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<blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6198403" data-attributes="member: 1879">Agreed, which is why I did not frame things in terms of culture, but physical demands. If you're postulating an objective value system them culture doesn't enter into it, something is good or not regardless of the local perspective. Which ignores the fact that culture is usually adaptive to some pressure. When you take the diverse physical needs of fantasy races into account (fire hurts most things but heals fire elementals) it rapidly becomes apparent that you cannot define any concrete thing as good or evil without finding an exception somewhere in the monster manual. And yet if Good vs Evil is confined to the realm of action then we are instantly cast back into the realm of moral relativism where good for the goblin is bad for the elf. Even worse, RAW some cursed or planar creatures can be good in their behavior and alignment and yet still count as EVIL (or Good, Lawful or Chaotic) in terms of detection and spell interaction, which explicitly detaches the objective/mechanical tag of Good and Evil from the objective values of good and evil, thereby rendering the whole thing a useless incomprehensible mess. I think we are actually all agreed on that. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Andor, post: 6198403, member: 1879"] Agreed, which is why I did not frame things in terms of culture, but physical demands. If you're postulating an objective value system them culture doesn't enter into it, something is good or not regardless of the local perspective. Which ignores the fact that culture is usually adaptive to some pressure. When you take the diverse physical needs of fantasy races into account (fire hurts most things but heals fire elementals) it rapidly becomes apparent that you cannot define [i]any[/i] concrete thing as good or evil without finding an exception somewhere in the monster manual. And yet if Good vs Evil is confined to the realm of action then we are instantly cast back into the realm of moral relativism where good for the goblin is bad for the elf. Even worse, RAW some cursed or planar creatures can be good in their behavior and alignment and yet still count as EVIL (or Good, Lawful or Chaotic) in terms of detection and spell interaction, which explicitly detaches the objective/mechanical tag of Good and Evil from the objective values of good and evil, thereby rendering the whole thing a useless incomprehensible mess. I think we are actually all agreed on that. :) [/QUOTE]

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