Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2218244" data-attributes="member: 27012">What rubs me wrong about the deva is that if the deva could be wrong, then sacrificing billions and billions of innocent lives on a gamble is not Good.  If the outcome is unpredictable, then the deva should not be supporting a mass extermination of life.  If the outcome is predictable, the Deva should be able to demonstrate how and why it will happen. And that's why I suggested making this an issue of Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Good rather than Neutral against the Outer Planes.Well, I would argue that neither the paternalism nor the tolerance are Good, per se, but elements of Law and Chaos recast as integral parts of Good by those who are LG or CG.  Too much Law and you get paternalism that doesn't respect the dignity of other sentients.  Too much Chaos and you may tolerate Evil until it gets powerful enough to do real damage.  And that's exactly why I say that the corner alignments are unstable and serve two masters.  At some point, the Lawful character needs to make choices between Order and Good and at some point, the Chaotic character needs to make choices between Liberty and Good.  And each time they choose Order or Liberty over Good, that means they are less Good than a pragmatically Good Neutral Good character.That's a valid point, too.  It at least raises the question of where the Chaotic Good Celestials are while this deva and others are working to slaughter billions and billions of innocent lives in order to possibly bring about a New Universal Order.And that's exactly how I think this would be better cast, though Devas, as NG, should be above such issues.  But even if a Lawful Good Celestial were to want to slaughter billions and billions to bring about Univeral Peace, there is still the issue that Good characters (A) protect innocent lives and (B) respect the dignity of sentient creatures.  I think that playing Russian Roulette oulette with the universe could violate either.If the deva can't be sure what happens but has no doubt, there must be some reason why the deva has no doubt.  If a superior or other divine force told the deva to do what it's doing, that only ofsets the problem to a higher power.  It doesn't eliminate it.  Someone powerful in the Celestial realm has decided that the death of billions and billions will produce a net Good and that better be more than a guess or roll of the dice for them to remain Good.This could be an interesting vehicle to explore issues of blind faith (on the part of the deva) if the Celestials are being deceived but that's a whole other theme.  Of course an even bigger question is that with everyone in the Outer Planes arrayed againt the Prime Material Plane and wanting it to implode, what chance should the Prime Material Plane really stand against such a thing?  Dragons and fey againt Angels, Devils, Devas, Demons, Archons, etc?  Which is why I think it's important to know why the deva thinks they are right.Actually, thinking about this, if I were Evil and sure that the end of the Prime Material Plane would let me win, I'd be doing my best to convince Good people that I don't want it to end. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />This should apply to all Good outsiders, I think.</blockquote>

Verification