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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 251029" data-attributes="member: 4720">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.</blockquote>

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