Are alignments relative?

[I'm A Banana]

IMC, alignments are absolute, but what people think is relative.

Just because somebody thinks they're good and tries their best to be good doesn't mean they nessecarily *are* good. Just because some elves think the world would be a better place by committing mass genocide doesn't make it true, and even if it is true, it doesn't make it Good.

Just because people fit under alignments doesn't mean that they know what is Good and what is Evil any more than we would, if we lived under such a system.

 

[Avatar]

Wow 3 pages, and still going. This is a better response than I'd hoped.

But reading some of the responses, I think things are a little off track from my original question IMHO.

I will agree that each God/dess judges alignment slightly differently. My point is, God/desses tend to be a vain bunch. No God truly thinks of himself as evil, just as Stalin and Hitler, despite killing millions, never thought of each other as evil. So what happens if Wee Jas or some other "evil" god (evil within the non-relative DnD Pantheon) tells his minions, "You are good! everything that Pelor and his people do is evil! Go and smite this evil!?

Alright, in DnD, it doesn't matter what Wee Jas tells his crew, their evil.

My question is, in an unknown pantheon (one of my creation) can I mask from my players who is working for the God of goodness and light and who is working for the God of death and destruction? If the answer is that alignments are non-relative, then the answer is no. Everyone working for the Dark God gets LE, NE or CE, or at best Neutral, alignments and vice versa.

Basically the idea is to hide from my players who they work for, if and when this game ever happens.

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks again to all who have replied,

Alan

 

[SableWyvern]

As someone else said, take alignment detection out of the game, or completely change what it does.

Create a convincing story for your gods to give their minions (ie, the PCs).

Go for it.

You can then keep absolute alignment, its just that only the gods will know the truth of it.

Or, you can make bigger changes, and alignment becomes relative.

But, it can certainly be done.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Think about things in reverse...

How can the god of death and desctruction appear to be a champion of good and holiness? Not just have the occasional benefit, mind you, but truly Good For All? What's the benefit of it? Why do those who worship it think of it as a good thing?

How can the god of light and purity seem wicked and deadly? What would be things that the good church would cover up?

One way to go about this may be to have a lot of high-ups with rings of mind sheidling and such.

...and just because the god is evil doesn't (nessecarily) mean all followers are. Those alignment restrictions are for clerics only...the day-to-day operators of the church and believers in the faith don't have to be evil.

Heck, I could think of a situation where the cleric wouldn't have to be evil, by nessecity. If they were interested in appeasing the god of death and destruction, or in the nessecity and beauty of things being cleared away to make room for the new.

Basically, IMHO and IMC, actions themselves aren't evil. It doesn't so much matter that you kill and eat babies as it matters *why* you would do such a thing and how you would ract to such a thing.

It's like...say we take a Mesoamerican/South American-style pantheon. The gods here *require* human sacrifice to live, to gain power, and to help out the human race.

In your typical D&D campaign, any cleric sacrificing people is a flagstone for EVIL!

But it could be that the only reason the sun rises in the morning (and, hence, plants grow and life continues) is because someone is killed to feed the sun.

This is definately a Lawful situation (needs of the many vs. needs of the few), but it is, in fact, a good act. Offering yourself up for sacrifice is a holy thing, and, when no willing candidates are found, you may have to do it do those who don't want it...but still, if you don't, you doom humanity to darkness and suffering, so you've *gotta.* You may not take pleasure in it, but it is an act of goodness, if you do it with the motive of helping out the entire world.

Similarly, most Good churches are associated with healing and recovery...but it could instead be associated with pestilence, starvation, and suffering. Life becomes a curse that death is a freedom from. Most people seek to end their existence, but a priesthood wishes to keep them down. Their motive is nothing more complex than greed and gratification...they hold these people back, infect them, they don't get infected themselves. You've got healing and recovery, all unwilling. Cure Disease looses it's relief powers if the disease just returns stronger than before.

Basically, if you want to blur the line, think about what it would take to have Evil and Corruption be regarded as a benefit -- why would it be good? Think about why Good and Purity could be very bad things....why would those who support the Dark Church rival the Pure Church, then?

Answer a few of these, and either make potions of glibness/rings of mind shielding/whatnot be available, or ditch the detect alignment spells.

IMHO, of course.

 

[Hand of Evil]

My question is, in an unknown pantheon (one of my creation) can I mask from my players who is working for the God of goodness and light and who is working for the God of death and destruction? If the answer is that alignments are non-relative, then the answer is no. Everyone working for the Dark God gets LE, NE or CE, or at best Neutral, alignments and vice versa.

Basically the idea is to hide from my players who they work for, if and when this game ever happens.

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks again to all who have replied,

Alan

Personally I do not think you are playing with alignment.

Again define and make a list. On the list set what each member of your pantheon represents. As you play the game match up the actions of the players to the actions on the list. You may have to do some math but they should show some traits.

 

[Green Knight]

This whole discussion reminds me of an article I read a while back where college students said they weren't being taught the difference between right and wrong in college. Rather, they were being taught moral relativism. "Well, if in this culture it's considered ok, then that makes it ok, and who are we to say that this is wrong?". What a load of crap that is. Just because atrocities are allowed within a culture doesn't make it ok. A culture which condones such actions is itself evil. Whether it be real world or in D&D.

Take the crusades for example. Those fellos thought that their religion and way of live was better than the Turks (it was the turks wasn't it?) so they decided to kill them all.

It wasn't the Turks. Turkey didn't even exist at the time. What DID exist was the Byzantine Empire, a Christian nation under siege from Muslim invaders.

And the First Crusade was a defensive war. It wasn't started just because the europeans felt that their way of life was better than the muslims and they were gonna go over there and kill them. The muslims had been invading Christian territory left and right, and the Crusaders were sent to retake some of that lost territory. Yeah, the committed atrocities along the way. But casting the Crusaders as the instigators and the Muslims as the innocent victims of "Imperial/Colonial Aggression" is nothing but a load of crap and a bald-faced lie (Not saying you're a liar. Just that you're repeating a lie).

Of course the Crusades weren't the most successful enterprise, but that's besides the point. The point is that they felt that their cause was a righteous one, yet now some/most of us look at it with distain

That's because there're some people who like to rewrite history in the name of Political Correctness, casting the Christians as the dastardly villains and the Muslims as the poor innocent and blameless victims. Neither side had clean hands, but the hands of the Muslims were certainly dirtier, as they started the whole thing, and some of the things they did in the territories they conquered puts what the Crusaders did to shame.

because they were breaking such fundamental (fundamental to us, it will be different in a couple of decades) laws such as "live and let live," "everyone is created kinda equal," yada yada yada.

If the Muslims had believed in the phrase "Live And Let Live" there never would have been any Crusades to begin with.

 

[SableWyvern]

I have to disagree somewhat, GK.

By my understanding, Byzantine intended to mount a defensive op, and asked their brothers in the west for some help. Expecting a small cadre of professional soldiers, they got instead a mad rabble raised by the Western Church (I believe that was the People's Crusade, which predated the official First Crusade).

The first mob, mainly of peasants, that arrived at Constantinople wasn't even allowed in the city. The Constantine Emperer wanted nothing to do with them.
Furthermore, the fact that in many cases it was Christians who were massacred by the Crusaders doesn't speak well of them (in that it shows all that many of the Crusaders really wanted was bloodshed, rape and pillage, and any greater cause was largely irrelevant).

That said, many of the Crusader states were quite enlightened, and some good things came out of the Crusades. But, in the main, it was a propoganda excercise by the Western Church.

Edit: Oh, and yeah it was remiss of me not to agree that the Muslims commited their fair share of attrocities as well. Both sides are guilty of that, in any war.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

But that doesn't remove the question of what's right to do.... Good people will sometimes commit evil acts.
...
So, even in a world with real, magically detectable alignments, there is room for moral uncertainty.

Agreed. You said nothing that was in any way against my argument. You've outlined some of the potential complications of the system. You've pointed out that the system can be circumvented. That doesn't make the system less absolute, in and of itself. It just means that there are ways of getting around the system.

Avatar, I would suggest you think about the potential players in this campaign. If they are the type who generally trust their divinations (as most players I knew did) then I stand by my suggestion to remove alignment detecting spells and abilities from the game. It would be grotesquely unfair to run an entire game with a series of false tests. You would essentially be punishing players for using an ability given them by the game. Unless of course, you told them ahead of time that the answers provided by those spells were relative, in which case, they're not a useful tool, only a deliberately coufounding one and shouldn't be included for that reason.

You could go the route that every significant person they meet is so heavily warded you can't tell what color their eyes are, much less their alignment. But that's a ridiculously contrived situation.

IMO "Know alignment" type spells as well as many divinations are simply problematic for a thinking game. Murder mysteries are the most notorious example, but there are others.

Green Knight and SableWyvern have pointed out one of the ways temporal distance clouds the issue. Two educated viewpoints on the Crusades can be very different (mine is yet a third one, but I'll leave off it for now). Physical distance has the same effect. What's drastically important to people in one location seems trivial or problematic halfway across the world, or even in the next town over. Example: Country A is struck by a famine. Their wizards know of a way to drain ley energy from the earth, but have long been unwilling to do it because they aren't sure of the effects. In order to feed their people, they begin draining it, and using it to rapidly grow crops. Halfway across the world, in country B, wizards begin to notice an imbalance in the world's magical energies. The drain from country A is having an adverse effect on nature in country B. They trace it to country A. Knowing nothing about the famine, country B knows only the effect of the draining on their lands. They can only imagine that such a vast amount of power is being used to power magical weapons and fortifications. Having no diplomatic relations or even more than heresay knowledge about country A, they are suspicious. Remembering tales of an ancient empire that tapped ley energies to conquer and destroy, they begin to get worried. So, they use their power to disrupt the flows of country B's tap. Without the stable flows, the crops begin to die, and the famine continues, killing thousands. Neither of these countries is evil, but they make errors out of ignorance and misunderstanding. Had they been able to meet face to face, things would be different. If they had access to powerful divinations, things might have been different. Country B would have been able to determine that country A was merely trying to avert famine temporarily, and that they would cease tampering with the ley as soon as they could.

A more personal example of the problem with divinations, etc: A party has gotten to be mid to high level. They've been smiting evil, liberating the oppressed, and generally being all-around good guys. The forces of evil are pretty displeased with this. They've stepped on the toes of a few devils, that kind of thing. They're too powerful to confront directly, so a plan is conceived to trick them into doing something that would lose them the patronage of their dieties. A devil assumes mortal guise and attempts to offer them a deal that could lead to their downfall. Standard rules: The party cleric or diviner determines easily that the guy is a devil in disguise. Or else he notices that the guy is triple-coated in wards and they become extra suspicious of him, thereby noticing the catch in the deal. Either way, the PCs get out of the situation with neither thought nor risk. No detect alignment and such: They would have to think about the deal. They might even pursue it for a time, risking their patronage, before they actually use their brains and/or moral compasses to figure out what's going on. Just seems like that would be much more interesting and fun.

 

[mmadsen]

My question is, in an unknown pantheon (one of my creation) can I mask from my players who is working for the God of goodness and light and who is working for the God of death and destruction? If the answer is that alignments are non-relative, then the answer is no. Everyone working for the Dark God gets LE, NE or CE, or at best Neutral, alignments and vice versa.

Basically the idea is to hide from my players who they work for, if and when this game ever happens.

If you want to hide Alignments from your players, then hide Alignments from your players. Remove spells like Detect Evil and Know Alignment. Or allow them, but require a Sense Motive vs. Bluff check for them to work as advertised.