D&D (2024) Comeliness and Representation in Recent DnD Art

[M_Natas]

Not how I see it. Souls are an extremely fuzzy concept rooted in metaphysics and spirituality. They don't apply IMO to every instance of sentience, thus they can't be the cause if it.

Hrm, it would be pretty hard to find a sapient being in D&D 5e that doesn't have or isn't a soul. Even elementals and devils are souls themselves.
Of course you can change that in your Homegame as you which.

But D&D 5e makes a difference between the Animus/spirit and the Soul.

Like speak with dead doesn't grant the corpse sapience- it just raises the animus so the caster is able to access the memories of the dead creature. But it can't make new memories or is sapient.

So the Animus/Spirit is just the energy to move the body, but the soul is the actual essence of the person.

So you have Body - Animus - Soul.

So in 5e you can have a Ghost (which is the soul) of a person, a Zombie of the same person and then you could have a non sapient speaking zombie if you cast speak with dead on it ....

In 1e in contrast Elves donhave souls.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That’s a pretty absolutist statement about a game that can have arcane and divine magic, extra dimensional beings, supernatural capital-letter Good and Evil, and can have spiritual rules which differ greatly setting to setting.

Personally, saying Warforged have souls was probably the easiest way to state that all rules that apply to other living races also apply to them, especially in regards to Raise Dead and Ressurection. I doubt it was meant to be a statement on the nature of souls across the board in other games, settings, or real world theology.

You'll notice that I threw "IMO" in there. Of course what a soul is and its role can and will vary from setting to setting. I would say that claiming a soul is necessary for sentience is a more absolutist view than anything I said.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hrm, it would be pretty hard to find a sapient being in D&D 5e that doesn't have or isn't a soul. Even elementals and devils are souls themselves.
Of course you can change that in your Homegame as you which.

But D&D 5e makes a difference between the Animus/spirit and the Soul.

Like speak with dead doesn't grant the corpse sapience- it just raises the animus so the caster is able to access the memories of the dead creature. But it can't make new memories or is sapient.

So the Animus/Spirit is just the energy to move the body, but the soul is the actual essence of the person.

So you have Body - Animus - Soul.

So in 5e you can have a Ghost (which is the soul) of a person, a Zombie of the same person and then you could have a non sapient speaking zombie if you cast speak with dead on it ....

In 1e in contrast Elves donhave souls.

WotC 5e has its take on it sure. It's certainly not the only take you could have, and I don't believe it needs to apply universally.

 

[Charlaquin]

In metaphysics with souls one would imagine the soul would actually do something. And that something could be (and often is assumed to be) sentience.

In many real belief systems where souls are a thing, they are complex multi-part systems with different parts of the soul being the seats of different aspects of the self.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Warforged canonically do have souls (possibly stolen ones), that is what makes them different and playable.

Autognomes, meanwhile, have no canonical mention of a soul. And neither do gnomes....

One of the early twists of the campaign I play the autognome in is that it is actually in Hell. Every character experiences a deep guilt and is consigned to hell because of it. Which suggested that my autognome not only had a soul stained with sin, but it was enough sin to put them in Hell.

D&D metaphysics isn't straightforward about souls (and varies kind of wildly depending on the lore you adopt), but the religious studies major in me has been chuckling consistently at the idea of an artificial life form programmed to feel guilt and experience sin and damnation. Like, just a circle of Hell with like, Frankenstein's Adam, a couple of Doctor Who villains, pieces of Skynet, a sentient and one two-foot tall metal gnome who feels real bad about what he did.

And presumably there's some angelic intelligent toaster or something who puts the faces of saints on its bread.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Probably turns on where you consider the line on "sapient" to lay. I've seen some very odd lines on the self-awareness/free will case in some games and fiction.

Is this like the Star Wars thing where the droids are clearly intelligent, feeling beings but absolutely no one but Luke cares?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Is this like the Star Wars thing where the droids are clearly intelligent, feeling beings but absolutely no one but Luke cares?

Its usually more cases where people parse "free willed"...oddly.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Its usually more cases where people parse "free willed"...oddly.

In the existentially horrifying sense that it may not exist?

 

[Lanefan]

The idea that without a soul they would be "just robots" is pretty gross TBH.

Not to me it isn't. To me, that's what Warforged are: PC-playable robots; an interesting conceit and something that makes Eberron stand apart as a setting, but that's it.

There'd be no telling the difference between a soul-less being and a more typical one while the soul-less ones are alive; the difference comes after they die in that if there's no soul (or spirit, same thing) to recall to the body in order to revive it, it can't be revived; nor can it be spoken with via Speak With Dead or similar. In a no-death campaign, who cares; but in a higher-lethality game this is a very big concern.

I had to give this a lot of thought because in my game an otherwise-living PC did lose his soul; which meant he was playing on hardcore mode (can't be revived, ever) for several years both in and out of game, until in-character actions and adventuring were able to stuff another soul into him. And that had further ramifiactions... (as DM I got a lot of play out of all that, and didn't really have to do anything as it was all player-driven).

 

[Fifth Element]

There'd be no telling the difference between a soul-less being and a more typical one while the soul-less ones are alive; the difference comes after they die in that if there's no soul (or spirit, same thing) to recall to the body in order to revive it, it can't be revived; nor can it be spoken with via Speak With Dead or similar. In a no-death campaign, who cares; but in a higher-lethality game this is a very big concern.

This doesn't help. If you can't be brought back from the dead, it's equivalent to being "just a robot"? Again, gross.