outer planes manifest the truth of their alignments. For instance, this tells us that people in Olympus believe that the path to good is freedom. It doesn't tell us that they are correct.




Exactly the point of Planescape play is to determine whose belefs are correct (in the way I outlined above)... if it was already decided there would be no point to playing.



pemerton said:


> I don't know what Gygax pesonally believed about these matters in play, but his framework as he writes it, it is possible to have a game in which a paladin goes to Olympus and explains to Zeus that in fact the lack of social order in Olympus is making everyone miserable (eg they keep getting into pointless arguments because there are no rules to settle when it is or isn't OK for Zeus to sleep with cows, for queens to compare their beauty and skill to the various godesses, etc). And for Zeus to then say, "Yep, you're right, we were wrong all along. Please help us right a sensible set of social rules that we can implement."
> 
> In the campaign, the paladin (and his/her players) would have vindicated the truth of LG by showing the Olympians that social order actually makes life better. (It would be roughly the opposite of the campaign I described upthread, where the PCs had to depart from the rules laid down by heaven in order to bring an end to human misery. In Gygaxian terms, that was a campaign in which CG (or perhaps NG) was shown to be true and strict LG false.)





And IMO this is perfectly in line with Planescape and what I, (and I believe @_*Kamikaze Midget*_ and others) have been stating all along.  But let's be clear... this scenario only proves, once Zeus and enough of the gods concedes, that LG is now correct for Olympus... not that LG is an objectively correct choice for anywhere else... 

It is also possible that a member of the Free League later comes along beats said paladin in a trial by combat, using dirty tricks and breaking the rules, and then convinces Zeus and the other gods that Olympus has been diminished and shackled by accepting the paladins laws and that only by throwing off these pointless bureaucratic chains, and even the hierarchy of the pantheon itself can Olympus rise to it's true potential... if they accept his beliefs, CG could now be the correct choice on Olympus... and so on.


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## I'm A Banana (May 16, 2015)

Hussar said:


> To me consensus alignment makes no sense. I mean heck, you gave an example where the beliefs of a group shifts a part of one realm into another. But that's not consensus alignment. They were wrong. If they were right then why did they get booted to another plane?  If they were right, shouldn't they have been able to stay?




They were wrong only because the consensus judged them wrong (they didn't convince enough people that they were doing things that should be called "good"). If they want to go back, they have to convince more people to believe that what they are doing isn't any different than what the angels are doing and maybe should be called good, too. 



> You can't have objective consensus. To me alignment is objective. It doesn't work if it's not. I loathed the old 2e take on alignment that tried to be relative but never actually did it.
> 
> For me, Planescape pretty much hit everything wrong with 2e. Playing without Hobbits?  That's easy. But tring to have a game about morality where the game itself predefined that morality is pointless.




I think the thing is that Planescape's take on alignments got rid of predefined morality, without getting rid of alignments as magical forces. An angel striking you down with the divine power of pure goodness was striking you down with the power of all the uncountable zillions of people who believe that anges weild the power of pure goodness, rather than just "goodness." 

For me, it's as easy to play D&D without objective alignments as it is to play D&D without bearded dwarves or whatever - it's just another setting-dependent thing I can change as I see fit. 

....but out of curiosity, would you play a Planescape game that just didn't have alignments? Kept the heavens, the hells, even the "map" (as unreal as that map is), but nothing to write on your character sheet, no _detect_ spells, no magical talismans of good/evil, etc.?


----------



## FormerlyHemlock (May 16, 2015)

pemerton said:


> It simply refers to a game-construct that governs the operation of a relatively small handful of magical effects that are in the game as legacy consequences of a different conception of alignment.
> 
> I don't see the point.
> 
> Suppose that (for whatever reason) a majority of the NPCs in PS decide that Demogorogn is "good" and Bahamut "evil", and so the polarity of all those magical effects is reversed. But Bahamut is still noble and generous, and Demogorgon still a vicious brute. Why would that be important?




I don't use the PS model of alignment, but nevertheless will comment:

It's not "important" unless the players make it important. It's just part of gameworld physics, like binary gravity. For me, that's why I usually ignore alignment unless alignment-related effects come into play (sentient weapons, etc.).

To use your terminology, alignment in my games is not epiphenomenal, but in practice it is pretty close to it. Occasionally players ask what alignment their actions are and I render a verdict, but that happens at a metagame level.


----------



## Parmandur (May 16, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> ....but out of curiosity, would you play a Planescape game that just didn't have alignments? Kept the heavens, the hells, even the "map" (as unreal as that map is), but nothing to write on your character sheet, no _detect_ spells, no magical talismans of good/evil, etc.?






Not to speak for  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] but this actually summarizes the way I feel about it precisely.  Those D&D-isms are there pretty much to eliminate moral questions like "should we kill the Orc baby?" if I recall what Gygax said about the matter correctly (not in the rules, but a latter gloss).  In order to make these issues really open, those would be best removed to make the questions more and grey than black and white.


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## steeldragons (May 16, 2015)

Wow. So those demons are pretty sweet, huh? 

What might be kind of Wonderland (and frankly kinda cool) if the whole thing is a myconid/or evil Zuggtmoy controlled mushroom/spore hallucination.

Yeenoghu is the Mad Hatter throwing a tea party (but is really just some derro nut), Fraz and Juiblex in the March Hare and Door Mouse roles (c'mon Juiblex popping a gooey "head"/eye out of a tea pot and unable to stay awake? That's some adventure gold right there). Grazzt, obviously, is the quaggoth that thinks he's elfin royalty and in the role of the Jack, with Orcus is in the Queen of Hearts role - but simply, beneath the illusion/hallucination the mind flayer. A disappearing Baphomet lounging about on tree branches reciting Cheshire Cat rhymes and riddles. Demongorgon is Tweedles Dee & Dum, arguing with each other, who, beneath the illusion are those two goblins with the silly names.

So, actually, there is no invasion of the abyssal lords. Just a bad magical (illusion) mushroom trip...while Zuggtmoy is trying to getaway with some scheme.


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## Fralex (May 16, 2015)

steeldragons said:


> Wow. So those demons are pretty sweet, huh?
> 
> What might be kind of Wonderland (and frankly kinda cool) if the whole thing is a myconid/or evil Zuggtmoy controlled mushroom/spore hallucination.
> 
> ...




Yeah, but make it really ambiguous whether this is all real or not. Oh, and if the characters previously played in another adventure, have several of the weird NPCs be _suspiciously similar_ to NPCs from the surface world!


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## steeldragons (May 16, 2015)

Fralex said:


> Yeah, but make it really ambiguous whether this is all real or not. Oh, and if the characters previously played in another adventure, have several of the weird NPCs be _suspiciously similar_ to NPCs from the surface world!




Totally. Like, here's your Wonderland...but through Abyss-colored glasses...Make the party say, "But I thought we were supposed to be in the underdark? What's with this red cloudy sky and sulfur-scented shortbreads that say "Eat me"? Oh! There's a drow in a waistcoat...he's going to the underdark for sure! We follow him into that hole..."

DM: You come out into a cavern of natural columns. DERRO AMBUSH! [combat combat] Round one's finished. You notice the "columns" are actual stone trees, with actual branches and "leaves" of rocks and crystal colors. The derro are gone. And you hear a low rumbly chuckle from somewhere up in the branches.

PC: Wait...Where'd this forest of stone trees come from? Where'd the derro go? What do you mean we're still in the same room?...and where's that laughing coming from? "

Actually, now, I'm seeing Grazzt as the catepillar...lounging about on a giant mushroom cap, smoking his hookah...kinda looking and sounding like "Him" from the Powerpuff Girls. hahaha.


Well, least I know how I'm re-writing things if i don't like what I see.


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## Fralex (May 16, 2015)

steeldragons said:


> Totally. Like, here's your Wonderland...but through Abyss-colored glasses...Make the party say, "But I thought we were supposed to be in the underdark? What's with this red cloudy sky and sulfur-scented shortbreads that say "Eat me"? Oh! There's a drow in a waistcoat...he's going to the underdark for sure! We follow him into that hole..."
> 
> DM: You come out into a cavern of natural columns. DERRO AMBUSH! [combat combat] Round one's finished. You notice the "columns" are actual stone trees, with actual branches and "leaves" of rocks and crystal colors. The derro are gone. And you hear a low rumbly chuckle from somewhere up in the branches.
> 
> ...




Actually, you just gave me an idea. Have you ever heard of the Tiffany Aching Discworld stories by Sir Terry Pratchett? There's a book where she basically enters the plane of elves and faeries, a horrible world where dreams come true. Haunting the land are creatures called "Dromes," these sort of psychic spiders that catch prey by spinning dreams for them to unknowingly walk into. The only way to escape the eventual starvation and digestion staying in the dream will cause is to find the creature in the dream that is actually the Drome in disguise, and kill it. It was a cool plot mechanic, and I always thought it would work well as a game mechanic, too.


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## steeldragons (May 16, 2015)

Fralex said:


> Actually, you just gave me an idea. Have you ever heard of the Tiffany Aching Discworld stories by Sir Terry Pratchett? There's a book where she basically enters the plane of elves and faeries, a horrible world where dreams come true. Haunting the land are creatures called "Dromes," these sort of psychic spiders that catch prey by spinning dreams for them to unknowingly walk into. The only way to escape the eventual starvation and digestion staying in the dream will cause is to find the creature in the dream that is actually the Drome in disguise, and kill it. It was a cool plot mechanic, and I always thought it would work well as a game mechanic, too.




Love it. Love everything about it. Totally stealing those. 

Now you've got my mind tripping up trope lane a bit and saying, "dream spiders"...underdark...spiders & drow...drow that worship/revere these dream spiders...capturing slaves/leading potential victims into these dream world" portals...a society of "dream-focused" drow...with no Lolth-related stuff needed.

Yes. These "dromes" have distinct possibilities.

Slight aside: I wonder if these "drome" psychic spiders had anything to do with -inspiration wise- the D&D race of psychic insectoids called [none too originally, if so] "dromites"?


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## HobbitFan (May 16, 2015)

The last couple posts from Fralex and Steeldragons have been awesome in their creativity. Thumbs up guys!


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## Fralex (May 17, 2015)

steeldragons said:


> Love it. Love everything about it. Totally stealing those.
> 
> Now you've got my mind tripping up trope lane a bit and saying, "dream spiders"...underdark...spiders & drow...drow that worship/revere these dream spiders...capturing slaves/leading potential victims into these dream world" portals...a society of "dream-focused" drow...with no Lolth-related stuff needed.
> 
> ...




I'm guessing it's just a coincidence. The dromes in the book were only spiders in the way they caught prey; they were described as pudgy white sponges on stubby legs. D&D was an influence on the author, though, especially his earlier stories about a hopeless wizzard (he can't spell) who accidentally learned a doomsday spell so massive no other spells would fit in his brain. Interestingly, though, his books were included in the "Inspirational Reading" section of the 5e Player's Handbook, so it looks like the inspiration went both ways.

...man, I'm gonna miss Pratchett. He was a cool guy. When he received his knighthood, he actually went out and forged a sword from meteoric iron ("for magical properties").


----------



## Hussar (May 17, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> They were wrong only because the consensus judged them wrong (they didn't convince enough people that they were doing things that should be called "good"). If they want to go back, they have to convince more people to believe that what they are doing isn't any different than what the angels are doing and maybe should be called good, too.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Yup, that would largely go a long way to fixing Planescape for me.  Thing is though, without alignment, the Great Wheel stops making a whole lot of sense.  Why does someone go to one afterlife and not another?  The divides between the planes are, IMO, largely arbitrary and based on alignment, which, itself, is a largely arbitrary division of morality.  So, again, there's no discussion of morality.  No examination of morality.  If you do X, you go to Plane Y.  Beings from Plane Y act in X manner and if they don't they get shunted to Plane Z.  

Never minding that I find D&D a very poor vehicle in general for this sort of thing.  Like I said, there are much better skill systems for adjudicating extended debates, and that sort of thing.  The objective alignment is a big roadblock, but, the system itself, IMO, doesn't lend itself to what I would want to get out of this kind of game.  

I guess at the end of the day, I can honestly say that it's just not for me.


----------



## Corpsetaker (May 17, 2015)

When it comes to alignment, it becomes an actual supernatural force for some creatures in my worlds such as demons, devils, inevitables, etc...


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## pemerton (May 17, 2015)

Imaro said:


> The interesting conflicct is in determining, through play, whose beliefs (if any) are correct (in the sense that they set the paradigm for the multiverse).



This is a reply to a post I made replying to you. In your earlier post, you said "the possibility exists that social order can maximise human well being and that the posibility exists that the best route to well being can be self-realisation largely free of social constraint." If the thing you said is true, then LG - which claims that social order is a necessary condition of human wellbeing - is false. And if what you said is true, then CG - which claims that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of human wellbeing - is also false.

So if what you said is true, then there is nothing to work out about whether LG or CG is true, because we already know that they're both false! And we also know that NG is true, because it is NG which says that, in some circumstances social order is the best path to human wellbeing, but in others free self-realisation is the best path.



Imaro said:


> Exactly the point of Planescape play is to determine whose belefs are correct (in the way I outlined above)
> 
> <snip>
> 
> And IMO this is perfectly in line with Planescape and what I, (and I believe @_*Kamikaze Midget*_ and others) have been stating all along.  But let's be clear... this scenario only proves, once Zeus and enough of the gods concedes, that LG is now correct for Olympus



What you are describing here is different from what I described.

As I presented the scenario (based on my reading of Gygax, which has elements of reconstruction but is grounded in his text), the question at issue was this: which claim is true, that of LG (that social order is a necessary condition of wellbeing true, or that of CG (that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of wellbeing)?

Given that Olympus is CG, that means (on the approach I am putting forward) that its inhabitants - for simplicity's sake, I'll focus on the Greek Gods - believe that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of wellbeing. In the scenario I outlined, I imagined a paladin refuting this. The refutation I had in mind involved the paladin pointing to all the ways in which wellbeing is absent from the inhabitants of Olympus: Zeus and Hera constantly fighting, Athena and Aphrodite clashing with various mortal queens, etc. And then arguing that those failures of wellbeing are precisely due to a lack of social order - Zeus does not have any systematic way of reconciling his sexual desire with his marriage obligations, the mortal queens don't have any set of rules governing the way in which they may or may not compare themselves to the godesses, etc.

If the paladin was correct about this - which is the sort of thing that play establishes, through the way the relevant fiction emerges - then s/he would have refuted the claims of CG. If s/he also persuaded Zeus et al of this (eg via social skill checks) then they themselves would come to realise that the claims of CG are mistaken.

Making real world comparisons is challenging because of board rules, but we might say that events in the world that occurred in the interwar period and then from 1939-45 showed that the claims of Fascists/National Socialists were wrong, and that in the period from 1945 on the majority of those who supported such claims have themselves come to believe that those claims were wrong.

But this has nothing to do with "consensus reality". The demonstration that certain claims about the relationship between social order/freedom and wellbeing were wrong rests on actual questions of social fact (eg is the reason for the fighting between Zeus and Hera a lack of rules governing sexual conduct? this isn't about anyone's beliefs, it's about the causal relations between social practices and human conflict/misery).

Whereas, at least as PS is being presented in this thread, it is not at all interested in questions of actual social causation.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> If it is not a good thing in a particular instance then how can it be said to be a virtue? If there are instances when it is not a good thing, then only by ignoring those instances can we say that it is a virtue. It clearly isn't at all times a virtue.
> 
> This seems so nakedly obvious to me in the common use of language and value judgments that I'm having a hard time believing you truly don't understand this.



If a necessary condition of behaviour disposition X being a virtue is that every time the disposition manifests human wellbeing is increased, then it seems almost certain that there are no virtues. That's not a ridiculous claim (eg some strong act utilitarians probably affirm it), but I don't think it's widespread.

For instance, nearly every popular discussion of Rommel lauds his virtues as an honourable and clever solder. Which is to say, these are regarded as virtues, though the manifestation of those dispositions did not always conduce to wellbeing (given who he was fighting for).

Similarly with generosity: being generous is a virtue. Of course, so is being wise, and part of wisdom is knowing what limits to put on one's generosity!

If you were trying to teach someone what _generosity_ was, and did not succeed in conveying that it was a virtue - a character trait that was admirable and worth cultivating - you would not have succeeded in your teaching. This is what makes it so challenging to write histories or anthropologies of people with values different from those of the author/investigator: because it is hard to understand what was meant by (say) _honour_ in some other place or time if you don't understand how that figured as valuable, but that can be pretty hard to do if there is a deep clash with one's own values.

Inga Clendinnen has written about this in the context of her work on the Aztecs, and also in some of her criticisms of the approaches taken by contemporary historical novelists.


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## steeldragons (May 17, 2015)

HobbitFan said:


> The last couple posts from Fralex and Steeldragons have been awesome in their creativity. Thumbs up guys!




Glad you liked it! Thanks for the XP.

We now return to you to your Merry-Go-Round Table on Arbitrary Alignment Assertions, already in progress:

<cue upbeat 70's game show theme music>
STARRING Pemerton & Kamaikaze Midget!
<applause applause>
with their panel...
emdw45...
Rejuvenator...
introducing Parmandur...
and featuring special guest appearances by...
Imaro... <raaah applause raaah>
and Hussar...<crowd goes wild!>
<theme music goes to drumroll>
And now...Live, from the Interwebs...entering its THIRTEENTH PAGE in a thread about looking at pretty pictures...
Your hosts...bound and determined...
Heeeeeeeere're Pemerton & KM!

Take it away, boys!


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## I'm A Banana (May 17, 2015)

Hussar said:


> Yup, that would largely go a long way to fixing Planescape for me.  Thing is though, without alignment, the Great Wheel stops making a whole lot of sense.  Why does someone go to one afterlife and not another?




I'm of the belief that PS doesn't need alignment to "work" as a setting, so I think there's an answer for this that works in the setting: you go to the afterlife that this consensus believes you belong in. Everybody thinks you're a self-interested and hedonistic sod, you'll get punted to the Abyss, even if in your heart of hearts you were doing the right thing. 



> Never minding that I find D&D a very poor vehicle in general for this sort of thing.  Like I said, there are much better skill systems for adjudicating extended debates, and that sort of thing.  The objective alignment is a big roadblock, but, the system itself, IMO, doesn't lend itself to what I would want to get out of this kind of game.




What's to stop someone from looting what works about those systems and putting them in D&D? Ideas like extended skill challenges are already a part of the game, surely it's not THAT big a leap to use them in a PS game. (And out of curiosity, what systems do the things you're looking for?)



> I guess at the end of the day, I can honestly say that it's just not for me.




Fair enough, but aside from "I just don't want to because I just don't want to" (which is fair enough!) I'm still a little confused as to why.



			
				pemerton said:
			
		

> If a necessary condition of behaviour disposition X being a virtue is that every time the disposition manifests human wellbeing is increased, then it seems almost certain that there are no virtues. That's not a ridiculous claim (eg some strong act utilitarians probably affirm it), but I don't think it's widespread.




In PS, at least, this idea is probably one of the setting's foundational conceits - all so-called virtues are only virtues from a certain perspective, and your PC is encouraged to disagree with the consensus perspective on what those virtues (and vices!) are or should be, and the conflict of ideas is born out of this disharmony being rectified over the course of the campaign narratively.


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## Rejuvenator (May 17, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Given that Olympus is CG, that means (on the approach I am putting forward) that its inhabitants - for simplicity's sake, I'll focus on the Greek Gods - believe that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of wellbeing. In the scenario I outlined, I imagined a paladin refuting this. The refutation I had in mind involved the paladin pointing to all the ways in which wellbeing is absent from the inhabitants of Olympus: Zeus and Hera constantly fighting, Athena and Aphrodite clashing with various mortal queens, etc. And then arguing that those failures of wellbeing are precisely due to a lack of social order - Zeus does not have any systematic way of reconciling his sexual desire with his marriage obligations, the mortal queens don't have any set of rules governing the way in which they may or may not compare themselves to the godesses, etc.
> 
> If the paladin was correct about this - which is the sort of thing that play establishes, through the way the relevant fiction emerges - then s/he would have refuted the claims of CG. If s/he also persuaded Zeus et al of this (eg via social skill checks) then they themselves would come to realise that the claims of CG are mistaken.



This doesn't sound like a real problem in play. The Olympians are thousands of years old, godly self-secure, with deifically high Intelligent and Wisdom, and their force of belief is so strong they can shape their home plane of Olympus (see Planescape rules), and I don't see a puny mortal paladin -- even an epic one -- having any chance of doing that.

In real life, my girlfriend -- as persuasive as she can be -- can barely convince me to buy a new pillow, and I'm no god. She certainly can't change my moral philosophy or political leaning. What can one paladin do today to the Olympic pantheon that an endless army of immortal Lawful Good missionaries couldn't do over the centuries?


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## pemerton (May 17, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> This doesn't sound like a real problem in play.



I don't think it's a problem at all - I think it could be a lot of fun! But the rulebooks don't really put it forward as a possibility - you'd have to work it out for yourself!



Rejuvenator said:


> The Olympians are thousands of years old, godly self-secure, with deifically high Intelligent and Wisdom, and their force of belief is so strong they can shape their home plane of Olympus (see Planescape rules), and I don't see a puny mortal paladin -- even an epic one -- having any chance of doing that.
> 
> In real life, my girlfriend -- as persuasive as she can be -- can barely convince me to buy a new pillow, and I'm no god. She certainly can't change my moral philosophy or political leaning. What can one paladin do today to the Olympic pantheon that an endless army of immortal Lawful Good missionaries couldn't do over the centuries?



I think there are two things going on here.

First, can a paladin persuade Zeus? My preferred approach, as a GM, is not to have the game pose problems for the players that their PCs aren't capable of answering. So if I take the view that Zeus can't be persuaded, then Zeus's opinions aren't going to be part of the game.

Second, the Olympians shape their home plane in the sense of determining its geography. But can they make it _true_ that,on Olympus, free self-realisation is a necessary condition of achieving wellbeing? If they can, then their alignment choice is basically arbitrary (because had they woken up on the LG side of the bed, they could equally have made it true that social order is a necessary condition of achieving wellbeing. There would be nothing actually at stake in the disagreement between LG and CG.

To me, the campaign set-up seems to offer more prospect of engaging play if the disagreement between LG and CG over the necessary conditions for human wellbeing is treated as a real one, and actual play then permits this to be settled one way or the other (eg by finding out what, in play, follows from the PCs rebelling against the social order, or alternatively what follows from the PCs imposing social order on those who (at least initially) reject it).


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## pemerton (May 17, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> all so-called virtues are only virtues from a certain perspective, and your PC is encouraged to disagree with the consensus perspective on what those virtues (and vices!) are or should be



What is the difference between "X is a virtue from this perspective but not that perspective" and "some people believe that X is a virtue, but others disagree?" It seems important to PS that the first be different from the second - otherwise there is no "consensus reality", there is just majority and dissident belief. But it is hard for me to grasp the difference.


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## Hriston (May 18, 2015)

pemerton said:


> I've always been a little puzzled by Sauron's motivations.




It may be interesting to consider, in light of the direction this conversation has gone, that Tolkien did not conceive of Sauron, or most probably Morgoth either, as simply, _unfathomably_ evil, but rather as someone with the same motivations that could believably lead a normal person to commit acts that we would call evil.



			
				J. R. R. Tolkien said:
			
		

> ‘In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any 'rational being' is wholly evil. Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world. In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible. He had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination, being in origin an immortal (angelic) spirit.’




We can see here that Sauron, in his origin was what we would consider to be LG, in that he desired the well-being of all creatures, and sought to bring it about through the establishment of order. Tolkien, through Elrond, alludes to the fall of Sauron in LR.



			
				Elrond said:
			
		

> For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.




Out of his desire to benefit all beings, Sauron eventually became a LN order _fetishist_, coming under the tutelage of Morgoth because of his admiration for Morgoth's effectiveness in carrying out his own designs. It was at that point, for Sauron, that _purpose_ became the _determinant_, and he became willing to dismiss the rights of other creatures to their own well-being in his pursuit of the control and domination that were necessary for him to implement his plans. Thus, descent from LG to LE was complete in Sauron in a way that is very relatable, and has many parallels in the behavior and history of non-fictional people. He simply felt that he knew better, and after the end of the First Age, and the further withdrawal of the Valar into the west, he most likely felt that it was in some way his responsibility. According to Sauron, the world _needed_ a God-King.

So what happens when Sauron scans himself and discovers he is evil? I believe that he would not be surprised. All that would tell him is that he is someone who has decided that trampling on the rights of others is necessary to carrying out plans that he believes will ultimately be of some benefit. In Sauron's case, this benefit was most likely not just for himself (which would be CE), but rather in the service of what he must have conceived as "the Greater Good".


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## fuindordm (May 18, 2015)

Wow, this is getting deep.   It's been an interesting conversation. 

I think the spell/alignment interaction has also become more problematic because D&D has evolved from a PRIME + outer realms cosmology to a MULTIVERSE + outer realms cosmology.  Consider: the alignment system sprang from literature (especially Tolkien
and Moorcock) where the human world was being actively manipulated by supernatural beings of good/evil/law/chaos. It makes perfect sense for Elric to cast Detect Law/Chaos on himself or other beings, as a pH test for supernatural threats and human agents using magic granted by higher powers.  The spells just mean "detect the source of power", not "detect ethos". In a more typical D&D world, the Detect spells can still be used as "detect allied god/power source" without problems, and the KA spell used as "detect ethos" (a sort of mind reading).  Elric detects as Chaotic but Know Alignment might reveal him to be neutral in character.  The Grand Inquisitor of the Silver Flame detects as Good but Know Alignment reveals him to be evil because he doesn't care one whit about individual lives--only the purity of the church and his own power. 

In the multi-prime cosmology, it's a little harder to justify epic battles between existential sources of power across every conceivable D&D world.  Alignment-as-ethos is culturally dependent, blurring the edges of alignment-as-power-source. In this cosmology it's more natural to treat the outer realms and their Powers as manifestations of prime material belief, but what detects as LG in Hyperborea might detect as LN in Oerth.  Frankly, this is why I rarely use the Great Wheel cosmology--but if I did I would run it as a place where alignment and even planar affinities are fluid and driven by the balance of power in the multitude of PRIMES, not absolutes using the PRIMES as battleground.

Anyway, that's how I run it--and how the structure of the cosmology informs my choice for what the alignment spells do in the world.


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## pemerton (May 18, 2015)

fuindordm said:


> I think the spell/alignment interaction has also become more problematic because D&D has evolved from a PRIME + outer realms cosmology to a MULTIVERSE + outer realms cosmology.  Consider: the alignment system sprang from literature (especially Tolkien and Moorcock) where the human world was being actively manipulated by supernatural beings of good/evil/law/chaos. It makes perfect sense for Elric to cast Detect Law/Chaos on himself or other beings, as a pH test for supernatural threats and human agents using magic granted by higher powers.  The spells just mean "detect the source of power", not "detect ethos".
> 
> <snip>
> 
> In the multi-prime cosmology, it's a little harder to justify epic battles between existential sources of power across every conceivable D&D world.



Interesting interpretation of Detect Evil etc (as detect power source).

I also agree that the "mulitversification" of D&D makes that approach harder to run with.



fuindordm said:


> the KA spell used as "detect ethos" (a sort of mind reading).



In an old Rolemaster campaign we had mind-reading spells that worked like this.


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## pemerton (May 18, 2015)

Hriston said:


> In Sauron's case, this benefit was most likely not just for himself (which would be CE), but rather in the service of what he must have conceived as "the Greater Good".



Two thoughts in response.

The first is a more-or-less scholastic point of AD&D alignment interpretation: in his DMG Gygax says of evil that it "does not concern itself with rights or happiness; purpose is the determinant". So if Sauron is serving something that he conceives of as "the greater good", but detects as _evil_, then whatever he is serving it is not rights or happiness. What is it, then? And while presumably he agrees it is not _rights_, does he also agree that it is not _happiness_? And if he does, what greater good does he think there is in which neither rights nor happiness figure?

The second point is not about D&D scholasticism but about the LotR. What is Sauron actually doing that could remotely be conceived as contributing to any sort of greater good, however conceived? He is not building any cities. He is not promoting any economic development. He is not even attempting to increase agricultural production. He seems to have no social or economic policies at all. That is why I say that I've always been somewhat puzzled by his motivations. He clearly want to exercise control over people, but doesn't seem to have anything in mind as the purpose for that exercise of control.


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## I'm A Banana (May 18, 2015)

pemerton said:


> What is the difference between "X is a virtue from this perspective but not that perspective" and "some people believe that X is a virtue, but others disagree?" It seems important to PS that the first be different from the second - otherwise there is no "consensus reality", there is just majority and dissident belief. But it is hard for me to grasp the difference.




I don't know that I appreciate that there needs to be a distinction. Consensus reality is formed out of the majority belief so that the former aligns with what a character with the latter would expect. In D&D, and thus in PS, most instances of generosity are seen as things that should gather the Good-aligned mana, and so they do. Someone who disagreed with that consensus would be someone who wanted to change it - who believed generosity is mostly about power exchange, and so should be included in the category of mana that is concerned with power and balance (neutrality, perhaps law) rather than the category of mana that is concerned with selflessness (which is not a part of most generosity according to them). If they succeeded in their missions, the consensus would eventually align with theirs and so someone who is generous would perhaps detect as lawful most of the time, rather than as good, just as they believe it should be.


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## Hriston (May 18, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Two thoughts in response.
> 
> The first is a more-or-less scholastic point of AD&D alignment interpretation: in his DMG Gygax says of evil that it "does not concern itself with rights or happiness; purpose is the determinant". So if Sauron is serving something that he conceives of as "the greater good", but detects as _evil_, then whatever he is serving it is not rights or happiness. What is it, then? And while presumably he agrees it is not _rights_, does he also agree that it is not _happiness_? And if he does, what greater good does he think there is in which neither rights nor happiness figure?




Giving the world its God-King? Presumably if you believe such a thing is destined, and Sauron knew much of the the Music of the Ainur, much more than his master, then it may be tempting, if not incumbent on you to bring it about by any means necessary. Sometimes, and I might say frequently, evil people have good reasons to do evil things. That doesn't make them good.



pemerton said:


> The second point is not about D&D scholasticism but about the LotR. What is Sauron actually doing that could remotely be conceived as contributing to any sort of greater good, however conceived? He is not building any cities. He is not promoting any economic development. He is not even attempting to increase agricultural production. He seems to have no social or economic policies at all. That is why I say that I've always been somewhat puzzled by his motivations. He clearly want to exercise control over people, but doesn't seem to have anything in mind as the purpose for that exercise of control.




What do you think feeds the armies of Southrons and Easterlings that have come from the four corners of the Earth to fight for him? He must be offering them something other than a promised place in the new world order he would establish. I would assume he is already the provider of some sort of stability. Maybe he offered to halt the plagues that were destroying their crops, which, of course, he had created in the first place, if they would only bow down and worship him. Once propitiated, doesn't the renewal of plentiful harvests prove that he _is_ truly worthy of worship? Unfortunately for this discussion, LR doesn't reveal much about the mind of Sauron. Tolkien, in the novelistic style of LR, doesn't talk about such details. We don't see Aragorn, for example, planning the golden age that was to take place after he assumed the throne, and yet we can see by his actions that he is good. The devices of Sauron, in contrast, tell us he is evil.



			
				J. R. R. Tolkien said:
			
		

> But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape – and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all 'reformers' who want to hurry up with 'reconstruction' and 'reorganization' are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.




So Sauron was a "reformer", someone who seeks to change the world for the better, it can be assumed. Keep in mind, however, that such a stance can be thought of as sinful, even blasphemous, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or as hubris in Greek myth. Another purpose for which he may have sought control, and which seems to be at odds with his possible goals as a reformer, might be seen in the making of the Rings of Power. Their most obvious power, even that of the One, was to preserve that which would otherwise have perished from the world. In this work his interests coincided with those of the elves. It could be that the coming Age of Men was something that he saw as a destructive force that he meant to control, or eliminate altogether.

In spite of these goals, however well-meaning, I think that Sauron would have been comfortable self-identifying as evil. He was, after all, a disciple of the original evil. Evil, in this construction of it, accepts domination and oppression as the most expedient and, in fact, necessary means to achieve its goals, however lofty or debased they may be.


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## pemerton (May 18, 2015)

Hriston said:


> What do you think feeds the armies of Southrons and Easterlings that have come from the four corners of the Earth to fight for him?



It's all a bit obscure, because Morder is presented as a barren wasteland, but one gather there are farms SE in Nurn. But did the Southrons and Easterlings not have functioning economies before they came to serve Sauron? My general impression is that they did, but the details are sparse.



Hriston said:


> He must be offering them something other than a promised place in the new world order he would establish.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



We agree that the LotR doesn't reveal much about Sauron. It does make it fairly clear that he is in some sense modernist or "reforming" in his aspirations, but it is somewhat left as an exercise for the reader to understand why that would make him evil.

The same issue doesn't arise for Aragorn, because the whole book is steeped in romantic notions of kingship - it is a fairy story, after all - and as long as Aragorn evokes those tropes, which he amply does, the reader can understand what it is that he promises.

But anti-modernity is not a fairy-tale trope that can be evoked in the same way, I don't think. As a reader knowing something of Tolkien's political and aesthetic views I can interpolate in elements of what Sauron may have been thinking, or promising, but I don't think that is quite the same as having this conveyed by the author.


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## pemerton (May 18, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> In D&D, and thus in PS, most instances of generosity are seen as things that should gather the Good-aligned mana, and so they do. Someone who disagreed with that consensus would be someone who wanted to change it - who believed generosity is mostly about power exchange, and so should be included in the category of mana that is concerned with power and balance (neutrality, perhaps law) rather than the category of mana that is concerned with selflessness (which is not a part of most generosity according to them).



In real-world social and moral discussion, the sorts of reasons that someone might put forward for thinking that generosity is not really selfless, and hence not so good as all its advocates make out, would themselves be primarily evaluative. Even debunkers generally have values - they are just diagnosing hypocrisy among the complacent majority.

It would be relatively unusual for someone - except, say, an anthropologist undertaking an analysis of gift-giving practices and other manifestations of reciprocal resepct - to discuss whether or not generosity was truly selfless or not purely as a taxonomic exercise.

But it seems in PS that the taxonomic reasoning is the only reasoning available, because the "consensus reality" removes the possibility of denying that generosity has the evaluative character that the consensus bestows upon it.

To put it in terms of an imagined dialogue, someone (call her X) denies that generosity is good. The interlocutor, Y, replies by saying that it most certainly is good, because the consensus says so. X then objects that the consensus is mistaken, and needs to change. Y asks "Why so?". At which point, it seems that X can only point to the taxonomical/analytical point - that so-called generosity is not selfless - but _cannot_ add what I think nearly every version of X in the real world would want to add: _and because it's not selfless, it's not really good_.



Kamikaze Midget said:


> I don't know that I appreciate that there needs to be a distinction.



I've tried to illustrate why I think there does need to be a distinction. In the real world, the fact that generosity is not selfless - were that a fact - would be a reason to think that it is not good. But that reason depends upon there being some connection between selfness and goodness that exists independently of any consensus.

(Contrast: there is no reason of the same sort why trees should be called "trees" rather than "les arbres". That really is just about consensus usage.)


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## Fralex (May 18, 2015)

After taking this personality test (http://www.16personalities.com/personality-types) and finding it scarily accurate, I've started to wonder what it would be like if alignment were based off something more like that.

It takes into account five things: Introversion/Extroversion, Intuition/Observation, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Prospecting, and Assertiveness/Turbulance.
(I got INFP-T, the "Mediator" group)


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## I'm A Banana (May 18, 2015)

pemerton said:


> It would be relatively unusual for someone - except, say, an anthropologist undertaking an analysis of gift-giving practices and other manifestations of reciprocal resepct - to discuss whether or not generosity was truly selfless or not purely as a taxonomic exercise.




Well it's relatively unusual for someone to delve into dangerous dungeons for wealth and glory as well - the protagonists of our RPGs are relatively unusual people. In PS, one of their defining qualities tends to be a questioning of the existing consensus's value judgements on one thing or another. I don't think this qualifies as "purely a taxonomic exercise" from the perspective of the character.  



> To put it in terms of an imagined dialogue, someone (call her X) denies that generosity is good. The interlocutor, Y, replies by saying that it most certainly is good, because the consensus says so. X then objects that the consensus is mistaken, and needs to change. Y asks "Why so?". At which point, it seems that X can only point to the taxonomical/analytical point - that so-called generosity is not selfless - but _cannot_ add what I think nearly every version of X in the real world would want to add: _and because it's not selfless, it's not really good_.




Every version of X in Planescape might not be able to say, literally, "it's not really good" (because it clearly does gather that alignment-mana and a character can prove this with the right magic), but they can say, literally "we should not regard this as good" (as in: it _should not_ gather that alignment-mana, it should gather some other or none in particular), and by that mean largely the same thing as someone in the real world who says "it's not really good." 

Certainly in the minds of a PS character, there is no source of "really good" outside of what people regard as good, so to change one is to change the other. It is only good because people say it is, and if we change what people say about it, it won't be good anymore (it won't gather that alignment-mana and so it won't respond to spells or effects that use that alignment-mana, such as _detect good_ or the soul's journey through the Astral Plane to one of the upper planes).


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## Parmandur (May 18, 2015)

pemerton said:


> It's all a bit obscure, because Morder is presented as a barren wasteland, but one gather there are farms SE in Nurn. But did the Southrons and Easterlings not have functioning economies before they came to serve Sauron? My general impression is that they did, but the details are sparse.
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Sauron's evil is obscure, but probably best seen in his servants and how they treat each other.  The Orc dialogue is some of the most interesting in the book: they demonstrate values of friendship, courage, loyalty, but also distrust, betrayal and murder.  They are held together by fear, not love or any other positive force.


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## Rejuvenator (May 18, 2015)

pemerton said:


> Second, the Olympians shape their home plane in the sense of determining its geography. But can they make it _true_ that,on Olympus, free self-realisation is a necessary condition of achieving wellbeing?



Yes because Olympus is the utopian incarnation of well-being via free self-realisation. Just like the Seven Heavens is a utopia of well-being via social order. They make it true because there it IS true. And it is true because it's a utopian ideal that many mortals believe in.

Now it you convinced a billion chaotic good mortals to embrace social order, perhaps then Olympus would change: become a pale shadow of itself like American Gods.

Does a paladin come knocking on Heaven's door, demand an audience with the Lord in order to abolish an outdated sin? Or might Heaven be different now because billions of people evolved their Judeo-Christian beliefs over a thousand years?



pemerton said:


> If they can, then their alignment choice is basically arbitrary (because had they woken up on the LG side of the bed, they could equally have made it true that social order is a necessary condition of achieving wellbeing. There would be nothing actually at stake in the disagreement between LG and CG.



Can someone recall which D&D edition had an Alignment section where for each of the Good entries, it wrote something like "[XG] is the best alignment to have because...". I think it was 2E, not sure. Anyway, IOW, it drew a moral equivalence between LG/NG/CG; they were just different paths to goodness, with different pros and cons. This is how I took it to play traditional D&D as well. Planescape took it farther by staking disagreements between the different paths to goodness and the meaning of life, but I don't find the execution compelling enough to ascribe to that.



> To me, the campaign set-up seems to offer more prospect of engaging play if the disagreement between LG and CG over the necessary conditions for human wellbeing is treated as a real one, and actual play then permits this to be settled one way or the other (eg by finding out what, in play, follows from the PCs rebelling against the social order, or alternatively what follows from the PCs imposing social order on those who (at least initially) reject it).



In the prime worlds, well-being is a fluctuating balance of self-realization, social order, and other sometimes overlapping sometimes conflicting ideals. Where individual liberty leads to chaos and discord, the paladin might persuade the king to restore order. When social order is rife with corruption and bureaucracy, the champion might reform the nation-state. This happens plausibly to me at the level of villages, cities, and kingdoms.

The Outer Planes, however, are incarnations of ideals, in classic D&D. You don't convince Zeus that Lawful Good is the way to go to well-being, any more than you convince Satan to stop being the Devil.


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## pemerton (May 19, 2015)

Rejuvenator said:


> Can someone recall which D&D edition had an Alignment section where for each of the Good entries, it wrote something like "[XG] is the best alignment to have because...". I think it was 2E, not sure. Anyway, IOW, it drew a moral equivalence between LG/NG/CG; they were just different paths to goodness, with different pros and cons. This is how I took it to play traditional D&D as well.



That is 3E.

But I've always taken those comments to be spoken from the perspective of an adherent of that outlook. I've not taken it to be the case that they are all true. If you do go that way, then you are correct that LG, NG and CG become morally equivalent. But I don't think that is very interesting - it means there is no conflict between law and chaos, anymore than there is conflict between people who wear shoes and people who wear boots. They just prefer different footwear.


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## pemerton (May 19, 2015)

Parmandur said:


> Sauron's evil is obscure, but probably best seen in his servants and how they treat each other.  The Orc dialogue is some of the most interesting in the book: they demonstrate values of friendship, courage, loyalty, but also distrust, betrayal and murder.  They are held together by fear, not love or any other positive force.



I think it's fairly clear that he is evil and his orcs are nasty.

I just don't really understand his motivations. Except perhaps that he hates the elves and the dunedain - perhaps it's all about revenge.


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## pemerton (May 19, 2015)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> Every version of X in Planescape might not be able to say, literally, "it's not really good" (because it clearly does gather that alignment-mana and a character can prove this with the right magic), but they can say, literally "we should not regard this as good" (as in: it _should not_ gather that alignment-mana, it should gather some other or none in particular), and by that mean largely the same thing as someone in the real world who says "it's not really good."



But _what reason can they point to_ for saying that "We should not regard this as good"?

The reason that biologists gives us for not regarding whales as fish is that _they are not fish_ (they are physiologically mammals - have lungs, don't lay eggs, etc - and are descended from mammalian land animals).

When I engage in political argument, the reason I tell people that they shouldn't regard so-and-so as good, or shouldn't regard such-and-such policy as bad, is because so-and-so _isn't good_ (and here are some reasons . . .), or that such-and-such policy _isn't bad_ (and here are some reasons . . .)

_Should_ is a verb that is begging for reasons. But what reasons can the person in Planescape bring to bear, given that the evaluative vocabulary that would normally be used to provide the reasons has already had its reference determined by consensus?


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## Hriston (May 19, 2015)

pemerton said:


> It's all a bit obscure, because Mordor is presented as a barren wasteland, but one gathers there are farms SE in Nurn. But did the Southrons and Easterlings not have functioning economies before they came to serve Sauron? My general impression is that they did, but the details are sparse.




Their war-making capabilities seem to imply a robust economy, but this is long after they have taken on the yoke of evil. My understanding is that most of the peoples of ME had worshipped Sauron and/or Morgoth for thousands of years before the events of LR, so I doubt if any them would remember what kind of economy they had before that time. I think we can assume varying states of development throughout the world at the time of the War of the Ring. Gondor, on the other hand, seems to be somewhat underdeveloped and depopulated, thus the bringing in of the alien Horse-lords to secure the northern border. Perhaps one of Sauron's goals would have been to develop and increase the productivity of the lands of Gondor by increasing the population with settlers from the south and east, to which, I assume, he promised dominion.



> We agree that the LotR doesn't reveal much about Sauron. It does make it fairly clear that he is in some sense modernist or "reforming" in his aspirations, but it is somewhat left as an exercise for the reader to understand why that would make him evil.




It wouldn't _necessarily_ make one evil, but Sauron becomes evil because he uses the exercise of raw power as the most expedient means of realizing his reformist goals. Contrast this with the prohibition under which Gandalf operates against using _his_ power. In Tolkien's book, power is reserved for the Valar.



> The same issue doesn't arise for Aragorn, because the whole book is steeped in romantic notions of kingship - it is a fairy story, after all - and as long as Aragorn evokes those tropes, which he amply does, the reader can understand what it is that he promises.




Right, and yet we do see Aragorn struggling with the temptation to use the power of the ring, leading him to separate himself from the Quest of the Ringbearer. Boromir is like Aragorn's shadow in this, in that he gives in to temptation and falls at the same moment in which Aragorn makes his decision to leave, or split, the company. His path is to exercise temporal power as a mortal king, but to exercise such power as the ring would give him would transform him into a second dark lord. The same is true for Galadriel, another who would rule and order things to her will. Even Gandalf seems to find it difficult to reject the ring, and yet he does so knowing that although it may be the most expedient path to winning the war, the power of the ring is ultimately the power to dominate the will of other beings, and to use it is to turn one's back on what is good.


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## I'm A Banana (May 19, 2015)

pemerton said:


> But _what reason can they point to_ for saying that "We should not regard this as good"?




In short, their own internal value-judgements and estimations. Since what actually acquires the "Good"-mana is open to opinion anyway, their judgements are as worthy as the consensus. The more they get people to think like them, the more the consensus shifts to model their version of what their ideal world is, the more the planes rearrange themselves to be what they believe they should be. 



> _Should_ is a verb that is begging for reasons. But what reasons can the person in Planescape bring to bear, given that the evaluative vocabulary that would normally be used to provide the reasons has already had its reference determined by consensus?




The reasons are particular and individual. The consensus is formed out of uncountable multitudes of particular and individual beliefs. As a PS character, you likely have reason to dispute this consensus that is particular and individual, and seek to change the beliefs of those uncountable multitudes to match your own.

For instance, a child on the streets of Sigil might grow up in the shadow of a serial murderer whose damaged mind results in a crime spree that terrifies this child's neighborhood. The murderer is eventually killed in the street by a band of enforcers. This seminal moment in the child's life becomes something they return to, to try and understand over and over again - why did this happen? How can it be prevented? You learn of the Harmonium and their efforts to correct the thoughts of damaged minds, to rehabilitate the mentally defective into functioning members of society. You understand that this would have prevented that serial murderer from terrifying the neighborhood, if he was just noticed early enough and given this treatment. Not only this murderer, but others, in the future, may be prevented by this. You join the Harmonium to advance this work, which you see as something unquestionably worthy of Good-mana, an act of compassion and a protection of innocents not unlike what the Archons and Guardinals are known for. So it surprises you to learn that the consensus disagrees - that this program has caused a layer of Arcadia to lose that Good-mana, because of the consensus that robbing someone of free will is not worthy of that Good-mana. 

Thus, you set out to change that opinion, so that your view becomes the consensus. You fight demon cults who delight in madness. You convince reluctant eladrin who see this as eroding individual conscience that this is for when that conscience goes awry. You weed out the devils and the power-mad seeking to use the mind control for selfish ends from your own organization. Guardinals begin taking up the same techniques. Slowly, the view of coercive mind control begins to match what you believe it should be - as a tool for the betterment of all. Consensus shifts, the layer is restored to Arcadia (heck, maybe Celestia gains a few new layers!), angels being to use your tools to heal the mentally ill, fewer children suffer your childhood fate of being terrorized by madness, social order increases, and you are shown to be correct (because people believe you to be so). 

Your reason for believing this is your own reason, personal to you. Because the consensus forms the idea of what is Good-aligned and what isn't, your desire to change that consensus needs no reasoning beyond your personal push. Much as happens in the real world, individuals decide for themselves, based on their culture, context, and experiences, what the world they're in should look like. In PS, as a PC, you then go out and shape the world to be that.


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