D&D General Souls and Spirits - are they necessary in order to exist?

[Ruin Explorer]

I do see it a bit differently than you explain it. When your soul leaves the body, you left the body. The character goes with the soul, not the meat. The body is a prosthetic for the soul to use. The Magic Jar spell seems to treat the soul similarly with how it describes the soul and you interchangeably.

Sure, you can argue nuance, but either way it's a very simple approach that doesn't raise too many complicated questions or play into unfortunate themes. It's just a "whoops soul missing so body no go" and your consciousness stays with the soul - this fits well with some mythology and I daresay it has a sort of "Disney-esque" vibe to it which I think works for most people.

 

[Celebrim]

I think losing ones soul ought to be a nasty experience. I mean, Liches commit evils to give theirs up for power and longevity.

Technically, Liches don't give up their souls - they give up their bodies. That is, they do the Voldemort thing and migrate their soul out of their body and into another object for safe keeping. They then continue to puppet their body remotely and can survive their body being destroyed because their actual body in which their soul is contained is something else entirely - their phylactery. Their former body, lacking its normal anima, is powered by the same sort of forces that power a zombie with the will coming from the remotely contained soul. Their former body, lacking direct connection to a soul, is almost unkillable precisely because damage to it doesn't distress the soul. The connection between the soul and body has been broken.

If you have your soul ripped out of you without the other preparation that Liches make for the transformation, you don't end up with a body you can control. You are in wherever your soul is. Or to put it another way, "you have a body; you are a soul." (Though in saying that I don't mean to imply a one-to-one correspondence between how D&D conceives of a soul and how any extant religion conceives of a soul, as even the above quotation implies a duality that isn't necessarily orthodox.)

 

[TwoSix]

Well, on the other hand, in the fantasy world, is the brain even the relevant organ? Or maybe its absolute physical size has little to do with its function. In past ages folk used to ascribe all sorts of functions to bodily tissues. In our world, they were often incorrect, but in the fantasy world, maybe things work differently. Like, sure you have a liver, but it isn't about processing poisons in the body - it is the seat of anger, and so on.

Oh, for sure it definitely isn't necessary. Most fantasy I've seen tends to keep humans with the same general anatomy, but I think that's mostly because trying to explain inhuman anatomy isn't really useful, for the story that's generally being told, plus the various organs are fairly potent symbols in their own right.

I think most fantasy does not require us to even consider "housing" identity, as the question only comes up rarely.

It comes up pretty often in my experience, especially within more modern fantasy, especially TV and movie fantasy. You can't have a body-swapping or possession storyline without the explicit idea of "identity" being a metaphysical construct that can be moved between biological containers.

 

[TwoSix]

Sure, you can argue nuance, but either way it's a very simple approach that doesn't raise too many complicated questions or play into unfortunate themes. It's just a "whoops soul missing so body no go" and your consciousness stays with the soul - this fits well with some mythology and I daresay it has a sort of "Disney-esque" vibe to it which I think works for most people.

I think "Disney-esque" is a perfect way to describe it. Shapechanging and possession are such common tropes that there's no need to discuss the metaphysical ramifications of what that would actually mean in universe.

 

[Celebrim]

I think "Disney-esque" is a perfect way to describe it. Shapechanging and possession are such common tropes that there's no need to discuss the metaphysical ramifications of what that would actually mean in universe.

In my experience, if you can't discuss those metaphysical ramifications then your players will immediately try to anti-rules lawyer on that basis with things like, "Why should it matter if my soul has been ripped out of my body? I still have a brain with functioning neurons. I can still continue walking around without a soul." You could just shrug and say, "Well I know that it doesn't make sense but that's how the rules work", or you could actually ask yourself, "Why do the rules work like this? Maybe the problem isn't the rules but my conception of the reality they describe." I'm a reasonably scientifically literate person but I've no interest in discussing whether or not the rules should work or how they should work on the basis of "science".

 

[TwoSix]

In my experience, if you can't discuss those metaphysical ramifications then your players will immediately try to anti-rules lawyer on that basis with things like, "Why should it matter if my soul has been ripped out of my body? I still have a brain with functioning neurons. I can still continue walking around without a soul." You could just shrug and say, "Well I know that it doesn't make sense but that's how the rules work", or you could actually ask yourself, "Why do the rules work like this? Maybe the problem isn't the rules but my conception of the reality they describe." I'm a reasonably scientifically literate person but I've no interest in discussing whether or not the rules should work or how they should work on the basis of "science".

In-game, you should absolutely understand the metaphysics, for sure. I was just saying most fantasy media, especially the more lightweight fluffy fantasy, utilizes a bunch of easily recognizable tropes, of which "identity as soul" is a common one.

 

[payn]

In my experience, if you can't discuss those metaphysical ramifications then your players will immediately try to anti-rules lawyer on that basis with things like, "Why should it matter if my soul has been ripped out of my body? I still have a brain with functioning neurons. I can still continue walking around without a soul." You could just shrug and say, "Well I know that it doesn't make sense but that's how the rules work", or you could actually ask yourself, "Why do the rules work like this? Maybe the problem isn't the rules but my conception of the reality they describe." I'm a reasonably scientifically literate person but I've no interest in discussing whether or not the rules should work or how they should work on the basis of "science".

Yeap, and if there is no impact to separating soul, spirt, and body, why bother with the distinctions? When it comes to the science vs the metaphysics, I usually just find mechanical impact, like vulnerability/resistance to certain magic, and leave the why to the player. Once magic is introduced science goes out the window anyways.

 

[Celebrim]

In-game, you should absolutely understand the metaphysics, for sure. I was just saying most fantasy media, especially the more lightweight fluffy fantasy, utilizes a bunch of easily recognizable tropes, of which "identity as soul" is a common one.

Virtually none of the works of Robert Silverberg work unless your soul is your identity. His overriding theme even in his science fiction is always that you have some identity that is more than your mind, your memories, or you body. In Lord Valentine's Castle for example, Lord Valentine is recognizably Lord Valentine despite not having the same body as Lord Valentine and not having any memory of being Lord Valentine or really any of his skills or abilities.

 

[Raiztt]

Edition-agnostic question here, and answers based on different editions might be of interest.

First, the background:

Some years ago in my current campaign one of the PCs - a Human Fighter - suffered a mishap where pulling a card from a modified Deck of Many Things stripped away his soul but otherwise left him hale and hearty. He ran for a few in-game years like this (and, somewhat incredibly for both the player and the game, stayed alive the whole time) while slowly coming to realize his odd condition, then eventually - with some very high-powered help - he got a soul stuffed into him that nobody else was using (it was extracted from the soul gem found in Ghost Tower of Inverness).

The ramifications of this were both good and bad. The good: he became completely invisible to most undead, who see only the soul or spirit of the living. He also became immune to a few (quite rare) effects that specifically target the spirit. The bad: if he died he was done. No revival in any manner, no speak with dead, nothing.

And so, my question to you all:

Would you allow a PC to lose its soul or spirit like this and yet still remain alive and playable?

If no, why?

If yes, what would you have as the ramifications of having no soul?

I try to keep my games as metaphysically grounded/coherent as possible, so with that in mind...

Souls are non-local so they can't "go" anywhere because they don't occupy space to any degree. Either you have one, or you do not. And if you do not, then there is nothing that has the subjective/1st person perspective of "you". Regardless of whether or not the thing in question is animate, alive, or ambulatory. In my games your soul just IS you. So, it depends on what you mean by "stripped of" - if you mean "taken away" that's a nonsensical question to me. If you mean "destroyed" then I'd allow the player to continue using that character, they'd just be what is known as a 'philosophical zombie'.

tl;dr the question presupposes that there can be a "you" absent 'your' soul, which is a premise that I deny. Despite the fact that we use the expression I just used ("your soul") as far as my game's metaphysics is concerned you do not 'have' a soul, you are a soul.

 

[Celebrim]

Yeap, and if there is no impact to separating soul, spirt, and body, why bother with the distinctions? When it comes to the science vs the metaphysics, I usually just find mechanical impact, like vulnerability/resistance to certain magic, and leave the why to the player. Once magic is introduced science goes out the window anyways.

Generally speaking if you can't answer what a soul is good for, you probably aren't going to think it very necessary. And yeah, magic can't work in a world that has anything remotely like the physics of the real world.

The definition that D&D is clearly implicitly using is the soul is the source of anima and identity in living creatures. It is the thing that is named by your true name (another thing imported into the rules but not well defined). The rules are mechanically consistent with that in the rare cases that souls are mentioned (magic jar, deck of many things, etc.) We could come up with other definitions of a soul and if you believe in souls that definition of your soul as identity might not be strictly correct, but it is the definition assumed by the rules and if you change that the rules will not be consistent to the described reality.

As for the distinction between soul and spirit that D&D classically made, it would appear to me that a soul is a type or subclass of spirit. Everything with a soul is or has a spirit but not every spirit is or has a soul. Things with spirits but where those spirts are not souls have anima but not a complete external identity. So unlike the souled thing their identity doesn't survive the death of their body (or perhaps doesn't fully survive it). This parallels the notion that an animal has a spirit but not a soul, and that personhood is defined by having a soul (generally one considered to be immortal in a way spirits aren't). Note these distinctions are generally Greek in nature, and a lot of D&Dism come out of Greek philosophy and science and how the ancient Greeks and the neighboring cultures that were influencing them (such as Egyptian or Persian) conceived the world. For example, that the periodic table of elements in D&D has four entries - earth, fire, water, and air - comes out of Greek natural philosophy.

But this distinction between souled and spirited shows up even less in the rules than souls themselves, so it's not as clear what Gygax was going for. And of course, people blindly copying Gygaxianism probably even have less idea what they mean than Gygax did.