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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7783260" data-attributes="member: 4937">This assumes omniscience on the part of the participants.  Just because the world is or isn't something, doesn't mean that everyone observing it will agree on what it is or isn't.Everyone in the fantasy setting can agree that there are forces and powers corresponding to the labels Good, Evil, Chaos, and Law.  But describing accurately what those forces are and represent is still a considerable challenge.  It's not even one that you can resolve by interviewing the forces and powers, because they themselves are obviously going to have biased perspectives and at least some of them are certainly going to lie, or tell half-truths, or perhaps decide that there are things mortals aren't meant to know.If there is considerable evidence of the reality of forces and powers corresponding to Good or Evil or what have you, belief doesn't become less important.  Belief is never only or even mainly about deciding what is real.  Belief is about deciding on the basis of the evidence you have what you are going to do about it.   And even in an animist world of tangible spirits you can commune with, you still are going to have a ton of questions.Moreover, if you were to interview agents of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos and ask them to describe the world, they would each describe something very different.  So yes, asked to describe Good, agents of Good would give a very different answer than agents of Evil, and agents of Good could still define evil as an absence of Good.  Whereas, agents of Chaotic Evil are very likely to tell you that there is no such thing as Good, and that the agents of Good are at best morally equivalent to themselves but in fact less honest.  They would say that everything comes down to a contest of power, and that the forces that call themselves "Good" in fact are simply trying to manipulate the weak into acting against their own interests to further their own at their followers expense.  There is a really good treatment of this in part of the Paizo Adventure Path 'Rise of the Runelords', where the writer takes the Seven Deadly Sins and inverts them and invents a culture that says, "No, these aren't vices, but virtues: self-confidence, ambition, abundance, pleasure, leisure, outrage, sexuality."   So, then the question becomes, is it 'good' for something to be decadent?   Just because you can agree something is real doesn't mean you can agree whether it is right.  The point is that even in a Planar Wheel cosmology everyone can still differ on what one ought to do.  It isn't obvious to everyone that Good is the correct way to behave or has the correct description of the universe.</blockquote>

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