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Holding non-Paladins to their class vows
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7822745" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>This is a very modern viewpoint, and in my opinion it's a bit crazier of a superstition than was believed by people who believed in fairies, witches, and spirits living in trees. They might have believed some really wild and far out stuff, but they never believed anything as crazy as that. They at least understood that they were mortal and frail, and no matter how much they really really wanted it to be true, they couldn't cause things to happen just because they really wanted it bad enough. Simple verifiable and repeatable scientific inquiry affirmed that truth again and again.</p><p></p><p>To people who literally believed in Oaths, they never assumed that swearing on something formed any sort of binding contract that empowered something to be kept and risked punishment and curses if it wasn't because of something in themselves. They always assumed that the Oath was kept and blessed and empowered by something external to themselves that did have the power to make things come true simply because they wanted to do it - something that wasn't much like a frail mortal.</p><p></p><p>I mean I understand why that modern viewpoint is becoming modern... I mean it's modern. But it's always struck me as a bit internally incoherent, because all the trappings and mechanics and myth built around it are still the mechanics, trappings, and myth of the older sort of view that Oaths were an external sort of thing, and it didn't matter that much at all how much you believed something, but what you believed in. I kind of feel like if you really want to take that and run with it, you'll end up with something that looks really different than D&D or typical consensus fantasy. For example, if matters how much you believe in something, and how much conviction that you have, then being delusional is the ultimate super-power and megalomaniacs are inherently godlike. Pratchett plays a bit of lip service to this in the Disqworld books, where he has magic be the spontaneous result of people believing in something, but I don't think he ever really takes this to the sort of logical extreme that you'd imagine would result from that. The only way to keep reality stable if that is the way it works, and Pratchett hints at this as well, is if there is some sort of external meta-belief - maybe what Great Atu'un the Turtle thinks - that keeps everything mostly in balance anyway.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7822745, member: 4937"] This is a very modern viewpoint, and in my opinion it's a bit crazier of a superstition than was believed by people who believed in fairies, witches, and spirits living in trees. They might have believed some really wild and far out stuff, but they never believed anything as crazy as that. They at least understood that they were mortal and frail, and no matter how much they really really wanted it to be true, they couldn't cause things to happen just because they really wanted it bad enough. Simple verifiable and repeatable scientific inquiry affirmed that truth again and again. To people who literally believed in Oaths, they never assumed that swearing on something formed any sort of binding contract that empowered something to be kept and risked punishment and curses if it wasn't because of something in themselves. They always assumed that the Oath was kept and blessed and empowered by something external to themselves that did have the power to make things come true simply because they wanted to do it - something that wasn't much like a frail mortal. I mean I understand why that modern viewpoint is becoming modern... I mean it's modern. But it's always struck me as a bit internally incoherent, because all the trappings and mechanics and myth built around it are still the mechanics, trappings, and myth of the older sort of view that Oaths were an external sort of thing, and it didn't matter that much at all how much you believed something, but what you believed in. I kind of feel like if you really want to take that and run with it, you'll end up with something that looks really different than D&D or typical consensus fantasy. For example, if matters how much you believe in something, and how much conviction that you have, then being delusional is the ultimate super-power and megalomaniacs are inherently godlike. Pratchett plays a bit of lip service to this in the Disqworld books, where he has magic be the spontaneous result of people believing in something, but I don't think he ever really takes this to the sort of logical extreme that you'd imagine would result from that. The only way to keep reality stable if that is the way it works, and Pratchett hints at this as well, is if there is some sort of external meta-belief - maybe what Great Atu'un the Turtle thinks - that keeps everything mostly in balance anyway. [/QUOTE]
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