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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felix" data-source="post: 940874" data-attributes="member: 3929">Wayside:In which case all criminals who protest their innocence should be released because prosecuting innocents is Evil? I understand that the urchin is, in fact innocent, but the grocer thinks he's guilty. The urchin was there when it was stolen, with his friend. His friend slipped an apple into the urchin's pocket without his knowledge. The urchin had the evidence on him. What the grocer is doing isn't Evil! It's Lawful. He found evidence of a theft, and proceeded to use the Law.No doubt. Exhibited quite well (I thought) in Sepulchrave's SH when the Lawful clerics butted heads with the Goodly Paladin. Good and Law (ie, Forgiveness and Damnnation) arn't always going to agree. [more on this later...]That is exactly what they are going to do. Chaotic times produce a power vaccum. They use the law to gain power... in a chaotic time they will set up laws that a) empower themselves, and b) set up order so that more power can be gotten later. Look at Devils: very Evil and very Lawful. Strict law and order in the hells. So what doesn't make sense? [FYI, the Chinese character for "Chaos" combines the characters of "Danger" and "Opportunity". Cool, eh?]Good, Evil, Law, Chaos in the alignment system are what they are defined to be. That is the Truth I was talking about. You run into a problem when you define one word with a system of values. For example: in my campaign, I define Evil to be selfishness (like you said) and Good to be selflessness. There. Problem solved. This is what every DM can do with the system DnD has provided. Every DM can define their own Truth. WOTC left if vague so DM's could shift the definition of Truth as they liked. They merely provided guidelines for the Truth.Whatever you define these things as, it's the Truth, it's absolute, and it's consistent. The code of morality in a world without a Truth might as well be writ in water.You had said that, "In DnD good is a principle that can be discovered and pursued, but evil is not." The example was to show that while these two gods were both Good, they would not go about doing things the same way. Ie, their linesof pursuing Good are different.[Consequently, you have said that Good can be discovered, then you said it's a broad value system... If by discover you mean "identify the meaning of Good" how do these jive?]I mentioned the blood war to agree with you that evils fight against each other. Don't know if it's PS though. And Kord and Hieronious are standard Greyhawk deities. In the PHB.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Law doesn't replace Good. Nor Evil replace Chaos. Someone who is LG is more likely to do a Good act than an Evil one. And more likely to do ao Lawful act than a Chaotic one. And if he's faced between a choice twixt Law and Good? If he chooses Law, it makes him no less Good. It might make him more Lawful...So can a god be absolute Law and absolute Good at the same time? Yep. Possibly because they're gods? Not just uber-men. They become Goodness and Lawfulness. What is beyond them? Those are the kinds of gods I'm thinking of.I have no doubt that you are totally correct that we would disagree all day. (God forbid you allow a Texan to enter a morality conversation.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> )Does pi have an absolute value? Mathmaticians have been disagreeing over it for ages. I think it does have a True value.Sages used to argue over whether the world was carried on the back of a giant turtle, or on the backs of 4 elephants. They never did come to a conclusion in their discussions. Until we found that the Truth is that the world is round!That being said, the absence of consensus over what the Truth is in a conversation held by us benighted mortals does not preclude the existance of Truth. Yesno?</blockquote>

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