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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5743496" data-attributes="member: 42582">Do you want an intellectual or a practical test?There is also the question of what you (or Bahamut) means by "justice"? Justice is often rendered as "ensuring that each receives his/her due", but attitudes can vary wildly in times and places as to what spheres of life are ones in which the notion of "a person's due" has any work to do. As I understand it, in classical (ie Greek and Roman) systems of ethics justice has comparatively little work to do. Notions of honour, magnanimity and the like are more important. On the other hand, in contemporary English-speaking moral and political philosophy (Rawls, Dworkin etc) justice looms very large: the whole of our productive and social life is generally seen as a site in which the value of justice has important work to do, and justice is generally regarded as a preeminent value. So, for example, even those who want to defend the permissibility of favouring family over strangers don't do so by arguing that some other value trumps the impersonal value of justice to permit favouring one's family. Rather, they argue that we have special obligations to our family members, and hence that they have special claims of entitlement against us.A third question is how much you want the players to metagame the challenge. That is, do you want the answer to be obvious, and to have the players then make a choice that is, in effect, a statement about their PCs' attitudes towards justice as Bahamut conceives of it. Or do you want a genuine moral/philosophical conundrum that embroils the players (and presumably, then, their PCs) in debate about what is the proper thing to do to honour justice and (thereby) Bahamut?One suggestion that would make it a practical test, reflecting mainstream contemporary views about justice, and would make it more of an ingame rather than a metagame matter, is the following:As you walk down a corridor in the temple there is a mirror. As each PC passes it, s/he sees a vision: someone s/he has wronged in the past, by failing to give that person his/her due, states his/her complaint to the PC, and demands recompense. (I'm assuming that your PCs have committed injustices in the past. If they're all paragons of virtue, then I guess the test of justice is not really going to challenge them. You'd also have to decide on whether or not you focus on scenes that were actually played out in game, or on other injustices that have been committed but not expressly roleplayed out - eg a beggar confronts a PC with the fact that the PC spent the night in a rich inn while the beggar spent the night sleeping on the streets with no comfort or shelter.)In the original temple, the idea would be that as a bewildered and/or distraught member of the congregation stood slack-jawed before the mirror, a priest of Bahamut would come up and provide comfort. The priest would ask the parishioner what s/he had seen in the mirror, and then ask the parishioner's response. Those who expressed a desire to right the wrong, and asked for the priest's advice, would be given the appropriate advice and help. (In cases where the wronged person was in another city, the priests of Bahamut might accept payment of compensation, and then arrange for it to be delivered to the victim by the priests of the temple in that other city.)Those parishioners who expressed indifference to the claim of justice would be subjected to punishment/penalties of some appropriate kind.In the ruined/abandoned temple, there presumably are no priests to minister to the PCs after they receive their visions. But depending what you want to achieve, there are a few ways you could set up the situation. One option would be that all the PCs see one another's visions. You could use this to seed some sort of intra-party conflict/dynamics. A different possibility would be to place some temple guardian/spirit in place of the priests - a sphinx or naga might be appropriate for this.In the case where you set it up as PCs vs NPC/creature rather than PC vs PC, you might want to think about what you do if a PC argues to the creature (and therefore, in effect, to you) that what s/he did was not unjust but deserved by the victim. How much moral argument do you want as part of the resolution of the scene?</blockquote>

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