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Souls and Spirits - are they necessary in order to exist?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9255256" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9255256, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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