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What would you say the problem is? What is your objective in this conversation? Because here is exemplified what I think the problem is. By this line of reasoning, there can be no such thing as a chaotic ruler. And yet practically every D&D setting which uses alignment does indeed allow for the...

What's the difference between the Stellaris system and the alignment system? Isn't it just a four-axis description rather than two? Recall that "what exactly constitutes 'authoritarianism' and 'egalitarianism'?" has been a hot discussion topic for the entire history of the game, leading to...

Can you give an example of a faction that isn't an actual organization and is campaign-world-agnostic? And can you explain how different DMs won't interpret it any differently?

The Blood War, like all wars, is being fought because the two sides have strategic goals which are incompatible. In the American Revolution, the Americans wanted one thing and the British wanted another, while the Hessians just wanted to get paid. Greed is a big enough concept to exist in all...

There's a pretty big difference between different interpretations of the general concepts of good and evil versus literally not having organizations called "The Harpers" and "The Zhentarim" in your campaign.

Demons care because they actively want to tear down the order of the multiverse. If the devils didn't exist, they'd still be trying to do that. Yugoloths would not and are not. I don't know enough about spirit naga lore to comment on them specifically. But it's no surprise that a material...

Mammon's endgame, like all devils, is bringing the multiverse under the orderly dominion of the Nine Hells. Yugoloths. Do. Not. Care. They don't care who wins the Blood War, they don't care whether law or chaos triumphs, they don't care about destroying everything, they don't care about ruling...

Think of all the crazy ideas that come about when reactionaries sit down in armchairs and try to figure out amongst themselves what generic "liberals" think and want, in between condemnations of same and triumphant proclamations of their own inevitable rectitude. Now remember that you are...

Oh, don't worry, there's plenty of old, broke stuff in the Magic multiverse too. (And even some pretty new broke stuff.)

He was writing in the 1600s and notwithstanding his critics he actually was Christian, so he believed God created the universe. But the how and why of all that are irrelevant to his theory -- that's what makes it so distinctive for its time. When you sit down to work on chess strategies, it...

Don't restrict your search space to the world's religions. Philosophers have built all kinds of secular models of morality as well. That "natural law" verbiage that was getting batted around earlier is straight out of Thomas Hobbes, whose account of morality was deity-free to the point of being...

This argument that "different tables adjudicate this thing differently, therefore the thing is subjective" seems very strange when you start applying it to all the other things that different tables adjudicate differently.

Sorry, I was unclear. When I said the "nature of morality" I was referring to the metaethical question of whether morality is subjective or objective (or something else or whether those labels are even coherent or...), not the ethical question of how to determine morality. This metaethical...

If I say that Moses gave Twelve Commandments and one of them was "Thou shalt not stack dice at the game table", I'm objectively wrong.

That's fine. I'm not telling you what you should or shouldn't believe. I'm saying that you presented the nature of morality as an easy question, but the empirical evidence is that it is anything but. When I come across a long-standing controversy but the resolution seems clear and obvious to me...

If this were clear, there would not be so many people who argue otherwise. The sun clearly rises in the east. The nature of morality? Slightly more opaque. Social constructs are not subjective. The United States is a social construct, but if Alice says the U.S. is in North America and Bob says...

My impression of the default model for outsiders is that they are all, essentially, the same thing: a "species" constituted of ideas rather than matter and correspondingly mutable. Even setting aside alignment changes, demons and devils and modrons and the like are always transforming as they...

5E PHB p. 122, "Alignment in the Multiverse": "Alignment is an essential part of the nature of celestials and friends. A devil doesn not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn't tend toward lawful evil, but rather is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would...

I am, to put it mildly, having an extremely hard time wrapping my mind around a claim that a social structure defined by assigning the positions of power to one sex only does not constitute sexism. If that is not the claim you intend to make, please clarify. I'd argue that even the "positive"...

I honestly don't understand you here. If one society does this and another doesn't, I think we're on solid definitional ground calling the first society more matriarchal than the second. Well, first of all, history unfortunately shows there's nothing cartoonish about the idea of extreme...